User:Peemags/Reflection

Contributing to Wikipedia

Throughout my high school and college career I have heavily depended on the extensive web of knowledge that is Wikipedia to write papers and assignments. Even on a day-to-day basis, I find myself consulting Wikipedia to answer important questions like, "How old is RuPaul?!??" Never once did I ask who was contributing to the articles nor what the inner workings of Wikipedia were. When I found out that I'd be joining Wikipedia and creating my own article, I was actually pretty excited to experience first hand what it would be like to be a part of a community which I had depended on so much in the past. My Wikipedia journey taught me much about what it means to be a newcomer in an online community and allowed me to examine the mechanics of moderation and governance in a community as big as Wikipedia.

Being a student enrolled through the Wiki Education Foundation, my newcomer experience was probably a little different than those of normal newcomers. Professor Joseph Reagle had his students, including myself, complete two tutorials before even creating a user account and beginning our projects. The first tutorial, titled "Policies and guidlines: basic overview" served to introduce the norms of Wikipedia. The tutorial discussed the 5 pillars of Wikipedia as a way to teach students how they can collaborate effectively. In addition, the tutorial delved into the "Holy Trinity" of Wikipedia, or as Reagle describes, "the core policies to understanding Wikipedia" . The last part of this tutorial explained talk pages and effective ways to communicate with other Wikipedia users. The second tutorial delved more into the technical aspects of editing and making pages. As a newcomer, I found it extremely helpful to have these formal guidelines explained to me even before making an account. These tutorials served as manuals to steer newcomers in the right direction and expose them to proper Wikipedia etiquette. This formal socialization helped create a clear transmission of culture to me, the newcomer.

After completing both tutorials, I proceeded to make an account. Unlike other sites, like Reddit that have minimal initiation rituals, Wikipedia lets anyone create an account and begin contributing to the site immediately. I found this particularly interesting knowing that many of the people who created accounts had not gone through Wiki Education tutorials. As Kraut and Resnick state in their book, "Building Successful Online Comunities: Evidence Based Social Design","Entry barriers for newcomers may cause those who join to be more committed to the group and contribute to it more". Initiation processes are beneficial to a group because the cause cognitive dissonance within users. By trying to resolve these feelings, users are more likely to think of a community highly, therefore are more likely to adhere to a community's guidelines and contribute quality information. Even the minimal tutorial initiation process I went through, I believe made me more committed to the community than other newcomers who did not go through the same process. At the same time, I feel as though Wikipedia should create a stricter and more uniform initiation process for all of its users, in order to hopefully cultivate more committed newcomers. Perhaps, Wikipedia users would have to complete a short tutorial before being granted editing powers.

Once I had created my own user account, I was excited to see that I already had received a welcome message. User Ashbackjonathan introduced himself to me as an experienced Wikipedian and hyperlinked some useful pages for me to read. The links guided me to Wikipedia articles that reiterated a lot of the information presented in the Wiki Education tutorials. In addition, Ashbeckjonathan left a list of resources that I could consult in case I had any questions, one being to ask him directly on his talk page for help. Kraut and Resnick state that, "When new comers have friendly interactions with existing community members soon after joining a community, they are more likely to stay longer and contribute more", and I believe that this having this interaction within hours of joining Wikipedia motivated me to integrate myself into the community and contribute quality content. Although I did wonder how many other newcomers Ashbeckjonathan welcomes to Wikipedia daily, I did not feel as though his interaction was insincere or automated. Assigning a welcoming committee to have friendly interactions with newcomers increases the frequency of those interactions, and I would not be surprised if Wikipedia has has certain users who are assigned the task of welcoming newbies. These welcoming messages are a good way to enforce the "Don't Bite the Newcomer" policy and they direct newbies to information they might find useful. Including direct and helpful links to pages such as "The 5 Pillars of Wikipedia" and "help pages", as Ashbeckjonathan did for me, serves as formal socialization. This socialization is a nice way of introducing newcomers to community guidelines and norms and probably minimizes aggressive "RTFM" instances. By having these pages documenting social and technical rules of Wikipedia, newcomers can be integrated more easily and experts don't have to redundantly teach newcomers . What stood out to me the most about Ashbeckjonathan's message was that he left some virtual cookies. Newcomers to Wikipedia are often times scared of editing and contributing because they feel as though experienced users are judging their contributions harshly . Sending Wikilove is a way to let someone know you appreciate their work, and although I don't think my cookies fully constitute as Wikilove, I do believe they act to make sure I feel welcomed and supported.

At this point, I felt comfortable enough to start playing around in my sandbox. Sandboxes speed up the learning process for newcomers by giving them a space to practice and reduce the harm to the community that newcomers might otherwise cause . I felt as though my sandbox was a great place to explore and develop skills without the fear of being watched by other users. What proved to be most useful about having a sandbox was having a place to practice tricker technical things like citations. I was surprised to hear that many newcomers don't use their sandboxes and instead go straight to making pages because as a newcomer, I don't think I would've had the skills to make my Eskimeaux article without drafting it in my sandbox first.

I published my first draft of the Eskimeaux page on February 17th after spending a few weeks in my sandbox. I was happy to see my first edit just two days later, which corrected a few reference errors. The transparency of Wikipedia is demonstrated through the logged edits which all users can see. This first edit on my page could be distinguished as automatic, because a bot made an edit as opposed to an actual user. Being able to trace who or what was editing my page and what changes they were making made me feel a lot more comfortable about the editing process. Another instance of of automatic moderation which I encountered was when I edited Mshuttles's page, Pioneer Goods Co.. I had attempted to link the word "Goodwill" to its correct Wikipedia page. Instead of linking to Goodwill Industries I linked to the disambiguation page Goodwill. This prompted an automated message by DPL bot to appear on my talk page confronting my mistake. The tone of the message was very friendly, and the bot clearly explained how linking to a disambiguation page was not helpful. In addition to automatic edits, I did receive manual edits from Wikipedians. For example, my favorite edit was made by a user who corrected my link from Pitchfork to Pitchfork Media. Although it was a little bit difficult receiving my first few edits, there was something very cool about the fact that Wikipedia's editing powers were so obviously distributed and that other users had the power and the motivation to correct my article.

In addition to the unsolicited manual and automatic edits I received, I decided to reach out Adam, a user who works for the Wiki Education Foundation and who wrote on my talk page explaining that he specifically helps students who are editing and creating pages as part of a class assignment. I wrote on his talk page asking to see if he could take a look at my nearly completed Eskimeaux page. He wrote back on my talk page with some general edits and completed some manual edits as well. Although I found some of his feedback confusing, I was still very happy to have another set of eyes look at my page. It was also impressive how quickly he replied to me and was able to give me feedback. When old timers, like Adam, can provide some sort of formal mentorship to new comers, newbies feel more committed to a community and contribute more. Communicating with Adam was easy, and I felt as though I had made some sort of bond with another user. I would definitely feel comfortable reaching out to him for more assistance, and perhaps reaching out to other Wikipedians who I don't personally know. From my experience with users editing my page, it's obvious that most people are just trying to help and make the site the best it can be. I didn't experience any hostile or overly harsh edits or critiques. Wikipedians aren't that scary after all!

Overall, I would classify my newcomer experience to Wikipedia to be very pleasant. I believe that because I read and practiced the behaviors and norms explicitly stated in tutorials, manuals, and helpful links, I was able to integrate myself fairly easily into the community. I felt immediately welcomed into this large community and I received support from a number of users. Although formatting and citing references were the hardest parts for me, I felt as though the interface was fairly user-friendly. I was excited to see my article gain some attention and edits, and I feel as though it has progressed a lot since its first conception in my sandbox.