Ceaseandexist

Hello!

• My name is Anna the Aloe Drinker and I am in Professor Joseph Reagle's Online Communities course at Northeastern University.

Ceaseandexist (talk) 17:03, 9 September 2014 (UTC)

Wikipedia: An Amateur's Adventure in the World's Biggest Sandbox

Wikipedia is a free-to-use and free-to-contribute internet encyclopedia established in 2001 by Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger. Behind Wikipedia's front-facing encyclopedic pages is a global community of individuals whose contributions and conversations collectively craft the 'Google-able' aspects of the site. Thus, Wikipedia is "both the textual artifact and the community producing it."

As a 20-something college student, my relationship with Wikipedia has undergone an interesting evolution. When I was in high school, the site was barred as a legitimate source of information. Whether due to institutional paranoia, or the fact that anyone anywhere could edit any entry at any time, citing Wikipedia in a school assignment was a request for significant point reduction, if not failure. However, that did little to dispel the online resource's utility. I, and many of my classmates, would begin any research journey on the Wiki page for our core topic, using the citations at the bottom as a pre-curated list of sources from which to draw viable information. Ironically, using sources found on Wikipedia, despite their direct derivation from the tool, would usually yield rich content and high marks. Entering college in 2011, my relationship with Wikipedia expanded from a covert 'source source' to a legitimate and public-facing information resource. In stark contrast to my high school days, teachers and peers alike referenced the site during class; linked to pages as part of assignments or discussions; and generally accepted the site as a citation, as long as there was a secondary citation present to reinforce the validity of the information. In my first two years at Northeastern University, I used Wikipedia to glean information for essays, as an alternative to Google's search engine capabilities, and even as a guide for content development and organization. The outline structure of many Wikipedia articles were a useful reference to helping develop a logical flow for my own writing.

However, it was not until I took the course upper-level Capstone course "Online Communities," taught by Professor Joseph Reagle, that my personal working definition of Wikipedia as a tool and resource expanded to include the term 'community.' The ongoing class assignment — to create our 'own' Wikipedia page on a topic using Northeastern University's archives — was an immersive exposure to the back-end of the online encyclopedia. Not only did Wiki articles require their own markup, but every article existed in a complex ecosystem, and was governed by restrictions, rules, policies, bots, and Wikipedians themselves. On Wikipedia, you, and your article, are never alone.

In the following essay, I will reflect upon my experiences as a first-time contributor to Wikipedia through the lens of online community design. I will first establish how my public identification as a student may have effected my community interactions throughout the duration of the assignment. I will then discuss the linear activities involved in contributing to Wikipedia, from training to creating an article to citations and refinement. I will argue that the fourteen-year-old site can significantly improve its on-boarding process, particularly when it comes to motivating, mentoring, and teaching newcomers. Finally, I will conclude with a reflection on my experience, the Wikipedia community, and my projected future engagement as a Wikipedian.

Wikipedia as a Student

At the onset of this assignment, my Wikipedia article was little more than a title ("The Elma Lewis School of Fine Arts") and a talk page, which bore the banner:

Additionally, clicking onto my user page, one would be met with a disclaimer: "My name is Anna the Aloe Drinker and I am in Professor Joseph Reagle's Online Communities course at Northeastern University." Thus, in every major outlet of my work as a Wikipedian, I was identified as part of a very specific group of students, in a specific class, with a specific assignment. I believe that starting my work as a Wikipedian alongside a class, and carrying the label of 'student' during my activities, significantly affected how other Wikipedians viewed, approached, and edited my work.

Over the duration of the Wikipedia assignment, beginning with the creation of my page, and concluding with this essay, the following users interacted, in the following ways, on my page, The Elma Lewis School of Fine Arts:

-On October 18, the bot account Yobot added [[Category:orphaned articles|orphan]] and [[Category:Uncategorized Pages|uncategorized]] tags to my page.

-On October 18, Postcard Cathy made several minor grammatical edits to my page.

-On October 20, LilHelpa changed 'it's' to 'its', and several other minor grammatical edits.

-On October 23, Nelsonana (classmate, as part of assignment) made edits to my page.

-On October 24, Jessicashamma (classmate, as part of assignment) made edits to my page.

-On October 29, AmandaRR123 (class advisor) made citation edits to my page.

-On November 3, Cnwilliams repaired a link to Hello Dolly, to disambiguate what I had had already.

-On November 7, Jllm06 added the following categories to my page: Roxbury, Boston, Education in Massachusetts, and Massachusetts.

-On November 16, 17, and 20, AmandaRR123 made minor formatting and reference edits to my page.

-On November 20, AnomieBOTchanged a citation date on my page.

In addition, AmandaRR123 and Jessicashamma wrote messages on the article's Talk page, and on my user talk page, I had a conversation with AmandaRR123 regarding citations, and also received the following invitation:

Hi Ceaseandexist! Thanks for contributing to Wikipedia. Come join other new editors at the Teahouse! The Teahouse is a space where new editors can get help from other new editors. These editors have also just begun editing Wikipedia; they may have had similar experiences as you. Come share your experiences, ask questions, and get advice from your peers. I hope to see you there! Writ Keeper (I'm a Teahouse host) Visit the Teahouse This message was delivered automatically by your robot friend, HostBot (talk) 16:18, 6 September 2014 (UTC)

Thus, a total of three bots, three classmates/class advisors, and four Wikipedians edited my page over the course of two and a half months.

All of the changes made to my page by non-affiliated, non-bot Wikipedians were very minor grammatical changes, or categorizations. Despite the bot-derived invitation signed by Writ Keeper, there were no real 'human' conversations or interactions with members outside of my classroom community. I believe that the minimal interactions with other Wikipedians were largely due to the fact that I identified as a student. Users were unwilling to offer me criticism or guidance, because they likely assumed that I was not actually committed to the community (and would leave at the conclusion of my assignment), or that I would need more time to feel things out for myself and understand the basic usage of the Wikipedia tools before the time it would take to edit my page would be 'worth it' to both parties. Or, they may have worried that making large changes or offering formal criticism when I did something wrong could dissuade or scare me away from future contributions.

Whatever its cause, the lack of sociality had a very apparent impact on my motivation to contribute to the Wikipedia community. I felt isolated and unimportant, even when my article began to resemble more fully formed pages. Since people are "more willing to contribute to an online group the more that they are committed to the group," I realized that much of my commitment (to Wikipedia specifically, but to any online community) derived from the human interactions shared with other members of the group. While four Wikipedians did touch my page, they did so without leaving more than a few words in the 'Summary' section. When I 'thanked' them for their contribution, I heard nothing back. I felt as if I were throwing rocks into an abyss: I was putting in the work, but there was no one there to recognize my contribution.

However, while the 'student' designation on my user page and article may have caused other Wikipedians to tread lightly, and thus impacted my experience as a newcomer in a negative way, I do not believe that the designation itself was inherently corrosive to my motivation and affiliation as a Wikipedian. In fact, "providing a collection of individuals with a name or other indicator that they are members of a common group will increase their identity-based commitment to the community.". Thus, a 'student' tag on a userpage could be a useful tool to generate internal communities on Wikipedia, and foster collaboration and shared learning. By clustering together other Wikipedians who identify as high school, College, or Graduate students, Wikipedia could create an identity-based community that grows, learns, cooperates, and assimilates into Wiki culture as a team. Expert Wikipedians affiliated with academic institutions could serve as advisors for the group, and help recruit, welcome, and on-board incoming students. Thus, the 'student' tag, would be less of a warning to other Wikipedians, and more of a mechanism to "cluster those who are similar to each other into homogeneous groups [to] foster identity-based commitment to a community."

Contribution

Despite my first-hand experience involving little social interaction, all (or most) contributions to Wikipedia are made within the boundaries of a collaborative culture. A collaborative culture is the "set of assumptions, values, meanings, and actions pertaining to working together within a community." Within Wikipedia's culture, there are two central values and assumptions: Neutral Point of View and 'assuming good faith.' Neutral Point of View (NPOV) is more in reference to the actual content: it should be non-biased, contain no original research, and represent all sides fairly. 'Assuming good faith,' on the other hand, refers to the human actions behind each contribution. All editors, contributors, and members of the Wikipedia community are encouraged to believe that every actor in the space has the community's best interest in mind, and to act with "patience, civility, and humor," even when their contributions are questionable, conflicting, or negative. Individuals are held accountable for their contributions; but other users are also held accountable to how they interpret and mediate the correction or discussion around these contributions. According to the "Zeroeth Law" as defined by Joseph Reagle, "while [these two elements] may work well in practice, [they] can never work in theory." Through more than a decade's worth of work (reified on every Talk and history page), Wikipedians have formalized the assumption of 'good faith' and operationalized 'NPOV.'

At the onset of my journey as a Wikipedian, I knew of this information for two reasons. First, I read about Wikipedia's standards and guidelines in class. Second, I took a training course for students hosted and designed by WP, that, along with the manual steps required to make edits and create articles, gave me a crash course in Wikipedia's Five Pillars.

Training

While the training course for students provided a comprehensive overview for newcomers, it was not enough to supplement or alleviate the learning curve. Even at the conclusion of the Wikipedia assignment, and following the creation of my article from scratch, I still feel as if I am 'training' on Wikipedia. First, I encountered a bug during the training that derailed the process by several days. Once I was able to complete the course, I felt confident: however, the moment I moved to the 'sandbox' space and began crafting my article, I realized that what I thought I had retained, I could not yet put to practice. During the first month, I was constantly referencing the training. I felt frustrated and flustered. Red links peppered my page. My citations were a mess. Sometimes I saw certain options, like the 'cite' button; other times, it was nowhere to be found. I would often be lost in a labyrinth of pages and subpages, far removed from my original query.

The training for students was simply not enough. Despite my commitment to making valuable contributions to the community, the time restrictions of student life meant that I did not have the hours to spend searching exactly how to format or cite specific content, and that when I did so, the development of the content for my article would fall victim to the time constraint. Several times, out of frustration, I abandoned attempting more complex structures or citations. While in the end, this did not effect the quality of my overall article, the difficulty of becoming accustomed to Wikipedia's tools, markup, and citation mechanisms had a significant impact on my motivation and commitment to the WP community.

In terms of training, my recommendation to Wikipedia would be to not only offer the sandbox training, but to provide a 'gamified' version that live-updates the user as they do certain tasks in actual WP spaces. For example, a bot could guide one through their first actual citation; help label edits made to another article; and run an interactive template facilitating the structure of an article around a particular topic. This would be a very complex and expensive undertaking that will likely not be implemented. Regardless, in order to bolster retainment, there needs to be more supplementary aids and training during a Wikipedian's first few months as a contributor.

Generating Content

Following the training for students, I went to the NU Archives and got to work translating the information to my sandbox in accordance to WP's Five Pillars. Thus, I crafted the article The Elma Lewis School of Fine Arts, sifting through aged papers, documents, legal transcripts, media mentions, and even essays from Elma Lewis herself. The hands-on research portion was the most familiar, and the easiest, part of the entire process. Within the first day of surveying NU's archives, I developed a skeleton for the piece, which I filled in and refined using online resources like newspaper databases. Simply collecting the information took hours — but processing it through the Wikipedia's Five Pillars was the brunt of the work. As a writer and student, creating content for Wikipedia required a significant perceptual change of what it meant to present information.

Despite the fact that I was working in a 'sandbox,' and my article had yet to be released to the judgement of Wikipedia-at-large, my knowledge of the Five Pillars actually contributed to more paranoia and uncertainty than it quelled. One pillar stated that Wikipedia has a neutral point of view; but the fifth pillar, that Wikipedia doesn't have "firm rules," almost seemed contradictory. Was NPOV not a 'rule?' Wouldn't one's work be changed if it were perceived as biased? Since "explicit rules and guidelines increase the ability for community members to know the norms," perhaps eliminating or augmenting the fifth pillar (at least for newcomers) would be more beneficial to teaching and retaining newcomers in the long run.

I had other concerns while generating content. What if someone deemed by article not 'Notable' enough, and my hard work was flagged for removal? What if the carefully generated sentences I wrote from my research were identified as biased or un-neutral? Worse still — what if someone were to make significant changes to my article, or add content that I had not covered? While that fear did not materialize, I often considered how I would respond to a heavy-handed revision of my work. I concluded that it would depend on who the editor was. According to Kraut and Resnik, "moderation decided by people who are members of the community, are impartial, and have limited or rotating power will be perceived as more legitimate and thus be more effective." So my reaction and acceptance of edits would be determined by the role of the editor in the community. What kinds of edits did they make? How did they justify those edits? Who are they? Have they made similar edits to articles in the past? Were they critical of my work, or sincere and helpful? Were the edits they made significant contributions that improved the presentation of the content, or was it a stylistic choice? The variant answers to these questions would determine whether I would debate, accept, or ask for clarification of any major edits.

This concern bled into Pillar 3: that Wikipedia is free content that anyone can use, edit, and distribute. On Wikipedia, there was no 'ownership' of work: while I reference the ELSFA page as "my" article, it is, of course, not mine at all. Being on Wikipedia, it belongs to the public domain. This is a very big difference to how ownership has related to my work thus far - in classes, my name is on assignments, and I am directly graded for them; at work, even in group projects, I am directly accountable for and linked to my contributions. The amount of time, effort, and skill required to make a significant and new contribution to Wikipedia is enormous. Detaching this work from the concept of ownership, especially for my identity as an American-raised college student, was a perceptual challenge.

Citations

The biggest challenge I faced during the process were the citations. Wikipedia's citation protocols are unique, and require both learning and un-learning. While Kraut and Resnik allege that "providing members with specific and highly challenging goals will increase their contributions," the specific and challenging goal of properly citing all of my sources contributed to the greatest frustration, and thus, procrastination, that I experienced overall.

Luckily, AmandaRR123 helped me during each step. Not only did she label my user page with the improper citation heading , but, following our conversations both on- and offline, she directed my to "be bold" and remove the label once my citations were refined . Amanda's aid during the complex process of citing unusual sources archived at Northeastern was the feedback I needed to identify areas of weakness, undo my errors, and repeat the process in a more knowledgable way. I believe that this learning is exemplified in the very stark difference between my citations when I began , and where they are today. Amanda's feedback empowered me to put significant work into my citations, and corresponds with the design claim that "goals have larger effects when people receive frequent feedback about their performance with respect to the goals."

Site Design Analysis

As a newcomer, I had a first-hand look into the process of on-boarding for new Wikipedians, and concluded that Wikipedia could implement site design changes to significantly improve this process.

In Wikipedia's current structure, 'expert' Wikipedians have little to do with welcoming people into the community and facilitating newcomers' experiences. Instead, they govern the organizational structure, conceptual backbone, maintenance, and dispute solving activities (which are essential to Wikipedia's goals). However, since "friendly interactions with existing community members soon after joining a community" can make a newcomer more likely to stay and contribute, there could be enormous value to linking expert Wikipedians with novice ones. These connections could reinforce newcomers' desire to participate; introduce them to best practices; and create a mentorship relationship that in its interpersonal value surpasses the perceived value of a potential contribution.

Of course, there are far more newcomers than experts. The creation of these links and relationships, however, can originally be mediated by bots. A bot can analyze a newcomers' contribution, and assess which 'expert' would best serve as a relevant mentor and director. Then, the bot can place a request (e.g. a citation change; a disambiguation) to the newcomer from the handle of the expert Wikipedian. Following the requested action, the newcomer has a choice to accept the request, and can directly reach out to the expert during or after the request, opening a dialogue. Since, according to Kraut and Resnick's design claims, "requests from high-status people in the community lead to more contribution than anonymous requests," and "people are more likely to comply with requests the more they like the requester," this bot-led facilitation will increase the frequency of contributions from newcomers and create relationships across contributor-experience-strata that persuade newcomers to contribute more frequently as 'liking' is established and reinforced.. Concurrently, by "assigning the responsibility of having friendly interactions with newcomers to particular community members," not only will these interactions increase, but they will normalize as a 'right of passage' to becoming a higher-ranking Wikipedian.

In the vast and anonymous world of Wikipedia, it is sometimes hard to understand the identity, interests, and activities of a single user. However, since "highlighting interpersonal similarity fosters closeness among individual members," another simple addition to Wikipedia's design can come in the form of 'Contributor Lists.' While one can access a list of all contributions and edits made to a single page by clicking 'View History', the individual users making those changes are not the focal point of the history archives. However, if Wikipedia were to add a tab for 'Contributors' to every page, exclusively listing the usernames of contributors to each article, members could easily find other Wikipedians whose interests correspond with their own. For example, if I was interested in Abstract Expressionism, I could quickly see who edited the Abstract Expressionism, Jackson Pollock, and Mark Rothko pages, and strike up a conversation with users who contributed to each page. This could increase the chance of 'off-topic' communication (or communication not directly linked to the action of editing Wikipedia) and thus, "can increase both bonds-based commitment and identity-based commitment" between members .

Finally, to improve the on-boarding and motivation process for Wikipedia newcomers, rewards and incentives should be built-in to the acculturation process. While Wikilove, an "experiment in appreciation," can be sent between users, other small, automatic rewards could be built into the training. For example, you can receive different badges on your user page once you start a new article and get it accepted in the main space; fix someone else's citation; categorize an article; or other 'basic' tasks. Not only will these bot-derived rewards make users "feel valued,", but they can help older Wikipedian's quickly assess a user's level of experience, and extend aid or criticism based on these visual distinctions. However, it is important that these build-in rewards do not crowd out an individual's intrinsic motivation to contribute to the online encyclopedia. The danger of offering rewards is that they, "like punishments, actually undermine intrinsic motivation that promotes optimal performance" and changes the "way we view the task"..

Thus, Wikipedia can enhance their site design to welcome, acculturate, and mentor newcomers; connect Wikipedians via shared interests; and increase or sustain motivation during the learning-curve process.

Reflection and Conclusion

Despite the conclusion of the class assignment and a full page of content on The Elma Lewis School of Fine Arts page, I do not feel 'done' with either my article, nor my journey on Wikipedia's back-end. Of course, I am not "done": there is an endless trove of information to discover on 'my' topic, and on any given topic on Wikipedia. More sources exist beyond the ones I incorporated; the information can always be presented better, and in stronger alignment with Wikipedia's Five Pillars; and there are dozens - if not hundreds - of other articles that I can link my page through. However, the lack of finality is not a negative: perhaps it is this feeling itself that drives the intrinsic motivation of the thousands of Wikipedians who contribute their time and efforts to the cause of a free online encyclopedia.

Throughout my 'Wiki' journey, I was encouraged by more than the grade. I wanted to contribute to something long-lasting, and something bigger than myself. So much gratification came, not only from adding sentences of text to 'my' article, but linking names, places, and concepts I discovered through my research to those already existing on Wikipedia. I saw my work filling in gaps in the ecosystem of knowledge, and that was the greatest reward of the experience overall.

In addition, the value of contributing to Wikipedia as a member of a student community, especially a specific class, cannot be understated. While the external perception of our contributions may have been skewed, our internal ties and in-class debriefs relayed a shared understanding that 'we were all in this together.' By going through a shared process, stumbling across the same difficulties, and contributing to each others' works, our ties as Wikipedians — and our ties as classmates — were reinforced by this assignment. I believe that this exercise should be replicated across classrooms throughout the country: whether in Online or Media studies, as per our example, or in content-specific classes ranging from Science to Art to History. By mandating contributions to Wikipedia as a class assignment, professors not only encourage their students to re-assess what makes their content "notable", but to present it from a 'non-biased' perspective, in a civil manner, within the context of both their classroom community, and the Wiki-community-at-large.

I may never again put in as much time bringing 'new' information to Wikipedia (although, I do not know where life, and my interests, will take me!). However, knowing what I know now, I will never fail to "be bold" on the site: I will fix errors; send suggestions; and every once in a while, log in to my user page to see if anyone left me a message on my talk page. I am a novice Wikipedian, and I am empowered.