According to estimates made by comScore, a media analytics company, Wikipedia reaches 29.5% of the worldwide computer-using audience, which works out to roughly 365 million worldwide unique visitors.[1] It is clear from this number that Wikipedia has grown to be a massive online community with a large network of users working together toward the common goal of developing a comprehensive online encyclopedia. With a community of this size, certain challenges arise when it comes to maintaining and growing the community. As communities grow larger, it can become difficult to govern or moderate users, especially in a community like Wikipedia which relies largely on consensus to reach decisions.[2] Further issues can potentially arise when newcomers to a developed community join and are unfamiliar with the rules and expectations of the community. I would argue that, overall, Wikipedia is generally successful in managing newcomers and in maintaining a system of community governance, but that there is still room for improvement in certain areas.
In some respects, I would say that Wikipedia does a particularly good job in managing newcomers, while in others I think there may be ways in which they have room to improve. Something that I think Wikipedia does well is socializing newcomers into the norms of the community. According to Kraut and Resnick in Building Successful Online Communities, the challenges of socialization are two-fold.[3] First, when a newcomer is initially starting out in the community, it is necessary that the community work to ensure that the newcomer will remain part of the community. This task, which Kraut and Resnick call retention, is necessary in order for the newcomer to develop ties to the community that make them want to stay.[3] Wikipedia itself seems to work toward this goal by encouraging users to “Be Bold” while beginning to edit, as well as providing useful pages that outline community rules and collect links to how-to and information pages. I personally found these pages to be helpful, though they often required me to scroll through a lot of information to find exactly what I was looking for. Perhaps streamlining some of the basic information would be helpful, though they certainly serve their purpose as they are.
Once newcomers are made comfortable and are welcomed into the community, it becomes important for them to be educated about the norms and expectations of behavior.[3] Wikipedia’s system of articles and videos that teach users how to navigate and edit on Wikipedia, as well as encourage them to begin editing, are a great way to work toward meeting both of these functions of socialization. I think it would benefit Wikipedia to feature the videos especially more prominently on the site, as they would be valuable resources to new or prospective members who are investigating whether or not they want to join the community. I know that it was extremely helpful to me at the beginning of the semester to go through the video tutorials in order to become more comfortable editing pages on Wikipedia, as well as understanding the core principles of neutral point of view, verifiability, and no original research. Having a visual example of how to complete certain tasks was incredibly useful, especially because certain aspects of Wikipedia editing seem to have a somewhat steep learning curve. These videos also have the potential to help solve the issue of protecting the community from those who may be new to the site.[3] While the ability for users to revert articles to previous versions certainly works to protect the site from potentially erroneous actions of newcomers, educating new users on the norms and expectations on Wikipedia through these introductory videos could solve some of the issues before they even occur.
While Wikipedia itself is overall very welcoming to newcomers, the same may not necessarily always be said about members of the Wikipedia community. As with any online community, as more members join, the more likely it is that there will be trolls or vandals that attempt to create problems in the community. Wikipedia attempts to limit the effects of these negative actions through the ability of other users to revert changes made to pages, as well as through their extensive banning policy. While this is certainly not indicative of completely positive or welcoming behavior within the community, I have come across users while perusing Wikipedia who are very willing to forgive new users, and even attempt to assume good faith and help them to understand the error of their ways. Being able to thank users and award them barnstars for good behavior is a simple way to reinforce good behavior on Wikipedia and promote positive user experiences through polite and helpful interaction.
An aspect of Wikipedia’s management of newcomers that I think has potential to be improved is their ability to recruit new members. On average, 9,028,232,387 pages are viewed per month on Wikipedia,[4] while there are only 139,042 registered users who have been active in the last month. Clearly it would not be useful to suggest that every person who uses Wikipedia contribute to articles, as that would lead to a whole host of other problems, but this massive discrepancy between page views and users certainly points to the need for Wikipedia to adjust their recruiting strategy. It seems as though Wikipedia has begun to address this issue, as evidenced by their attempts to develop community health strategies. Whether any of their proposed strategies will be particularly successful in recruiting and retaining users remains to be seen. From my own experience with Wikipedia, I think it could be useful for them to highlight more obviously the amount of work that needs to be done, as casual users may not be aware of the sheer amount of work that goes into maintaining Wikipedia. This is something Kraut and Resnick speak to when discussing the best ways to encourage users to contribute to a community. They claim that the ability to easily find and track work that needs to be done encourages users to contribute to this work.[3] Wikipedia does list ways that users can help to improve articles in the "Help Out" section of the community portal, but I know that I would not have thought to visit this page if I had not taken this class. Perhaps providing clearer ways to access this information would be helpful to new users who may be unaware of it. Even including information about it in the introductory videos could also be helpful.
Community governance is another area in which Wikipedia seems to be a mixed bag. On one hand, Wikipedia’s system of using consensus to make decisions[5] works to build the collaborative, egalitarian community which they strive for[2] as well as ensures a network that peer reviews articles for accuracy. On the other hand, the necessity of consensus often leads to seemingly never-ending arguments about often minute details of an article, to the point where Wikipedia has an ongoing list of the lamest edit wars in Wikipedia history. If there was a way to streamline the process while still maintaining both quality and a sense of egalitarian collaboration, I think Wikipedia would be able to nearly master community governance in their community. This is certainly a Herculean task, though, so I do not fault Wikipedia for not achieving it yet.
Ultimately, despite any potential flaws that may be found with their structures of governance or approach to newcomers, Wikipedia is still steadily working toward their goal of creating “the largest, most comprehensive, and most widely-available encyclopedia ever written." Taking an article that was barely a paragraph long, turning it into something more substantial and rich in information, and thereby contributing to such a large collective endeavor was incredibly gratifying. I had very little understanding of the behind the scenes work that goes into creating all the articles on Wikipedia and maintaining a community that can work together toward common ends, so the ability to become acquainted with Wikipedia’s process through practice was certainly enlightening. Though I may not necessarily become an avid Wikipedia editor in the future, I really enjoyed the learning experience.
- ^ "comScore data on Wikimedia - Meta". meta.wikimedia.org. Retrieved 2018-04-06.
- ^ a b Reagle, Joesph (2010). Good Faith Collaboration: The Culture of Wikipedia. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. pp. 97–116. ISBN 978-0262014472.
- ^ a b c d e Kraut, Robert; Resnick, Paul (2011). Building Successful Online Communities: Evidence-Based Social Design. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. ISBN 9780262528917.
- ^ "Siteviews Analysis". tools.wmflabs.org. Retrieved 2018-04-06.
- ^ Grimmelmann, James (2015). "The Virtues of Moderation". Yale Journal of Law and Technology. 17: 42–109.