User:Bcstanley1/Reflection

Introduction

A community is only as strong as its members. Regardless of the features, tools, and mission of an online group, it is ultimately the quality and dedication of the members of the community that dictates the success or failure of that platform. As such, enticing new members into joining a platform and fostering positive first impressions to increase retention must be a primary goal of any platform. Especially given the effort Wikipedians must put in to contribute to the site as compared to the minimal attention it takes to write a Tweet, recruitment and retention of members is a daunting task on Wikipedia. In my time editing Wikipedia this semester, I have discovered two main features of Wikipedia that shape newcomer experience:

1. The aid of an experienced Wikipedian as an instructor and support of the WikiEdu support is a strong tool in encouraging newcomers to join the site and stay in the community

2. Despite the tools and culture of gratitude on the site, the lack of knowledge of these tools and norms for newcomers without a guide would discourage one-time editors from staying on the site.

Recruitment

Without taking this course, I do not think I ever would have joined the Wikipedia community. Despite having been aware of the community since elementary school and knowing anyone can join and edit the site, the allure of contributing to this online encyclopedia was never strong enough to convince me to make an account. However, once I heard the advocacy from an experienced member (in this case User:Reagle), I was interested enough in the prospect to take this course and try my own hand at editing Wikipedia. Kraut and Resnick discuss in Design Claim 2 in the section on newcomers that word of mouth advocacy is far more likely to succeed in recruiting new members than impersonal advertisement. This was definitely the case in my experience. While there are other reasons I took this capstone, I was interested in hearing about what it was like to edit Wikipedia from someone who had already done it, and that encouraged me to take the step I had never taken before to join Wikipedia. If Wikipedia had a place for people interested in joining the site but not yet committed to discuss the idea with experienced members, it may increase the number of newcomers to the site.

Selection

For an online community, it is not enough to simply recruit new members into making an account. The site must work to ensure the people coming in will be a good fit for the community. According to Kraut and Resnick, one way to do this is by requiring new users to complete some kind of diagnostic test that will cause uninterested or undesirable newcomers to be weeded out. While it is easy to commit small acts of vandalism through Visual Editing on Wikipedia, source editing, citing sources, indenting, signing posts, and the difference between user pages, talk pages, and articles are all things a newcomer has to learn to make major contributions to the site, and this can function as a sort of diagnostic test that screens out those that really have the capability and drive to learn how to be a Wikipedian and those that do not.long Had it not been for the aid of User:Reagle and the courses through the WikiEdu page, I would have been far more likely to give up before my contributions made it into the main space. Rather than having to navigate this unofficial diagnostic test myself, I was guided through it in a way that made joining the community far more accessible. While this undermines the power of the selection tool by giving aid to some newcomers, it still requires users to learn the techniques before contributing and serves to separate dedicated newcomers from passers-by.

Retention

Once newcomers have joined Wikipedia and been tested to find the best new members, Wikipedia has to encourage these members to stay. One way to encourage newcomers to remain in a community and continue to contribute is through positive and friendly interactions with people that are already a part of the community. Wikipedia has several built in functions to aid these interactions. "Thank" buttons in article histories, the practice of Wikilove and its accompanying templates, and the collaborative nature of page building all encourage articulations of gratitude. Displays of gratitude double how likely it is that a user on a site will help a second time and increase both the time spent helping and rate of work.

However, despite the existence of these tools of gratitude, I received very little positive feedback from the Wikipedia community. In fact, the first experience I had in moving my article to the main space was User:1 (pseudonym) reverting all my work back to the previous version due to a formatting preference (see here Special:Diff/922527393). In a study on Wikipedia, Zhu et al. found that negative feedback increases newcomers effort on the specific task, but they mention previous research that found negative feedback decreases user motivation in general. In my experience, having my work reverted definitely increased my work on the Shock Site page, looking quickly for a solution to ensure my content was able to be added once again into the site, but it was extremely disheartening to see my first article reverted, so I feel less motivated to create a second page if it will be reverted. I was nervous about reaching out to User:1 to ask why he reverted my article without any comment on it, but the positive review of my work from User:Reagle and User:Shalor (Wiki Ed) (a type of gratitude discussed by Mathias where a person describes your contributions to influence others decisions about them ) as they argued with User:1 to leave my contributions pushed back against that hesitancy and encouraged me to continue contributing to Wikipedia.

As such, when it comes to retention on Wikipedia, a mechanism to encourage existing members to take a look at newcomer pages and share some WikiLove or thanks when newcomers make there first contributions could increase the number of newcomers that stay and continue to contribute. Just having the mechanisms isn't enough, because if a newcomer's first impression is negative like mine was, it can strongly inhibit motivation to continue contributing. Editors should also take a look at the profile of a user whose work they are reverting to see if it is a new account, because it could be a good chance to take the next step and socialize that user into understanding the norms of the group and correct their mistakes rather than inadvertently discouraging them from continuing.

Socialization

Even after users have gotten a handle of the tools available to them in an online community and have decided to continue using them, newcomers can still inadvertently violate norms of a community simply from a lack of knowledge. Wikipedia has a plethora of norm pages such as Wikipedia:Assume good faith, Wikipedia:Assume the assumption of good faith, and Wikipedia:NPOV as well as smaller norms like signing all of your talk page comments like this: Bcstanley1 (talk) 05:46, 22 November 2019 (UTC) and using the metric of "rough consensus" to resolve disputes. The sheer amount of spoken and unspoken norms can leave newcomers overwhelmed in trying to figure out where to start. In my case, the aid of User:Reagle and WikiEdu definitely helped me become socialized into the community. It was far easier to learn these norms from members that already knew the history of the norms and which ones were most important to know than it would have been had I just picked norm pages at random. I found myself feeling more like a "Wikipedian" as I learned these norms, which supports Kraut and Resnick's claim that having experienced members mentor newcomers can cause them to be more committed to the group as they learn how to interact and follow community norms.

Not only was I socialized through the support of User:Reagle and WikiEdu, the reversion of other contributions on my site taught me some norms as well (like how to deal with vandalism). User:2 (pseudonym) vandalized my page, adding information in the middle of the first sentence about Wikipedia itself being a shock site (Special:Diff/924773922). Immediately, a user reverted the vandalization, and User:2 made two consecutive edits, one of which complained about the reversion (Special:Diff/924775013). User:3 (pseudonym) reverted User:2's edits, and responded to User:2's comments Special:Diff/924781096, explaining that the changes were inappropriate. In this, I was learned about how do deal with vandalism and inappropriately graphic content by watching User:2 and User:3 interact. It was a more passive socialization compared to my experiences learning from User:Reagle and WikiEdu and less impactful, but still demonstrates another way newcomers can learn community norms. As a newcomer, I was lucky to have both these avenues, but I am concerned that newcomers that would not have the same support from experienced Wikipedians that I did would struggle far more to be socialized into the community.

Protection

Finally, communities benefit greatly from tools that protect the site from the inadvertent harm newcomers can do while learning about how to contribute. Especially on a site like Wikipedia that is attempting to create factual, neutral, and verifiable content on all of its pages, newcomers can do a lot of harm in making good faith contributions that violate Wikipedia's policies. Kraut and Resnick recommend the use of sandboxes that allow newcomers to learn how to use the site and decrease the damage they do, and I absolutely found that to be a useful feature as a newcomer. Considering the contentious history of the Shock Site page (having been nominated for deletion several times and requiring a banner at the beginning of the talk page stating important Wikipedia norms), I would have been very hesitant to jump right in and make changes before I knew how to correctly edit in both the Source and Visual Editors. The sandbox allowed me to play around with tools, headers, citations, and more before I moved my content onto the Shock Site page. It decreased the concerns I had as a newcomer, made the process of creating a contribution far more exciting than stressful, and saved users following the Shock Site page a lot of grief and reversions that would have happened had I started on the main page. That said, despite the usefulness of a sandbox, I doubt most newcomers would realize immediately how to create the sandbox and what it is for. While I benefited from being instructed on how to use it, most newcomers would have to discover that tool for themselves, which could decrease the power it has for those users.

Conclusion

As I reflect on my Wikipedia experience, I see two glaringly different avenues a newcomer can have in being introduced to the community:

1. My experience: When guided by experienced Wikipedians and Wiki courses, newcomers can have a plethora of tools to help them join Wikipedia including first-hand accounts to encourage you to join, guides on how to use the many tools on Wikipedia to help you past the unofficial diagnostic test, friendly and individual support from your mentors to increase your motivation, introductions to Wiki norms so you can learn how to behave, and demos on how to create and use sandboxes to decrease initial harm in the group. All of these lend themselves to an extremely positive experience as a newcomer and would increase the retention and contribution quality from these newcomers.

2. The trial by fire experience: For newcomers that do not benefit from guides from existing Wikipedians, I can easily see a far different experience. Despite the tools that Wikipedia has like norm pages, Wikilove templates, sandboxes, and walkthroughs, if a newcomer doesn't have someone that will let them know it exists, it would be easy to get lost in the mess of source editing, the pain of having your contributions reverted, and the frustration of the system. It is not enough to have these tools, newcomers have to be aware of them. As such, I think my experience may very well be the exception from most newcomers and that newcomers without guides like User:Reagle would quickly find themselves discouraged from joining the Wikipedia community.