Nelsonana

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Hi! I am so excited to get started on Wikipedia!

• Hi there Nelsonana my name is Sarah! --Sarahnals (talk) 22:01, 11 September 2014 (UTC)

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A Reflection on Wikipedia

A class assignment outlining my experience as a Wikipedia user.

In September, I couldn’t shut up about this shiny, new free encyclopedia I joined online--you know, Wikipedia? While going through the Student Orientation, I took in-depth notes to make sure I could be a professional “Wikipedian” by week two... or so I thought. Slowly, as time went on during my Online Communities course I lost motivation while still remaining active on the site. Wikipedia is a large community that requires motivation, knowledge, contribution, and skill, but what is Wikipedia doing to make sure users stay around long enough to become “Wikipedians.” How is WIkipedia maintaining the motivation of its users to contribute to the cite? My experience with Wikipedia did not create a Wikipedian, it lost one. In this essay, I will discuss Wikipedia’s user newcomer model and retention in relation to Kraut and Resnick’s, “Building Successful Online Communities” and my own experience.

Wikipedia is a niche community; It is one that is comprised by users who take pride in their knowledge and are motivated to share their knowledge with the world in a regulated and trusted way. I love the idea of Wikipedia, and when I first began using the site, truly believed that I had found a niche I could settle in to. The trouble with being a newcomer to a community is that you, most often, have joined something you think will meet your needs, not what necessarily meets the communities needs. In my case, I knew that I could be a helpful contributor to Wikipedia, but their policy to “be bold” was a bit daunting for me. Kraut states that the turnover rate of newcomers in an online community “is especially high” [cite 205] because their commitment needs are not met; this was the case for me.

I have been a Wiki-user since September, yet have had only three Wikipedians interact with my page [1], and only one editor outside of class reached out to me as a member of the community. Though it’s exciting to have people edit my page, it wasn’t until late November that a fellow Wikipedian, outside of my class, reached out to me in a friendly way [2]--long after I began to feel disengaged from the community. Kraut claims, “[w]hen newcomers have friendly interactions with existing community members soon after joining a community, they are more likely to stay longer and contribute more.” Unfortunately for me, waiting nearly three months for acknowledgement made me feel forgotten about rather than motivate me to give Wikipedia another shot. Additionally, when I joined WIkipedia I learned about Wikipedia’s Welcoming Committee. I was excited to be welcomed and partnered up with a WIkipedia guru of sorts. Unfortunately again, the day I have been welcomed to Wikipedia has yet to come.

In the case of Kraut’s example of Wikipedia as a good source for “teaching newcomers the ropes,” I have to agree. Though I was never welcomed into WIkipedia, the orientation, or training, session that I went through in order to join the community was incredibly thorough and helpful in understanding my potential as a user. Wikipedia’s explicitly stated policies and guidelines establish the norms of the site, and in doing so, set a standard for every user, including the newcomers, to uphold. By giving newcomers explicit Wikiquette to follow that are no different from old-timers, there is no hierarchy to be intimidated by. According to Van Maanen and Schein’s theory of organizational socialization, Wikipedia would be considered both “institutionalized” and “individualized.” In the case of their training, Wikipedia has a very institutionalized and collective approach, where new users will “go through a common set of experiences seigned to produce standardized responses to situations.” Yet, there is no communication after the trainings telling users what they can do next. This individualized process is considered random, variable, and disjunctive because the newcomer is responsible for transitioning into an editor and answering further questions they may have on their own. In my case, I was lucky to have both a professor and Wikipedian available to me at school whom I was comfortable asking what might seem like trivial questions to an old-timer Wikipedian. Given my lack of communication with other users on the site, there were many points in time where, without my professor as a go-to, I was discouraged and wanted to quit altogether.

So, how is Wikipedia maintaining the motivation of its users to contribute to the site? According to Kraut, fostering an identity-based attachment--or connection “to the group as a whole or its purposes--will “[lead] people to continue their participation in the group in the face of membership turnover.” In my experience, this was not the case. As a member of my class, I felt connected to community in my classroom, but my identity with the community and its purposes did not flourish in the least. There were no guidelines suggesting how to grow relationships or establish any value for myself within the community, and when no one reached out to me I lost motivation to care for the site at all. Assuming that most active members of Wikipedia have experienced the site differently, Kraut’s notion that the explicitly stated goals and purpose of the community have helped to create a strong identity-based commitment must be true. Given that Wikipedia is a thriving community today, I posit that many of the active members in the community are active because they entered into the community already being bold, and already committed to the purpose, and therefore the group.

As I have stated previously, I love the idea of Wikipedia; A free encyclopedia, a space to share knowledge, a space to converse with other lovers of knowledge and writing--there does not seem to be a downside. Unfortunately, due to my lack of tasks and involvement in the community, I did not find a niche here. Wikipedia is a place to be bold, but what they don’t tell you when you sign up is that if you are not bold, you will most likely not have a place in the community. I had a great experience writing and contributing my article to Wikipedia, though I am not motivated to contribute any further.