Alex Stonehill - COMMLD570 Building Successful Online Communities
Wikipedia Reflection Essay - May 15, 2021
Introduction
editEditing Wikipedia for the first time can be intimidating, but surprisingly exciting and gratifying.
In this essay I’ll reflect on my experiences making substantial updates to the Wikipedia page for San Juan Island National Historic Park, as part of a Master’s level course in “Building Successful Online Communities at the University of Washington. In the process, I hope to offer some recommendations for the Wikimedia Foundation and the Wikipedia community toward improving the experience for editors (especially new ones) and strengthening their community, based on the principles we learned in this course.
Context: Wikipedia’s position
editWikipedia is a marvelous human achievement. It’s truly inspiring that a collaborative effort of tens of millions of people working without extrinsic/material motivation has created the largest encyclopedia in human history and the fifth most visited website in the world.
But in spite of robust traffic, there’s been much hand-wringing about the decline in editing participation, with the number of editors of English wikipedia falling off substantially after a peak in 2007 (see graph below) and other versions of the project following similar declining trend lines.
The good news is, that decline has leveled off since 2014. And taking the ecological view of online communities, there's very little competition for Wikipedia. While the contraction of interest in editing English Wikipedia around 2008 may reflect a fundamental shift in the way people use the Internet — from generative and informational, to social — for those who do have a bug for content creation, Wikipedia is the place to be. No similar project can boast the same level of impact, reach and recognition. Wikipedia editors quite literally get to ‘write the book’ on their topic of choice, which can be a powerful intrinsic motivator.
On the other hand, the kind of self-expression that users have come to expect from other sites in the social media era is heavily constrained on Wikipedia by its norms. That’s because the project is primarily in service to readers seeking information — the editors/contributors who make the whole thing work are an (unpaid) workforce, but not the primary user base.
In an internet of Tik Tok videos, flame wars, free streaming content and Candy Crush, editing Wikipedia is not "fun" in any traditional sense. So why do people do it (or why don’t they)?
Perhaps my own experience can shed light on this question:
Recruitment
editI started editing because of an extrinsic motivation that is probably relatively rare for Wikipedia editors; I needed to do so to pass this class and earn academic credits. I probably wouldn’t have contributed, or at least spent as much time contributing, without that motivation. But this is an area of great potential for the Wikipedia community. Over the past decade or so, it’s gone from a punch line in homework assignments and online debates (“What’s your source for that, Wikipedia???”) to a much more respected source of information (perhaps inverse to erosion of faith in traditional informational authorities). That legitimacy presents an opportunity.
Recommendation 1: Further expand collaboration with educational institutions like high schools and colleges where students publish general interest research papers as Wikipedia articles, rather than just handing them in to their teacher.
Short of these kinds of formal partnerships and support structures like Wiki Edu, intentional efforts to grow the editor base are currently pretty limited.
But there’s one obvious place to start: The project has about 140,000 active editors in a given month compared to 1.7 billion unique visitors. That’s right, only a miniscule .008% of visitors make an edit to the site! Given those traffic numbers, even minimal efforts to persuade readers to become editors could increase the editor base exponentially. Anything from a “try making an edit” button, to a pop up box that says “I see you come here often… did you know you can contribute?”
Recommendation 2: Invite readers to experiment with editing through simple advertising or other messages on all Wikipedia pages.
“Is it illegal to edit wikipedia” was just suggested to me as a search term by Google, indicating that this issue isn’t just that readers are too lazy or otherwise uninterested in making edits — they’re unaware that it’s a possibility. The principles of persuasion outlined in our Week 2 lectures suggest that people (1) need to be asked to contribute to a community, (2) in ways that are simple and clear, (3) with mention of the community benefits and goals, and/or (4) by familiar, high-status, or otherwise likeable people.
Initiation
editBut does the Wikipedia community really want a bunch of new editors?
Kraut & Resinck summarized the challenges of initiating newcomers into a community, and the effort required to socialize them so that they don’t do the group harm. In the case of Wikipedia, that harm would look like making sloppy, biased or self-interested edits that undermine its value as an information source, or accidentally destroying others’ work in a way that would be demoralizing to them.
My own experience suggests that Wikipedia might be taking too much care to prevent such harm, at the expense of creating a welcoming, empowering environment for new editors.
After creating an editor account, which was frictionless, my first task was selecting an article to edit. This was a struggle for a few reasons:
- The requirement that edits be neutral made it feel like I shouldn’t edit on topics that I care too much about. Topics that came to mind initially were music groups or albums that I’m a fan of, and local politicians who I’ve been following. But would my enthusiasm translate to bias?
Recommendation 3: Make a directory of articles in need of creation or expansion that is searchable by topic, keyword and general area.
- The exhaustive sourcing requirements are important to maintain legitimacy of the information. But they delegitimize first hand knowledge. For example, I ended up selecting the article about San Juan Island National Historical Park, where I visit several times a year. On those visits, I’ve seen various animals of interest like bald eagles, orcas, foxes with my own two eyes. But I couldn’t find a source that would back that up
Recommendation 4: Create a citation norm for first hand knowledge. Later editors can always contest this, but it would be valuable to be able to differentiate “I just didn’t bother to source this” from “The source for this is my first-hand knowledge.”
- It was hard to accept that I would be helping by editing an article, and that I wasn’t judging or erasing the work of others, who I assumed to be more qualified or established community members than me. The history of edits on the pages I researched were intimidating lists of usernames and years of changes made. Who was I to step in and revise their work?
Recommendation 5: Humanize the established Wikipedia community by making user accounts more robust, adding profile photos, and even featuring prolific contributors, so new users know who they’re in community with and understand their fallibility.
Training & Norm Setting
editThe training modules offered by Wiki Edu, and the “Learn to Edit” section on the main Wikipedia site are functional enough for anyone determined to sit down and become an editor, and can serve as a reference for active editors to look up how to do things if they get stuck.
But the presentations might misunderstand the principles of motivation and commitment for those joining online communities that we studied.
What intrinsic motivation would drive the average person to decide to edit an article? Mostly likely, they’d see information that they know to be untrue, or identify key information that’s missing from an article.
In either case, to notice that they’d likely have to have personal knowledge of the topic. But current Wikpedia norms treat such knowledge as invalid (see Recommendation 4)
The user interface for making a change is quite accessible: There are prominent links to “edit” at the top of each page, and even each individual section. Making changes without any investment into the community or understanding of group norms is easy. Through the lens of the utility model for motivation, this is a good thing. The costs are low, so it’s easy for the intrinsic rewards to outweigh them.
But there is no middle ground between completely uninformed editing that will likely be reversed or have to be repaired by more established editors, and taking an exhaustive training program before making one’s first effort, perhaps resulting in the kind of paralysis I described above. Kraut & Resnick suggest, and other communities have shown, that sequential socialization tactics help new members learn, encourage contributions, and increase commitment (p. 215).
Recommendation 6: With each edit that a new user makes, dole out one norm or piece of training, starting with the most important. For instance, the first time I hit publish, I get a message that says “Congratulations on your edits. Did you know wikipedia requires all information be cited by an original source? Learn more here.” or “Thank you for editing. Please make sure the language you added is neutral. Read more here.”
Feedback & Encouragement
editThe actual research and editing part of my experience went smoothly, though the fear that my edits were not up to snuff persisted. For habitual Wikipedia readers, the content feels canonical — that’s the whole point of an encyclopedia — so changing it feels transgressive.
I was lucky enough to have a lot of encouragement from the instructor of our class that we should be relatively aggressive with making changes. But I wouldn’t say that same encouragement was signaled within the user experience. Without being told to, I probably wouldn’t have known to use the user talk page, and that’s where I found validation and support, in the form of a Wikipedian named Reywas92.
Recommendation 7: Call attention to the talk page, edit history and other features, with a very short site tour that comes up the first time a user hits “edit.”
Just a couple hours after I published my edits, Reywas92, who has over 50,000 edits under their belt, chimed in with some suggestions that were presented in a very supportive, but also constructive manner. I got three important things out of this interaction:
- Validation that my edits had added something to the page, dispelling the feeling of imposter syndrome I had coming in.
- Expanded knowledge of norms and functions of Wikipedia. They explained basic style norms like citations needing to go outside of the punctuation, and how to avoid duplicating templates.
- A sense of accomplishment that my work was seen by another member of the community with more experience.
This last element seems particularly important in terms of creating commitment to the Wikipedia community. Had Raywas92 not responded to my edits and made these suggestions, it would have felt like they disappeared into the edit history of a page that perhaps wasn’t seen often. Knowing that they were seen by a veteran user increased the intrinsic rewards of my contribution. And connecting with another user in a small way helped me build bonds-based commitment to the Wikipedia community.
Recommendation 8: Create periodic follow up notifications letting new editors know how times many pages they’ve edited have been viewed.
Recommendation 9: Create a formalized structure for veteran editors to review new editors’ work and interact with them in order to increase socialization and bonds based commitment.
Going forward
editNow that I understand the norms about editing, not to mention the technical functions of Wikipedia, I’ll be much more likely to do it when I encounter problems during my typical exploration of the site as a reader.
As a reader, I’ve benefited for years from the efforts of Wikipedians in a way that I didn’t truly understand until I became one myself. Now I feel a normative commitment to reciprocate their hard work, and contribute to the community myself to aid future readers.