User:Allie.Mackenzie/reflection

Ice cream tastes different when you’re eating it after a breakup. You don’t savor the quality of the cream or enjoy the texture of the toppings. Rather, you’re eating it to self-soothe. As Kohn writes regarding the dangers of rewards, “’Do this and you’ll get that’ automatically devalues the ‘this.’” Normally, you savor your favorite flavor. This time, the ice cream just tastes like the heartbreak you're trying to forget. It’s an example of extrinsic motivation, “in which the activity is a means to achieve some other outcome,” as Kraut and Resnick write. Similarly, students are used to having grades dangled in front of them like carrots—they often become our only incentive for completing coursework, no matter how much our younger selves loved to learn. When instructed to contribute to a Wikipedia page for the sake of an assignment, my motivation was project completion and nothing more. Yet as I navigated this new digital space, I found myself abiding by its many rules not because I had to, but because I wanted to. Once a newcomer in the community, I started to settle in—and my reward began to shift.

I began my search for a topic by browsing a list of suggested page edits, but found little inspiration. Like most people, I engage with content the most when I am interested in it, and based on class readings I knew that intrinsically motivated people performed better than extrinsically. It was for this reason that I contradicted my professor’s suggestion to pick a topic I knew little about. Marketing had become my interest and profession, and I narrowed the topic to influencer marketing—its growing popularity meant its Wiki page was likely to need recent updates.

Influencer marketing is rapidly becoming a major part of the social media marketing industry, and each new week seems to produce another “news” story about an entitled millennial whose follower count went to her head. Because of this, I was surprised to see just how much information was lacking from the Wiki page. I suspect that this may have to do with the male-dominated Wikipedia world having little overlap with the female-dominated Instagram world.

Before I could decide on this topic, I had to be sure that I was not violating any of Wikipedia’s rules. Because part of my job involves working with influencers, I thoroughly researched Wikipedia’s conflict of interest rule. The guidelines suggest using “common sense” to determine whether any external relationships are too close—based on their examples, I was clear on that front. I have no stakes in the influencer industry nor do I work directly in it, and I have no relationships with influencers outside of professional necessity in my social media role. The guidelines also read, “Subject-matter experts (SMEs) are welcome on Wikipedia within their areas of expertise, subject to the guidance below on financial conflict of interest and on citing your work.” Thus, I concluded that I was considered an SME and would take extra care to cite all of my sources to prevent any personal opinions from slipping through the cracks.

As I prepared to make my first edit as a newcomer, I was met with a gatekeeping obstacle. Bruckman claims that most larger websites such as Yahoo do not require permission for users to contribute, unlike smaller sites. My experience differed slightly: a dialogue box in the “edit” page stated that in order to edit the Wikipedia page, I had to have made ten previous edits and have an account that was at least four days old. The limitation had been put in place to prevent spamming, which had apparently been an issue for that page. This is an example of a technology-enforced regulation as described by Kraut and Resnick when discussing how communities prevent unwanted behavior In the case of this Wikipedia page, the community decided that a simple coding change was the best method of regulation.

Measures such as those prevent community members from wasting energy on trolls, and a member’s attention is a limited resource. Low-quality contributions are a detriment to online communities, because they waste valuable attention that could have been spent in more productive ways. This scenario had already become a reality by the time I browsed the talk page. Based on what I read, someone had made lots of essay-like, poorly-cited contributions that were subjective rather than based on fact. Similar to my situation, that person had contributed as a result of a school assignment. Their motivations were extrinsic; they contributed because their grade depended on it. Consistent with the theory that extrinsic motivators lead to poorer results, their edits were poor in quality and created a need for further edits. Again, attention is a valuable resource in online communities—so I was not surprised to see that two contributors had expressed reluctance to “fix” the problem this contributor had created. Julietdeltalima demonstrated this by saying, “I've had this on my watchlist for several months but haven't had the stomach to deal with it (or uninterrupted chunks of time to keep an editing window open for as long as even one section is going to take).”

Zhu et al. identify four types of feedback: positive, negative, directive, and social. The reprimanding tone characteristic of negative feedback was detectable in some of the talk page comments, which (according to Zhu et al.) might begin to explain why the author of the poor contributions stopped participating (or perhaps she had simply completed her assignment).

After seeing the aftermath of poor contributions, I was determined not to make the same mistake my fellow student had. Though we both had the same original motivation, I had a new one: the obligation to make up for some of the mess they had created. I felt much like how Kraut and Resnick describe hacker culture: “You have to believe that the thinking time of other hackers is precious—so much so that it’s almost a moral duty for you to share information, solve problems and then give the solutions away just so other hackers can solve new problems instead of having to perpetually re-address old ones”.

Aside from editing for grammar, clarity, and sentence structure, I began the daunting task of creating new paragraphs based on objective fact. As I progressed, I noticed that my writing process began to shift. Writing countless college essays had put me in the habit of citing sources simply to meet a quota, but this time was different. I suddenly felt a sense of responsibility and obligation as I wrote. Now, I cared about the quality of the sources I used. I took the time to dig through reference lists for the original sources, sometimes scrapping them when the research sponsor had a conflict of interest. I edited and revised many of my sentences, making sure my phrasing reflected exactly what was evidenced in the sources.

I partially attribute this change to the realization that whatever contributions I made would become a piece of public knowledge, available to the masses. I wasn’t just writing for a grade anymore; what I wrote would affect what many others learned. Whereas with past writing assignments I only had extrinsic motivators compelling me to include citations, I now had an internal sense of obligation to do so. I was aware that excellently written and cited sentences would stay on the page—a claim to fame I selfishly did not want to pass up.

It was a new feeling for me. Except for during art classes, I had never once considered expanding on an assignment after the deadline had passed. That is, until now. What was once a punishment was now a reward, simply because my motivations had changed from extrinsic to intrinsic. Sure, the deadline has passed, and a low grade will inevitably be sent to rot in my gradebook with the others. I do regret not starting sooner, because there is so much more content that I could have explored. Even so, I’ll admit that I still feel like I still won something. It’s the perfect avenue for post-grad professional development, without the university price tag. I won’t ruminate about what could have been, because now I have all the time in the world to carry on with it. The external motivators of grades and deadlines had worn my morale down, and I was ready to go out with a fizzle, defeated. When I was finally granted the freedom to choose my own direction, the very act of learning became the reward. Suddenly, I remembered one of my favorite quotes by William Butler Yeats: “Education is not the filling of a pail, but the lighting of a fire.” Suddenly, I could taste the ice cream again.