User:Ginachu1993/reflection

Reflection/analysis

Everyone needs a sense of belonging. Coming as an international student to the United States, I joined a sorority in my sophomore year because I want to have a home away from home. There are different organizations in Northeastern, such as, Korean Student Association, Business Frat, Pharmacy Frat, Taiwanese Student Association etc. People need to feel like they belong to certain groups. For example, people in the same major will join the organization that is specifically for field. Likewise, people coming from the same background and nationalities will join the organization with the same identity. An online community is a virtual community whose members interact with each other primarily via the Internet. For many, online communities may feel like home, consisting of a "family of invisible friends".

Online community has the same concept of a school’s organization, but only it is online. In this reflection, I want to talk about what I learn from knowing nothing about how Wikipedia works to creating my very first Wikipedia page –Coiled SewnSan

After working on the Wikipedia project, I understand that Wikipedia is not just only a useful encyclopedia, but also an online community. Throughout the semester, Professor Reagle has assigned us multiple weekly Wikipedia tasks for us to have a better understanding of the Wikipedia community. The Wikipedia tasks are very helpful because it slowly guides and walk us through different function of Wikipedia and how to use the best out of it. After I created my account on Wikipedia, there is a user page and a talk page at the top left corner. Wikipedia users can give a brief introduction about them and talk about the Wikipedia page that they are working on. Another one is the Talk page, where other user can come by and welcome the newcomers or just simply say hi. I have a few messages from my classmate and when I was going through them and trying to say hi back, I saw one of them got invited to the Teahouse. "Teahouse is a friendly space where new editors can ask questions about contributing to Wikipedia and get help from experienced editors". [1]

There are a lot of tools that people can use from Wikipedia to write a perfect article. I found that Wikipedia community portal extremely helpful. The Help Out section in the Wikipedia community portal has nine categories and they are fix grammar, fix wikilinks, update with new information, expand short articles, check and add references, fix original research issues, Improve lead sections, add an image, and last but not least, translate and clean up. I remember one of the Wikipedia task that we were assigned to do was go to the community portal page and fix random people’s pages from the Help Out section. I think this is such a great portal because Wikipedia users can help out each other. When we want to check what other people edit in your article, we can go to the "history" page and check all the "diffs", and this is one of them,[[special:diff/773957208]]. Professor Reagle added an image to my page and it shows up in the history so I can access he made the change in my article. Here is another diff from a random Wikipedian, [[special:diff/773932814]], which he/she helped me categorized my article to the footwear and Egyptian category. It makes people want to help out and edit other’s article more when they know that other people will do the same thing in return. I believe this is an example or reciprocate from Robert Cialdini. In the Science of Persuasion, Robert Cialdini (2001) talked about “the six basic tendencies of human behavior that come into play in generating a positive response: reciprocation, consistency, social validation, liking, authority, and scarcity.” As Robert said, “reciprocation is defined as all societies subscribe to a norm that obligates individuals to repay in kind of what they have received.”

I believe Wikipedia users transitioned into a community from an encyclopedia platform are because of the satisfaction from the self-disclosure. People exchange knowledge through Wikipedia and form a community so it creates a sense of belonging for them. Wikipedia users use the talk box to communicate ideas and create self-disclosure. As I mentioned about my background earlier about joining a sorority, which is a school organization as well as a community, makes me feel like I belong to a certain group with similar identity, common interest, and goal. “A total of 296 Chinese middle school students participated in this research. The results revealed that exhibitionism fully mediated the association between online competence need satisfaction and self-disclosure on the mobile net, and partly mediated the association between online relatedness need satisfaction and self-disclosure on the mobile net.” I also want to relate this argument to the book that we study in the class, Building successful online communities, which the author Kraut (2011) talks about intrinsic and extrinsic motivations. Extrinsic motivation refers behavior that is driven by external reward and achieving value such as money, fame, grades, and praise. This is opposed to intrinsic motivation and arises from outside the individual. Intrinsic motivation refers to behavior that is driven within the individual because it is personally rewarding rather than the desire for some external reward.

In conclusion, I learned so much and had so much fun working on this semester long Wikipedia project and in the Online Community class. Now I can tell the people who once told me not to trust Wikipedia that they are wrong because it is very challenging to create a new Wikipedia page. Wikipedia users need to go through a long process in order to create a new page. They are risking of article being rejected and deleted from the community so if an article has any sort of commercial purpose, it will be taken down. Articles without reliable and credible sources are not allowed in the Wikipedia community too. Everything is very detailed oriented and put into a lot of effort on maintaining a correct format and providing accurate information and knowledge to the world.