Wiki Reflection essay:
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Through the WikiEd course, I was trained to write a Wiki standard article, how to use the tools, and follow the regulations set for contributing to the community. Wiki is known to have flexible rules, but their foundation is built upon firm principles. Their standards are distinguished through things like creating effective paraphrasing, utilizing reliable sources and content neutrality. Socially, Wiki also has policies like keeping good faith. In this community, we must treat it like an online encyclopedia, we must curate with a neutral point of view, and we should respect the contributions and input of the community. This was more difficult than I expected, although this could have been the result of the level of difficulty of my topic.
One of the challenges I faced in the Wiki assignments was interpreting my sources and then communicating the information. Since we have to use reliable sources, in order get the best representation of the idea I believed I only had to use primary and educational sources. My topic was on radical evil and in the beginning, I had the sense that if I read the material that I wouldn’t have that much difficulty in presenting the idea. I was wrong. Radical evil is too abstract of a subject to understand without delving into the subject matter completely. It didn’t help that the philosopher contradicted himself through his establishment of ethics. What did help was the sources that pointed out and argued his contradictions. The sources were dense and extremely difficult to interpret by someone who has little background in philosophy. What I figured out was to take from basic (non peer reviewed) sites to get an overview and use that to interpret the secondary and primary sources. I also found difficulty in paraphrasing. The words I read seemed important to me in understanding the idea for how it was presented from the originator. Figuring out the best way to write it so that the average person could understand took a lot of revising and rewriting. I found myself constantly rewriting sentences. Another thing I learned was not to make abrupt edits, like deleting a whole quote from an article. Even though the original article had only one sentence and a quote the size of a paragraph, I should have gave edited it out in pieces and gave a better explanation of why it was unnecessary. Doing this I got my edits reverted and deemed nonconstructive.
Overall, after reading to what seemed like a billion sources, composing, and refining the article, I can say that I got a good taste of the intrinsic incentives that Wiki has to offer. I felt so much satisfaction seeing my work constructed and it would feel more satisfying having it read by thousands of readers. After this article and completing Wikied, I would greatly consider contributing to Wiki again in the future. Outside of the classroom, recognizing these values would be difficult for the general public.
One of the problems that contest in online communities is need for participation. Wiki articles are mostly stub-articles and in order for Wiki to increase the class of articles, they need people to give meaningful contributions. For myself, and probably everyone in the class, I would have never thought to contribute to Wiki until we were given the incentive of getting a grade for it. Therefore, I see an importance of receiving an incentive to generate intrinsic motivation. More specifically, an extrinsic incentive to bring in new users and advertising intrinsic incentives to arise intrinsic motivation. In the course we see that designing incentives are difficult because it crowds out intrinsic motivation. When a person is given extrinsic rewards, like money, it can reduce the intrinsic motivation to contribute. Personally, if I was given money for working on Wiki articles, I would lack genuine self-motivation to work on tasks and I would just be focused on receiving the incentive.
I believe in order to arise levels of intrinsic motivation; intrinsic incentives would help more than extrinsic rewards. But it’s hard to see the value of feeling the gratification and education of contributing to wiki without having to start somewhere. So that’s where the idea of giving at least one, easily obtainable extrinsic reward tailored to the general public. Examples of an intrinsic incentives would be like a paper certificate of an accomplishment, bold messages on the user page that generate gratification, personalized messages from Wiki educators, and maybe even advertising high contributing users on the home wiki page. Advertising these intrinsic incentives, I believe is the most important part. From my experience, it was hard to see the incentives that were given to me by wiki. Overlooking the incentive of a grade given from the class, I wouldn’t have seen any benefit in contributing to Wiki as an individual. From a person who is stuck in their working routine, there’s low expectations in contributing into something that you don’t see any benefit towards. In some sort, I see the fault in lack of advertising the benefits and rewards of contributing from the Wikimedia Foundation. I believe that people won’t go out of their way to look for these benefits, so Wikipedia should take it in their own hands to make them prominent. Places like social media, universities, high schools, highly trafficked public places are great ways to gain the eyes of the public and show them that contributing a an online, interactive, and collaborative encyclopedia has intrinsic value. Looking at their homepage, it is simple. If I was doing research, I wouldn’t be motivated to do anything else with Wikipedia but to use it for information. Another idea can be to add something like an accomplishment meter on a reader’s page that could ease a reader into a user’s accomplishment meter. Having this defaulted on the margin while you surf through the site can act as a visual representation of what you can gain from reading and contributing to Wiki.
These are just some small pitches I created to advise Wiki with some of the challenges they face. Overall, I believe once you accomplish a solid amount of work towards Wiki, the incentives and the motivation that arises from it is clear and recognizable to the users. Being faced with getting new users to participate and become committed is difficult when you need motivation to be intrinsic. When I first started this class, it was difficult for me to find that motivation until I was forced to put everything together for a grade. As I have read many Wiki articles, I look at my work now and it’s become very gratifying to see that I created an article myself. In the future, I hope classes like this become more popular so that students can contribute to a public good.