Wikipedia Project Reflection
When entering a new online community, there’s always bound to be some sort of learning curve, not just in terms of physically navigating the website, but navigating the community itself. While Wikipedia may not be an online community in the traditional social-media sense that many people first think of, it’s absolutely a community. It not only has its own formally stated rules, but also more subtle guidelines for interacting with the platform and its community that can only truly be observed from directly interacting with that community. By completing this assignment and attempting to follow those stated rules, I was able to learn more about those subtle guidelines that are unearthed through community interaction and can be very telling of a community's norms and values.[needs copy edit]
When I initially began this assignment and was looking for a topic to write on Wikipedia about, I became very anxious in a way that didn’t begin to dissipate until I was actually posting my article to Wikipedia, despite my preparations before actually posting. Most of this anxiety and worry stemmed from my own personal habits when it comes to online communities; when attempting to join a new one, I often won’t post at all until I feel I’ve gotten a good sense of how those community interactions operate. With this assignment, however, while I was able to view other random interactions on random talk and edit history pages, there was no true template for interaction on Wikipedia, at least nothing as easily observable as patterns on a social media feed. While this goes against how I personally like to curate my online interactions, it does go along with Wikipedia’s “Wikipedia:Be Bold” mentality, in that you don’t truly get a feel for the community until you decide to be bold and start posting, as that’s what truly fosters personal interactions on Wikipedia.
On top of my personal anxieties, another issue I faced during this assignment was my own biases, something that I didn’t truly notice until after receiving community feedback and reflecting on this assignment. When picking a topic, I was looking for something I was interested in, but not something about which I would be noticeably biased. This led me to choosing Omegaverse, as I’m interested in fan communities but with no genuine bias about Omegaverse. There was an existing page on this topic before I began the assignment, but it was bare-bones, and I felt it could do with some expansion. It’s as I began writing and posting, that these biases became more apparent. And while I say biases, I don’t necessarily mean this as a bad thing, more so just my own previous experiences that I carried with me into the assignment. [needs copy edit]
The issue with these biases, I now realize, is that my previous experiences in this meta type of writing revolve around fandom and writing for fandom, rather than writing about fandom in a more direct, informative way. In my original version of expanding upon the Omegaverse article, I had typed out the three different sects of Omegaverse (alpha, beta, omega) in more of a list format, a type of formatting I’ve seen more commonly used on Tumblr and other fandom spaces. However, I now realize this is less common on Wikipedia likely due to being less concise, as my version was later edited back down into a smaller, less wordy paragraph. In that same original version, I had also commented on variances in the Omegaverse and non-traditional roles and rules for writing it, another section that was then removed. While I still personally stand by this section and believe it to be relevant, I can understand why others didn’t agree. The non-traditional aspects of Omegaverse are more up to fandom discretion and thus, less formally discussed and lack formal sources. Due to that, I can see why the community would believe it’s not fit to be on Wikipedia, which is more about the direct, informative, need-to-know information regarding a topic rather than something which could be considered just fandom insight.
This, however, brings me into the discussion of newcomers on Wikipedia, especially in regards to consensus. As Reagle describes it, consensus is a general agreement, in which not everybody may totally agree, but there is no active disagreement.[1] As necessary as consensus is, I believe, to be able to cultivate any sort of community or forum, it can also lead to the issue of barring[needs copy edit] out newcomers who may not agree with that already achieved consensus. As an example, in this version of my article, I included a source from Livejournal, a mostly defunct blogging platform that was the precursor to Tumblr in terms of hosting fandom content and communities. While I’d gone into writing the article understanding that sites like Livejorunal weren’t typically Wikipedia-approved sources, I believed this one source would be fine considering it’s the literal source prompt of what’s now known as Omegaverse being discussed in fandom spaces. The source was still removed regardless. I relate this to the issue of consensus and newcomers, because if I personally had been part of the Wikipedia community when the consensus of acceptable sources was being discussed, I would’ve fought for these types of sources being more allowed. Whether one person’s voice would’ve made a difference is mostly irrelevant, as the point is more so about being a member who’s able to help achieve that consensus (or can at least say they were able to try and make their voice heard) rather than being a newcomer who’s stuck with the pre-achieved consensus.
This idea of a pre-achieved consensus isn’t a novel one, but I believe it’s more relevant to Wikipedia than other online communities. The community of Wikipedia doesn’t exist in a bubble the way some fandom communities do. Rather, because of how heavily trafficked Wikipedia has become since its conception and due to it being informative in nature, it makes sense that Wikipedia would have these pre-achieved, pre-established rules and consensus, and they’d be much more in-depth and more rigid than other online communities. While these self-governing rules may not be completely perfect for every circumstance, or even completely universally agreed upon by active, longstanding members of the community, they’re still very much needed in order for the community to continue to act as it does, with the aim to be both reputable and informative while still allowing for collaboration and the “anyone can edit” mentality and policy.
Due to these guidelines, I would make the argument that while Wikipedia is not as welcoming to newcomers as other online communities may be, it’s a necessity that comes with the goals that Wikipedia as a community sets out to achieve. Personally, while completing this assignment I didn’t feel very welcomed by the community. On top of most of what I had contributed to the article being heavily edited or reverted, the only direct, personal feedback I received was a rather cold comment from an anonymous IP user, calling my work unintelligible. While looking back on my work I can see how my writing style wasn’t exactly in line with Wikipedia’s typical style and their standards, I do believe that helpful criticism would’ve been more encouraging than a callous remark.[citation needed] However, while I might consider these types of interactions callous and unfeeling, it’s these stricter types of upkeep that keep Wikipedia functioning as it does, as a genuine source for well-sourced, accurate information.
While I’ve learned that I might not be a good fit for Wikipedia, I also learned that Wikipedia might just not be a good fit for me, something that’s very much in line with Kraut’s design claims on newcomers.[2] This entire editing assignment could be seen as a separating task, in which I was able to learn about the community and how they function, learn if I was a good fit for them, and conclude that I am not. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing; someone could have the same experience I did on Wikipedia, but find the editing feedback much more rewarding, thus finding a community that’s a good fit for them and already facilitating a bond between them and the community, due to that interaction and feedback. In this way, Wikipedia’s approach to newcomers isn’t necessarily welcoming, but seems to be effective in finding those who would be good community members, and weeding out those who wouldn’t. While I didn’t personally find Wikipedia to be a good fit for me personally, I still found this experience to be overall rewarding, providing me with valuable insight on a community I otherwise wouldn’t have looked at twice.
- ^ "5 The Challenges of Consensus". reagle.org. Retrieved 2020-12-04.
- ^ Kraut, R.E.; Resnick, P. Building Successful Online Communities: Evidence-Based Social Design. MIT Press.