User:Ntranle/reflection

Introduction

The thought of me becoming a Wikipedian never crossed my mind up until I joined professor Reagle’s online community class, in which we are learning about different theories about the online communities, specifically Wikipedia. I set myself aside from Wikipedians because I had certain perceptions of what or who a Wikipedian might have to be. I saw a Wikipedian as someone knowledgable and geeky, which are the two terms that I don’t identify myself with.

However, by learning about the community and partaking in editing articles, my views about Wikipedia and Wikipedians has shifted. Wikipedia serves as a collaborative platform that “anyone can edit”, and Wikipedian is anyone that contributes to the Wikipedia community. Hence, I can now proudly call myself a Wikipedian. As a newcomer, I had to familiarize myself with a new set of rules and norms to abide by the Wikipedia culture. My experience on Wikipedia allowed me to engage with the materials in class about norms, motivations, and collaboration as I further understand and analyze the societal structure of an online community and how I am as an individual learn and uphold the standards.

My Experience

Norms

I first picked the topic of the Vietnam War through the lens of my grandfather. Professor Reagle then first informed me about the rule of Wikipedia, “Neutral Point of View” (NPOV), in which Wikipedians need to present facts with a neutral stance on the matter. To achieve NPOV, editors sometimes need to represent multiple points of view to draw a view with great accuracy that backed up by verified sources. NPOV is crucial in a freely collaborative environment like Wikipedia, where people come with different backgrounds and values. Thus, NPOV acts as a ground rule that forces editors to focus on the importance of the article, instead of their own opinions. I support NPOV, but find it is hard to stay “neutral” as bias is inevitable and can exist subtly in the word choice we use. Therefore, I actively kept that in mind while editing my article.

Another Wikipedia rule that was helpful to know as a newcomer was “Assume Good Faith” (AGF), in which people assume good faith in others. In a collaborative community, conflict is almost inevitable, and AGF reminds people to stay open-minded and welcoming towards each other. This is in the hope of taking the next step to resolve the disagreement. Like NPOV, I also believe in the benefits of AGF. However, I think it is hard to stick to this rule as the conflict worsens with personal attacks. Therefore, as conflict exacerbates, we do not only assume good faith in others, but we also need to reroute and focus on the sake of the article and the goal of the community as a whole.

By understanding NPOV and AGF, I transitioned into becoming a good member of the Wikipedia community, and they also help me govern my behavior while editing and interacting with others.

Motivation

Being a member of the Online Communities class with my peers who are enrolling in the same course and institution motivates me to contribute more in class and in the Wikipedia community. For the class, professor Reagle organized our schedule, materials, and instructions by putting them in a syllabus. I find this very useful as I learn to navigate through the course materials and learn about Wikipedia through the guidelines provided on the syllabus. According to Kraut and Resnick (2012), “providing easy-to-use tools for finding and tracking work that needs to be done increases the amount that gets done”.

Moreover, as a member of the class, we have different sets of rules and deadlines relating to the Wikipedia assignments that we need to follow. Consequently, I think being a member of the class has an effect on my motivation for contributing to the Wikipedia community, in which the Online Community is a subgroup of Wikipedia. Kraut and Resnick claimed that named groups within a larger community increase member’s commitment to the subgroups. Furthermore, my class, as a subgroup, enhances my feeling of closeness to group members (i.e., my classmates), who work on the same projects and share a similar experience as I do, thus, increasing my affective commitment. As Kraut and Resnick wrote, “affective commitment is based on the feelings of closeness and attachment to a group or members of the group”. My affective commitment acts as the intrinsic motivator that allows me to ask questions freely, and leave comments and feedback for my classmates on Wikipedia. Another sense of responsibility that I have experienced is normative commitment, in which I felt obligated to the community as I collaborated with my classmate, Vishare, to work on the Bay Windows article. Since my work will affect not only me but also my classmate, I was motivated to work harder for the benefits of two of us.

On another note, since our Wikipedia articles are graded, it motivated me to work more carefully and perfect my article that follows the Wikipedia guidelines as I did more comprehensive research on Wikipedia syntax and references. This can be explained by Kraut and Resnick’s design claim, in which they state: “coupling goals with specific deadlines leads to increases in contribution as the deadline approaches”.

Article

Challenges

I initially felt discouraged when picking a topic to edit since Professor Reagle told members of the class to choose a topic that we were familiar with. I wasn’t confident with the lack of knowledge on the subject and the lack of familiarity with the Wikipedia editing tools. However, with a few trial and errors, I acquired a basic skill set and landed on the topic that I was eager to work on, which is about Bay Windows, New England’s largest LGBT publication. After picking the topic, I came across different kinds of challenges. Namely, there is a lack of scholarly and verifiable resources on the matter. It is hard to stay neutral while editing because the sources I found were using words that implied bias. Furthermore, one of my classmates also was working on the same topic. However, the coincidence allowed us to collaborate, which enabled me to have exposure to the collaborative aspect of Wikipedia.

Collaboration/Feedback

Since Vishare already worked on her version of the article, I asked her permission to merge her version into my mine. We discussed and split the work equally. After our discussion in class, we decided that I would be working on merging and editing for grammar and references while Vishare was working on expanding the article by adding information into “Highlights” section and finding new sources. We failed to use the Talk page as we were using Imessage by Apple as our primary communicating tool. I find Talk pages to be difficult to keep my eyes on as there are too many different Talk pages for each edit and each page.

Besides Vishare, I got another chance to interact with others by leaving feedback on their sandboxes and talk pages. I also received feedback from Catalina, who left her comment on the talk page and bolded her feedback directly in my article. I find this to be very useful as I can view her edits and go to “View History” to see what has been changed. I find the mechanism of Wikipedia to be fairly easy to navigate through. However, I can see it can be confusing for newcomers as the platform has a lot of tabs and pages.

Another tool that I found was beneficial was the “Get Help” button that placed on top of the page, in which I can click to get the assistance I needed from the Wikipedia experts who were specifically assigned to help us with the task. Vishare and I reached out to Shalor, and she gave us the most helpful feedback so far, in which she pointed out the issues with the tone and the sources. She also gave us the recommendation to look into articles on other newspaper like the New York Times.

Conclusion

Overall, being a Wikipedian taught me to not only become a good editor but also a good member of the community as I learn about the norms and the collaborative culture of Wikipedia. Moreover, I got to get my hands on the editing of a real article that has a direct impact on the site, which enhanced my motivation to work harder as I could see the effects of my effort. A limitation that I would like to note is that because we were mainly working with our peers in our subgroup, my experience doesn’t adequately reflect my experience with the Wikipedia community as a whole as I didn’t have any interactions with other Wikipedians outside of my own circle.