User:Wlefkovich/Wikipedia Reflection

When Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger first created Wikipedia, it seemed like a crazy idea to believe that a crowd-sourced encyclopedia would become one of the most popular and reliable information platforms on the internet. Yet, it has defied expectations thanks to a surprisingly small group of extremely dedicated users - a study of Wikipedia edits in the 2000s revealed that nearly 80% of edits made are done by around 1% of users. Despite its incredible success, Wikipedia struggles to engage more than this small group.

During this semester, I spend time on Wikipedia creating my article, 2018 NFC Championship Game officiating controversy. Through my experiences, I learned that Wikipedia's top-heavy contribution problem is a function of its difficulties educating and engaging new members in the community. In this paper, I will argue that the two biggest challenges for Wikipedia's management of newcomers are effective socialization and retention. I will then recommend a slight design tweak for Wikipedia that will help to increase bonds-based and identity-based commitment to the community.

Effective Socialization

Effective socialization, in which newcomers are taught the ways of the group, is the first issue that afflicts the community. Though the "policy trifecta" claims that "users of a fast and flexible wiki should 'ignore all rules,'" the reality, in practice, is that Wikipedia does have rules - and if you violate them, the reaction will be swift and immediate. For example, despite thorough research on how to set up a subpage for this very essay, I did it incorrectly. My reflection was immediately marked for speedy deletion - twice. With that said, User:Reaper Eternal, an administrator, generously linked the appropriately set-up subpage on my user page, found here: Special:Diff/890087498. While the interaction was kind and helpful, I still haven't been socialized to the norms for creating a subpage. Over the course of the semester, I experienced other such instances of socialization by fire.

After completing my article on my sandbox page, the next step was to add an image, an infobox, and categories. All three of these tasks proved difficult. Adding an image became a confusing and time consuming process, despite help from the Wikipedia:Uploading images page and User:Reagle. Eventually, I found an image that wasn't ideal, but seemed to have been uploaded to Wikipedia Commons. Apparently not, I found out, when I opened my article the next day and the image was gone. It had been removed because it was a non-free file (Special:Permalink/884806383). Ultimately, I got lucky because another user uploaded the image for my article. However, the result is that I was never socialized to the norms associated with correctly uploading images. As for the infobox, I spent a considerable amount of time on the Help:Infobox page attempting to learn how to create one for my page. In the end, I gave up and decided to copy one from a similar article. I consequently grew fairly confident editing infoboxes from tinkering with the existing one I chose for my article, but still don't know how to create one through source mode. The final step before my article went live was choosing categories, or so I thought. Only after I added categories did I learn that they do not go in sandbox articles. I discovered that only after they got deleted, seen here: Special:Diff/889057423. In this instance, the result is that I became socialized to the rule of not putting categories in the group, but it was certainly frustrating to find out in the manner I did.

Once I limped to the completion of my article, I was ready to go live when I learned that in the meantime, another article with the same name and topic as mine had gone up. The night prior, I was working to upload a fair-use photo for my article, only to be told that there was no article with my title, and I needed to go live before I could upload the image. And yet, somehow there was an article, with the same name, that had existed for three weeks without my knowing. Furthermore, the image from the article, what was almost identical to the one I was hoping to use, just appeared on my sandbox page. It was wholly confusing and just another example of me being completely con-fuddled with the ways of Wikipedia. In the end, I simply wrote on the talk page of the existing article and imported my content (Special:Diff/890048230).

As a member of a college class, I had the luxury of provided tutorial videos, librarians, User:Reagle, and our education sponsor, User:Shalor (Wiki Ed). Most new Wikipedians are given none of these resources to help socialize them to unfamiliar rules and regulations. As a result, they are left to their own devices to research and learn countless norms, many of which involve working in source mode, which isn't exactly intuitive. The help/reference pages are extensively thorough, often to the point where it becomes a whole new project to figure out how to approach whatever problem you are trying to solve. There are tutorial videos online, but they too can be quite long. If newcomers learn by trail and error, as I did, it can become quite frustrating when the work that's done simply gets changed or edited because a rule that either isn't known or isn't followed quite to a "T" is violated. As a newcomer trying to become acclimated to the community, the continuous corrective feedback can become exhaustive and deter contribution.

Retention of Newcomers

Another steep challenge for the Wikipedia community is the retention of newcomers. Retaining newcomers requires engagement and development of strong ties - but in order for newcomers to become engaged in the community, they must first get over the hurdles of initiation. Learning, understanding, and familiarizing oneself with the unique and challenging norms and regulations of Wikipedia, for example, the difficulties I encountered during my socialization phase, effectively act as an initiation for newcomers. And perhaps, the initiation is a little too effective. 60% of registered editors on Wikipedia never make another edit after the first 24 hours of participating. For me personally, as a recent Wikipedia newcomer, I have a hard time envisioning myself ever making a major contribution to the community in the future. I'm not even sure I would make a minor edit. After a full semester of learning about Wikipedia norms, I still don't know how to do much outside basic editing functionality - and I don't have any strong ties to Wikipedia that would motivate me to commit to learning more or contributing in the future.

The "development of strong ties," a crucial piece of newcomer retention, is an area where Wikipedia could improve. It is, of course, challenging for a website that is anonymous to develop bonds-based ties, although there have been people who have met on the wiki. But for the newcomer with relatively few interactions, such as me, bonds-based commitment does not develop. Unless newcomers feel a particular sense of pride or intrinsic benefit from contributing to Wikipedia, which I happen not to, needs-based commitment does not apply. Newcomers know that Wikipedia will be just fine without them, and thus they feel no obligation to the community. Therefore, normative commitment does not exist. That leaves only identity-based commitment. In order to feel identity-based commitment, newcomers must feel connected to the group as a whole or its purpose. While I admire the purpose of Wikipedia, to create an "encyclopedia of all human knowledge," I don't feel especially connected to it. I can't say I "identify" with the purpose, so to speak. Consequently, I feel no sense of commitment to the Wikipedia community. While there are those who do identify with the community purpose or are intrinsically motivated to contribute to Wikipedia, the majority of newcomers, 60%, feel no commitment to the community.

Recommendation to Improve Retention and Socialization

Although Wikipedia struggles to retain newcomers, I think a simple design tweak could improve their retention rate. The strongest potential form of commitment for Wikipedia, based on its characteristics, is identity-based. Contributors who identify with the goal of Wikipedia are often the most important members of the community. For example, User:Ser Amantio di Nicolao, who is behind around a third of Wikipedia, celebrated closing the gender gap of Wikipedia biographies by "writing another article. Making another edit". That kind of commitment to the global encyclopedia is the type that Wikipedia needs to inspire. By creating groups, with "a name and tagline that articulate shared interests", within the larger community, Wikipedians with interests in similar content can congregate and discuss the proliferation of content they are particularly passionate about. A subgroup like this would increase identity-based commitment. In order to create such a subgroup, Wikipedia could use the categories feature already in place. In addition to using categories to sort articles, they could also use categories to group like-minded users contributing to similar types of articles. Each category would have a group page where users could talk and get to know each other, perhaps even forming bonds-based commitment. Though there exists categories for users who use/do something, for example, Category:Wikipedians who use Safari, the category page is simply a list of all the the users in the category. The proposed page should appear more like a subreddit - a page that highlights questions, conversations, topics of interest, and ideas for articles in the category. While this may seem to go against the Wikipedia norm of staying "focus[ed] on the task," I think the proposed style of group page would work in tandem to keep users on task by encouraging contributions to the categories they are passionate about, while simultaneously promoting identity and bonds-based commitment. Additionally, these groups could be utilized to aid socialization of newcomers. The Reddit-esque format of the group page would allow relative newcomers to ask questions in a forum-like environment, and users who want to see their categories grow and thrive could help usher WikiChildren through their teenage years and into maturity.

Wikipedia is an incredibly complex and vibrant community driven by a small number of intensely dedicated users. In order to widen the breadth of contributing users, the community should incorporate functionalities that work to address the issues of newcomer socialization and retention. Creating category-based groups to encourage commitment to the community and its users is one way Wikipedia could foster progress in these challenging areas.