Suggested Wikipedia Community and Wikimedia Foundation Improvements

The wikipedia community is an ever evolving community. There are some spaces the wikimedia foundation though can improve on wikipedia itself. If it had a more user friendly 'Main page', the implementation of algorithms to make your wikipedia experience easier and a better exposure to community not just content, it would be more effective in drawing young loyal wikipedians.

Right now, when you first enter the wikipedia main page it feels outdated, over cluttered and irrelevant to the things that interest me. This is unlike many other platforms such as Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram where they tailor your experience from showing you what your friends are doing to even the advertisements on the page. Of course the purpose of wikipedia is not social media, rather a collaborative project to create a place for humans to contribute to the wealth of knowledge iin the world. But I disagree, this collaborative project should follow some of the principles of social media. The main page should be somewhat tailored to you. It should show you stubs and articles that you are interested in so you can read and learn about it and maybe even edit it. By improving the presentation of the main page, it wont only retain users to want to come back but also not feel overwhelming with the mass amount of words, sentence fragments and boring monotonous user experience.

This brings me to my next point, the community. If the main page was revamped the sense of community will also be improved. Although Wikipedia is focused on content, there should also be just as equal of importance to the exposure to community. As of now it is difficult to find people I know or connect and see what they are doing. This could also be due to the fact that I'm new to this platform but still, there are lots of steps to simply look at what my fellow peers are editing or looking at. Wikipedia attempts this by the use of dedicated wikiprojects but I believe that these are even hard to find or feel motivated to put in the work to become a well known user in the group.

Lastly, alongside improvements on the home page, emphasis on community building, there should be built in algorithms and systems that help aid your wikipedia experience. In this day and age, technology is advanced enough to make predictions for you and learn from your patterns. With improved autonomous systems, wikipedia can easily mine your data about the topics you commonly search, the people you interact with to make your experience more personalized. One way the main page can benefit from this is the inclusion of a "For you" section or something similar that autosuggests wikis that need improvement but are in line with your interests. I found it difficult to find a topic to write about and I believe if Wikipedia removes the work of finding something to edit in the first place, we could use more of our time editing.

My experience with Wikipedia

On wikipedia I created the Palace Skateboards article. At first I thought it would relatively be simple but through more and more research and learning about what makes a good article it increasingly became difficult. There is alot of information you can find on the brand online but I struggled with knowing what to include, omitted, the structure of the article itself or how to maintain a neutral tone. Furthermore, it was hard to organize all of this information into a cohesive piece that was both simple and easy to read and something the Brand may hopefully be proud of as well.

The modules on wikiedu and practice exercises really showed me that there is more thought and structure to Wikipedia than I thought. My preconcieved notions about Wikipedia is that you just simply edit things and can copy and paste paragraphs from other notable sources, but this is not the case. To write something superb on wikipedia takes alot of time and effort. With the explanations of what sources are good and bad, references for certain topics, what kind of images you can add, the whole collaborative talk page, etc., there is more complexion than being a random anonymous editor. Not to mention, there is a slight learning curve with markdown that has exponentially been made easier through the visual editor. I can see how someone can feel reward and be intrinsically motivated to become a "wikipedian." There was a level of satisfaction to publish my work onto the main space and seeing some people edit and improve on my article already. This excited me to look into other topics I'm interested in to see if there are ways I could significantly improve upon it. Ever since wikipedia has been on my radar because of this class, more and more has the importance of having accurate and reliable information on this page has come to my senses. Lately in my social interactions or daily dose of youtube videos I watch, I've been hearing people say, "Wikipedia says.." or something along those lines. This means that it is crucial to have accuracy throughout this free encyclopedia since it is usually one of the first few web search results and place where people go to for more information on topics.

My experience in Wikipedia through the lens of COM482

There are two types of motivation, intrinsic and extrinsic motivation. As we learned from class, too much extrinsic motivation through incentives could conflict eachother and lead to unexpected or negative outcomes such as "crowding out" at the organizational level that leaves the organization with less work produced. Therefore, we must find the ways wikipedians are motivated and cater to those instead of come up with what we think would be beneficial or keep people around such as paying people, giving reputation points, and leaderboards.

In one of the academic papers published by Warncke-Wang et al called "Misalignment Between Supply and Demand of Quality Content in Peer Production Communities" it was found that wikipedians seem to edit on things and seem to not put much of a priority of reaching a large audience. This suggestions means having tailored wikipedia experience would only benefit the users. This is because by showing what they are interested in through autonomous systems, motivation could be improved. Also, this could decrease the opportunity costs which is a utility model that focuses on an individuals thought process of whether or not they should put effort into doing something and the things they could have done instead. Improving and editing wikipedia pages comes with lots of work and the opportunity costs could be reduced if they feel as if wikipedia is refreshing and listens to their needs with a better main page that helps make these opportunity costs decisions easier in other words, making it easy to find useful things to do which falls into one of persuasive techniques stated by Kraut et al.

Lastly, a better emphasis and navigation for community would benefit newcomers and the rules and governance on wikipedia making the overall experience better. This is because, if a community is cohesive and users are committed with the improvement of motivation, users will spontaneously comply. Right now, it is hard to maintain build or engage with a network. To some extent, when you first enter the world of wikipedia you are flooded by masses of rules, policies, and expectations. And the moment you cross any of these lines, whatever you tried to edit or add to the wealth of human knowledge, it seems as if random admins can just come in and speedy delete you. This shouldn't be the case, there should be improved ways to establish whether or not someone is acting in good faith or just trolling. With these improved features, admins and long time users could help assists these newcomers in improving their work so that it could be permanently added to the main space.