User:Haolongzzz/Reflection essay

Reflection Essay

Wikipedia is an online community where people can look for sources and elaborate on an existing or new article. I firmly believe that Wikipedia should provide more awards as extrinsic motivation for users to navigate and then contribute to the community. Though I felt the intrinsic motivation to get involved with Wikipedia to receive credits from my class, I did not see a lot of external benefits provided in the community. For example, if there were social badges or special prizes given, I would be more inclined to spend more time on Wikipedia. In addition, there should be more moderators to supervise all the users’ activities, for some users might deliberately ruin an article for unknown reasons due to a lack of regulation in the community. Offering a safe and bias-free environment for an online community is indispensable for its smooth development. What is more, I consider that Wikipedia should think about changing the design of the webpage. If there could be more eye-catching pictures and vivid descriptions of each section instead of a pure white background with blocks of text for each section, new users would probably dedicate more time and effort to exploring the community. In this essay, I will be discussing ways of how Wikipedia employs the concepts I learned in my course to engage its users and my reflections about being an enthusiastic user of this application.

After going through all the different tasks in Wikipedia, I am impressed with how enticing the Wiki community is for providing freedom to its users. I realized that editing other people’s work is allowed as long as I could make it better and potentially improve the original version to another level. Also, I can link the keywords to other existing articles on Wikipedia, and I could return to fix my mistakes as many times as possible. In terms of my learning experience, I got encouraged to continue with my progress on Wikipedia because of “things that make tasks fun or interesting” ( Kraut et al. 2012, p.25). I deeply felt that my positive contribution to the Wikipedia community is crucial even by simply adding sources or elaborating on the initial work. However, finding reliable sources is not an effortless task because I have to check the credibility of the website and then sort out the core ideas to add to the original article in my own words. Additionally, I had a similar experience when proofreading my classmates’ work-- although I was initially intimidated by proofreading other classmates’ work and then providing comments for improvements, I felt truly relieved and delighted when seeing my classmates incorporate my comments into their articles. Most importantly, I do enjoy reading some of their articles that overlap with my interests, so I reckon there are a few students who are as committed as me toward certain topics.

The theory of motivation is composed of intrinsic and extrinsic factors, and it is applied in this journey of exploring Wikipedia. As demonstrated by the authors in the textbook, “many of the benefits created by a member’s contribution is realized by others” ( Kraut et al. 2012, p.25). When I saw my classmates were all proactively accomplishing all the Wiki tasks and making edits on Wikipedia, it encouraged me to keep up with them. Plus, when someone left a random message on my Wiki talk page, motivating me to do the same, this established an immersive atmosphere for participation. Furthermore, when the instructors asked me to bring up at least one level for their chosen article, I attempted my best to obtain social recognition from my instructors. Apart from the notion of motivation, the principle of commitment also applies to my Wiki adventure. Since the instructors did not require me to choose a specific topic, I carefully looked for an article that could spark my interest. After I selected the article illustrating a successful Chinese businessman, I was quite committed to it. Because I felt a strong sense of obligation to my chosen article in the Wiki community, I desired to achieve a well-rounded article and then fulfill my commitment. Honestly, my advice is supposed to be taken more seriously than the ones suggested by random new users because I followed each step in the training guidelines of Wikipedia and stayed quite active in the community for more than a month, gradually building up my experience. As a result, I would be able to provide more persuasive advice than new users in joining Wikipedia.

As illustrated by the authors, “expectations about how to handle conflicts are especially important to keeping a community productive” ( Kraut et al. 2012, p.126). For instance, there are free-rider problems in the Wiki community because there is a large pool of users. Even though a solid article will be edited many times by different users, not every user’s contribution is the same. If the group size could be smaller, this will incentivize more advanced users to receive the credits equally. I do want to change the editing requirements for all users, depending on their contributions to Wikipedia, they could only edit the articles whose levels are corresponding to them. For instance, the non-active users could only edit the stub-level articles or below, yet the active users would be capable of editing start-level articles. However, only the verified expert users would access the c-level articles or above to make some edits. Concerning the uniqueness of Wikipedia, it is a community comprised of a diversity of global topics. It is also a place for people who are eager to create a new article and look for support from others. Most importantly, it acts as an effective search engine to enable people to seek answers. In other words, Wikipedia is, in a way, different from other communities, for it could detect the copyright of an image and evaluate if the content of a revised article violates any of the norms, such as plagiarism or word-by-word paraphrasing.

In conclusion, I am longing to dive deeper into Wikipedia in the future and try to devote my time and knowledge to the long-term development of this online community. Although there are pros and cons to using Wikipedia, it has been a thriving online community serving numerous users. If we could work hand-in-hand with one another, the community will flourish even brighter over time, generating substantial convenience and benefits for everyone.

Works Cited Ebookcentral-ProQuest-Com.offcampus.lib.washington.edu. https://ebookcentral-proquest-com.offcampus.lib.washington.edu/lib/washington/reader.action?docID=4562447.