English Wikipedia has over 23 million registered users and I became one of those users when I joined on January 9th 2017. The next day a bot named “Host Bot” left a welcome message on my Talk Page on behalf of Teahouse hosts. I was immediately welcomed as a new member into the community. The message looked like this:
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Hi Chloegendron! Thanks for contributing to Wikipedia. We hope to see you there!
Delivered by HostBot on behalf of the Teahouse hosts 16:03, 10 January 2017 (UTC) |
Newcomer Management edit
The message above is a prime example of newcomer management. In my opinion Wikipedia does a really great job of attracting newcomers and addressing/preventing the 5 problems that are associated with newcomers to the community.
First is the recruitment of new members. While I might have been required to join Wikipedia for the purposes of this class, others who have a thirst for knowledge should be immediately drawn to the site. As shown on the Wikipedia:Purpose page, Wikipedia is a community for those who wish to help collect and distribute as much knowledge and information in an encyclopedia setting as possible.
Second is selection - even though Wikipedia is open for anyone to use, all those who register may not be a good fit for the site. This can be seen though the fact that 60% of registered users never make another edit 24 hours after signing up. This could be that the user decided Wikipedia was not user friendly enough or they made an account for the sole purpose of editing a specific item or section of a specific article so they never needed to use their accounts again.
Third is retention through the engagement and development of ties. This step is all about connectivity. When a user feels connected to their community they have stronger ties to it and will be more motivated to engage and participate within in. When I was welcomed to the community by Teahouse, they offered me the opportunity to join a friendly space where new users could ask questions and receive guidance from more experienced users.
Fourth is socialization, or teaching the newcomers the ways of the group. Each newcomer is strongly encouraged to familiarize themselves with the following pages: Wikipedia:Principles, Wikipedia:List of policies, and Wikipedia:List of guidelines. These pages are very resourceful for new, or current, users to find information about Wikipedia. When in doubt, “Please Do Not Bite The Newcomers.”
Fifth is protection. Many of the aforementioned rules are set in place so that the community is not disrupted by newcomers. When a new user joins the community it is assumed that they will read the manual and familiarize themselves with the rules and norms of the community. For some this comes easily and for others it comes with practice. In order to ensure the community is protected from those who are still getting a hang of the site, there are administrators (Wikipedia:Administrators) and other Wikipedians who spend their time moderating the site for disruption, hoping to give advice to those who have made mistakes rather than to punish them.
Moderation edit
I have just mentioned moderation, which is defined by ''James Grimmelmann'' (pg. 47) as, “the governance mechanisms that structure participation in a community to facilitate cooperation and prevent abuse.” Wikipedia has particular techniques, distinctions and characteristics that the site uses in order to moderate the community Some of which are: excluding, pricing, organizing, norm-setting, transparency, distribution, capacity, size and identity.
Excluding: Examples of Wikipedia exclusion comes in the form of reducing congestion by excluding spammers from the website. This coms in three main forms - “advertisements masquerading as articles; external link spamming; and adding references with the aim of promoting the author or the work being referenced.” ([[Wikipedia:Spam]]). There is also exclusion of articles that are not deemed to be notable. This, in fact, happened to my article when I moved it from my sandbox to the mainspace - a user came in and dropped a template on to my article that you can see here.
| Wikipedia size & users | |
| English articles: | 6,827,782 |
| Total wiki pages: | 60,760,375 |
| Average revisions: | 20.1 |
| Total admins: | 859 |
| Total users: | 47,457,253 |
| UTC time: 02:29 on 2024-May-27 | |
Pricing: Time is money and on Wikipedia the price can be seen through those who spend their time writing/editing articles and moderating the community to flag spammers and abusers.
Organizing: Organization on Wikipedia comes in the form of properly creating, editing and formatting articles. This also includes conducting no original research like synthesis (not combining information from article A and article B to come up with conclusion C).
Norm-setting: As seen above, Wikipedia has very structure guidelines users must follow but Wikipedia also has explicit norms that users follow. These are things like timestamps after posting, utilizing talk pages, etc. Norms can also vary depending on what it is, for example, older Wikipedians tend to have their own set of norms that differ from the larger majority of Wikipedians.
Transparency: Wikipedia as a community likes to be as transparent as possible. This comes in many forms such as clearly defining the community norms to not shadow banning users. A shadow ban is when a user is given a ban for no particular reason and without warning (more about types of bans below).
Distribution: Anyone, anywhere can be an administrator on Wikipedia and there are multiple administrators at all times. This is a distribution of power so that no one user is superior and holds the ability to control the sites.
Identity: Wikipedia allows users to decide how identifiable they wish to be. While most users prefer anonymity, I decided to chose my username to be my first and last name, user:ChloeGendron. This worked best for me because I like to keep things synonymous - on all of my community platforms, my usernames are always the same. While this is the method that works best for me, I appreciate that there are options in this community to keep a user’s identity completely anonymous.
Capacity: Wikipedia has a large infrastructure. There are many servers and bots operating the system to make sure that the community is always running at full capacity.
Size: At the time this was written, English Wikipedia had: 5,337,547 articles; 41,871,641 total wiki pages; 1,264 admins; 30,642,243 total users; and 21.1 average revisions. To see how this stacks up to the current totals, please see the box located above and to the right.
Community Governance edit
Many of the concepts mentioned above touch upon the idea of Community Governance. While Wikipedia is mostly a self-governing community it does have a few measures set in place to govern.
First is banning. Wikipedia:Banning policy states, “A ban is a formal prohibition from editing some or all Wikipedia pages, or a formal prohibition from making certain types of edits on Wikipedia pages. Bans can be imposed for a specified duration or an indefinite duration.” The types of bans are as follows: site bans, article or page bans, topic bans and interaction bans. The decision to ban can be made by various different committees, the Wikipedia community as a whole, the Wikimedia Foundation or by Jimbo Wales.
Second is blocking. Wikipedia:Blocking policy states, “Blocking is the method by which administrators technically prevent users from editing Wikipedia. Blocks may be applied to user accounts, to IP addresses, and to ranges of IP addresses, for either a definite or an indefinite time. Blocked users can continue to access Wikipedia, but cannot edit any page (including their own user pages), except (in most cases) their own user talk pages.”
Third is protection. Wikipedia:Protection policy states, “Wikipedia is built around the principle that anyone can edit it, and it therefore aims to have as many of its pages as possible open for public editing so that anyone can add material and correct errors. However, in some particular circumstances, because of a specifically identified likelihood of damage resulting if editing is left open, some individual pages may need to be subject to technical restrictions (often only temporary but sometimes indefinitely) on who is permitted to modify them. The placing of such restrictions on pages is called protection.” Requests for protection on an article can be done by any user but administrators are the only users who can place protection on an article. The types of protection are as follows: fully protected; template protected; semi protected; create protected; move protected; upload protected; pending changes protected; extended confirm protected; and office protected.
My Wikipedia Experience Extended edit
During my time contributing to Wikipedia I had little to no trouble. At first navigating the site was a little intimidating but after reading Wikipedia's policies and procedures for the community, and after completing the Student Training Modules from the Wiki Education Foundation, I felt better prepared to take on the creation of my article.
I created the Panorama Music Festival article. While writing this article I found myself trying as best as possible to stick to the wikipedia:The perfect article guidelines. Once I moved my article from my sandbox and into the mainspace, I was honestly very surprised that my article did not get set for deletion like many of my classmates. I chose an article I felt there was a need for but another user told me that it was not notable. I was also given feedback that I needed to rely less on primary sources, so I did more research to find credible sources for this information that was not coming directly from the festival producers.
In conclusion, I have enjoyed my time contributing to Wikipedia and given all that I have learned about newcomer management, moderation and community governance from the Wikipedia principles, policies and guidelines I think I will continue to be an active user for the foreseeable future. I enjoy the feeling of community that Wikipedia has to offer. I was welcomed from the very beginning by being encouraged to ask questions and participate in the community. ChloeGendron (talk) 19:27, 6 April 2017 (UTC)