Throughout Professor Reagle’s Online Communities course, Wikipedia has been the go-to example for the majority of the class concepts. From newcomer initiation to community moderation, Wikipedia is the ideal site to discuss with regards to its strategies, successes, and failures. It is not perfect, but it is established and highly successful, which is what makes it so intriguing and relevant for a course of this nature. It makes sense, then, that we were provided with the “Wikipedia experience” throughout the semester and that the course culminated in each student completing a Wikipedia page (mine being Drizly, an Internet-based alcohol delivery service). However, it has become clear throughout the past three months that my Wikipedia experience has not been as organic as the experiences of many other contributors in the community. Having been part of a class wherein I would have failed had I not completed all of the Wikipedia-related tasks, I feel as though this extrinsic and rewards-based motivation trumped any intrinsic motivation I may have had to contribute to this community by my own volition. In addition to discussing my own motivation for contributing to the community, I will discuss Wikipedia’s areas for improvement with regards to newcomer initiation and community building, along with suggestions around how to improve those areas.
One of our earlier readings, from Alfie Kohn’s Punished By Rewards, described the rationale behind why rewards and extrinsic motivation often crowd out people’s intrinsic motivation. He states that “rewards, like punishments, actually undermine the intrinsic motivation that promotes optimal performance” (69). In addition, “intrinsic motivation is often corroded by circumstances other than receiving rewards, such as when we are threatened, [...] watched, [...] expecting to be evaluated, [...] forced to work under deadline, [...] ordered around, [...] or competing against other people” (79). I would be lying if I said that my motivation to contribute to Wikipedia this semester was intrinsic. Prior to the course, I had read my fair share of Wikipedia articles and thought about writing my own once or twice, but the real motivation came from looking at Professor Reagle’s syllabus and noting just how crucial this assignment was to success in the course. While I was never “threatened,” per se, I was to some degree watched and expecting to be evaluated by Professor Reagle. Additionally, I was working under the deadlines noted in the syllabus, ordered around (the syllabus uses the word “Task” for each Wikipedia exercise we are to complete), and—as is an underlying assumption in most American classrooms—competing against the other students in the class. The conditions under which my entrance into this community was based are crucial to understanding and properly analyzing my experience with Wikipedia over the past three months.
In addition to Wikipedia being embedded into the structure of this capstone course, our experience with Wikipedia was also through the Wiki Education Foundation, which is a program through Wikipedia that offers focused and specialized support to students working with the site. Kraut & Resnick, in their book Building Successful Online Communities, argue that “clustering those who are similar to each other into homogenous groups fosters identity-based commitment to the community” (82). The Wiki Education Foundation, to me, seems like Wikipedia’s attempt to group together students who are using Wikipedia for coursework in an effort to reduce the fear around a site so large and overwhelming. It works in some ways—for example, it was nice to see that Adam from WikiEd wrote a message on my Talk page back in January. However, it was immediately clear that this was not a personalized message and that he had said the same thing to each of my classmates. The trainings were helpful, and I was introduced to the Five Pillars along with the concepts of Verifiability, Notability, and Neutral Point of View. Additionally, I was taught how to edit articles and introduced to the idea of a sandbox and a Talk page. Even though as students we were introduced to Wikipedia through the Wiki Education Foundation and received training before we were able to contribute, the size of Wikipedia community remained a hindering force and prevented us from becoming fully immersed. As Kraut & Resnick state, “large communities with a large volume of communication reduce bonds-based commitment unless some means of clustering communications is used” (99). While I did feel comfortable communicating with the members of my class, I was completely unsure of how to communicate with anyone else and nervous due to the size of the Wikipedia community.
The seemingly infinite size of the Wikipedia community was another factor that negatively impacted my motivation to contribute. Kraut & Resnick state that “people will contribute more to a group if they think their contributions make a difference to the group’s performance” (63). Besides two of my fellow students and our Wikipedia Ambassador Amanda, very few edits were made to my page, even after it was transferred from my sandbox to Wikipedia. For me, there was no indication that my article was contributing anything significant to the larger Wikipedia community as a whole. Although it was rewarding to see my finished article at the end, my Wikipedia experience ultimately felt quite solitary and not as collaborative as I would have imagined it to be.
As I argued earlier, Wikipedia is not perfect. So, how can it improve?
In my opinion, the main way in which Wikipedia can improve its process with regards to newcomers is that it needs to, in essence, force newcomers to interact with the community. Fostering bonds between newcomers and existing members will not only result in new members becoming more committed to Wikipedia as a whole, but will also take away the overwhelming feeling that comes with entering into the largest existing online community.[needs copy edit] As Kraut & Resnick state, “combining contribution with social contact with other contributors causes members to contribute more” (43). While Adam from WikiEd did write on my Talk page back in January, I would have appreciated receiving an email or notification from Wikipedia that included suggestions of people similar to me in the community who I could talk to—whether they were students or just newer members like me. An instant chat feature could also help with this, so that each interaction with another person in the community does not feel so formal.
Additionally, as Aronson & Mills argued in their article The Effect of Severity of Initiation on Liking For a Group, the severity of a member’s initiation into a group is directly related to that member’s eventual commitment to the group. This is not to say that Wikipedia should aggressively haze its newest members, but perhaps that each member should have to go through a training that is similar to the one provided by the Wikipedia Education Foundation. Additionally, it might be helpful for each member to complete practice exercises (like writing a few sentences with a Neutral Point of View or giving another user a Barnstar) in order to prove to both Wikipedia and the member that they are capable of contributing productively to the community. Something I struggled with throughout my time working in Wikipedia was impostor syndrome, or the idea that I was in over my head and not actually smart enough or good enough to be contributing to this community. Providing practice exercises ahead of time could increase the confidence of the new members and prove to them that they have the same worth as every other community member who had to complete the same training.
At one point during the semester, the motivation behind Wikipedians’ contributions came up as a topic of discussion in class. I knew why I was on Wikipedia, but I struggled to come up with reasons why Wikipedians who are not extrinsically motivated would contribute to the community. I looked around online and eventually came across this interview, which I shared with the class. Justin Knapp is Wikipedia's top editor with over 1.3 million edits. He stated that his motivation comes from the fact that Wikipedia is a fun and relaxing hobby, but it also aligns with his personal values as it is “a way to encourage sharing, free culture, community, privacy, and liberty.”
Wikipedia’s 28,034,865 users (129,861 of whom contribute regularly) are proof that it is a highly successful community. However, while I have found my overall experience with Wikipedia and my completed contribution to be extremely rewarding, I know that my experience will never be that of Justin’s. Until Wikipedia develops a successful way to group users by interest or shared experience and allows them to discuss these interests/experiences in an informal manner unrelated to the pages they are creating and editing, I fail to understand Justin’s sentiment about Wikipedia encouraging community. It does encourage users to edit each other’s pages and discourages from "biting the newcomers," but beyond users’ contributions to Wikipedia pages, there seems to be very little bonds-based commitment. My satisfaction throughout my three months on Wikipedia has come solely from the contributions I have made—not from the impact of these contributions on the larger community or from the interpersonal bonds I have formed on the site. I believe that when Wikipedia can provide a stronger sense of community and impact to its members, that will mark its transformation from a successful online platform to a successful online community.