PaulSereeyothin

Wikipedia Report

As one of the most successful online communities out there, Wikipedia certainly has a friendly user interface for the reader, averaging more than “18 billion page views per month (Anderson, 2016).” This is seen by the neat, standardized content structure in Wikipedia with the leading section at the top, giving an overview of the whole article. There is a navigation box as well. Today, the “English Wikipedia” has 6 million plus articles (Singh, 2020). Behind the scenes of such a community, one would think that the sheer number of Wikipedians contributing would commensurate with the number of viewers, even rivaling that of a whole nation. However, statistics show us that only 1 percent (~1300 people) of Wikipedians generated approximately 77% of the content between 2001 and 2011.Furthermore, a 2008 study, found that globally, only 9 percent of women contribute to Wikipedia (Torres, 2016). Not too long ago, Wikipedia had a total of about 1.5 million biography articles, 17% of which are female biographies (Shigh, 2020). Unfortunately, gender bias is still a serious problem in Wikipedia today. Back in 2016, Wikipedia was the 7th most visited website in the world (Torres, 2016). Today, the website has claimed the 3rd spot on the list of most visited websites in the world (Internet&Searchengine, 2020). With regards to Wikipedia’s popularity as a neutral source and coupled with the problem of ethical design for inclusiveness in today’s information age, I believe that it is imperative to solve the skewness of Wikipedia’s sources by: (1) lowering the entry barrier to newcomers by improving the site’s user interface for enhanced internal communication and (2) consider advertising Wikipedia as an non-discriminatory, open-source project instead of an encyclopedia.

When I was initially trying to learn the norms around wikipedia, I was not frustrated with the rules but with the website’s user interface itself. For instance, I personally did not enjoy the talk page features since it does not keep all the messages in one space. Someone could leave a message for you on your “user” page, in the talk page of the article that you are working on, or in one of your sandboxes. Luckily, the notifications feature helped me to locate the messages. Another design that I disliked was the “view history” tab, especially when I tried to compare different versions of the article. Although it is supposed to be helpful in showing who is doing what, the “source code” formatting makes all the revisions very hard to spot. Prior to learning about contributing to Wikipedia, I never saw it as a community but merely an encyclopedia website. Therefore, I never saw encyclopedia as an open-source project that I could contribute to. Despite going through a linear process of socialization into Wikipedia through COM 482, I still had these frustrations. Therefore, I can imagine that the socialization process for the majority of newcomers are even more convoluted.

The three solutions I proposed in my introduction are all aimed at lowering members’ turnover rate by enhancing internal communication, fixing Wikipedia’s skewness, and addressing my personal frustrations — killing three birds with one stone.

The benefits of simplifying the communication system and making it more transparent outweighs the cost of keeping it the same way. As discussed in class, Wikipedia has an ambiguous design in this area because newcomers felt that they were trampling on other people’s work, which sometimes lead to heated arguments which a lot of women feel intimidated by according to the Business Harvard Review (Nicole, 2016). To counter this transition to a more transparent communication system, Wikipedia could make it more explicit to prospective contributors that it is normal to make changes to other people’s work. Furthermore, this change will make the feedback from old timers to newcomers more visible which has been proven to make newcomers stay longer and contribute more (Resnick&Kraut, 208). You can imagine it almost like a mentor-mentee relationship when editing certain articles.These feedbacks will serve as a guide to what is acceptable behavior. Another potential problem is that this change could signal a transition from identity-based commitment to bond-based commitment where members can more easily interact with each other. However, I don’t think there will be much of an impact because most of Wikipedia’s design already encourages identity-based commitment which is shown to increase members’ loyalty to the community norms (Resnick&Kraut, 81). For instance, enabling members to use pseudonyms, not having a flexible profile page with personal information, grouping homogeneous people together through wikiprojects whose mission is in alignment with the whole site, and more. Lastly, I think the benefits of making this change will allow trolls to be spotted faster. With a messy user interface in the edit history tab, it may be challenging for inexperienced Wikipedians to do so.

Next, changing outsiders’ perception of Wikipedia as an open-source project through ads will increase the pool of newcomers as proven by research (Resnick&Kraut, 180). I see this as a sound action plan due to the high number of readers whom I consider to be potential Wikipedians. This step is especially crucial when only a small number of people successfully get converted to a Wikipedian. Using common sense, a larger pool of prospective users would also generally increase the diversity of the contributors as well, leading to more diverse articles being created.

All in all, the implication of all the points above is that the group of contributors themselves has to be “neutral” like the content itself and that the current 1% of Wikipedians that are contributing will not be around forever. Therefore, in terms of Wikipedia’s survival, improving the training process for new members is also an indispensable design choice that must be made.

In terms of the materials that we did not cover, the most prominent thing I can think of is how to design the website’s interface to complement the things we learned. Since this is not a design class, I was not thinking about going into detail, but rather, a general overview. For instance, seeing what the typical website design looks like. I think this plays a big role in giving users a good experience since they have developed habits from other popular websites like Facebook. When I was evaluating what Wikipedia can improve on, I wish that I had created a visual representation of the major tradeoffs between each topic that we covered so that I could see the bigger picture. Due to the limitations of the web, saying yes to a certain design is saying no to another. Hypothetically speaking, Wikipedia is unique in terms of its stage as an online community. I feel like every online will inevitably reach this point like Wikipedia where the community becomes developed to a point where quality supersedes quantity and newcomers are rejected. It’s like an online community trying to resist change.

Works Cited

1. Anderson, Monica, et al. "Wikipedia at 15: Millions of Readers in Scores of Languages." Pew Research Center, 16 Jan. 2016, www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2016/01/14/wikipedia-at-15/#:~:text=Wikipedia%20averages%20more%20than%2018,to%20data%20reported%20by%20Wikipedia. Accessed 10 Nov. 2020.
2. Internet and Search Engine. "The Most Visited Internet Sites of 2020." BroadbandSearch.net, www.broadbandsearch.net/blog/most-visited-popular-websites. Accessed 10 Nov. 2020.
3. Shih, Carol. "Wikipedia Has 1.5 Million Biographies in English. Only 17 Percent Are about Women." Www.thelily.com, www.thelily.com/wikipedia-has-15-million-biographies-in-english-only-17-percent-are-about-women/. Accessed 10 Nov. 2020.
4. Singh, Manish. "Wikipedia Now Has More than 6 Million Articles in English." TechCrunch, 24 Jan. 2020, techcrunch.com/2020/01/23/wikipedia-english-six-million-articles/#:~:text=Wikipedia%20has%20surpassed%20a%20notable,more%20than%20six%20million%20articles. Accessed 10 Nov. 2020.
5. Torres, Nicole. "Why Do so Few Women Edit Wikipedia?" Harvard Business Review, 2 June 2016, hbr.org/2016/06/why-do-so-few-women-edit-wikipedia. Accessed 10 Nov. 2020.