User:XinqiaoCheng/Report

Recommendations for Wikipedia Community on How to Dealing with Newcomers

In this report, I would like to talk about my own experience from a complete outsider to a newcomer in Wikipedia community, and then give my advice on how to better attract and retain newcomers based on my experience, my observation, and what I learned in class. Apart from reflecting my thoughts upon my own experience, the other reason why I decided to focus on giving advice on dealing with newcomers is that as professor Hill cited in class, there is a decline of editorship in Wikipedia since 2008, and the professor pointed out that the decline was most likely to be caused by the decline in the community’s ability to retain newcomers. So the rationale is that if Wikipedia can attract the right people to join the community and integrate newcomers into the community, maybe we could see an increase of editorship, or at least a flat editorship, so that it can get closer to one of its missions, which is to empower and engage people around the world to collect and develop educational content.

Attracting the Right People

From my point of view, Wikipedia is doing great on effectively advertising for new members but not doing enough to get the right people to self-select to the community since it always says “everybody is welcomed to edit,” but in fact not everybody is able to do that in terms of making the community a better place. So here comes my first suggestion which is to make the online training for students, the Wikipedia Adventure, the Wikipedia Tutorial, or at least a short version of them mandatory for newcomers. In other words, newcomers should take tests and then join the community to edit if they passed the tests, which likes a diagnostic task. There are three merits for doing that. First, because it requires comparatively more efforts to join the community, people who do not have time to do the training can be screened out. Since they do not even want to spend their time to do training, how can we expect them to have enough time to make contributions? Second, because of the same reason, we can expect a more committed crowd to join because studies show that users who are more invested feel a stronger commitment to communities and stay longer. Third, it ensures that newcomers know the norms well so that they are less likely to do harm to the community. Though it may not be effective for filtering vandals, for those who are well-intended but did not have a chance to know the norms before they jump in and start making contributions, it could as least help them to be better prepared.

Integrating Newcomers into a Community

Wikipedia is also doing well on incorporating newcomers into the community in terms of protecting communities from inappropriate behavior by newcomers and teaching newcomers how to behave in ways that are expected to. For instance, it has robots and administrators to post banners of warnings or to delete harmful content promptly. It also has several kinds of tutorial for newcomers to choose from. However, As a new student editor, even though I completed the tutorial, it was still daunting for me to move my first article to the main space for everyone's review. So my second suggestion is about finding ways to help newcomers to take their solid first steps. I noticed that articles in Wikipedia should be categorized, so maybe we can make use of that to help newcomers find their “mentors”: Along with the drop down menu of existing categories, Wikipedia could also provide a list of names (or groups) of experienced editors in the niche so that an unconfident newcomer can easily request help with their first articles before they are published. Supported by old-timers, newcomers could not only feel less stressed but also have stronger interpersonal relationships with sub-communities' influencers; for old-timers, it could also save them some time searching for new articles which they can offer their help with.

Apart from feeling unconfident, I also had a bad experience after I published my first article that I felt like I might not contribute anymore. There was an old-timer deleted nearly half of my article and left very harsh comments on my talk page accusing me of doing public relations for the organization I am writing about. It was not his being harsh to me that made me feel uncomfortable. What made me feel frustrated is that some of my work was being deleted by someone without even discussing with me. He did explain why he deleted them on my talk page, but it was after he took action of the deletion, and it sounded to me like an order from a person who is on higher position instead of a collaboration which how it should work in Wikipedia. I know the fact that most of the content in Wikipedia is free licensed so anyone can edit, but deletion before discussion still leads to a feeling of trivial and disrespected for newcomers, which will large likely to deter them from making more contributions. In addition, after I discussed with the person who deleted my content on my talk page iteratively, explaining why I think the content I mentioned was important, we reached an agreement that some of the content could have been kept if they were expressed in a more appropriate way. So my third suggestion would be to allow anyone to make minor edits on any articles directly, but when it comes to making deletions or additions of paragraphs, or changing main arguments, people should discuss with the person who created the article or who did the previous edition first, and make changes after that as many interested parties as possible give their consent. In order to do that, we can refer to the moderation of Slashdot and customize a simpler way for Wikipedia. Apart from making newcomers feel equal to old-timers and more responsible for their own work, the discuss-first-then-act kind of mechanism can also prevent contributors from doing repetitive work like reverting to the previous version and from having misunderstandings about one another.

I am not the only one who received harsh comments. In fact, as pointed out in an article on MIT Technology Review, it is because of estimated 90 percent male members in the Wikipedia community that leads the place to be “a crushing bureaucracy with an often abrasive atmosphere” that scares newcomers away from further participation. There are projects going on aiming to address this problem, and I do not have any better ideas for that yet. But it ought to be the priority for Wikipedia to think about in order to improve itself, especially for the sake of retaining newcomers.

Experienced editors in Wikipedia would receive barnstars from other members for exceptional work and great efforts. However, there is no custom to reward newcomers. So my last suggestion is to enhance extrinsic motivations of newcomers by giving them rewards. In order to prevent members from gaming the system, my idea is to allow newcomers to share their good performance outside of the community to their social media platforms like LinkedIn. In this way, the additional value for contributing to Wikipedia along with contributing based on intrinsic motivation could boost the editorship of newcomers. Besides, the aforementioned decline of editorship in Wikipedia might result from a decrease of time people spent on Wikipedia because social media has taken up too much of their time. So by integrating social media with Wikipedia, I expect more people's attention to Wikipedia Community.

Limitations

My suggestions above are merely based on my role in the community. The old timers may have completely different opinions on how to make Wikipedia a more successful community. Also, I cannot tell which side is more likely to give unbiased suggestions, the same for insiders and outsiders, unless we conduct tests based on the suggestions. That is the only way to find out what is best for the community after we provide theoretical suggestions, and that is also the most persuasive way to educate decision makers.