User:Tiarawearer/reflection

Considering that Wikipedia was launched in January 2001 and I was born in May 2002, I have quite literally never known a world without it. Up until this semester, however, I had never felt the desire to contribute to Wikipedia or take my status from frequent consumer to contributor - in my mind, it was not appropriate or necessary for someone like me, a young and inexperienced student, to contribute to an encyclopedia. I was not an expert, and therefore was unqualified to add anything relevant - surely, someone better, more educated than me had contributed anything that needed to be contributed. In short, I did not think Wikipedia had space for me.

A full semester and several contributions later, including the creation of the 2023 Paris bedbug infestation article, you would think my attitude had changed. Despite now having proof of the fact that I can carve out a place for my contributions, I do not think of myself as a Wikipedian and do not plan on adding much else to the platform after the conclusion of this course. My reflection will delve into some of the reasons why based on my experience this semester, and will rest on the following argument - online communities that grow too large will need to rely on heavily bureaucratized processes to welcome newcomers that will ultimately fail to accurately represent the community's character and create a jarring contrast between expectation and experience that leads to disengagement. Using Cialdini's six basic tendencies of human behavior and Kraut & Resnick's work on the challenges of dealing with newcomers, I explore how these principles can explain how massive online communities such as Wikipedia experience this phenomenon.

Am I welcome here - Social Validation and Liking

Since 2001, Wikipedia has grown exponentially and currently consists of more than 47 million editors. As I envisioned joining this space, I felt a sort of excitement mixed with apprehension. There is something of a "cool" factor about joining a platform so many people know and are already contributing to. According to Cialdini, using the principle of social validation, "requesters can stimulate our compliance by demonstrating that others just like us have already complied." Hearing that Wikipedia editors came from all sorts of backgrounds and that Prof. Reagle had years of experience introducing students to the platform with success emboldened me and made me look forward to starting my time as a Wikipedian. I created my user page and added user boxes, excited to see how other Wikipedians might react. When I learned that each user page had a "talk" page, I thought this experience might come to resemble my other experiences in online chats and walls on writing and social media websites, where strangers might introduce themselves in hordes and welcome me to the platform. I thought we might bond at our excitement over being Wikipedians, and all the features of the website that we could learn about together.

That wasn't the case. After creating my user page on January 12, 2024, my first and only interaction until the creation of my article a few weeks later was with Brianda, our assigned Wikiedu instructor. Although I am not unfamiliar with very broad "Welcome to our platform!" messages and understand their usefulness, my experience joining online communities is that there is usually a very easy and intuitive way to interact with other members, such as a chat box. On Wikipedia, I felt that I did not know where to get the social validation I so desperately sought. According to Kraut and Resnick, "interpersonal recruiting is more effective than mass communication." Cialdini's comments on how "similarity can expedite a rapport" and that "compliments stimulate liking" support this claim. Based on my experience on Wikipedia, the social validation and liking does not really come until you have made a worthwhile contribution or at least have made a calculated effort to insert yourself in the fray. The social and human component of Wikipedia takes second place to making sure that no erroneous information is spread. While logical, this can lead to some very off-putting, or simply non-existing, interactions with Wikipedians upon joining the community.

I don't mean to impose - Scarcity and Authority

When a group grows large, it needs rules. As the rulebook grows, so does the amount of time newcomers need to spend familiarizing themselves with the rulebook in order to understand how to operate as members of the community. Reagle (2015) talks about this "obligation to know" by saying that in online communities, "the availability of information creates a social expectation of knowing it." The problem with Wikipedia is that there is so much information available, not only to members but also to consumers. The obligation to know looms so large and the information bank so wide that as a newcomer, I felt overwhelmed and discouraged. And since experienced editors are busy leading their lives on Wikipedia, there was no "bureaucratic" way for me to go about consuming the information. The only help I had initially was the class and the Wikiedu content, something which I may not have known to seek out if I had joined the platform independently. This gap between a platform guided by clear guidelines and the confusion that comes with figuring out how to read the guidelines can be demotivating. As Kraut and Resnick said, "when conventional organizations provide recruits and complete information about the organization, prospective members can form accurate expectations about it."

Given that I didn't really feel like a member of the community, since I didn't know anyone in the community except for my classmates, I was extremely hesitant to ask anyone but my professor for help in understanding what these expectations were. The question of "space" kept coming back to me. Since I didn't feel like there was much space for me (or alternatively, there was too much space for everyone else to crowd me into a corner), I questioned every move I made until I physically couldn't avoid jumping into the fray. Academic validation, more than the genuine desire to contribute, motivated me.

The few exercises we did in copyediting, such as the minor changes I added to the ageism page helped me get more familiarized with the visual editor and publishing my changes. In that regard, even finding my topic did not feel too complicated. I was surprised to learn that there was indeed untrodden ground on the platform. If that was the case, then why did my contributing to the platform feel so off? In relation to scarcity, Cialdini says that "information that is exclusive is more persuasive." As I had my first interactions with Wikipedians, I wondered if some of their behaviors and my mindset were guided by this strange push and pull between wanting contributors to add to Wikipedia's existing knowledge without spreading the information too think so that existing editors still had something to do.

Upon moving my article to mainspace, I did not encounter any significant pushback. The only major edit that occurred was the speedy deletion of a user page I had accidentally created for my article. Although this was completely warranted and actually quite helpful, I felt nevertheless as if I had done something wrong (which I had). My response to the comment left on my talk page was so placating in its tone, I find it almost comical looking back on how much I was looking for approval from someone I viewed as an authority figure. Their authority was reflected to me in the speed at which they made edits (the speedy deletion occurred only moments after my creating the user page) and the confidence. Based on my own approach to Wikipedia, being extremely cautious and taking ages to make even the smallest of changes, being confronted with this confident counterpart was jarring. The issue that quickly arose as strangers began adding changes to my article was that I did not know how to evaluate whether these editors were always in the right.

Concerning authority, Cialdini says that "if we fail to think, as is often the case when confronted by authority symbols, we can often be steered in the wrong direction by ersatz experts - those who merely present the aura of legitimacy." Getting initial feedback from Prof. Reagle after moving my article was very helpful in helping me understand where my article stood. Further changes down the line, however, were more confusing. One interaction in particular comes to mind - when I added a picture of a bedbug to my article, it was immediately reverted by a user who claimed that it was not constructive and that "Images are not generally used in articles simply as decoration or to elucidate general points." While the user was pleasant enough in tone, when I raised this point in class Prof. Reagle seemed confused by this claim, just as I had been. In my confusion, however, I hadn't dared contest who seemed to be an experienced editor, and instead became very placating once more, accepting his edit.

The fact that I could not understand how to evaluate a person's authority made me even more confused about how to follow procedure. The only times I felt confident in my contribution was in the User talk:Reagle/QICs and my peer reviews to Talk:Fashion museum and Talk:The Mamba Mentality: How I Play. This is because I knew where I stood in relation to my fellow student editors, and I was aware that we were all using the same references in how we edited Wikipedia. Most importantly, we all had a common resource - Prof. Reagle.

The ambiguity of Wikipedia and the lack of connection between users who make significant changes to one another's content can come to feel like everyone is looking to gatekeep and protect their work or authority by imposing on others, even when they do so in a relatively pleasant way.

We're better off as strangers - Consistency and Reciprocity

Ultimately, the reason why I think my Wikipedia journey will be coming to an end after this course is that I do not have the energy to engage in all of the processes that would make me a consistent and active member of Wikipedia, giving back to the community in ways it gives to me. Cialdini speaks of reciprocity as a code that all societies subscribe to, "a norm that obligates individuals to repay in kind what they have received." The problem with that is that I do not have the patience (or constant good nature) to be reciprocal in a way that is productive. In one of my QIC's, I had mentioned feeling appalled at the quote by a fellow Wikipedian where he said "I've been fighting with the same people over issues with reliable sourcing for well over a year." Quite honestly, I think I would give up after a minute. From my brief experience and relating this back to my thesis on the lack of purely human interaction on Wikipedia, I do not see the act of fighting for my position on this platform as a worthwhile endeavor, not considering that it would likely cost me my peace of mind and a lot of time.

Finally, Cialdini describes an important human motivation, "the desire to be, and to appear, consistent." If I were to take stock of the semester, I would say I have felt consistently out of place on Wikipedia. From my inability to understand what felt like very basic concepts or the amount of effort and planning that went into every single contribution, the main reward I felt I got was an uncomfortable feeling of being out of the loop. Because of this, I would prefer to return to my previous state, as a mere consumer of Wikipedia's information. Though I am glad to understand more about the workings about the platform and I believe they will aid me to be a greater critical thinker in regards to the information I encounter on the platform, I am more than happy to take myself out of the equation.

In a 2008 talk at Harvard Law School "deconstructing" Wikipedia, the site's co-founder Jimmy Wales made the diagnosis that "Given enough time humans will screw up Wikipedia just as they have screwed up everything else, but so far it’s not too bad.” At Wikimania 2014, a conference and festival hosted by the Wikimedia movement in London, England, Wales gave a keynote address that centered around the following quote: "We are growing from a cheerful small town where everyone waves off their front porch to the subway of New York City where everyone rushes by. How do you preserve the culture that has worked so well?"

Perhaps if I had joined Wikipedia in 2002, I could've babbled my way into a community that felt like home from the very beginning. I could've bought an inexpensive plot of land that was not constantly being wrestled away from me, and served as a mentor to those looking to establish their residence. I could've watched newcomers arrive and grown bitter at their lack of respect for my neighborhood, until my reprimands moved from gentle reminders to brusque diktats.

In another life, perhaps Wikipedia would've been human enough for me to join - as of now, I feel as if the wall of bots and rules keeping me from the life at the center of this community is a barrier large enough to make me an outsider.