User:Moreno.ci/reflection

Reflection

Prior to this project, I had never really considered Wikipedia as a site with a flourishing community. Yet from brainstorming, to editing, to publishing, I have been helped along the way by my professor, classmates, and other Wikipedians in the process of creating an article. Being a newcomer to a community, whether offline or online, can be daunting. My classmates and I had to be open to public moderation and editing suggestions from established members of the community. But the culture of helping others is prominent in the governance of Wikipedia. In my short experience thus far, it has shown to be a site which truly does try to promote good faith and collaboration in the pursuit of expanding the world’s largest online encyclopedia.

Moderating Newcomers

Part of being a newcomer means learning the norms of a community either through experience or direct teaching. As a newcomer to Wikipedia, I realize I am lucky to have been educated on the norms of creating an article and how to engage with the community by taking Online Communications with User:Reagle in a classroom setting. Also, since I embarked on this project with only three other classmates, it was easier to develop a sense of identity-based commitment to helping one another as fellow newcomers to Wikipedia. Kraut and Resnick believe “ensuring that new recruits match the style and values of an online community will lead them to stay longer and be more satisfied with their membership”.

This is relevant to my contributions because as a newcomer I had to ensure that my article matched the style and values of Wikipedia as described in WP:NPOV prior to submitting an article for review. As a result of this, I felt confident in my writing when User:Robert McClenon approved the article for review and said there was nothing obviously wrong with the draft. This user seems to be very prominent in the Wikipedia community, having been awarded multiple Barnstars from other Wikipedians, as well as the Wikipedia:WikiProject Editor Retention/Editor of the Week Award. This semblance of authority and notability persuaded me to feel satisfied that my article was well-written, followed a neutral point of view, and adhered to the overall WP:RULES.

Moderation

Grimmelmann describes moderation as ways of managing participation in a community to ensure that it promotes cooperation and prevents abuse from occurring. Part of moderating newcomers includes using information from given identities in order to use better moderating methods. I believe that since I am listed as a current student of User:Reagle’s course, User:Shalor (a member of the Wiki Education Foundation) wrote on my talk page User talk:Moreno.ci to introduce themselves as well as give me tools to begin participating on Wikipedia. By including a link to the student training library, User:Shalor moderated my behavior by promoting training modules so I could learn how to participate on Wikipedia much easier. This would prevent me from learning-by-doing and would lower the amount of norm-upsetting that could occur. Since I did this article for a school project and not merely just for leisure, I have more of an obligation to know the norms of interacting on Wikipedia, and User:Shalor was a helpful resource in that sense.

Community Governance

Community governance is when a community comes to a consensus on how it should be ran or how disputes should be settled. This can be done through facilitation, polling/voting, or inclusion and deletion. On Talk:The Bechdel Cast, there was one user who believed that the article did not meet the requirements of notability for inclusion on Wikipedia. The article was ultimately accepted for review, and although not necessarily deletion, their comment was largely ignored by me and other members of the Wikipedian community. By consensus, it was decided that the article was okay for publication.

Another instance of community governance is one in which User:Casey.ha moved information about the hosts into their own separate paragraph. I was still definitely in the editing process, but I had not thought about structuring the article this way because the one I was modeling the page off of, My Favorite Murder, did not have a separate section for their guests. However, it definitely made the article flow much better by focusing on the premise of the podcast and introducing the hosts and their qualifications after Special:Diff/865747671.

Concluding Thoughts

Adding a photo of the Bechdel Cast logo was confusing and tricky, so it was something I put off until the end. However, after much searching I found the Wikipedia:Plain and simple non-free content guide page, which made understanding copyright concerns much easier. I went on the Wikipedia:Non-free content criteria page to ensure that their logo met the criteria for non-free content before uploading and filled out the template for logos.

There was a noticeable spike in my page views on November 12th and 13th. I believe that this is because The Bechdel Cast posted a screenshot to their Instagram of the “Format and Structure” section. Their Instagram comments had people say the section was funny and informative, and it made me feel like I had done my job well. Although written impartially, listeners and members of the Bechdel Cast community will understand the underlying humor in this section through their own sense of identity-based commitment to the podcast.

I am glad to have had the opportunity to create an article for Wikipedia. This project began with the extrinsic motivation which often accompanies a class assignment. However, having the freedom to choose a topic we deemed notable enticed my intrinsic motivations to do lots of outside research and create the comprehensive list of The Bechdel Cast episodes. In response, I was shown good faith and collaboration. Collaboration is agreeance as much as it is disagreeance, and I received both types of collaboration from Wikipedians in the pursuit of making the article better for the whole community.