User:Veronikkkki

Wikimedia Projects – What motivates people to participate here? What are the challenges?

What motivates?

Wikimedia Projects rapidly accelerated globalization within knowledge-spread related fields by creating the environment for information diffuse. Wikimedia is well-known for its huge resources of articles about almost every topic existing. Anyone, who is willing to share their knowledge, can write and edit articles, instructional guides, describe words for any language, and so much more. Behind gratuitous writing and editing the Wikimedia source channels, there are reasons, which drives people from all around the world to engage in the Wikimedia Projects. All of them can be identified as personal stimulus. Personal tie to the cause. An American international monthly men’s magazine GQ has been releasing 10 minutes episodes for more than five years, where celebrities go undercover to well-known knowledge sharing platforms. One of the targets is Wikipedia, which is the first Wikimedia Project. The celebrities go directly to the articles written about them, start analysing and editing them, if there are any mistakes. Also, any Wikimedia users can join in cowriting the articles, but usually the personal ties exist, when cowriters feel associated with the topic. Learning. Wikimedia holds under its name many smaller platforms dedicated to learning process. Wikimedia provides various learning tools from Wiki dictionary to having valid scientifical papers. This simplifies learning process to anybody interested in improving their current educational base. Since a wide variety of people from different backgrounds are involved in the constant enhancement of the Wikimedia’s platforms, they continue to improve each other’s expertise and fulfil the missing knowledge gaps. Gathering diverse perspectives. Different perspectives on the same subject force our brains to question the given information. It leads to double checking and going deeper in what is important to us. Even explaining words’ meanings can benefit from diverse Wikimedia’s community. Because every person adds own detailed explanations, which helps learn with details, instead of superficially. Voice and belonging. Hobbies and interests can unite, but also diversify people. It is important to find somebody, who you would share your interests with. Because every voice needs to be heard and everyone wants to find a place where they would belong. When a person has a knowledge that is not relevant to the person’s surrounding, it can be written down for others sharing the interest. Wikimedia is a tool, which helps to be heard, if a person has a valid thing to write. Stewardship. It is the job of supervising or taking care of something, such as an organization or property. Some sources state that writing an article evokes in people the feeling of ownership and superiority. Also, satisfy the need to receive credibility and acknowledgment for their own creation. Furthermore, it is related to gaining a sense of purpose and usefulness. Because when an author writes their article on Wikipedia, the article becomes author’s nurturing object. Writers or editors will often come back to check changes and other users’ inputs. Since Wikimedia provides its users with an additional platform for communication purpose, cowriters can simply exchange thoughts, justify text changes and discuss the topic. The constant additional actions towards the article provides a writer with a role of caretaker. Digital citizen. Internet being so advanced, that even creating a virtual world that is facilitated by the use of virtual reality is more real than ever before. People are spending about 1/3 part of their daytime online, being online while having free time and even monetizing that time. As internet is taking over more spheres of our life, more people feel the need to fix, invest, modify and put up efforts in improving digital space. This is where a conception of digital citizen came from. It is just similar to citizen duties, but on internet space.

Challenges • Projects always face some challenges. Wikimedia is a long-term project that keeps expanding its capacities and spheres. Naturally, not everything goes as planned, especially, when the target audience is people from different cultures, with different mindsets, speaking different languages and having diverse educational backgrounds and goals. • Languages barriers. This may induce many misunderstandings and losses in translation. Also, it can lead to a dissatisfaction because in some languages there are more information written about a certain topic than in others. It is impossible to force people to translate the platforms to the least popular languages, but is it an obstacle, which create additional challenges. • Liability, but personal. After a while, when Wikimedia was created, the platform was considered to be less reliable, everyone felt the need to double check information, since there was no control in who writes and edits articles. The same stereotype is slogging over the years, and don’t even help with new Wikimedia projects appearing. The liability is a personal responsibility of each volunteering writer or an editor, and it is personal. But it negatively correlates with the corporate identity, this is why it is also a challenge in the further project’s development.

Overall, the project is gaining its speed and volume. And positive aspects outweigh the challenges, because the Wikimedia community has been growing and expanding for a lot of years now. And because the project success relies on its volunteer writers and editors, the situation’s changes are unpredictable.