Over the past year I was part of a team that developed the Co-op, a newcomer support space on Wikipedia. The Co-op was designed to match newcomers with experienced Wikipedians around specific needs. In our final report we present our findings from the pilot, describing the existing newcomer support ecology on Wikipedia, where the Co-op fits in, as well as performance outcomes of new editors that used the Co-op. You can find the final report here.
Tag Archives: wikipedia
Researching newcomer support on Wikipedia
Wikipedia was once seen as “wild west” experience for newcomers, leaving them to their own devices to figure out how to participate. Over the past few years we have seen a growth and formalization of newcomer support systems, however researchers have not taken stock of what this growing ecology for newcomer support looks like. In a recent post on the progress of the Wikipedia mentorship project I am working on, I talk about this need for scholarship as well as some findings from a recent interview about this topic. Below is an excerpt from the post:
From initiatives like the Education Program that connect experienced Wikipedians with college students editing for the first time, to spaces like the Teahouse, where newcomers can ask questions the best way they know how without any worry of criticism, each of these examples consolidates information-seeking opportunities into a manageable experience.
See the full post here and scroll down to “August-September Updates.”
Reimagining Wikipedia Mentorship
Wikipedia has matured as an open source collaborative project, featuring a robust governance structure that has emerged over the project’s 13 year history. While the policies and guidelines help shape the creation of quality content on Wikipedia, one area of the community structure that is receiving a great deal of attention and thought is the experience of newcomers. Research shows that ,of late, newcomers find themselves in a hostile environment that does not welcome their contributions. With Wikipedia surviving on the goodwill of volunteers, chasing away newcomers has implications for the long term sustainability of the movement. As such, researchers and community members alike are rethinking how to support newcomers so that they will be more inclined to stay with Wikipedia. As someone who thinks a lot about the experience of newcomers in online collaborative communities, I was excited to receive news this week that I along with two other Wikipedians received a grant from the Wikimedia Foundation to develop a new mentorship system that matches newcomers with experienced Wikipedians based on the skills newcomers wish to learn. The aim of the project is to support newcomer socialization and learning with the broader goal of supporting newcomer retention. Over the next six months I will work on this grant as a researcher, examining the newcomer experience in the system we design as well as the outcomes of their participation. This project should shed light on some of the broader issues of expertise sharing and newcomer socialization and will ideally make valuable contributions to the research and design around development and management of online collaborative environments. I look forward to writing here about what I find over the next six months.
Abstract for Dissertation Proposal “Towards a Sociomaterial Perspective of Socialization in Open Online Collaborative Communities”
Socialization is a process where newcomers move from a state of uncertainty to a state of fluency in the practice, terminology, and behavior that define an organization. For settings where activities have a high degree of impact on the functionality and continued existence of the organization, socialization processes are particularly important (Van Maanen & Schein, 1979). While formal training models successfully integrate newcomers, crowdsourced projects like Wikipedia are unable to provide formal training due to the ad hoc assemblage of volunteers that participate. Studies on socialization in open online collaborative projects typically focus on information seeking, the impact of feedback, and the construction of social networks as newcomers make sense of their new environment. While such research is important, there is scant consideration for the material components of the online platforms and their role in the socialization process.
Building the Commons 