Wikipedia Initiative: Socialization of Newcomers in Wikipedia

Orders of magnitude more people read Wikipedia articles than contribute to them. Wikipedia imposes technical and cultural barriers that make it difficult for newcomers to contribute. The Association for Psychological Science (APS) and several other scientific societies are sponsoring Wikipedia Initiatives, urging their members to harness the power of Wikipedia to represent various branches of science as fully and as accurately as possible to the general public and thereby to promote their free teaching worldwide. In particular, APS is urging all of its members to participate by adding new entries and enhancing existing ones with more complete and accurate information with references. This is an especially exciting initiative for teachers and students who can make updating or creating Wikipedia entries part of coursework.

The goal of the HCI project is to improve socialization tools and procedures to guide newcomers who join Wikipedia. Socialization is the process of teaching newcomers the norms, customs, and knowledge required to perform their roles in a group. Approximately 40 faculty members have used our tools in their classroom as part of an assignment where students improve articles relevant to the course topics. The summer research assistant will conduct interviews and observations of current users of these tools and propose (and potentially implement) improvements to them. This job gives students the opportunity to exercise all elements of a user-centered design project and will lead to improvements in software used by hundreds of students.