Building Successful Online Communities (Fall 2025)/Wikipedia Advising Report

In addition to finishing up your Wikipedia article, everybody should turn in a report analyzing the Wikipedia community, using your experience and the material we've covered so far to offer an assessment and advice to the Wikimedia Foundation and the Wikipedia Community on how to improve their community. I want you all to treat this as a dress rehearsal for your final projects.

Your report will be evaluated, first and foremost, on the degree to which it provides useful, informed, and actionable advice to the Wikipedia community and the Wikimedia Foundation. It will also be evaluated on the degree to which you engage with the course material. See the writing rubric for details on my expectations in terms of the content of the papers. A successful essay will do the following things:

1. Provide detailed, concrete, and actionable advice to the Wikipedia community and the Wikimedia Foundation. What should Wikipedia think about doing? What should they think about changing?
2. Comment directly on your experience in Wikipedia. This is not general musing: the details you include should be evidence to serve your argument.
3. Connect your experience in Wikipedia explicitly to the concepts in the course material we have covered. Justify your recommendations in terms of the theories and principles we've covered. Why should your recommendations be taken more seriously than just random advice from a new user?
4. If possible, reflect on what parts of the theories or concepts we covered applied or didn't. You don't have to take everything taught in the course for granted. What would you change or add based on your experience? What is unique or different about Wikipedia?

I will give feedback to everybody in the course on their assignment. The basic structure is shorter, but extremely similar, to what you will be doing in the final project. As a result, you can treat this as a "mid-term" and make adjustments based on feedback.

There's no minimum word count, but I'd suggest you make the most of the space you're given. Generally speaking, you can say more, be more insightful, demonstrate more fluency (all the things we are assessing) if you use more space.

Your audience is Wikipedians who may read your report. You don't need to define things to prove to us that you've read. You should define terms if you think that an audience of Wikipedians (who have not taken the class) will be lost/confused otherwise. Use your judgment to make a compelling, well-reasoned, and well-supported argument.

The intro, body, and conclusion format is pretty reliable and useful. But if you feel it's better or more useful to deviate from that as well, that's fine. Don't use the numbered questions as your format, but do demonstrate consideration of each point somewhere in your essay.

Make an argument for why, based on your experience in Wikipedia and what you've learned in the class, things could/should be better and how that might happen. "A description of your experience" is part of that, but we're not asking for a trip report. Your experience is important, but the details you share should always be in service to the argument and suggestions you are making.