Absence of a source is the usual cause for material disappearing; not
that, even with a good source material, may be removed by someone with
an agenda. Perhaps a note on the editing window about citing a source
would help. When you first start editing you imagine that because you
know something simply saying it is enough, particularly if you are
expert in the field.
Fred
On Tue, 3 Feb 2015 08:26:44 +0100
Quim Gil <[email protected]> wrote:
This weekend I was at the Wikimedia stand in https://fosdem.org
(+5000 free
software geeks in Brussels). We asked every single person stopping
by
whether they had edited Wikipedia.
The majority had not, thinking that they were not really qualified,
or not
knowing where to start. We showed them the "Help out" section at
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Community_portal, which
nobody had
seen before, and they found it interesting.
However, a significant minority had edited, but the conversation
always had
this pattern:
- Have you edited Wikipedia?
- Yes... (silence), but then my edits were gone (shrug with a kind
of
embarrassed smile).
I didn't ask, but the average impression these people left me was
that they
believed that maybe they were not qualified to edit Wikipedia after
all.
What a missed opportunity for Wikimedia!!! During the whole weekend
I only
found one successful regular editor that was not involved in other
Wikimedia activities. And one photographer that contributed to
Commons
contests.
I'm not saying those reverts / deletions were wrong. However, maybe
a
better UI would not send new editors to a cliff so consistently?
People
seem to understand the benefit of starting with "Help out" types of
action
as a training, if only they knew such thing existed. Also, would it
be
useful to warn new editors adding more than NNN characters about the
likely
need of citations?
PS: and another article about forking/federating Wikipedia as an
alternative to deletionism
http://blog.jonudell.net/2015/01/22/a-federated-wikipedia/
--
Quim Gil
Engineering Community Manager @ Wikimedia Foundation
http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/User:Qgil
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