On 3 November 2011 10:47, Ray Saintonge <[email protected]> wrote: > On 11/03/11 2:49 AM, David Gerard wrote: > > On 3 November 2011 09:31, Ray Saintonge<[email protected]> wrote: > >> Also can the expression "citation needed" be changed to something that > >> is more inviting to newbies, like "Please add citation"? > > We may be late for that - "citation needed" is entering English. > > > > > Be that as it may, is it inviting to the newbie? If a change is going to > draw them in it's still worthwhile. > > Ray > > Whilst we're discussing newbie recruitment [and retention] I saw an interesting comment from John Broughton, author of [[Wikipedia - The Missing Manual]], on the WMF blog today that I thought was worth sharing: http://blog.wikimedia.org/2011/11/02/new-comparative-study-to-re-examine-the-quality-and-accuracy-of-wikipedia/#comment-29077
[quoting the blogpost] “A comparative analysis of the quality of Wikipedia’s articles and other popular alternatives is crucial to identifying avenues for improvement.” Actually, NO. What is crucial to improvement is to reverse the continuing decline in the number of active Wikipedia contributors – to get more new editors, and to keep active editors longer. There are already known enormous backlogs – see for example http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2011-10-31/Opinion_essay(including its comments), because the number of contributors is declining in absolute terms, not to mention in respect to the ever-increasing size of the encyclopedia. Every major Internet commercial website spends millions of dollars every month testing and implementing changes to make their websites easier to use. But the Foundation – which depends far more on its contributors to create content than any other organization except social media sites like Facebook – has never put the user experience of *editors* as anything close to its number one priority. And the result is that people with time – because more people spend more time on the Web every year – commit less and less time as editors on Wikipedia and other WMF websites. Readership goes up, inexorably, but the people who create the content continue to be fewer and fewer, inexorably. The Foundation has some initiatives ongoing that will help – a WYSIWYG editor and an analysis of why editors leave being potentially the most useful. What is missing is a commitment by the Foundation to make editing EASIER. That means not only the user interface, but such matters as creating a separate Table namespace (in the same way that there is a separate, and different, namespace for media files); a one-click or two-click way of creating a fully-formatted footnote citation from any source page on the web; a hash total for article versions so that reverts can be easily removed from watchlist reports (for those who don’t care about what is typically vandalism removal); a functional help system for less-experienced editors; a professionally created and edited set of screencasts for new and intermediate-level editors, showing how to perform various tasks; edit options beyond just all-or-nothing opening of an article or article section (for example, “add a footnote”; “improve a footnote”); and more. _______________________________________________ foundation-l mailing list [email protected] Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
