https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=30208
Roan Kattouw <[email protected]> changed: What |Removed |Added ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- CC| |[email protected] --- Comment #52 from Roan Kattouw <[email protected]> 2011-09-14 11:46:34 UTC --- I, too, write this as a private individual, not as a WMF contractor. I haven't really been involved in this discussion, but something in the comments jumped out to me and I felt the need to respond to that. (In reply to comment #48) > and furthermore, writing an encyclopedia article should necessarily > be more difficult than posting your baseball card collection on eBay. In my > opinion, it would be a mistake to devote resources to simplifying the editing > interface so that more 12-year-olds and uneducated people are encouraged to > create new articles. Wikipedia is an academic endeavor, not a social > networking site. See [[en:WP:COMPETENCE]]. If you can't figure out how to > write a new article, then perhaps you shouldn't. > This quote sums up a sentiment that some people have told me exists in the Wikipedia community, but I didn't believe them until I read this comment. This anti-usability sentiment is dangerous and must be resisted. I agree that writing an encyclopedia article requires the author have expertise in the subject at hand. However, much of the expertise needed to figure out the current, confusing interface has nothing to do with the subject at hand. A law professor would be very capable of writing the initial version of an article about a new court case, but get totally lost in the article creation interface and process because he's not that good with computers. Creating a Wikipedia article is quite a few steps above using e-mail and word processing software on the technical ladder. People with no more than basic computer skills aren't all 12-year-olds or uneducated people. A lot of them are smart and knowledgeable and have something to contribute, they just aren't very good with technology. Their contributions aren't useless just because they're not good at working with computers. We need to improve the usability of our interface and process in order to attract these people; right now, we're more or less implicitly rejecting them. If we don't attract these people, we will stay in the status quo where the editor community is slanted towards male students in their 20s, and we'll have holes in our coverage for many subjects that young male students don't care about. In order to come close to gathering the sum of all human knowledge, we need to actually give all humans a fair chance of participating. This is not to say that diversifying the editor base is a magic bullet that will certainly expand the breadth of our coverage, or cause shiny pink ponies to appear out of nowhere, or anything like that. But firstly, these things are certainly not going to happen if we don't, and secondly I believe diversification is inherently better for the health of the project (and I think a few influential people agree with this). Anti-usability sentiments with arguments like "it needs to be hard or we'll be hammered by idiots" are elitist, exclusionist, and run counter to the inclusionist (in terms of people, not necessarily in terms of articles), egalitarian principles that Wikipedia was founded on. -- Configure bugmail: https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/userprefs.cgi?tab=email ------- You are receiving this mail because: ------- You are the assignee for the bug. You are on the CC list for the bug. _______________________________________________ Wikibugs-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikibugs-l
