Steve Bennett wrote: > Here's another: when someone searches for an article (let's say "norwegian > antarctic expedition") that doesn't exist, let's encourage them to add it - > we have successfully located someone interested in a topic that we don't > have an article about. This is a good start.
However, there are a lot of "gotchas" to the process of observing what appears to be a missing article and proceeding to attempt to create it, and it takes a good deal of experience in Wikipedianism to successfully navigate them. Even apart from all the political tripwires a newbie could stumble into when the topic concerns something controversial either in the "real world" or in the bizarre confines of Wikipolitics, there's the matter of there possibly being an article on a topic already, just under a slightly different spelling. On Wikipedia, capitalization and punctuation matter, and newbies can't be expected to know all the nitpicky conventions used to decide what the "proper" title of an article is. Maybe they'll end up creating an article under "Norwegian Antarctic Expedition" when the slightly differently capitalized "Norwegian antarctic expedition" already exists but they didn't manage to find it. Or maybe the existing article is under "Antarctic expeditions of Norway" or "Antarctic expeditions (Norwegian)". Sometimes there are redirects from other obvious titles, but not always. Or the newbie might misspell "Norwegian". It's happened to me a few times, that I've created a new article where I thought there was a gap, then later found there to be one already under a slightly different name. -- == Dan == Dan's Mail Format Site: http://mailformat.dan.info/ Dan's Web Tips: http://webtips.dan.info/ Dan's Domain Site: http://domains.dan.info/ _______________________________________________ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
