I couldn't agree more, it reminds me of a principle in UX/UI (can't recall its "name" or exact wording) that emphasises the importance of giving help exactly when it's needed, not before nor after.
On Wed, Mar 6, 2024 at 10:59 AM Romaine Wiki <romaine.w...@gmail.com> wrote: > In the past days, a new Wikipedia contributor edited Wikipedia and made a > great contribution, except... This user added zero sources, and the article > in what the edit was made was about a living person. So the verifiability > is a problem and in conflict with the policy Biographies of living persons. > This was just one example of thousands that have to be dealt with every day > in Wikimedia. And every day the community tries to maintain the quality of > Wikipedia and has to deal with this kind of edits. > > I asked myself the question: why did this new contributor not add any > sources? > > I logged out, went to an article and clicked edit. Made some modifications > (in the Visual Editor), and then clicked Publish changes. In the steps I > took to edit the article, I got nowhere a message that Wikipedia wants to > have sources for the information I added. Nowhere! > > I hope that every experienced user by now understands the importance of > adding sources. But we cannot expect from new contributors to already know > this. They need to be informed that adding sources is needed. They do not > go first read the manual of Wikipedia with all the help and project pages, > they just start editing right away. They think, link in many other > platforms, that if they do something wrong, they get a message while > editing/uploading/etc. > > For some strange reason, if you edit Wikipedia, you get no notification at > all that you need to add sources, even while this is one of the most > important pillars of Wikipedia. The result is that a lot of work of these > new contributors gets lost, because the information is removed from the > articles because of a lack of sources. If those new users would have got a > message in the Visual Editor during the editing, a lot more contributions > would be able to stay in Wikipedia, less new contributors would get > demotivated, and it would reduce the workload of existing users who do the > maintenance every day. > > As with the influx of edits without sources nothing is done, the Dutch > expression "mopping with the tap open" (Dutch: dweilen met de kraan open) > applies here. > > Romaine > > > > > > _______________________________________________ > Wikimedia-l mailing list -- wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org, guidelines > at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines and > https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia-l > Public archives at > https://lists.wikimedia.org/hyperkitty/list/wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org/message/2J32V233R72OWB5W2DKGXIGBPVC6Y75B/ > To unsubscribe send an email to wikimedia-l-le...@lists.wikimedia.org
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