2009/12/5 Carcharoth <carcharothwp(a)googlemail.com>om>:
Give polite and constructive feedback on their
editing, be gentle on
what they are doing wrong, leave them with plenty of ideas for other
things to do, and warn them that Wikipedia is a big place and some
people they meet will be quite abrasive. If they are already abrasive
themselves, support anyone they have upset.
"Wikipedia is part of the internet, so (a) there are a certain number
of complete idiots (b) there are a certain number of people who will
think you are a complete idiot. Whatever you do. Those of us here to
write an encyclopedia learn to be patient and get on with it."
Or do you mean how to get them editing in the first
place? That used
to be "click this red link and create an article". As the standards
for new articles rises and the links are to obscurer topics that need
a good start when created, that is harder to do. Maybe promote more of
the links to various projects such as disambiguation, wikilinking,
vandalism patrol, simple article clean-up, and so on. But don't throw
people in at the deep end and wonder why they are floundering.
That's why missing-article lists occur to me as a good starting point
- these are articles that someone has noticed we could do with. So a
coupla good references and they're likely to stick.
- d.