[Foundation-l] Newbie recruitment: referencing

[Liam Wyatt]

On 3 November 2011 10:47, Ray Saintonge <saintonge at telus.net> wrote:

> On 11/03/11 2:49 AM, David Gerard wrote:
> > On 3 November 2011 09:31, Ray Saintonge<saintonge at telus.net>  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.