[WikiEN-l] Ars Technica: Prof replaces term papers with Wikipedia contributions, suffering ensues

[Peter Ansell]

On 31/10/2007, Wily D <wilydoppelganger at gmail.com> wrote:
> There's plenty of low hanging fruit for writing good starts using just
> teh google.  In fact, I wrote one yesterday:
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/La Cuisinière and last friday:
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Fournier_de_Belleval and the
> friday before that: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roméo Beaudry and so
> on.  It's really not very hard at all.  The obiggest problem is
> probably the anti-redlink culture that's growing very strong, that
> keeps people uninformed on what needs writing.
>
> More than anything else, the fact that writers are so strongly biased
> against redlinks these days is a huge reason new page creation has
> gone down.
>

It was only let to get this far because no-one was willing to make a
conclusive policy pro-redlinks. The extensive use of WP:CONTEXT does
not help in this way. In theory CONTEXT works because people are
discouraged from linking everything, but in practice with multi-person
inputs, it ends up being the absolute lowest set of links that people
are willing to accept, instead of a larger variety.

Personally, as a moderately red colourblind person, I think that red
text stands out just enough... I can't imagine the hassle about
reading redlinked articles that I have heard from normal vision
people.

Peter