[WikiEN-l] Newbie and not-so-newbie biting

[David Goodman]

Most of the ones doing a single article won't be. Suppose one in five
of them did? But even apart from general purpose editors I've seen
some move on to do articles on their industry in general, and not
biased ones either, or fix technical errors in other related articles.

That it's difficult, certainly--I devote about half my wiki-time to
it, and I typically can deal with 5 a week. Suppose 200 of us did even
one a week? That's 10,000 editors a year helped, and 2,000 of them
becoming generally active.   Things which look hopelessly daunting for
a single person, are much less so if many people join in doing it,
which is why Wikipedia works in the first lpace.


David Goodman, Ph.D, M.L.S.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:DGG



On Fri, Sep 18, 2009 at 12:18 PM, Charles Matthews
<charles.r.matthews at ntlworld.com> wrote:
> David Goodman wrote:
>> " the overwhelming majority of speedily deleted articles deserve to be
>> so." -- yes, so they do. But of the people who contribute them, many
>> can be encouraged to learn how to write adequate articles and perhaps
>> become regular contributors. People who write inadequate unsourced
>> promotional articles can be simply rejected, or alternatively  helped
>> to write good ones or at least realize and understand  why their topic
>> is unsuitable and respect us for our standards.  If one out of ten
>> respond favorably to our endeavors, we'll gain 100 good contributors a
>> day.

k. David's argument seems to need
> shading: an editor who is only really interested in creating a company
> or product article may not become a general-purpose Wikipedian. But of
> course he or she may, and we just don't know. (It's the old argument
> about advertising being mostly wasted money, and the argument is valid
> here.)
>
> Charles
>
>
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