This weekend I was at the Wikimedia stand in
https://fosdem.org (+5000 free
software geeks in Brussels). We asked every single person stopping by
whether they had edited Wikipedia.
The majority had not, thinking that they were not really qualified, or not
knowing where to start. We showed them the "Help out" section at
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Community_portal, which nobody had
seen before, and they found it interesting.
However, a significant minority had edited, but the conversation always had
this pattern:
- Have you edited Wikipedia?
- Yes... (silence), but then my edits were gone (shrug with a kind of
embarrassed smile).
I didn't ask, but the average impression these people left me was that they
believed that maybe they were not qualified to edit Wikipedia after all.
What a missed opportunity for Wikimedia!!! During the whole weekend I only
found one successful regular editor that was not involved in other
Wikimedia activities. And one photographer that contributed to Commons
contests.
I'm not saying those reverts / deletions were wrong. However, maybe a
better UI would not send new editors to a cliff so consistently? People
seem to understand the benefit of starting with "Help out" types of action
as a training, if only they knew such thing existed. Also, would it be
useful to warn new editors adding more than NNN characters about the likely
need of citations?
PS: and another article about forking/federating Wikipedia as an
alternative to deletionism
http://blog.jonudell.net/2015/01/22/a-federated-wikipedia/
--
Quim Gil
Engineering Community Manager @ Wikimedia Foundation
http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/User:Qgil