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.
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?
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