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/
Absence of a source is the usual cause for material disappearing; not that, even with a good source material, may be removed by someone with an agenda. Perhaps a note on the editing window about citing a source would help. When you first start editing you imagine that because you know something simply saying it is enough, particularly if you are expert in the field.
Fred
On Tue, 3 Feb 2015 08:26:44 +0100 Quim Gil qgil@wikimedia.org wrote:
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
Matthew Flaschen wrote:
Forking content to another site is fully allowed by the license, and better support for that (and merging it back later) would be an interesting experiment.
Yeah, I had also recently thought the Wikimedia Foundation is not working toward information freedom as such; freedom to edit is exercised, but not to redistribute, modify, and merge back. Interestingly, I think resolving this could also improve editing experience and editor retention.
I had written a small spec about making merging stuff between different wikis possible. This is what git does, and is a key driver of software freedom. More details here: https://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/mediawiki-l/2015-January/043847.html
On 02/03/2015 03:49 AM, FRED BAUDER wrote:
Absence of a source is the usual cause for material disappearing; not that, even with a good source material, may be removed by someone with an agenda. Perhaps a note on the editing window about citing a source would help. When you first start editing you imagine that because you know something simply saying it is enough, particularly if you are expert in the field.
It does say, "Encyclopedic content must be verifiable." (with "verifiable" a link) at the top. However, I don't know how many people read this, and it could be clearer that really it's best to provide a citation right away (rather than it just being possible to add one).
Matt Flaschen
On 02/03/2015 02:26 AM, Quim Gil wrote:
PS: and another article about forking/federating Wikipedia as an alternative to deletionism http://blog.jonudell.net/2015/01/22/a-federated-wikipedia/
This is an interesting idea to play with.
However, their criticism of http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Content_forking is based on a misunderstanding.
That article forbids within-English Wikipedia forks (e.g. two separate histories of Europe, one written from the Russian perspective, one written from the German perspective).
Forking content to another site is fully allowed by the license, and better support for that (and merging it back later) would be an interesting experiment.
Matt Flaschen
Forking content happens all the time to Wikia, Shoutwiki, Mirror sites, etc. Of course its best if Wikipedia is credited, but with the open source licensing of Wikipedia's content, its not required as far as I know.
Another angle to look at for why these folks no longer edit would be how their content was reverted. Was it reverted because it was wrong? Because some article owner showed up and had a different opinion of the article? Did they leave a snide comment or call it vandalism, cruft, spam, trolling or some other derogatory term often used on Wikipedia? All these things matter when it comes to our impression on new editors. The reality is that it takes time to learn to edit. Wikipedia has hundreds of policies and thousands of essays clarifying them, even well established editors and admins often disagree on what the right interpretation is (hence the arguable need for the Arbcom). Arbcom rarely deals with new editor problems, they deal with established editor and admin problems, so to assume that editors only leave because they don't understand or aren't qualified to edit is, IMO, under-representative of the larger problem in Wikipedia of trust, helpfulness, abusiveness towards editors (particularly new ones), article ownership and bad faith assumptions.
Reguyla
On Tue, Feb 3, 2015 at 4:42 PM, Matthew Flaschen mflaschen@wikimedia.org wrote:
On 02/03/2015 02:26 AM, Quim Gil wrote:
PS: and another article about forking/federating Wikipedia as an alternative to deletionism http://blog.jonudell.net/2015/01/22/a-federated-wikipedia/
This is an interesting idea to play with.
However, their criticism of http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ Wikipedia:Content_forking is based on a misunderstanding.
That article forbids within-English Wikipedia forks (e.g. two separate histories of Europe, one written from the Russian perspective, one written from the German perspective).
Forking content to another site is fully allowed by the license, and better support for that (and merging it back later) would be an interesting experiment.
Matt Flaschen
EE mailing list EE@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/ee
On 02/03/2015 04:53 PM, Reguyla wrote:
Forking content happens all the time to Wikia, Shoutwiki, Mirror sites, etc. Of course its best if Wikipedia is credited, but with the open source licensing of Wikipedia's content, its not required as far as I know.
Both of our main licenses, the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Text_of_Creative_Commons_Attribution...) and the GNU Free Documentation License (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Text_of_the_GNU_Free_Documentation_L...) require attribution, as well as share-alike/copyleft.
Another angle to look at for why these folks no longer edit would be how their content was reverted. Was it reverted because it was wrong? Because some article owner showed up and had a different opinion of the article? Did they leave a snide comment or call it vandalism, cruft, spam, trolling or some other derogatory term often used on Wikipedia? All these things matter when it comes to our impression on new editors. The reality is that it takes time to learn to edit. Wikipedia has hundreds of policies and thousands of essays clarifying them, even well established editors and admins often disagree on what the right interpretation is (hence the arguable need for the Arbcom). Arbcom rarely deals with new editor problems, they deal with established editor and admin problems, so to assume that editors only leave because they don't understand or aren't qualified to edit is, IMO, under-representative of the larger problem in Wikipedia of trust, helpfulness, abusiveness towards editors (particularly new ones), article ownership and bad faith assumptions.
Yes, I agree that social factors play a big part in why newcomers don't feel welcome.
Matt Flaschen