On Mon, Feb 11, 2013 at 08:29:22AM +0200, Shlomi Fish wrote:
On Fri, 08 Feb 2013 08:03:11 -0500 Sumana Harihareswara sumanah@wikimedia.org wrote:
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Metrics_and_activities_meetings/2013-02-07
Yesterday I gave a 3-minute presentation about the Outreach Program for Women at the monthly Wikimedia Foundation all-hands meeting. My slides are up on Commons:
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Opw-presentation-feb7-2013.pdf
More about our participation in OPW:
Thanks for making the slides available, but I was annoyed by the fact that I had to switch to every page individually, and could not figure out a way to download the .pdf itself (but there should be). Your talk seems like a good initiative, and I will encourage it.
Just click "Full resolution," it took me a minute to find, as well. I expect there will be digitized video of the event, or one can hope.
As for your guidelines to persistent engagement, is there a web page where you explain in more detail? I feel like those would make very good advice in the proper circumstances -- however, I cannot imagine how they could be applied to as bold an initiative as the Outreach Program, and especially and above all, you cannot sensibly say they apply to "predominantly women".
I think many of the ideas you expressed would be well received by the wiki*edia "welcoming committee", and that might be a good place to try them out [1] in the field, possibly achieving a reduction to a smaller number of axioms in the process.
....
I think we should change the templates on wikipedia to read something more like “Please find citations from reliable sources for this article.” instead of the much less constructive and more frightening “This article lacks citations from reliable sources. It may be challenged and removed.”.
This is a great improvement, in my opinion, but there might be problems with using the imperative voice, even if it begins with "please". It is an interesting idea though, and it makes me laugh to think that Wikipedia's public pleas have already bordered on such lines, we might as well have had a big Uncle Sam pointing at our organ of sense of duty: "I want YOU to edit this broken-ass website."
Agreed that the "challenged and removed" sentence sounds like an insurance-company cop-out, something like a "we told u so". What about an attempt at sympathy, "Unfortunately, articles may be swiftly removed if content falls short of basic criteria..."
Actually, to trip out on something I'm passionate about, it's nonsense that vandalism is so sensitive an issue that we have to self-police the encyclopedia in this way. In the case of an incomplete article, let's just flag it as such, and move on. Then, sections with this flag ("non-authoritative"???) would not appear unless you are looking for them.
-Adam