An alternative tack is to encourage people to edit sections rather than click the edit
button at the top of the page. Aside from often avoiding templates and infoboxes, a habit
of editing by section will greatly reduce your risk of edit conflicts.
As for editing Wikipedia improving a marketable skill, I'm sure we have lots of
editors who edit in languages other than their first language. I may have a skewed
experience there because much of my editing is fixing typos, but I like to feel that one
of the added benefits of my editing is that I am sometimes helping others improve their
written English.
Of course there is a minimum competence level needed before you can try and write
significant content in a language you are learning, so we need to be careful about the
level of fluency we suggest people have before we encourage them to edit in a language.
Regards
Jonathan
On 21 Apr 2015, at 19:32, Christine Meyer
<christinewmeyer(a)gmail.com> wrote:
You make some good points, Ellie. However, it's been my experience that even a basic
knowledge of HTML helped me learn Wiki syntax. I am by no means a coder, although I am
married to one. Perhaps a better way to frame it is that learning Wiki syntax can help
you learn to code easier?
Christine
User:Figureskatingfan
On Mon, Apr 20, 2015 at 3:20 PM, Ellie K
<myindigolife(a)gmail.com> wrote:
I read Marie Earley's message about the Inspire campaign, and specifically about the
Pinterest-related proposal. I was interested in the Pinterest proposal too! I use
Pinterest for fun. As far as I know, I was the only one to endorse it (I am FeralOink on
WP, Ellie Kesselman IRL).
Marie said this in her message on the GenderGap mailing list:
"If the pitch to women were "learn
code by editing Wikipedia" then I think there would be a greater take up..."
Yes, I agree that there would be a lot of interest from women if that were true. However,
editing Wikipedia and learning to code have nothing to do with each other. Learning Wiki
syntax for editing is something that can take bona fide programmers a (brief) while to
learn, as it is markup with many additional Mediawiki-specific features. More to the
point, Wiki syntax isn't a programming language, nor does it closely resemble HTML or
CSS, which are not programming languages either. The only people who code on Wikipedia are
the Wikidata folks and those who build utilities (many in Python, I think) for whatever
the toolserver is called now. Most Wikipedia editors are not going to have any interaction
with these few folks, nor any means to learn the skills they have.
I'm sorry for sounding negative, but I don't want to mislead women into thinking
they will learn a job skill like programming (coding) by editing Wikipedia. There are many
other things one may learn by editing Wikipedia, but they aren't so easy to articulate
and vary by individual.
--Ellie Kesselman (FeralOink)
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