On Sat, Dec 5, 2009 at 4:18 PM, Charles Matthews charles.r.matthews@ntlworld.com wrote:
I personally think we are at the stage where we should be spending time improving what we have, rather than creating more work. We aren't low on articles.
Which would be a personal decision, indeed. People should give priority to what they think is more important. But do you have ideas about getting newbies to improve articles? (I happen to think that starting by improving existing articles is probably a better training, and certainly an easier one. The question is how to motivate newcomers, to do that or anything else.)
Give polite and constructive feedback on their editing, be gentle on what they are doing wrong, leave them with plenty of ideas for other things to do, and warn them that Wikipedia is a big place and some people they meet will be quite abrasive. If they are already abrasive themselves, support anyone they have upset.
Or do you mean how to get them editing in the first place? That used to be "click this red link and create an article". As the standards for new articles rises and the links are to obscurer topics that need a good start when created, that is harder to do. Maybe promote more of the links to various projects such as disambiguation, wikilinking, vandalism patrol, simple article clean-up, and so on. But don't throw people in at the deep end and wonder why they are floundering.
Carcharoth