On Sat, Dec 5, 2009 at 4:18 PM, Charles Matthews
<charles.r.matthews(a)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