On 12/5/06, David Gerard dgerard@gmail.com wrote:
Ah, thank you so very much. These are just the sort of things I was looking for. I'll see what can be done to round up contributors to alleviate the systemic bias.
The postings are also interesting from the point-of-view of finding what turns off qualified people from contributing Wikipedia.
Unsurprisingly, both blogs mention that the whole 'notability' mess is a big barrier, and a big part of our systemic bias. We keep things that appeal to the average Wikipedian and try to delete things the average Wikipedian has never heard of. Sure, most of the time an expert new editor will be able to save their new article with sufficient argument and sourcing, but the prospect of that argument being necessary is enough to turn people off.
The "West of the Moon: blog entry also mentions some other aspects. It confirms my suspicions that infoboxes and tables are off-putting to those not familiar with them (or at least, not used to editing structured markup) - she mentions wanting to fix the [[Alabama]] infobox. Advanced markup appeals to the established contributor and the computer-geek, but the more complicated the markup the more challenging it is for outsiders to make the first steps to becoming Wikipedia contributors.
In both cases, having to deal with the petty squabbling puts them off. I'm not sure whether this can easily be fixed, though.
-Matt