On 10/2/05, geni geniice@gmail.com wrote:
Your idea runs into the problem (that inclusionism makes worse) that people want to write about stuff they are interested in.
You're proposing that Wikipedia's greatest strength is a problem. In general terms, I couldn't disagree more strongly.
People write at Wikipedia because they want to. First, we should recognize that they want to write about what they're interested in and strongly encourage them to do so. This gets them involved here.
Then, we must recognize that volunteer editors will only write about articles they aren't interested in if they're motivated by another related interest.
I had no prior interest in [[Sigurd Syr]] before contributing to the article on him. What I did have an interest in, was improving Wikipedia, and making an apology to User:Briangotts, and he selected [[Sigurd Syr]] as my assignment when I offered to make a referenced, content contributing, good faith edit to an article of his choice.
Although I think I did a pretty good job with Sigurd, I never would have done so if I'd not been interested in the other goals of my edit.
A second example: in an edit summary on the [[FairTax]] article, I thought I was a little harsh, so I apologized to User:Morphh, who until that day, had only ever edited FairTax, FairTax talk, and the talk pages of a few other editors on that single article. Well, I made my offer, and gently insisted that I wanted to do an edit for him. He assigned me my choice of articles in the topic of [[Life extension]] or [[Transhumanism]] and I chose [[Roy Walford]].
As a direct result of this, he posted on his talk page, the following: "Very nice. A side effect of your proposal is my own exploration of wikipedia. I've added half a dozen sections to my watch list. I've already made small edits. I don't have the time to make good contributions to many articles but its fun to get involved. The amount of information available on this site is amazing."
And now Morphh has begun to edit outside of FairTax.
So the puzzle is NOT to prevent people from writing about what they're interested in, but to find newer and more creative ways to get them interested in a broader range of topics. -- Michael Turley User:Unfocused