On 11/25/06, geni geniice@gmail.com wrote:
On 11/26/06, Gregory Maxwell gmaxwell@gmail.com wrote:
# Encouraging our existing volunteers to write about things they don't care about but which we can generally agree that we ought to cover well. ## Admittedly, we already do this to an extent but there is certainly more we can do.
Not really. Most wikipedia volunteers are here to write about the stuff they are interested in. They are not interested in major work beyond that. Sometimes the boarders can be bent (so you are interested in wars? How about the wars of Africa?). Sometimes they cannot be.
Further problems is that sometimes you need particular bits of knowledge to write about things. Hard to write much about say Mauritania without being able to read Arabic and french (which is a pity because the results of the last elections came out on Thursday and [[Politics of Mauritania]] need uprating).
If your writing is totally dependant on what you know, then you probably have a [[WP:NOR]] related problem.
A side effect of NOR is that completely disinterested parties should be able to do a job of similar quality to our interested writers, although perhaps with a somewhat greater expenditure of energy.
... and I don't think it's unreasonable to ask people to expend energy. We call our contributors volunteers for a reason. Are people vacationing at Disney land called 'volunteers'? :)
We do see evidence of folks working on subjects that are not primary interests to them... I saw it in the last danny contest, but I'm sure there are many other examples.
Working with people paid to edit is going to be problematical since you would likely have to pay them to do more than write.
I do not claim that it's trivial. Only that it's actionable. ... We don't really know what to expect. It's my thought that on many of the subjects that need work it will be fairly easy... if anyone cared enough to fight over the content of the article then the article probably wouldn't stink. If this turns out to be true, then our policy for paid writers could be to tell them to just walk away from any subject where community interest presents an obstacle to their efforts.