On 11/25/06, geni <geniice(a)gmail.com> wrote:
On 11/26/06, Gregory Maxwell
<gmaxwell(a)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.