On 5/17/06, Erik Moeller eloquence@gmail.com wrote:
[snip]
Highlight their edits. Create a page where volunteers can sign up as mentors to deal with them. Only in the worst cases, tell them that if they don't find someone to mentor, they will be blocked. And I probably should polish my "School of Wikipedia" idea a bit more. Writing is a skill that can be acquired.
I fully agree that editing Wikipedia is a learning process, as would, I hope, practically everyone on the project. This is, in fact, one of the main ideas behind the current plans for Wikiversity [1] - to provide for a way for people to learn how to do useful things related to Wikimedia projects - such as, say, identify and critique sources for Wikipedia articles or Wikibooks, grab and edit video clips (Commons, Wikipedia), create diagrams and illustrations for articles, textbooks, etc.
Wikipedia is a strong learning community, but not all the time. Too often, I see people saying things like "You have no idea what you're talking about", when the person is merely expressing what they believe to be true - which results in a typical flamewar, arbitration case etc. I think that we need to have a place for people to be free to experiment and to learn collaboratively - there are, of course aspects of this inherent in Wikipedia (as in all wikis) but it's not enough in my opinion. I think that Wikiversity should be that "School of Wikip/media".
Best, Cormac (Cormaggio)
[1] http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikiversity/Modified_project_proposal