I'd be all up for writing a wikibook introduction to Wikipedia. Anyone else interested? :) FT2 On Fri, Aug 28, 2009 at 9:24 PM, Keegan Paul <kgnpaul(a)gmail.com> wrote:

I'm serious..... FT2 On Fri, Aug 28, 2009 at 10:09 PM, <wjhonson(a)aol.com> wrote:

2009/8/28 FT2 <ft2.wiki(a)gmail.com>om>: Most people are not going to want to read a book before editing wikipedia. Your problems are: 1)getting people to click the edit link in the first place (polish style tab highlighting may help here) 2)getting them not to give up once they've clicked the edit button (usability project) 3)encouraging them to edit again in future (mostly related to making sure they have a good first experience). -- geni

Keegan Paul wrote: It's a big topic, obviously, but this book written by a few Wikipedians is probably the best introduction I've found: http://howwikipediaworks.com/ Of course, not everyone will go off and read a book. But, I mean, it's a fairly large community, engaged in a fairly large project (one that's never been attempted at this scale, actually), so some amount of effort to fully understand what's going on is inevitable. What we really want is: a much shorter version of that book, that somehow covers an even larger breadth of information. ;-) It's tricky. I mean, we're not just teaching people about Wikipedia itself when we explain how to edit Wikipedia, but about many other fields of knowledge that they may or may not already have any grounding in, which we've adapted in our practices (and which many of us have learned as we go). The idea of tertiary-source summaries vs. original research; what constitutes original research in various areas; what a neutral tone sounds like; what scholarly citation looks like; how to evaluate the reliability of sources; how to spot surprising claims that need citations; how to write in a sort of fractal summary style; etc. Some of this is slowly seeping out into the wider culture, which may make the acculturation process easier if lots of people coming in already know certain things. The widespread outside-Wikipedia use of "[citation needed]", often in a way reasonably close to what we usually mean by it, is one example (and actually imo good for knowledge in general--- journalists in particular are increasingly getting the "[citation needed]" thrown at them when they make questionable-and-unsupported claims). -Mark

I... friggin... love it. And I rarely love anything at all. I mean I don't even love Cheetos, although I like it. But this page you linked is the first time I've ever encountered anyone doing this. It's the wave of the future! I wish I had the technical ability to do it, or the time. I'm like one of those zombies in the Bela Lugosi "White Zombie" (1932) which I just linked up today (shameless plug shameless plug) Chairpotato's "Night at the Movies!" http://knol.google.com/k/chair-potato/chairpotatos-night-at-the-movies/hyuj… Just look at their faces as they push that grind-stone around and around and around. I'm like that. Only with a whip. W.J. -----Original Message----- From: Andrew Gray <andrew.gray(a)dunelm.org.uk> To: English Wikipedia <wikien-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org> Sent: Fri, Aug 28, 2009 4:24 pm Subject: Re: [WikiEN-l] Positives to publicity 2009/8/28 <WJhonson(a)aol.com>om>: tip about say, There's something related that's been floating around for a few years - it's a bit more lighthearted, but it's pretty interesting nonetheless. http://jonudell.net/udell/gems/umlaut/umlaut.html -- - Andrew Gray andrew.gray(a)dunelm.org.uk ____________ ___________________________________ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l