Steve Bennett wrote:
Here's another: when someone searches for an
article (let's say "norwegian
antarctic expedition") that doesn't exist, let's encourage them to add it -
we have successfully located someone interested in a topic that we don't
have an article about. This is a good start.
However, there are a lot of "gotchas" to the process of observing
what appears to be a missing article and proceeding to attempt to
create it, and it takes a good deal of experience in Wikipedianism to
successfully navigate them.
Even apart from all the political tripwires a newbie could stumble
into when the topic concerns something controversial either in the
"real world" or in the bizarre confines of Wikipolitics, there's the
matter of there possibly being an article on a topic already, just
under a slightly different spelling. On Wikipedia, capitalization
and punctuation matter, and newbies can't be expected to know all the
nitpicky conventions used to decide what the "proper" title of an
article is. Maybe they'll end up creating an article under
"Norwegian Antarctic Expedition" when the slightly differently
capitalized "Norwegian antarctic expedition" already exists but they
didn't manage to find it. Or maybe the existing article is under
"Antarctic expeditions of Norway" or "Antarctic expeditions
(Norwegian)". Sometimes there are redirects from other obvious
titles, but not always. Or the newbie might misspell "Norwegian".
It's happened to me a few times, that I've created a new article
where I thought there was a gap, then later found there to be one
already under a slightly different name.
--
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