Kyle, I think these are all good suggestions, and we should try to find ways to help speakers improve the quality and consistency of presentations.
Part of this is giving them good, clear guidelines; and advice for first-time presenters who are eager to get their ideas out to the community. Part of this is asking for more information (asking for a precise length helps ensure it has been run through once), and giving presenters more feedback on the information received from them.
A wiki fanatic might encourage people to post their slides & papers early, so that others can suggest improvements or updates :-)
SJ
On 10/30/05, Kyle Lutze kyle@randomvoids.com wrote:
two things there, I'm not talking about a neat powerpoint presentation or a bunch of visuals, that's not needed for a good speech.
I'm talking about, we had people who had to be cut off half way through their speech because they didn't practice at all to stay in their timelimits, and others that got to the point to where they went(I think we even had one person say this too) "what should I talk about now?" because they hadn't prepared enough material.
Wikipedia is great as a whole because people are continually fixing other's mistakes for the final bit that shows, but for presentations what they say up there is the final bit, and they never had anybody critique them or give them any pointers.
All I'm saying is we need to get some sort of proof from them, say a month in advanced that they have a basic outline of their speech done and they can honestly say that they've practiced the whole thing at least once through and timed themselves.
We had some of these presentations aired on the news, they are practically representatives of wikipedia when they are up there, so we should hold them to a higher standard than just one edit they do on wikipedia.
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-- ++SJ