Better late than never, commenting on this.
I'm quite sensitive to the issue because of news articles about organizing on the Israel Palestine issue. See this page for links: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_talk:WikiProject_Israel_Palestine_Col...
Also because I started as an advocate and it took me a couple years of my 5 years, 7 months and 16 days to get in the "Wikipedia head" and because I have wasted so much time with rabid advocates who have NOT and pull every trick in the book (including offline harassment) to promote their agenda.
And of course we live in DC where advocates on zillions of issues abound and if we held lots of workshops to encourage new editors we'd doubtless get all sorts of advocates (political, social, artistic, etc.) so it's important to stress, as Dan wrote: "workshop on how to edit an article that you have strong opinions about, etc." Something I tried to do in my first workshop. (I'll report on that workshop and my interest in doing more general DC workshops for newbies in a separate email later today.)
Plus the first workshop I did was after being asked by a friend to do one by a national Coalition of Civil Liberties groups, many of which are particularly concerned with legal persecution/prosecution vs. Muslims and Arabs. (I ended up editing in this area myself far more than I originally intended because many of the articles are poor or biased - esp. BLP-wise - and would love to see others cleaning them up, as well as branching out to other areas of interest to them.)
But the bottom line is that activists do have a strong motivation to LEARN how to edit, to over come the various learning issues, and understand policy, and once they have these editing skills they can apply them to all sorts of articles on other topics that interest them. (I started out interested in bad articles on me and on my peace group and my interests just kept widening over time.) And they are going to edit anyway, so getting them into the NPOV and Dispute resolution head quickly and efficiently is very important.
Carol in dc
On 1/11/2012 2:12 AM, Dan Rosenthal wrote:
I don't think it needs to be about pushing a POV at all. Why can't the booth highlight examples of ways to improve coverage and depth/breadth of LGBTI related articles, highlight LGBTI wikiprojects, maybe even do an impromptu workshop on how to edit an article that you have strong opinions about, etc.
On 1/11/12, bob@racepacket.combob@racepacket.com wrote:
Perhaps we should rethink our "recruiting" strategy. If our goal is to attract editors dedicated to collecting knowledge and writing a non-point-of-view encyclopedia, I think our outreach efforts would be best targeted to people with expertise (like the GLAM community) or people with a lot of spare time (like the retired community).
In general, "community activists" (of any viewpoint) are more likely to seek out WMF projects to push a particular point of view. So, recruiting at the Republican Conference, the Democratic Conference, the Family Foundation Convention or this conference would call into question our Chapter's commitment to NPOV. I think there is a difference in an outreach effort that targets academic conferences vs. an outreach effort that targets political activist gatherings.
Is there a general set of WMF guidelines as to the scope of outreach efforts? For example, I know that WMF cannot support partisan political activity. Has this proposal been vetted by the Legal Committee and the Chapter Board?
If we had a booth, what would be the message? We want you to volunteer time to WMF projects, but we don't want you to push the viewpoint you traveled to Baltimore to discuss? Thanks, -- Bob