It's interesting that you chose spellchecking as your example. On the English Wikipedia, I tend to see that as an activity that some people actually do find fun (or relaxing). Plus, spelling errors (or perceived spelling errors[1]) are something that unregistered users really like fixing. But maybe that varies significantly across language editions.
In any event, spelling errors are probably the case where eventualism is most appropriate. It is rare that someone will be misinformed because of spelling mistakes, and they serve a useful signaling function in making it clear that a given piece of content has probably not undergone peer review. And rather than driving people away, they tend to draw them in—Cunningham's law[2] never fails.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:ENGVAR [2] https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Cunningham%27s_Law
On Thu, Jan 24, 2019 at 6:55 PM John Erling Blad jeblad@gmail.com wrote:
Both in Wikipedia and other parts of the Wikimedia-universe there are a lot of jobs that should be done, but are not so popular. Because they are not done, people get tired and backs away from whatever they are doing.
I could give several examples, but lets say spellchecking. It is not fun doing spellchecking, even if you are spellchecking something written by a professor. Instead of doing spellchecking you do something else, like poking around in some code, or write about Pokemon. While you do so the professor gets a bit annoyed over the not so perfect article, and starts to wonder what happen to the crowd in crowdsourcing.
Somewhere along the way the it became so bad to talk about anything except the pure wikipedian sitting on top of his pillar with a book and a computer, writing articles in solitude, that we completely missed the opportunities to get a much larger momentum.
The Norwegian Bokmål Wikipedia has over a half a million articles. About 10 % lack sources. Nearly all of them has spelling errors. It is nothing unusual about this.
Could we use bounties to get some momentum?
John Erling Blad /jeblad
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