On 20/11/2007, Christophe Henner <christophe.henner(a)gmail.com> wrote: Yeah you might want to think about your wording there. We built this wiki and yet only now do we have the chance to tell other people how to edit? What do you think we have been doing for the last few years? Because either it will have minimal impact or you didn't budget for enough database servers. That's nice of you. That's nice of you. Um you are talking to wikipedians here please respect their intelligence. You said you wanted this to be an annual event. Oh dear. Would that include "which could involves"? If the signpost can find someone to turn my writing into conventional English I'm sure you can find someone you could run your email past. There are many ways to motivate the community. Sugar coated condescension isn't one of them. -- geni

This vulgar monstrosity got my blood boiling. Who the hell thought this one up? Clearly, not someone who spends half their day fighting in the dirty, blood-bespattered trenches of the never-ending Wikipedia-wars. Look, the plain fact is that we don't want more people adding their own junk to the English Wikipedia. Out of the 2 million articles there, under 5000 have got any sort of quality control tag attached to them (FA, GA), and even those often have very severe problems. 5000 out of 2 million? Is that anything to be proud of? The rest? God help us. Even ostensibly decent-looking articles simply fall apart when any sort of critical scrutiny is applied to them - the version of [[Johann Adolph Hasse]] copied over in whole from 1911 Britannica may have looked quite nice, but Christ only knows how many goddamned lies it contained until I rewrote the thing from scratch. Same with [[Gluck]], which I'm currently having to do exactly the same with. More seriously, poke around in the history of [[Russia]], a plausible-seeming piece of well-tuned nonsense, cobbled together from an ultra-nationalist viewpoint from online encyclopaedias and newspapers, that absolutely falls in on itself when even semi-expert eyes look at the beast. I could easily cite perhaps a couple of million - quite literally - more examples of decent-looking Wikipedia articles that are, in fact, absolute crap. Wikipedia, the encyclopaedia written by the rabble, isn't working. Hell, I haven't even got on to the user conduct problems - trying to maintain control over enwiki isn't a question of helping the encyclopaedia along, it's a question of riot control while dodging the shit flung at you from 3 sides. So what's the solution? The solution we propose is to get more of the faex populi editing Wikipedia. Oh, please - this is so bad it's almost funny. Most people I know, who I would not trust with an encyclopaedia any more than I would trust Jack the Ripper with my adolescent sister, don't know you can edit WP so easily, despite using it daily. Thank heaven! Why let them in on the great secret? Why? Oh why? Hell, they're not even bad people - they'd just be hopelessly incompetent at writing an encyclopaedia. Let the racaille stick to real life - please don't let them near an encyclopaedia! We don't need more half-informed plebians copying 1911 (or worse, Catholic bile from 1913) in, or adding their own speculatory trivia, or propagating yet nationalist myths, or moronically repeating the latest pseudoscientific junk they heard from Mrs Jones at No.12 (why, how well did homeopathy work for her! Must be something in that, then, eh?). What we need, need so badly we're screaming for them, are people with time and access to decent sources, sources printed (hopefully), and printed by well-respected publishers. People are prepared to spend time painstakingly writing quality articles from the sources - not fools who merely rabidly repeat the latest malicious gossip off the intarwebz. So, by all means, have your "Edit Wikipedia Week". I'll participate with unbelievable enthusiasm - but I'll be picking who I encourage to edit Wikipedia with incredible care and caution - and even then, you've still got the problem that the work of one honest man can so easily be trashed by two rogues (anyone remember stable versions - 'pon my word, I do declare I'd almost forgotten them. Stable versions seem to be rather like this year's audit - never finished). At a time when Wikipedia's reputation in academia is in the shitter - and to most noble people of quality, this is what really hurts - we invite more of the village idiots into the online city? The horror, the horror! CM Odi profanum vulgus et arceo. _________________________________________________________________ Feel like a local wherever you go. http://www.backofmyhand.com

I'd encourage people be careful about the message here. "Edit Wikipedia Week" (abbreviated "EWW"?), sounds much like something Stephen Colbert might come up with. The goal is not to triple the number of elephants in Africa [a bit of Colbert inspired vandalism], but rather to get more people involved and teach good editting. Most of the suggestions for activities do seem to have a reasonable focus, but I think some of the backlash on this list is coming from people who perceive this event as pushing editting solely for editting's sake, and yes pushing editing can be destructive. Instead, I think we would be better served by thinking of this as a "Learn Wikipedia Week" or a "Teach Wikipedia Week". In other words, think of it as not simply getting more people to hit the "edit" button, but more comprehensively as a effort to try and teach productive editting skills to new users. In addition to presentations, and the like, a bit of valuable preparation might be to think about how people learn Wikipedia and spend time cleaning up some of the introductory pages that new users first see. -Robert Rohde On Nov 20, 2007 5:58 AM, Christophe Henner <christophe.henner(a)gmail.com> wrote: