On 19-Jun-2012, at 7:33 PM, Srikanth Lakshmanan wrote:
On Tue, Jun 19, 2012 at 6:08 PM, Nitika Tandon ntandon@wikimedia.org wrote: Indeed participants will be editing articles relating to Indian context like Indian culture, history, arts etc
I just hope you meant to say participants will be editing articles *they are interested in* and which may / may not happen to be articles relating to Indian context like Indian culture, history, arts etc. People shouldn't be told to edit on subjects (None of the wikipedians were not told to edit on some topic, they just found it themselves). People must chose what they are interested in themselves and edit. This was also partly a reason why IEP failed, because not everyone was interested in data structures!
Agreed. No one can direct or command any editor to edit any single type of article. We're only suggesting - that too for the initial edits. We shall not be instructing participants to edit India related articles *only* but would be encouraging them to edit such articles at least to begin with because of the following reasons: Articles pertaining to Indian context are under covered/documented leaving a higher scope for improvement; thus making it easier for a new editor to expand and improve. We want to make things as easy as possible for new editor while s/he is learning and figuring Wikipedia. Our experience from outreach indicates if we leave it open to the audience to decide an article they'd like to edit, they usually pick a high visibility article. It is difficult for new editors to improve when experienced editors have done so much on an article. For e.g., if it's a first time editor, editing an article on Shaktimaan (with limited content and only 15 references) will be easier than editing an article on Harry Potter (which is relatively well documented and has 164 references). However, new editors don't understand this instantly and need to be suggested, at least for their initial edits. Once again, I'd like to reiterate, that we'd just be suggesting the participants to start by editing an India related article because in most likeliness it will be not be as well covered as an equivalent 'western article' (if I can say) and it will be easier for them to edit an article which is not well covered. Another way could be suggesting them to pick start/stub or non-existent articles, however in the later we'll have to guide them to check multiple times or else there is always a fear of making a duplicate.
Thanks Nitika