On 13 June 2012 09:55, Gordon Joly gordon.joly@pobox.com wrote:
On 13/06/12 09:30, Stevie Benton wrote:
I agree with everything that Jon said. Editing for the first time is a bit daunting, especially for people with zero online publishing experience.
That's why I have been promoting editing skills on a Mediawiki website first before going into the lion's den that is the English Wikipedia.
Quite right, from the point of view of the learning curve. The issue would be motivation.
Relevant to this discussion is my own experience. I joined WP almost exactly nine years ago. But for the previous year I had been intensively editing the wiki at http://senseis.xmp.net/ . So I stepped up to a community maybe 100 times larger, but with quite a lot of savvy. Very helpful to me, but not a representative arrival.
Indeed you'll forgive me an anecdote about "How Wikipedia Works" got written. My co-author Phoebe Ayers got her newbie story on p. 302. Where's mine? Well, the editor we were working with, otherwise very good, thought I'd made a mixed message of my arrival story, and it got cut; in compensation I got a box with two of my jokes on p. 351. That is why Gordon's correct observation is muffled in the book, if there at all. (BTW you can't win all the discussions of this kind in co-writing a book, and if you think you can, don't extrapolate your attitude to WP ...)
What had I been doing for the previous nine years? Teaching and playing go. I believe this is something to do with the "contrarian" view I'm pushing, and I did run this idea past the trainer-trainer at the weekend.
Charles