I can absolutely see lowering the number of edits required, but it
might also be worth looking at or adjusting what sort of edits we are
looking for or adjusting them per-resource though that might get
messy. For example, people who are creating articles need to have a
different, and one could possibly argue higher, level of Wikipedia
literacy and familiarity than someone doing automated edits. They're
both valuable! But may have different needs w/r/t the Library.
As someone who approves people for a few different WL resources, I see
basically two kinds of applicants
- People who just apply for access to ALL WL resources and just are
rolling the dice about whether they'll be accepted. What they apply
for doesn't match their areas of interest or expertise or even editing
areas, or their qualifying edits are all profile page edits
- People who apply for a narrowly-tailored set of resources that match
their editing expertise
I guess the larger question is whether WL resource access is seen as a
perq for longer time editors or if it's supposed to just be a tool to
help people edit Wikipedia.
Thanks for sharing that's valuable to hear. I would put money on the fact that a lot of helpful new editors who don't yet qualify wouldn't even bother to apply, for lack of awareness or just giving up after seeing the requirements on the main landing page.
Your larger question is definitely the right one. I would say that if our mission is to give everyone on the planet free access to the sum of all knowledge, we need to treat it like a resource that's available to anyone who wants to make a good faith effort to create and edit articles. The bar for access should be the minimum necessary to ensure that you've shown real interest and ability to make use of the library. If there are limits on the volume of editors who can participate, there are other tools we can use like making access expire if you don't use it. (Do we do that already? Pardon my ignorance here.)
_____________
Jessamyn West
User:Jessamyn
box 345, randolph vt 05060
On Wed, Jul 27, 2022 at 4:26 PM Steven Walling <steven.walling@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> I wanted to start a discussion on lowering the threshold for access. Very very very few people qualify for the current requirements of 500+ edits, 6+ months editing, 10+ edits in the last month, and no active blocks. In fact basically this excludes any new editor no matter how good faith and helpful they have been. Even just lowering one of the account age or edit count thresholds would go a long way.
>
> I recently was pretty shocked to discover this high of a bar for access, after recommending the library as a resource to a new editor who has been doing a great job and (as a young student) could use access to academic source material in creating science-related content. I won't name them, but as an example this editor has over 300 edits and has created just over 50 articles, mainly for missing plant species.
>
> Do the participating institutions require this level of exclusionary criteria? How can we gather data to show them that there are good content contributors being excluded here?
>
> These requirements seem pretty absurd especially since many of the largest resources in the Library, like JSTOR, give any random person with a Google account access to 100 free articles per month. The risk profile of a Wikipedia who say has,100 edits and 1 month of experience has got to be less than that? We should pilot a threshold like that.
>
> Steven
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