[Foundation-l] 10 thoughts on how to improve the quality of Swedish Wikipedia‏

[Maria Fanucchi]

I've been down for a while now and have not been getting much done, but this
essay has made we want to attack my watchlist with renewed determination and
enthusiasm. So many points are touched on in such a clear way. It's honest
about the difficulties we may encounter without being "OMG this is too hard"
scary. It's lovely. Thank you, Lennart!

Barnstars are mentioned only in passing, but I would like to say that often
a barnstar or a simple text message saying "thank you" can do wonders to a
contributor. So often - too often - one feels alone working on a subject no
one else seems to know or care about, and after a while you start to despair
of having anyone read what you've written. Getting a thank-you note at a
moment like that gives an enormous boost to your enthusiasm for your work
and the impulse to continue working. And that, in turn, will contribute to
the amount of good articles.

I suspect that this "recognition effect" also accounts for the popularity of
the article traffic statistics tool ( http://stats.grok.se/ ). People can
now see just how many visits the articles they contributed on get every
month, which is a big step up from before when you had absolutely no way of
knowing because few visitors edit and/or leave messages on talkpages. When
this tool was launched, I cannot stress how often I read someone going
"yay!" on the IRC channels or on Wikipedia. It's nice to know your work is
being read.

Again, thank you and happy editing,
--Maria
User:Arria Belli

On 3/12/08, Lennart Guldbrandsson <wikihannibal at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> Hello,
>
> Just to let you know a bit of what's happening at the Swedish Wikipedia.
>
> In the middle of February I published an essay. As it was I who wrote it,
> I
> am perhaps a bit biased here, so I will try to put it mildly: it created
> the
> largest number of positive actions I have seen in… well, forever, at
> Swedish
> Wikipedia. It has since become a document that many Swedish Wikipedians
> refer to as a standard document. It will certainly be a main topic at our
> general assembly of Wikimedia Sverige. I recently posted this to
> internal-l,
> and got questions about reposting it on foundation-l. It has since been
> "released" on Meta as well, both in English and the orginal Swedish.
>
>
> --
> Lennart Guldbrandsson, ordförande för Wikimedia Sverige och presskontakt
> för
> svenskspråkiga Wikipedia
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