[Foundation-l] Social networking (was: Analysis of lists statistics: community in decline)

[Alex]

geni wrote:
> 2008/11/3 Gregory Maxwell <gmaxwell at gmail.com>:
>> On Mon, Nov 3, 2008 at 4:18 PM, David Moran <fordmadoxfraud at gmail.com> wrote:
>> [snip]
>>>  What we SHOULD be
>>> talking about is not social media, but more robust tutorials and
>>> walkthroughs for new users as they go through their first edits, and their
>>> first created articles, &c.
>> I agree.
>>
>> And moreover,  this is important because *quality* not *quantity* is
>> what we should be most concerned about.   With umpteen million
>> articles in across many languages Wikipedia has already reached
>> "mission accomplished" level from a pure quantity measure.
>>
>> Making it easier to contribute won't just help quantity, it will help
>> quality by reducing some forms of bias, and bringing in a broader
>> range of knowledge.  If Wikipedia is only easy for techno-geeks then
>> editors will be mostly techno-geeks, and their edits may not
>> representative. (The [[Warp drive]] vs [[Ice pick]] effect).
> 
> Tutorials and walkthroughs are useful only after you have got that
> first click. We need to get better at getting that first click.
> Perhaps even just making the edit button bigger or a different colour.
> 
> We also need to get better at highly our different ways of attracting
> that first click. Luring people onto talk pages or the like. A system
> which went "you have view 100 pages why not try editing one" would be
> too annoying to allow for live use but perhaps some smarter way to
> target those likely to edit.
> 

I agree, this is a problem. I've corresponded with people on OTRS who,
despite the edit button on every page, the "anyone can edit" on the main
page, and the "you can improve this" on various maintenance templates,
really had no idea that they could edit articles. I don't recall how
many of the survey questions asked about this, but hopefully the survey
results will give us some reasons on why people don't edit and hopefully
we can address them.

I agree with David and Greg though as well. Wikitext is /supposed/ to be
simple. Unfortunately, several years of adding more and more
complexities through complex templates, parser functions, and tag
extensions has changed this somewhat. Its still easier than a
programming language or raw HTML, but many articles are well past the
point where one can look at the wikitext and easily figure out how the
basics of editing work.

A while ago (more than a year now) I started work on
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Article_wizard designed to help
new users write articles. I eventually got distracted by other things
and stopped working on it, but its still there if others want to work on
it. The Slovenian Wikipedia seems to have a slightly more developed
version -
http://sl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedija:Napi%C5%A1i_%C4%8Dlanek - that
they also link to in the various system messages shown when creating a
new article; the en.wikipedia version never quite got that far.

-- 
Alex (wikipedia:en:User:Mr.Z-man)