[Foundation-l] A fundraiser for editors

[Craig Franklin]

> Message: 5
> Date: Tue, 3 Jan 2012 15:08:12 -0800
> From: Erik Moeller <erik at wikimedia.org>
> Subject: Re: [Foundation-l] A fundraiser for editors
> To: Wikimedia Foundation Mailing List
> 	<foundation-l at lists.wikimedia.org>
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> On Mon, Jan 2, 2012 at 8:53 AM, James Heilman <jmh649 at gmail.com> wrote:
>> The fundraiser for money has been working exceedingly well with our
>> number of donors increasing 10 fold since 2008. What we need now is a
>> fundraiser for editors. I meet well educated professionals who use
>> Wikipedia but have no ideas that they can edit it. We need to run a
>> banner with the same energy we use to raise money to raise editor
>> numbers. This idea has been trialed to a limited extent here
>> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Invitation_to_edit but the
>> effort did not have sufficient data crunching behind it to determine
>> if it works.
>
> James,
>
> thanks for this note! The problem, as I see it, is that we know that
> new editors, once they attempt to make their first edit, hit an
> enormous number of barriers. Even if they master mark-up (which is a
> big IF), they're likely to fail when their edits get reverted due to
> lack of proper citations or other issues.

I'd just like to echo this.  As part of Wikimedia Australia's outreach
programmes, I've done more than a few academies, and once we get them
to write their articles initially in the user space, the #1 problem by
far we encounter is difficulty with the markup and editing interface.
One comment that I received (from a PhD, no less) was along the lines
of "Wow, this is a throwback, like editing text in the old MS-DOS
days".

I keep an enthusiastic eye out for the WYSIWYG editor, and it does
look like it's bubbling along quite nicely.  It won't solve all of the
problems, but I think that once it is complete and implemented, we
will see an increase in the retention rates of editors, particularly
editors who are not traditionally considered to be computer power
users, or who have not had the benefit of growing up with this sort of
technology.

Regards,
Craig Franklin