-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
Moin,
On Friday 09 December 2005 20:05, David Gerard wrote:
Anthony DiPierro wrote:
Right. It's not perfect. Just better. At least if someone is lazy and doesn't attribute something and then someone else catches them, it can be fixed. If we added a "references" field to the edit page, even if it was optional, the number of attributions would probably increase even more. The field would be unformatted, so someone could of course type "I just knew it" or "copied from some website" or even "poop" for their reference, but it'd be one more thing to look into if someone put their reference as "Wikipedia".
I put forward an idea a while ago which people weren't too keen on, but I think it's time for it to be presented again: when a new article is created, prefill it with text. e.g.
[snipa bit]
- From my experience with people very new to wikis, I also set up a new link in the menu ala "Create new article". When clicked it asks about the title, and then bounces them back to the wiki, the edit box open and a text similar to yours already filled in.
People view this as _much_ easier than mucking about with the URL, putting a link in somewhere else, and/or starting with an empty edit box.
The most FAQ was "How do I start a new article?" followed by "And why is this so complicated?", closely followed by "How do I add a headline again?"
Especially in-frequent contributors tend to forget these things very quick and since the computer should help the humans and not vice versa, I finally patched my local Mediawiki installation to fix this issue. Everyone's been happy since :)
Best wishes,
Tels
- -- Signed on Fri Dec 9 21:09:24 2005 with key 0x93B84C15. Visit my photo gallery at http://bloodgate.com/photos/ PGP key on http://bloodgate.com/tels.asc or per email.
This email violates U.S. patent #6,756,999 http://tinyurl.com/2vuqm:
[ [ Konsoles* ] [ Mozilla ] [ KMail ]]