[WikiEN-l] Re: Re: Re: RE: Re: Taking your eyes off the ball

[Michael Turley]

On 10/2/05, geni <geniice at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> Your idea runs into the problem (that inclusionism makes worse) that
> people want to write about stuff they are interested in.

You're proposing that Wikipedia's greatest strength is a problem.  In
general terms, I couldn't disagree more strongly.

People write at Wikipedia because they want to.  First, we should
recognize that they want to write about what they're interested in and
strongly encourage them to do so.  This gets them involved here.

Then, we must recognize that volunteer editors will only write about
articles they aren't interested in if they're motivated by another
related interest.

I had no prior interest in [[Sigurd Syr]] before contributing to the
article on him.  What I did have an interest in, was improving
Wikipedia, and making an apology to User:Briangotts, and he selected
[[Sigurd Syr]] as my assignment when I offered to make a referenced,
content contributing, good faith edit to an article of his choice.

Although I think I did a pretty good job with Sigurd, I never would
have done so if I'd not been interested in the other goals of my edit.

A second example: in an edit summary on the [[FairTax]] article, I
thought I was a little harsh, so I apologized to User:Morphh, who
until that day, had only ever edited FairTax, FairTax talk, and the
talk pages of a few other editors on that single article.  Well, I
made my offer, and gently insisted that I wanted to do an edit for
him.  He assigned me my choice of articles in the topic of [[Life
extension]] or [[Transhumanism]] and I chose [[Roy Walford]].

As a direct result of this, he posted on his talk page, the following:
"Very nice. A side effect of your proposal is my own exploration of
wikipedia. I've added half a dozen sections to my watch list. I've
already made small edits. I don't have the time to make good
contributions to many articles but its fun to get involved. The amount
of information available on this site is amazing."

And now Morphh has begun to edit outside of FairTax.

So the puzzle is NOT to prevent people from writing about what they're
interested in, but to find newer and more creative ways to get them
interested in a broader range of topics.
--
Michael Turley
User:Unfocused