[WikiEN-l] Ian McKellen's article - a challenge

[Steve Bennett]

On 22/04/06, Will (Zsinj) Bumgarner <wbzsinj at gmail.com> wrote:
> What I don't understand is when people look themselves up and see
> erroneous information, they don't just go and fix it. It's as if they
> have something to prove by saying "Wikipedia sucks" instead of
> contributing to the effort and making Wikipedia better.

I've made this remark before, but anyway: Imagine you're a newbie to
Wikipedia. You end up there from google, clicking straight to
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ian_mckellan . Now, tell me, what can you
see on the screen, as you read the article, tells you that you could
*right this instant* edit the article to fix any changes?

There is not the slightest indication. Only the bold text "edit this
page" in very small print up the top, in the sort of tab that most
people will filter out mentally. Even the tagline "From Wikipedia, the
free encyclopaedia that anyone can edit" got edited in favour of
stripping this simple fact out.

Most people have a vague idea that random internet people write
Wikipedia. Fewer would realise that they can, without any registration
at all, edit the page they're seeing, and get an instant result, right
now.

Steve