[WikiEN-l] How to bring back people who don't want to bother?

[Kirill Lokshin]

On 1/11/06, David Gerard <dgerard at gmail.com> wrote:
> There's a specialist topic that's about to create its own wiki. In
> discussion on a board, one person said "Why not just use Wikipedia?
> What you're describing is identical." Another responded with: "No,
> some 15 year old moron will mark it for deletion just because they
> know nothing about it."
>
> So that's part of our public image now. Well done alienating webcomics
> authors, i.e. creators of memes and popular culture on the net.
>
> Not to mention the way the webcomics AC case ended: AFD trolls now
> have the all-clear to work actively to alienate actual experts,
> because the self-professed ignorant are now *officially* to be
> considered equal to those who have an actual bloody clue.
>
> I was amazed knowledge of it had spread so far. Jimbo, you heard about
> this example at the recent UK Wikimedia meet (the doll collectors) -
> this was actually an independent example from the same field.
>
> Experts from fields that actually haven't been alienated literally
> don't think it's worth bothering to try writing in Wikipedia any more.
> Is there anything we can do to rehabilitate Wikipedia's image in the
> outside world?
>
> (yes, geni, I know you're happy to be rid of annoying specialist experts)

This is really a process question more than an image question; all the
PR in the world won't help us if the fifteen-year-olds are still
deleting articles.

On that note, why not give more authority to WikiProjects?  We'd need
some sort of community sanity-checking process to limit it to
"legitimate" projects; but certainly some of the larger and more
organized ones (particularly those that deal with areas where
"notability" isn't a very contentious issue) could handle their own
deletion/guidelines/etc. with minimal supervision.  We already have
this for stubs, but is there some reason it wouldn't work for at least
some subject areas?

Kirill Lokshin