[WikiEN-l] Zero information is preferred to misleading or false information

[Cormac Lawler]

On 5/17/06, Erik Moeller <eloquence at gmail.com> wrote:

[snip]
>
> Highlight their edits. Create a page where volunteers can sign up as
> mentors to deal with them. Only in the worst cases, tell them that if
> they don't find someone to mentor, they will be blocked. And I
> probably should polish my "School of Wikipedia" idea a bit more.
> Writing is a skill that can be acquired.
>

I fully agree that editing Wikipedia is a learning process, as would,
I hope, practically everyone on the project. This is, in fact, one of
the main ideas behind the current plans for Wikiversity [1] - to
provide for a way for people to learn how to do useful things related
to Wikimedia projects - such as, say, identify and critique sources
for Wikipedia articles or Wikibooks, grab and edit video clips
(Commons, Wikipedia), create diagrams and illustrations for articles,
textbooks, etc.

Wikipedia is a strong learning community, but not all the time. Too
often, I see people saying things like "You have no idea what you're
talking about", when the person is merely expressing what they believe
to be true - which results in a typical flamewar, arbitration case
etc. I think that we need to have a place for people to be free to
experiment and to learn collaboratively - there are, of course aspects
of this inherent in Wikipedia (as in all wikis) but it's not enough in
my opinion. I think that Wikiversity should be that "School of
Wikip/media".

Best,
Cormac (Cormaggio)

[1] http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikiversity/Modified_project_proposal