[WikiEN-l] Edit Wikipedia Week is coming. How not to bite the n00bs?

[joshua.zelinsky at yale.edu]

Quoting Delirium <delirium at hackish.org>:

> Florence Devouard wrote:
>> The primary role of the welcome is, I think, informing the newcomers of
>> the community expectations.
>>
>> When I look at the current template, I think it is rather good, but I
>> find interesting that the most important expectations we are mentionning
>> on the talk page of the newcomers are about "naming conventions" or
>> "manual of style".
>>
>> Other expectations, such as code of conduct or consensus building, are
>> only mentionned on a second page, where the newcomer will have to go.
>> Note that I like the five pillars page very much. It is bright, concise,
>> to the point.
>>
>
> Hmm, that's a good point. IMO we should emphasize to newcomers that the
> things they really need to know up front in order to contribute are: 1)
> write neutral content; and 2) cite reliable sources so that what you
> write can be verified by someone else. It's useful to link to some pages
> explaining what those things mean (WP:NPOV, WP:RS, and WP:V). It's
> probably also useful to give a few general background links, like the
> five-principles ones. Most of the rest can be safely be left for later
> IMO---if a newcomer is writing neutral, well referenced articles, it's
> not a big problem if they name their article [[Prince Foo of Bar]]
> instead of [[Foo, Prince of Bar]]---that's easy to fix.
>
> One thing that *is* something of a bottleneck IMO is the technical
> business of citing sources. A newbie looking for guidance on how to do
> that goes to WP:CITE, which quickly degenerates into a morass of
> multiple systems, template help pages, and who knows what else. Maybe we
> should have something prominently posted along the lines of: "If you
> find this confusing, feel free to cite your sources however you want!
> Someone will fix up the formatting later as long as you provide a
> complete citation to the sources you used."
>
> -Mark

That's an excellent idea. I've just brought it up at WT:CITE