[WikiEN-l] Ars Technica: Prof replaces term papers with Wikipedia contributions, suffering ensues

[David Gerard]

On 30/10/2007, Wily D <wilydoppelganger at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 10/30/07, charles.r.matthews at ntlworld.com
> <charles.r.matthews at ntlworld.com> wrote:
> > "David Gerard" wrote

> > > There's little low-hanging fruit left, as we've noted here
> > > before - but any WikiProject will have endless lists of red links just
> > > waiting for someone to do the legwork to research and write an
> > > article.

> > Bah. I still dispute this.


Little of what casual visitors would think of as low-hanging fruit, then!


> > >Someone with university-level research facilities should be
> > > able to do a much better job than from a mere Googling, in not much
> > > more time.

> > A proper library for writing a proper article, OK. But let's not propagate the fallacy that one can't write a good stub any more.

> There's plenty of low hanging fruit for writing good starts using just
> teh google.  In fact, I wrote one yesterday:


Oh yeah. I still find new things to write.


>  It's really not very hard at all.  The obiggest problem is
> probably the anti-redlink culture that's growing very strong, that
> keeps people uninformed on what needs writing.
> More than anything else, the fact that writers are so strongly biased
> against redlinks these days is a huge reason new page creation has
> gone down.


This is bad. How to get across to the fervently anti-redlink (and they
exist) their error?


- d.