[WikiEN-l] Positives to publicity

[Delirium]

Keegan Paul wrote:
> People truly do have no clue about how to edit or the community and how it
> functions.  Actually, I don't think the functionality of the community can
> be described.
> Folks are amazed to be told that they can edit willy nilly, make an account
> and all that.  For all our popularity worldwide the vast majority of the
> consumers have no idea (I realize I'm preaching to the choir) until these
> news stories invoke interest.  So, what to do about it?  How to not bite?

It's a big topic, obviously, but this book written by a few Wikipedians 
is probably the best introduction I've found: http://howwikipediaworks.com/

Of course, not everyone will go off and read a book. But, I mean, it's a 
fairly large community, engaged in a fairly large project (one that's 
never been attempted at this scale, actually), so some amount of effort 
to fully understand what's going on is inevitable. What we really want 
is: a much shorter version of that book, that somehow covers an even 
larger breadth of information. ;-)

It's tricky. I mean, we're not just teaching people about Wikipedia 
itself when we explain how to edit Wikipedia, but about many other 
fields of knowledge that they may or may not already have any grounding 
in, which we've adapted in our practices (and which many of us have 
learned as we go). The idea of tertiary-source summaries vs. original 
research; what constitutes original research in various areas; what a 
neutral tone sounds like; what scholarly citation looks like; how to 
evaluate the reliability of sources; how to spot surprising claims that 
need citations; how to write in a sort of fractal summary style; etc.

Some of this is slowly seeping out into the wider culture, which may 
make the acculturation process easier if lots of people coming in 
already know certain things. The widespread outside-Wikipedia use of 
"[citation needed]", often in a way reasonably close to what we usually 
mean by it, is one example (and actually imo good for knowledge in 
general--- journalists in particular are increasingly getting the 
"[citation needed]" thrown at them when they make 
questionable-and-unsupported claims).

-Mark