[WikiEN-l] Eschatology and Wikipedia

[Samuel Klein]

On Tue, Dec 28, 2010 at 5:16 PM, George Herbert
<george.herbert at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Tue, Dec 28, 2010 at 4:47 AM, Ray Saintonge <saintonge at telus.net> wrote:
>> On 12/23/10 1:31 PM, George Herbert wrote:
>>>
>>> The social stuff which is complex is something which is a barrier, but
>>> one that all western society members who are modern communications
>>> literate are fundamentally equipped to handle.  Some will fail at it
<<
>> This seems to beg the question: How do you define "modern communications
>> literate"?
>
> Facebook, Gmail, Twitter, smartphone user.
>
> Those are a 95%+ solution for kids and young adults, if not 99%, and
> are easy enough for older adults (my parents, etc) to the point that
> they're arguably better than an 80% solution for the US population.

Those examples are also widely used all over the world, including in
regions where the Internet is still new.

Most highly popular services start by letting each participant define
themselves, and the default contribution that people are encouraged to
make is usually permament and not subject to removal by others.

One of the unkind and awkward aspects of the Wikipedia experience is,
that the default requested contribution is an edit, new page, or
upload, all of which may be reverted or followed by warnings and
challenges, by people who expect you to RTFM to learn how to behave.

Some possible improvements:
  - add new things that all users are encouraged to contribute
(first-class citizens of the list 'ways to further the project'),
which are entirely within the user's control:  information about
themselves and their environment, joining wikiprojects and work
groups, taking part in polls and usability studies, answering
questions from other users and readers
  - make a user's contributions permanently visible to them, if not to
others (modulo vandalism), taking advantage of permalinks and file
histories, even when those contribs have for now been removed from the
default public view(s) of an article, or when they have been
quarantined from view by other users for concerns about copyright
status.  this improves on the crude tool of deletion and keeps
contributors from feeling that their hard work has been destroyed or
disrespected, often due only to it being incomplete or
not-yet-proven-notable.
  - develop better sandboxing policies, tools, and effective sandbox
environments, so that new users can truly experiment and get used to
editing before they are challenged, reverted, deleted, and blocked.

Sam.