[Foundation-l] WSJ on Wikipedia

William Pietri william at scissor.com
Tue Nov 24 22:37:53 UTC 2009


Samuel Klein wrote:
> I've been working with swahili-speaking students over the past week
> introducing them to Wikipedia (as part of an article-writing contest sw:wp
> is running this winter).  They're net-savvy, many maintain a blog, but
> they're not geeks.  And they tend to be totally baffled by the Wikipedia
> editing process, from finding the 'edit' tab to adding sections or images to
> grasping the lifecycle of an article.  That has significantly changed my
> impression of the current barrier to entry for using MediaWiki.

I would love to see a more detailed writeup of how your impressions have 
changed, and examples of experiences that have changed them.

One of the most pernicious problems in software development is that you 
can't temporarily forget what you know. The closest you can come is to 
learn about the experiences of novices. In aid of that, I've seen 
real-life use cases provide a lot of insights.

William




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