[Foundation-l] Wikipedia Executive Director?

[Andrew Gray]

On 9 December 2010 18:54, Michael Snow <wikipedia at frontier.com> wrote:

> it into the story for fundraising and other communications. We need to
> both make sense and be accurate. If it's accurate and doesn't make
> sense, it probably won't be effective, but also just because something
> makes sense to people doesn't make it accurate, and that's equally a
> problem.

It may be a bad move in this case, but I don't think we should
*always* avoid this sort of "glossing". We ran banners on the English
projects, for example, describing people as "Wikipedia authors"; this
is a term not generally used there, preferring "editor" instead.

But to an outsider, "author" is a much more descriptive term than
"editor"; it doesn't imply seniority or control, and so while it's
technically inaccurate it actually gets the idea of "a normal user"
across much better than having the "right" terminology would.

(Many of us have seen seen cases where someone's heard "editor of
Wikipedia" and got drastically the wrong impression...)

-- 
- Andrew Gray
  andrew.gray at dunelm.org.uk