[Foundation-l] Missing Wikipedians: An Essay

[geni]

On 18 February 2011 23:24, aude <aude.wiki at gmail.com> wrote:
> Heather Ford, a former Wikimedia advisory board member and researcher/writer
> in South Africa has written an essay, "The Missing Wikipedians" about
> systematic bias on English Wikipedia (especially) against new users and
> topics pertinent to Africa and other diverse places/people.
>
> As an example, she cites the English Wikipedia article [[Makmende]] and the
> deletion request made, biting the newbie.
>
> http://hblog.org/2011/02/16/the-missing-wikipedians/
>
> Please read and discuss.

Author appears to be living in 2006 (deletionists vs inclusionists)
and apparently this represents a clash between the two groups:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Articles_for_deletion/Makmende

Where in practice it's a pretty standard if rather one sided AFD.

>  What might we do to help make Wikipedia a more
>  welcoming place for newbies

Since they seem to be determined to read the listing on AFD process as
deletion not much we can do. Some changes to

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Template:Article_for_deletion/dated

perhaps but keeping it within the current length could be tricky.

>and for such diverse topics?

Drop a prompt to add sources into the article creation process and
make adding sources easy.

-- 
geni