[Foundation-l] Missing Wikipedians: An Essay

[Mike Dupont]

I have read this article this morning,

Well this is a similar problem I am having with adding details to, or new
articles about Kosovo,
even my attempts are getting deleted. Having problems even getting the
Turkish, Bosnian or Albanian alternative names added without being deleted,
even if sources, let alone a coverage of members of parliament (list of them
deleted as not notable).
Also local pop-stars who are not notable by English newspapers are deleted,
even if they are well know and unavoidable.

If you have any interest in learning about a minor place, its politics,
culture and so forth then you would want to keep these articles.
My suggestion was to create a list of politicians, which if not notable
themselves, as a total should be interesting.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Articles_for_deletion/List_of_politicians_in_Kosovo
I based this upon the local election that recently took place, and this
article was deleted. you can see my backup here,
http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=User:Mdupont/List_of_politicians_in_Kosovo

Similar lists could be made of local items in other countries, at least they
would not pollute the global name-space of articles, but an interested party
would find time.

Anyway, I can give you more examples of similar problems if you are
interested.
Btw, we are working on raising funds to help promote editors to work on core
articles on the sq.wikipedia, and that might be a good solution to get more
people working on that, it is less disputed.

mike



On Sat, Feb 19, 2011 at 12:24 AM, 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.  What might we do to help make Wikipedia a more
> welcoming place for newbies and for such diverse topics?
>
> Cheers,
> Katie (@aude)
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-- 
James Michael DuPont
Member of Free Libre Open Source Software Kosova and Albania flossk.org
flossal.org