[Foundation-l] A fundraiser for editors

[Mark]

On 1/3/12 1:41 AM, Keegan Peterzell wrote:
> On Mon, Jan 2, 2012 at 1:16 PM, Pharos<pharosofalexandria at gmail.com>  wrote:
>
>> I would pitch it as a simple appeal to edit the Wikipedia article on
>> your hometown (or home neighborhood if you're from a big city).
>>
>> In my experience, something like this has been attractive to a very
>> broad spectrum of people, and gives them a nice "in" as a place to get
>> started.
>
> Big cities usually work a lot better than small towns or medium sized
> cities, where inclusion of local places are often reverted due to lack
> of assertions of notability.
>
I agree cities are probably better, but I don't think that's really the 
best place to start editing Wikipedia either, because it's an area where 
it's really easy for new users to mistakenly think that they should 
write content based on their personal experience rather than on sources. 
We can try to explain that, but the nature of the subject matter imo 
makes it more likely to be an issue. The sources there are often 
particularly problematic as well, with a lot of good info tangled up 
with tourism/boosterism type sources.

The smoothest new-user editing experience, from what I can tell, tends 
to be source-first rather than topic-first: someone who's interested in 
Byzantine churches, for example, and has in front of them a quality book 
on Byzantine churches, will (I think) usually have a good experience 
creating new articles on individual churches that cite that book (the 
most common road-bump here is that their articles may get tagged as 
orphans).

One possibility could be to rotate subject-specific "how to get started" 
appeals. Something like: "Interested in architecture? [Pithy appeal that 
links to brief, newbie-friendly info on how to contribute on the subject 
of architecture]"

-Mark