Wikipedia Task Force: Reader Conversion

[netmouse]

I have been selected to participate in the Wikipedia task force to increase contributions from readers and under-represented groups. In other words, to convert wikipedia readers to editors.

I have posted a few of my pet theories as to why people are discouraged from or disinterested in editing wikipedia on my wikipedia strategic planning user page. I welcome discussion there or here about why you or people you know choose not to edit wikipedia.

Comments

[alicebentley]

I was an interested editor when Wikipedia first started up, but after the third or fourth time my extensively researched pages were dumped for some fanboy's screed I just stopped trying.

Now years have passed, it has no doubt vastly improved, and I really need to be doing my grad school work right now. i figure I'll check in with Wikipedia again next summer.

[cos]

Thing is, anyone can do that sort of "dumping", and it's also easy to un-dump. I've occasionally checked back on pages I edited in the past, and restored my work when I thought it was pointlessly damaged or replaced. People who care enough to come back and engage with that, often have something useful to contribute.

Did you actually have the very same page consistently destroyed? Or do you mean that this happened for several different pages, and you didn't restore your work?

[alicebentley]

Both really. The main page I was struggling with was never just "dumped", but would be substantially re-written, often with many errors. At first I tried to incorporate whatever it was they were trying to get in there, at least the parts that were correct. But then two days later the page would have changed yet again in yet another manner.

And it was only a write-up about a manga title, not something critical I felt the need to fight for.

I also saw a lot of other people's work voted out as Not Notable, almost always by people who openly admitted that it must not be notable because they personally hadn't encountered it before.

Big Sigh. And more useful things to put energy into.

[netmouse.livejournal.com]

I suspect it has improved, but I think this is a really core comment. The most highly rated survey response for why people edit wikipedia (http://strategy.wikimedia.org/wiki/Participation/Drivers_of_participation) is that they 'like the idea of sharing knowledge and want to contribute to it'. Learning that your contributions will not last seriously undermines that motivation.

(and yes I know they averaged together ratings on a subjective scale, which is statistically a horribly wrong thing to do. I sigh.)

[alicebentley]

Yep. Observing that if you care enough to do the work you also need to care enough to constantly monitor and correct any erroneous changes.
It just wasn't worth it at the time. And now I'm busy.

[(Anonymous)]

That was my impression: what counted was not how much time you spent researching the actual subject, but how much time you spent maintaining the page (and learning the ropes and gaming of Wikipedia, and perhaps social networking with the relevant clique).