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

[nwhyte]

My experience of Wikipedia as a community has been pretty negative.

Example 1) A friend of mine was an editor, was blocked in error in July 2007, and it seemed absurdly difficult to unblock him - let alone for anyone at Wikipedia to take responsibility for the mistake or to apologise. See this affair chronicled at these links:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Administrators'_noticeboard/IncidentArchive276#User:Gerry_Lynch_Unfairly_blocked_as_a_sockpuppet
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:Alison/Archive_12#Gerry_Lynch
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:Gerry_Lynch#Unblock

It seemed to Gerry (and it seems to me) that if he and I had not flagged up this on our respective blogs, and got friends to directly lobby the admin involved, his block would have been allowed to stand. (And one person who tried challenging the block on Gerry was then himself blocked, which is appalling.) As it is he is discouraged from contributing as he once did, and I am discouraged from doing much at all.

http://sammymorse.livejournal.com/tag/wikipedia
http://nwhyte.livejournal.com/905163.html
http://matgb.livejournal.com/222634.html
http://nielsenhayden.com/makinglight/archives/009200.html

Example 2) This is rather more minor but much more personal to me. Back in January 2008 I created a page about my ancestor Sir Nicholas White - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nicholas_White - who was a moderately well-known political figure in 16th-century Ireland. I was dismayed to get a comment a few months later on a livejournal post on a completely different topic as follows:

Do you think you can make your way towards supplying sources for Nicholas White (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nicholas_White), specifically the ones you were working from when you created the article? This stuff is supposed to be verifiable, in case you've missed the last more-than-half-a-decade's worth of policy development.

No "thank you for your contribution to Wikipedia", just, as a subsequent commenter put it, an "insultingly offhand and demanding" comment which very effectively vandalises my commentary on the quality of St Mark's written prose. Why did this anonymous person not email me, or comment on my user page? Is it wikipedia policy to vandalise newbie users' blogs if they don't keep every rule? Because that is what I felt had happened.

Well, bugger that. I shall create content where I know it is valued and useful, which is clearly not Wikipedia.


Your list of points is very good. I completely agree that "conventions are non-obvious"; I also agree that it is a problem that if your own wikipedia page is wrong, you can't change it yourself or even put in an official request to have it changed, you have to find a friend who knows their way around Wikipedia and isn't obviously linked to you, which is an absurd way of having to game the system. But very simply, there is no openness, no obvious way into the system, no helpdesk. Wikipedia appears to cater for experienced Wikipedians without very much interest in increasing their number - indeed, the two examples I gave above actually look like attempts to intimidate the faint-hearted, and frankly whether or not that was the intention it was successful for both me and Gerry.