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

[foms.livejournal.com]

I don't consider myself to be expert enough on a large variety of topics. Where I do think to make a contribution, generally someone else has made it first.

As others have mentioned, the interfaces, both technical and social, are not of the friendliest.

A couple of examples:
At a very basic level, if one clicks on the link to edit a Wikipedia article, one is usually confronted with a mass of wiki mark-up. for the uninitiated, this, in itself, is sufficiently daunting to have a good chance of scaring one away. The same applies to discussion. In addition, for discussion pages, one must understand that the discussion page is a wiki, itself. This is not necessarily obvious even to someone who already uses the web; it is not the usual interface for providing content.

I have not contributed to Wikipedia at all, even to fix obvious typos. I have read quite a few history and discussion pages for Wikipedia articles. Much there often seems to be expressed in such a way as to lead me to doubt intent toward cooperation.

Interesting that you should be bringing this up today. It was only a Tuesday that I became curious about what hacking might be happening using Wikipedia. I searched on just those terms and came up with a bunch of articles such as this: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/the-dark-side-of-wikipedia. It seems that there is a certain justifiable paranoia, though that is no excuse for unpleasantness as a policy or even as a common response when dealing with newbies.

I will, however, plug another on-line, volunteer cause: Distributed Proofreaders (www.pgdp.net). I did a bunch of work for them early on (about 2000-2001). It's fun nit-picking, if you like that sort of stuff and I think that the cause is good. I should really get back to doing more of that.

[dd-b.livejournal.com]

You're right about the markup. It's the templates and all the special things, which cluster at the start of the article. I've done web development professionally, and I'm self-taught in that and computer software, and I've been doing computer software for 40 years, which is to say I'm used to diving in and learning stuff and I'm not easily intimidated. And Wikipedia still looks like kind of a mess at the "looking at start of article" level.

(The templates and such are used for a reason, and they're a pretty decent mechanism for what they do, so I don't have a really good solution here. Maybe better tutorials? Or more loud assurances that mucking that stuff up a little bit isn't that serious a thing.)

[foms.livejournal.com]

That's an excellent thought. If there were an announcement line at the top of each editing page (preferably in an unusual colour) telling people that, no matter what they do, the version that they saw when they clicked the "edit this page" link can be recovered in about 15 seconds, it would likely go a long way toward alleviating newbie hesitancy. It would probably annoy the experienced users and would probably come to annoy the very people who needed it in the first place but that's a risk of moving the balance in favour of friendliness toward people who otherwise might not use or help the resource.

[netmouse.livejournal.com]

well, and the technology could very well be capable of discerning that a user is a first-time editor and just show that message if your IP or user ID has not previously edited wikipedia.

There are a number of things it might be good to show in a "so this is your first time editing?" message.