On 13 June 2012 09:55, Gordon Joly <gordon.joly(a)pobox.com> wrote:
On 13/06/12 09:30, Stevie Benton wrote:
I agree with everything that Jon said. Editing for the first time is a bit
daunting, especially for people with zero online publishing experience.
That's why I have been promoting editing skills on a Mediawiki website first
before going into the lion's den that is the English Wikipedia.
Quite right, from the point of view of the learning curve. The issue
would be motivation.
Relevant to this discussion is my own experience. I joined WP almost
exactly nine years ago. But for the previous year I had been
intensively editing the wiki at
http://senseis.xmp.net/ . So I stepped
up to a community maybe 100 times larger, but with quite a lot of
savvy. Very helpful to me, but not a representative arrival.
Indeed you'll forgive me an anecdote about "How Wikipedia Works" got
written. My co-author Phoebe Ayers got her newbie story on p. 302.
Where's mine? Well, the editor we were working with, otherwise very
good, thought I'd made a mixed message of my arrival story, and it got
cut; in compensation I got a box with two of my jokes on p. 351. That
is why Gordon's correct observation is muffled in the book, if there
at all. (BTW you can't win all the discussions of this kind in
co-writing a book, and if you think you can, don't extrapolate your
attitude to WP ...)
What had I been doing for the previous nine years? Teaching and
playing go. I believe this is something to do with the "contrarian"
view I'm pushing, and I did run this idea past the trainer-trainer at
the weekend.
Charles