[WikiEN-l] Re: [Wikitech-l] Preformatted blank articles? (was Experiment on new pages and GFDL)

Fri Dec 9 20:13:14 UTC 2005

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Moin,

On Friday 09 December 2005 20:05, David Gerard wrote:
> Anthony DiPierro wrote:
> > Right.  It's not perfect.  Just better.  At least if someone is lazy
> > and doesn't attribute something and then someone else catches them,
> > it can be fixed.
> > If we added a "references" field to the edit page, even if it was
> > optional, the number of attributions would probably increase even
> > more.  The field would be unformatted, so someone could of course
> > type "I just knew it" or "copied from some website" or even "poop"
> > for their reference, but it'd be one more thing to look into if
> > someone put their reference as "Wikipedia".
>
> I put forward an idea a while ago which people weren't too keen on, but
> I think it's time for it to be presented again: when a new article is
> created, prefill it with text. e.g.
[snipa bit]

- From my experience with people very new to wikis, I also set up a new link 
in the menu ala "Create new article". When clicked it asks about the 
title, and then bounces them back to the wiki, the edit box open and a 
text similar to yours already filled in.

People view this as _much_ easier than mucking about with the URL, putting 
a link in somewhere else, and/or starting with an empty edit box.

The most FAQ was "How do I start a new article?" followed by "And why is 
this so complicated?", closely followed by "How do I add a headline 
again?" 

Especially in-frequent contributors tend to forget these things very quick 
and since the computer should help the humans and not vice versa, I 
finally patched my local Mediawiki installation to fix this issue. 
Everyone's been happy since :)

Best wishes,

Tels

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