3 ms·
It's always seemed weird to me that wikipedia has a problem with scaring away potential editors. I for one love editing wikipedia and never found it in anyway i
by _feda_ 14y ago
It's always seemed weird to me that wikipedia has a problem with scaring away potential editors. I for one love editing wikipedia and never found it in anyway intimidating when I started editing in my teens, although I'm probably part of a sizable edge case of humanity that enjoys the relative complexity of the process of editing itself, markdown et al. I don't find the culture to be off-putting either, because the culture gels nicely with my personality traits and those of any person who would enjoy contributing to an encyclopedia.
Wikipedia has a learning curve sure, but like learning to use a shell instead of a gui, the pain is certainly ultimately worth the gain. The barriers to entry are nowhere near as high as those I imagine serious, academic editors face in their careers.
- mjn 14y agoAs an academic I generally agree. I have mostly good experiences editing Wikipedia, with a handful of bad ones. By and large it's much more reasonable than some of the things I've run into in academia. My main wish on Wikipedia is that I got more feedback of any kind. Often I will write an article and never hear from anyone about it. Maybe I pick too obscure topics, but it'd be nice to hear some constructive feedback more often.
- _feda_ 14y agoIt's regrettable you're not getting the feedback you should be getting, as this is something that will really help you stick to it. On the other hand, the very reason you aren't getting feedback is a good one: you're working on obscure articles, which is precisely the area wikipedia needs work done on in order to become the fully-fledged, echt encyclopedia (as I'm sure you know in the case of proprietary equivalents professionals are hired to fulfill the role you are fulfilling). Anyway, consider yourself a lonely pioneer ;)