Talk:New contributor objections

German participation study

Are you familiar with this http://www.i2.psychologie.uni-wuerzburg.de/ao/research/wikipedia/gor08_wikipedia_readers.pdf (link goes to a English language summary poster) participation study by Johannes Schroer, University of Würzburg? I have a digital copy of the full study, that includes quite detailed research on why people participate - or don't participate. It is published by now as book: Schroer, J. (2008). Auslösende und aufrechterhaltende Faktoren der freiwilligen Mitarbeit an einem Web-2.0-Projekt. Berlin: Logos and the author told me, that he would be willing to provide us with the raw data (particularly with the correlation matrix), if we can use it. The full study is of course in German language. Frank, hast du die Untersuchung oder willst du sie? Und kümmerst du dich drum, die Rohdaten zu beschaffen, wenn ihr sie brauchen könnt. --h-stt !? 08:16, 16 October 2008 (UTC)

Hallo H-stt, vielen herzlichen Dank für den Hinweis. Die Untersuchung habe ich irgendwo auf meiner Festplatte, ich muss aber ehrlich zugeben, dass ich sie lediglich als nicht laienverständlich in Erinnerung habe. Hast Du Kontakt zum Autor? Vielleicht könnte es ja Sinn machen, mal ein Gespräch mit ihm zu führen. Herzliche Grüße --Frank Schulenburg 16:42, 25 October 2008 (UTC)

Cluster 2

• Do not want to learn how to edit wiki pages. Never heard about that argument. Even the old people we are working with in Germany had no problems to learn the wiki markup. Some things could be better (tables, info boxes), but people usually accept that they have to learn something new when using computers/internet

Strange, I hear it all the time. Offline, but also online in this community. Wikimedia basic markup may be not so bad to learn, the total edit experience is pretty bad for uninitiated. Many pages look like computer code when seen in edit mode. User unfriendliness of the Mediawiki software is discussed all the time on mailing lists and meetings. Tables, templates and references are the main culprits. Suggestion for improvement: there have been attempts already for a more structured presentation of the edit page. Ideally I would like to see placeholders for templates and tables, and only when a user wants to edit a specific table he/she clicks the placeholder and gets to edit the table or template invocation in a separate page or box. Erik Zachte 03:29, 17 October 2008 (UTC)

Indeed, it takes a lot of time to learn editing, one problably does not do so without ambition and previous skills. Who said that, "never heard about that argument"?--Ziko 12:48, 18 October 2008 (UTC)

About the objections by the 72-year-old professor

I was thinking about those objections made by the 72-year-old professor. I don't know if it's a good idea, but maybe creating a new Wikimedia project could help. Sort of a "WikiScholars". Changing Wikipedia so that professors would feel comfortable writing and not being edited is (and I guess everyone will agree with me) out of the question. Wikipedia's freedom is what makes it work. So I thought, what about a new project, with rules somewhat different from Wikipedia's? It could work, as long as all content remains completely free to use and read, as it is on Wikipedia.

"If everyone can change my text, I will certainly not write articles!"

• The new wiki could work like disambiguation pages: when you type in a search, the topic page won't show the content itself, but links to the articles written on that subject. Those articles would be stored within the user's namespace, and would be protected so that only the user can edit his page and subpages (of course, sysops and etc. will still exist and handle vandalism situations, or inadequate content, like advertisement).

"Contributors should at all needs use their realnames."

"Only registered Users should be allowed to contribute."

"Authors should state their area of expertise."

• This could be solved by only creating user accounts during meetings (which could be handled by local chapters, or finding some way to make sure someone is really who he says he is, like professors who have e-mail accounts with the school's/university's domain name, or have their own page within a university's website).
• The userpage would have to state their qualification and other information.
• I know the logistics of this could be complicated, but I think professors would be interested in posting their articles on a website people would actually read. I mean, WMF projects are not some obscure online journals with only half a dozen readers. In addition, it would bring people around the world, with the same expertise, much closer.
• Schools and colleges could be more open to meetings if their teachers and professors are interested in getting an account.
• If we make sure of the user's identity, this would become a knowledge database by qualified authors.

"There should be editorial departments"

• This would work the same way as all wikis, with sysops, checkusers, etc., except for the content within userpage, wich is the user's responsibility (of course, vandalism situations excluded).

"There should be "stable versions", which can only be edited by "verifiers" or "editorial departments" "Wikipedia articles do not increase a scientist's reputation."

• I guess this has pretty much been covered, but I'll just point out again that if the user's identity is verified, it would be consistent information, therefore each article a user writes, becomes a source, and that does increase reputation.

"Why a new wiki? It could be solved by giving privileges to scholars and letting them use the already existing projects", someone might say.

• Well, I don't really like the idea of giving that sort of privileges to some people on regular wikis, because they should remain open. Anyone can edit. Here we're talking about people who, given those privileges on a regular wiki, would maybe try to monopolize content, even indirectly, inhibiting other users by editing everything they post. And monopolizing or creating an "information elite" is not the idea. But, on a wiki specifically for scholars, there would not be disputes, because each scholar could just write their own article, instead of arguing. That would also increase the amount of information available.

Again, I don't know if this is a good or feasible suggestion, considering I'm new to wiki and there are probably many difficulties I didn't think about, but I thought it was worth writing anyway.Carla Abreu 13:51, 25 October 2008 (UTC)