Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2013-03-04/Op-ed
We must do more to turn readers into editors
- Ypnypn is an inclusionist who has been editing Wikipedia since 2010. He wrote the essay Don't overwhelm the newbies.
- The views expressed in this op-ed are those of the author only; responses and critical commentary are invited in the comments section. The Signpost welcomes proposals for op-eds at our opinion desk.
Recently I was having a casual conversation with a friend, and he mentioned that he spent too many hours a day playing video games. I responded with a comment that I, too, spent way too much time on an activity of my own – Wikipedia. In an attempt to reply with a relevant remark, he offered something along the lines of: "So have you ever written anything?" After a second, I quickly answered yes, but I was still in shock over his question. It seemed to be rooted in a belief on his part that using Wikipedia meant just reading the articles, and that editing was something that someone, hypothetically, might do, but not really more likely than randomly counting to 7,744.
This made me realize how much of the general populace views Wikipedia – as a website put together by some mysterious people, probably professionals. "that anyone can edit" is a phrase like Coca-Cola's "It's the real thing", seen a thousand times without ever really being thought about. The numerous [edit] links? Who knows what will happen if you click, but probably not worth finding out. Most sites have dozens of random links floating around, so people tend to mentally adblock them, especially considering that the links are all the way on the right side of the page.
That's right, a simple change of moving the [edit] links to a more visible location might gather many new editors. Companies spend vast amounts of money and time to determine the perfect layout to attract customers; we need to spend just as much effort trying out various tweaks to determine what will attract editors. This needn't harm the readers, if done right. But we absolutely must engage in trial-and-error to figure what will work best. Maybe my suggestion will help; maybe not. But there's no excuse for ignoring the issue.
Of course, the position of the [edit] links is hardly the only reason for the popular misunderstanding of Wikipedia. MediaWiki may be simpler than HTML, but is nothing compared to Microsoft Word. It's not a coincidence that so many Wikipedians understand some form of programming. VisualEditor should help the issue somewhat, but it's years behind schedule. Other causes may include the uniqueness of Wikipedia: readers have no experience with the idea that online info comes directly from other readers.
But perhaps the main reason why readers don't realize that this is really an encyclopedia "that anyone can edit" is that it isn't. Consider this: out of the top ten articles visited per this, three are semi-protected. Most major articles like United States, science, sun, apple and encyclopedia are protected (from a reader's perspective), so the edit links don't show up at all. While it's been claimed that only 5% of articles are protected, these more or less coincide with the 5% most viewed articles (with plenty of exceptions which prove the rule). Readers don't see protection as an unfortunate action taken to prevent vandalism; they see it the same way they can't edit the New York Times's website, evidence of a clear-cut distinction between readers and editors. To make matters worse, so-called anonymous editors can't create pages (unlike in most language versions of Wikipedia), so a casual visitor will have little inclination to believe that (s)he can, indeed, take part in building the world's greatest source of knowledge.
There isn't a simple solution to this. Encouraging helpful edits while preventing unhelpful ones is an ultimately impossible task. But as time goes on, we feel an increasing need to fully-protect Wikipedia's reputation by semi-protecting its articles, making us resemble Citizendium. It's easy to revert vandalism; let's not focus solely on preventing it no matter the cost.
The introduction of pending changes protection may help somewhat. Readers are once again given the [edit] links, thus being invited to contribute. But after they click "submit (not save) changes", they are told that their submission will need to be reviewed by an experienced editor. Encyclopædia Britannica offers the same thing, and almost any newspaper will take a look at what you mail them. The concept of readers being the writers is completely lacking. And in any case, pending changes can not feasibly be applied to thousands of pages, as a huge backlog would quickly develop.
A lot of effort has been spent on trying to enhance newbies' experiences. This effort, including the Teahouse, is certainly vital. But it does nothing about getting people to make a single edit in the first place. We're so used to seeing Wikipedia through the eyes of editors that we don't understand how it looks to a reader. We enjoy claiming that "All readers are editors" without doing anything to make this saying a reality. Before I started seriously editing, I didn't even know what a star or plus in the upper right corner meant. The average visitor has no clue and no real desire to have a clue – fact: most people who want to join Wikipedia already did – and we don't really care, preferring to spend time making new rules about hyphens and dashes, and designing a Teahouse to help newbies navigate them.
Discuss this story
The trend: http://reportcard.wmflabs.org/graphs/active_editors 71.215.85.167 (talk) 22:18, 7 March 2013 (UTC)[reply]
Preceding a statement with "fact:" does not make it so. Citation? Ijon (talk) 23:26, 7 March 2013 (UTC)[reply]
How do you propose to deal with the influx of unhelpful edits and vandal pages that would occur if semi-protection were turned off and IPs could create pages? You claim that reverting vandalism is easy, yet I see from your contributions that you have little to no experience dealing with vandalism or correcting the work of new editors. Danger High voltage! 00:21, 8 March 2013 (UTC)[reply]
My edit button is right next to the section heading, but I believe that's because I chose to in user preferences. Perhaps that should be made universal, if only as a test to see if it makes a difference?--SPhilbrick(Talk) 00:28, 8 March 2013 (UTC)[reply]
As User:Danger points out, vandalism is a continual series of waves eroding the hard work of our editors. The real issue with Wikipedia is that only so many persons will self-select to contribute. The vast numbers of people that only read Wikipedia see no incentive to edit articles. The divide between editors and lay readers is both real and appropriate. I recommend every editor in academia consider the Campus Ambassador program. Chris troutman (talk) 02:06, 8 March 2013 (UTC)[reply]
Pro tip: regularly try to read/edit while logged out signing anon to make case-in-point ;-). This can give us some insights into how others view our wiki. Anon contributions are getting harder and harder every year. Especially the fact that you can't spontaneously create articles and "make red things blue" as a logged out user really breaks the wiki for this our largest group of contributors.
"But do you see what kind of mess people make at first?" is no excuse. Eventually messy stubs grow into wonderful articles; and the people grow up alongside. We have an entire wikipedia full of examples of that principle. (that, and speedy-deleting those messy first stubs is/was pretty much phase 20 in the meatball:WikiLifeCycle ) --2001:980:DE98:1:5108:A946:B993:2C2A (talk) 09:28, 8 March 2013 (UTC) "Hooooom, patience my little hobbit!" said the Meta:Eventualist[reply]
"And in any case, pending changes can not feasibly be applied to thousands of pages" Really? It seems to work well for the 1.5 million articles on the German Wikipedia, where it is globally enabled. —Naddy (talk) 13:04, 8 March 2013 (UTC)[reply]
Recall that when Wikipedia was invented, its creators wisely decided to use a special "wikisource" language rather than raw HTML, because they wanted articles to be editable by anyone, even people who did not know HTML and did not have any familiarity with computer languages. In particular, they decided that simplicity of the wikisource was totally more important than aesthetics or typographical conventions. So, for example, they settled on straight quotes rather than open-close quotes.
Unfortunately, Wikipedians at all levels seem to have forgotten that philosophy. The first thing that one sees when clicking "Edit" is a bunch of templates for tags, hatnotes, infoboxes, and other paraphernalia. Often one has to scroll a windowful or two before getting to the head paragraph. The text is usually littered with templates, s, and in-line references (and templates within references), and part of the source is now devoted to looks rather than contents.
No one can possibly know by heart all those templates and their parameters. Experienced or computer-wise users can guess and hack their way around that jungle of templates; but a novice user can only conclude that "everybody can edit" means "everybody with a computer science PhD". (The only "new editors" who will not be put off are the vandals.)
Wikisource complexity alone cannot explain the sudden jerk in the plot above around 2006-2007. However, as the usability study concluded, it may explain why Wikipedia is no longer able to attract new editors. Sadly, there has been absolutely no reaction by the Foundation to that finding...
All the best, --Jorge Stolfi (talk) 07:01, 13 March 2013 (UTC)[reply]