Re: [Foundation-l] Newbie recruitment: referencing

[Magnus Manske]

On Wed, Nov 2, 2011 at 9:49 PM, David Gerard  wrote:
> On 2 November 2011 21:41, Nathan  wrote:
>
>> I knew it looked so obvious someone must've already tried to do it.
>> See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:ProveIt.jpg and
>> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:ProveIt_GT. This is a GUI reference
>> adding interface that shows up while editing (i.e., after you click
>> "edit this page.") It's a gadget currently available to everyone.
>> A gadget is certainly handy and I'll be using ProveIt from now on,
>> but... it doesn't help people who are not logged in or have never
>> edited before, it's not widely publicised, etc. etc.
>
>
> This needs polishing into some sort of newbie-usable tool and
> deployment as soon as can be managed. (i.e. before the WYSIWYG of our
> dreams.)

Go to
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:MyPage/common.js
and insert
importScript('User:Magnus Manske/insertref.js');

You'll get an "Insert reference" link in your toolbox. Select some
(best plain, unique) text in the normal page (not the edit page!),
click the link, paste the reference, choose to insert left or right of
the selection, in edit mode click save, done.

This has been sitting there since March 2009. It's probably not what
you want "as is", but the concept could be married up with the Proveit
interface, and the "save" could be done via API, so you never ever see
the edit page.

Cheers,
Magnus

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Re: [Foundation-l] Newbie recruitment: referencing

[David Richfield]

On Thu, Nov 3, 2011 at 1:55 PM, geni  wrote:
> 2011/11/3 David Richfield :
>> A tool which pops up asking for a URL, author and date would be a rich
>> source of bad references.  We should rather be looking at ways to get
>> references to books and journal articles.  Web references should be
>> the exception rather than the rule, because the vast majority of
>> websites are not WP:RS.
>
> Problem is a lot of books are rather questionable. However dead tree
> worship means people generally ask fewer questions.

People should question book sources, but that doesn't mean that we
shouldn't be encouraging people to find them and use them.

> The reality is
> that your average person is unlikely to access to journals and only
> have books to hand on a narrow range of subjects.

If you have the web to hand, you have Google Books and Google Scholar
(which shows you which of the articles are full-text).

> Under those
> conditions the web is by far the most likely viable source of
> citations.

A much richer source of citations, true, and easy to use badly, but
very hard to use well: it's easy to get rubbish sources off the web,
but it takes experience and expertise to find good ones.

-- 
David Richfield
e^(ði)+1=0

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Re: [Foundation-l] Newbie recruitment: referencing

[geni]

2011/11/3 David Richfield :
> A tool which pops up asking for a URL, author and date would be a rich
> source of bad references.  We should rather be looking at ways to get
> references to books and journal articles.  Web references should be
> the exception rather than the rule, because the vast majority of
> websites are not WP:RS.

Problem is a lot of books are rather questionable. However dead tree
worship means people generally ask fewer questions. The reality is
that your average person is unlikely to access to journals and only
have books to hand on a narrow range of subjects. Under those
conditions the web is by far the most likely viable source of
citations.


-- 
geni

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Re: [Foundation-l] Newbie recruitment: referencing

[David Richfield]

> This demands far too much of newbies.  We can sometimes be very
> cult-like in our demand for references and sources.

Verifiability is central to Wikipedia, and it should not be otherwise.
If we have editors who do not understand what a reliable source is, they
need to be educated.  If they don't care about that kind of thing, and
are scared off by our demands for reliable sources, we might be scaring
away the people who should be scared away. Where do I go to join the
cult?

> If you want to scare away newbies you do that very well by thrusting
> him into a highly subjective debate about the nature of reliable
> sources.

Sure, it's subjective.  Reinforcing the common misconception that a URL
is a citation is not what we should be doing, though.

> I too would prefer books and articles. I'm also sure that some of the
> references provided will be bad.  A reference is what it is, but it
> would be badgering newbies to ask them how they know that something is
> true.

Perfectly true - a better wording is needed.

> What we want to instill here is the good habit of references, and out
> of good faith trust that editors are not inventing their references.
> *Keep it simple.*

Made-up references are not a big issue: it's wildly unreliable
references taken from a cursory google web search that are the problem.

> A tool that ask whether the reference is from a book, a journal, the
> web or something else is good for a different reason. The choice would
> lead to different drop-down boxes where only the relevant questions
> would be asked.

A very useful advantage; true!

> A lot of the books that I have are pre-ISBN.

Also true - at that point I'd always just filled in the form, but of
course now I know about reftag...

David

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Re: [Foundation-l] Newbie recruitment: referencing

[Liam Wyatt]

On 3 November 2011 10:47, Ray Saintonge  wrote:

> On 11/03/11 2:49 AM, David Gerard wrote:
> > On 3 November 2011 09:31, Ray Saintonge  wrote:
> >> Also can the expression "citation needed" be changed to something that
> >> is more inviting to newbies, like "Please add citation"?
> > We may be late for that - "citation needed" is entering English.
> >
> >
> Be that as it may, is it inviting to the newbie? If a change is going to
> draw them in it's still worthwhile.
>
> Ray
>
> Whilst we're discussing newbie recruitment [and retention] I saw an
interesting comment from John Broughton, author of [[Wikipedia - The
Missing Manual]], on the WMF blog today that I thought was worth sharing:
http://blog.wikimedia.org/2011/11/02/new-comparative-study-to-re-examine-the-quality-and-accuracy-of-wikipedia/#comment-29077

[quoting the blogpost] “A comparative analysis of the quality of
Wikipedia’s articles and other popular alternatives is crucial to
identifying avenues for improvement.”

Actually, NO. What is crucial to improvement is to reverse the continuing
decline in the number of active Wikipedia contributors – to get more new
editors, and to keep active editors longer. There are already known
enormous backlogs – see for example
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2011-10-31/Opinion_essay(including
its comments), because the number of contributors is declining
in absolute terms, not to mention in respect to the ever-increasing size of
the encyclopedia.

Every major Internet commercial website spends millions of dollars every
month testing and implementing changes to make their websites easier to
use. But the Foundation – which depends far more on its contributors to
create content than any other organization except social media sites like
Facebook – has never put the user experience of *editors* as anything close
to its number one priority. And the result is that people with time –
because more people spend more time on the Web every year – commit less and
less time as editors on Wikipedia and other WMF websites. Readership goes
up, inexorably, but the people who create the content continue to be fewer
and fewer, inexorably.

The Foundation has some initiatives ongoing that will help – a WYSIWYG
editor and an analysis of why editors leave being potentially the most
useful. What is missing is a commitment by the Foundation to make editing
EASIER. That means not only the user interface, but such matters as
creating a separate Table namespace (in the same way that there is a
separate, and different, namespace for media files); a one-click or
two-click way of creating a fully-formatted footnote citation from any
source page on the web; a hash total for article versions so that reverts
can be easily removed from watchlist reports (for those who don’t care
about what is typically vandalism removal); a functional help system for
less-experienced editors; a professionally created and edited set of
screencasts for new and intermediate-level editors, showing how to perform
various tasks; edit options beyond just all-or-nothing opening of an
article or article section (for example, “add a footnote”; “improve a
footnote”); and more.
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Re: [Foundation-l] Newbie recruitment: referencing

[Ray Saintonge]

On 11/03/11 2:49 AM, David Gerard wrote:
> On 3 November 2011 09:31, Ray Saintonge  wrote:
>> Also can the expression "citation needed" be changed to something that
>> is more inviting to newbies, like "Please add citation"?
> We may be late for that - "citation needed" is entering English.
>
>
Be that as it may, is it inviting to the newbie? If a change is going to 
draw them in it's still worthwhile.

Ray



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Re: [Foundation-l] Newbie recruitment: referencing

[Ray Saintonge]

On 11/02/11 2:11 PM, Nathan wrote:
> A button or link that says "Add a reference?" that brings up a box
> with several lines, labelled "URL" "Source" "Author" "Date". Click
> "Ok" and the reference is inserted, no ref syntax or other ugly
> interface necessary.
>
> Put it automatically at the end of a paragraph or somewhere else,
> maybe even include a section selector as step 1 of the box. Allow it
> to be manually inserted, so if a reference is needed but someone
> doesn't have one, they can make it easy for someone else to add it.
>
>
We do have the important rule of leaving something for others to do.  
Your last sentence strikes at an important point.  The difficulty is 
that too many people shoot first, and ask questions of the corpse later. 
Deleting the unsourced statement is easier and cleaner that having a 
"citation needed" link to clutter the appearance of the page. While 
there are circumstances where that approach is justifiable, for most 
articles it isn't. For the non-editing reader, the notice puts him on 
alert to apply his own judgement to what he reads. As we drill further 
down into knowledge sources that corroborate each other will become 
fewer and more scattered.

Ray

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Re: [Foundation-l] Newbie recruitment: referencing

[Fae]

Tom's point on lag is an important consideration, I tend to use tools such
as greasemonkey (see the wiki citation generator direct from Worldcat
entries -  - Google, The
Guardian and others also available) and my local scripts using iMacro to
scrape key information from a website and format a neat citation (see
attached iMacro javascript for the NY Times). Such tools being client side
ensures a quick response and I have had such poor experiences with server
site user scripts causing problems that I have invariably switched them off.

Though not an obvious solution for new users, having a standard tool for
Google books/news, WorldCat, leading newspapers etc. and possibly working
with partners such as Zotero might be a useful alternative path to consider
rather than limiting our thinking to the Wikipedia edit box interface.

Cheers,
Fae
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Re: [Foundation-l] Newbie recruitment: referencing

[Ray Saintonge]

On 11/02/11 11:27 PM, David Richfield wrote:
> A tool which pops up asking for a URL, author and date would be a rich
> source of bad references.  We should rather be looking at ways to get
> references to books and journal articles.  Web references should be
> the exception rather than the rule, because the vast majority of
> websites are not WP:RS.
>
> How about a wizard-like tool which asks "did you read this in a book,
> in a newspaper, a journal article or on the web?" and if the answer is
> "on the web" asks the user how they know it's true.  Compare for
> example Commons's image uploader.  Users who care about references
> should be taught how to extract good refs from Google Books and Google
> Scholar - both quite easy to use.  If you paste the ISBN of a book
> into Citation Expander, it fills in the whole citation for you, and
> the same for pubmed IDs.  Now we just need a tool which will do this
> for major newspapers on the web.
>
This demands far too much of newbies.  We can sometimes be very 
cult-like in our demand for references and sources. If you want to scare 
away newbies you do that very well by thrusting him into a highly 
subjective debate about the nature of reliable sources.  I too would 
prefer books and articles. I'm also sure that some of the references 
provided will be bad.  A reference is what it is, but it would be 
badgering newbies to ask them how they know that something is true. What 
we want to instill here is the good habit of references, and out of good 
faith trust that editors are not inventing their references. *Keep it 
simple.*

A tool that ask whether the reference is from a book, a journal, the web 
or something else is good for a different reason. The choice would lead 
to different drop-down boxes where only the relevant questions would be 
asked. A lot of the books that I have are pre-ISBN.

Ray

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Re: [Foundation-l] Newbie recruitment: referencing

[Tom Morris]

On Wed, Nov 2, 2011 at 21:41, Nathan  wrote:
> I knew it looked so obvious someone must've already tried to do it.
> See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:ProveIt.jpg and
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:ProveIt_GT. This is a GUI reference
> adding interface that shows up while editing (i.e., after you click
> "edit this page.") It's a gadget currently available to everyone.
>

A lot of us aren't using ProveIt because of the slowness in loading.
You click edit, then you start editing, only for ProveIt to start
loading, bouncing the edit box around and generally making things
slow. Personally, I just use the built in 'Cite' buttons and I also
use Reftag, a tool that lets you paste in a Google Books URL and which
then spits out a copy-pasteable citation - see
http://reftag.appspot.com/

-- 
Tom Morris


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Re: [Foundation-l] Newbie recruitment: referencing

[David Gerard]

On 3 November 2011 09:31, Ray Saintonge  wrote:

> Also can the expression "citation needed" be changed to something that
> is more inviting to newbies, like "Please add citation"?


We may be late for that - "citation needed" is entering English.


- d.

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Re: [Foundation-l] Newbie recruitment: referencing

[David Gerard]

2011/11/3 David Richfield :

>> This should be kept in mind (particularly for bot design) when many new
>> articles such as biographies are *incorrectly* tagged for speedy deletion
>> or as unsourced when sources are present in the article, they just do not
>> use the citation template or ref tag.

> Does this seriously happen?  The only tag that is appropriate to this
> situation is refimprove or cleanup or maybe wikify.


Yes, helped by tools that encourage dealing with new users to be
treated like a first-person shooter.


- d.

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Re: [Foundation-l] Newbie recruitment: referencing

[John Vandenberg]

On Thu, Nov 3, 2011 at 8:29 PM, Liam Wyatt  wrote:
> On 3 November 2011 09:26, John Vandenberg  wrote:
>
>> We could create a zotero plugin which allows the ref to be added to
>> the end of paragraph.
>>
>> We could go even further and integrate mediawiki and a zotero server
>> so that Wikipedia can use named refs throughout.
>>
>
> Oh yes please! :-)

Other wikis have this. ;-(

http://doc.tiki.org/Zotero

-- 
John Vandenberg

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Re: [Foundation-l] Newbie recruitment: referencing

[Ray Saintonge]

On 11/02/11 2:32 PM, David Gerard wrote:
> On 2 November 2011 21:28, Nathan  wrote:
>> To explain what I mean: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:QUICKREF
> YES. We need this horribly urgently.
>
> It should also pop up when someone clicks on a "[citation needed]" tag
> - that's a blue link that looks like a direct invitation, after all.
>
At present clicking on that leads to a page that explains why we need 
citation, but says nothing about how to do it. That's useless. Linking 
to a usable box would be a big improvement.

Also can the expression "citation needed" be changed to something that 
is more inviting to newbies, like "Please add citation"?

Ray

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Re: [Foundation-l] Newbie recruitment: referencing

[Liam Wyatt]

On 3 November 2011 09:26, John Vandenberg  wrote:

> We could create a zotero plugin which allows the ref to be added to
> the end of paragraph.
>
> We could go even further and integrate mediawiki and a zotero server
> so that Wikipedia can use named refs throughout.
>

Oh yes please! :-)

-Liam
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Re: [Foundation-l] Newbie recruitment: referencing

[John Vandenberg]

On Thu, Nov 3, 2011 at 6:57 PM, David Richfield
 wrote:
> [Suggestion to encourage other website to generate pastable citation code]
>
> I like it a lot!  How do we go about promoting this idea?

I dont like it.

Websites should provide citations as COinS, or another standardised format.

Then tools can be built around importing and exporting them into
Wikipedia formats. (include different code for different language
Wikipedia)

e.g.

http://www.zotero.org/blog/zotero-wikipedia-perfect-together/

That does create a barrier to entry, however I would prefer someone
adds "* Author, Book title, p. num" in the References section rather
than pasting in syntax code from another website without much clue
about the process.  If they get the former wrong, someone will help
them.  If they get the latter wrong, they will probably be reverted
for breaking the article.

We could create a zotero plugin which allows the ref to be added to
the end of paragraph.

We could go even further and integrate mediawiki and a zotero server
so that Wikipedia can use named refs throughout.

http://forums.zotero.org/discussion/20026/zotero-plugin-for-mediawiki/

--
John Vandenberg

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Re: [Foundation-l] Newbie recruitment: referencing

[Liam Wyatt]

My guess about how to go about doing that would be to write up the
documentation for how to use the relevant parts of the API for this
specific purpose. I think it would not be possible to give a solution that
worked for everyone because each external website would have a different
database structure that would need to be mapped to. Nevertheless I'm sure
that as long as we make it perfectly clear what needs to be done, the 3rd
party website's admins will know how to make that happen. I also assume
that it would need to be different kinds of formatting for different
language editions to make it work with the local template parameters.

Not being a techie though, I've no idea if the kind of documentation is
really hard to produce or is really simple. Nevertheless I strongly suspect
that it would be easier/faster/cheaper to do that than to introduce major
usability improvements to the citation system on Wikipedia(s).

-Liam

wittylama.com/blog
Peace, love & metadata


On 3 November 2011 07:57, David Richfield  wrote:

> [Suggestion to encourage other website to generate pastable citation code]
>
> I like it a lot!  How do we go about promoting this idea?
>
> David
>
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Re: [Foundation-l] Newbie recruitment: referencing

[David Richfield]

> there is no requirement or policy for ref tags to be used in an article. If
> a new user wishes to stick sources as plain text at the bottom of an
> article, this is not actually a failure against the manual of style or our
> verification policy.

This may be true, but it is a policy that an individual article's
style should be consistent.

> This should be kept in mind (particularly for bot design) when many new
> articles such as biographies are *incorrectly* tagged for speedy deletion
> or as unsourced when sources are present in the article, they just do not
> use the citation template or ref tag.

Does this seriously happen?  The only tag that is appropriate to this
situation is refimprove or cleanup or maybe wikify.

-- 
David Richfield
e^(πi)+1=0

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Re: [Foundation-l] Newbie recruitment: referencing

[Fae]

Hi,

Making referencing easier on Wikipedia with optional tools is a good thing,
but there is a parallel activity of educating old hands to be aware that
there is no requirement or policy for ref tags to be used in an article. If
a new user wishes to stick sources as plain text at the bottom of an
article, this is not actually a failure against the manual of style or our
verification policy. So long as the user is adding verifiable and reliable
sources they can do this in any format they prefer and in fact our policies
encourage a discussion and local consensus rather than forcing standard but
arbitrary styles and templates onto such an article.

This should be kept in mind (particularly for bot design) when many new
articles such as biographies are *incorrectly* tagged for speedy deletion
or as unsourced when sources are present in the article, they just do not
use the citation template or ref tag.

By the way, many of us old hands routinely give simple advice on footnotes,
I have  which explains the
ref tag in a very simple way, and points to other help including a
demonstration video I prepared some time ago.

Cheers,
Fae
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Re: [Foundation-l] Newbie recruitment: referencing

[David Richfield]

[Suggestion to encourage other website to generate pastable citation code]

I like it a lot!  How do we go about promoting this idea?

David

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Re: [Foundation-l] Newbie recruitment: referencing

[Liam Wyatt]

2011/11/3 David Richfield 

> A tool which pops up asking for a URL, author and date would be a rich
> source of bad references.  We should rather be looking at ways to get
> references to books and journal articles.  Web references should be
> the exception rather than the rule, because the vast majority of
> websites are not WP:RS.
>
> How about a wizard-like tool which asks "did you read this in a book,
> in a newspaper, a journal article or on the web?" and if the answer is
> "on the web" asks the user how they know it's true.  Compare for
> example Commons's image uploader.  Users who care about references
> should be taught how to extract good refs from Google Books and Google
> Scholar - both quite easy to use.  If you paste the ISBN of a book
> into Citation Expander, it fills in the whole citation for you, and
> the same for pubmed IDs.  Now we just need a tool which will do this
> for major newspapers on the web.
>
> --
> David Richfield
> e^(ði)+1=0


I like this approach, but it is also possible to do this the "other way
around" - that is, on OTHER websites which are frequented by well educated
and (potential) good quality Wikimedians
Let me explain...
Click on the "cite" button near the top-left here:
http://trove.nla.gov.au/ndp/del/article/628050
Scroll to the bottom here:
http://www.powerhousemuseum.com/collection/database/?irn=207936
The first of these is the National Library of Australia's Digitised
Newspaper collection, the second of these links is the database of objects
in the Powerhouse Museum in Sydney.

They have both now implimented across their entire database a system to
automatically generate correctly formatted citation code to that specific
newspaper article/object that the reader can copy+paste into Wikipedia.
This both legitimises "working on wikipedia" to their users and also
increases the likelihood that their content will be used by us - a win-win
situation.

I believe that the kind of people who are spending their time looking at
museum catalogues and looking at very old newspapers are EXACTLY the kind
of people that we would like to encourage to work on Wikipedia adding
citations. Furthermore, the "generate the correct citation code" clearly
already works (e.g. there are 6 such citations used here
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sydney_sandstone#References ).

Whilst the effort to move towards WYSIWYG code in MediaWiki continues
behind the scenes, perhaps it would be relatively easy for the WMF (or a
dedicated individual) to produce some documentation (and sample code?) that
clearly and easily explains to other similar organisations how to implement
this system on their own site. I can see this being particularly useful on
newspaper websites too. I imagine that this would be much simpler, cheaper
and faster to do than building a new Wizard/tool ON WIKIPEDIA because that
would require all sorts of community debates, browser testing, localisation
etc. etc.

Just a thought,
-Liam
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Re: [Foundation-l] Newbie recruitment: referencing

[David Richfield]

A tool which pops up asking for a URL, author and date would be a rich
source of bad references.  We should rather be looking at ways to get
references to books and journal articles.  Web references should be
the exception rather than the rule, because the vast majority of
websites are not WP:RS.

How about a wizard-like tool which asks "did you read this in a book,
in a newspaper, a journal article or on the web?" and if the answer is
"on the web" asks the user how they know it's true.  Compare for
example Commons's image uploader.  Users who care about references
should be taught how to extract good refs from Google Books and Google
Scholar - both quite easy to use.  If you paste the ISBN of a book
into Citation Expander, it fills in the whole citation for you, and
the same for pubmed IDs.  Now we just need a tool which will do this
for major newspapers on the web.

-- 
David Richfield
e^(πi)+1=0

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Re: [Foundation-l] Newbie recruitment: referencing

[Mateus Nobre]

Loving these discussions about newbie recuitment.

This tool have to be available for everyone, not as a gagdet for logged users. 
Mostly newbies don't even know what is a gagdet. This have to be available to 
IPs and all users.
The idea by clicking in ''citation needed'' was the first great one here. 
You're awesome, guys.
But I thought something about a tool in the edition box. A tool aside the 
edition box sayin ''Put your source here'', and the newbie would put just the 
URL and then, would appear some blank lines for Author, Date, etc.. Just the 
essential ones. Have to be fast, instictive, and no-boring at all.

_
MateusNobre
MetalBrasil on Wikimedia projects
(+55) 85 88393509
  30440865


> Date: Wed, 2 Nov 2011 17:41:20 -0400
> From: nawr...@gmail.com
> To: foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org
> Subject: Re: [Foundation-l] Newbie recruitment: referencing
> 
> I knew it looked so obvious someone must've already tried to do it.
> See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:ProveIt.jpg and
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:ProveIt_GT. This is a GUI reference
> adding interface that shows up while editing (i.e., after you click
> "edit this page.") It's a gadget currently available to everyone.
> 
> A gadget is certainly handy and I'll be using ProveIt from now on,
> but... it doesn't help people who are not logged in or have never
> edited before, it's not widely publicised, etc. etc.
> 
> ~Nathan
> 
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Re: [Foundation-l] Newbie recruitment: referencing

[Nathan]

I expanded the WP:QUICKREF page to discuss available tools. While
ProveIT (created by Georgia Tech) is a gadget that is available to all
logged in users in Preferences -> Gadgets, it's not available to
others, new users are unlikely to know about it, and it doesn't add
prompts to add a reference in the main body of article-space. I think
those are key improvements that could be made, either to ProveIT or to
a different gadget (or, ideally, an extension).

On Wed, Nov 2, 2011 at 5:49 PM, David Gerard  wrote:
> On 2 November 2011 21:41, Nathan  wrote:
>
>> I knew it looked so obvious someone must've already tried to do it.
>> See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:ProveIt.jpg and
>> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:ProveIt_GT. This is a GUI reference
>> adding interface that shows up while editing (i.e., after you click
>> "edit this page.") It's a gadget currently available to everyone.
>> A gadget is certainly handy and I'll be using ProveIt from now on,
>> but... it doesn't help people who are not logged in or have never
>> edited before, it's not widely publicised, etc. etc.
>
>
> This needs polishing into some sort of newbie-usable tool and
> deployment as soon as can be managed. (i.e. before the WYSIWYG of our
> dreams.)
>
>
> - d.
>
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Re: [Foundation-l] Newbie recruitment: referencing

[David Gerard]

On 2 November 2011 21:41, Nathan  wrote:

> I knew it looked so obvious someone must've already tried to do it.
> See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:ProveIt.jpg and
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:ProveIt_GT. This is a GUI reference
> adding interface that shows up while editing (i.e., after you click
> "edit this page.") It's a gadget currently available to everyone.
> A gadget is certainly handy and I'll be using ProveIt from now on,
> but... it doesn't help people who are not logged in or have never
> edited before, it's not widely publicised, etc. etc.


This needs polishing into some sort of newbie-usable tool and
deployment as soon as can be managed. (i.e. before the WYSIWYG of our
dreams.)


- d.

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Re: [Foundation-l] Newbie recruitment: referencing

[Nathan]

I knew it looked so obvious someone must've already tried to do it.
See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:ProveIt.jpg and
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:ProveIt_GT. This is a GUI reference
adding interface that shows up while editing (i.e., after you click
"edit this page.") It's a gadget currently available to everyone.

A gadget is certainly handy and I'll be using ProveIt from now on,
but... it doesn't help people who are not logged in or have never
edited before, it's not widely publicised, etc. etc.

~Nathan

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Re: [Foundation-l] Newbie recruitment: referencing

[David Gerard]

On 2 November 2011 21:28, Nathan  wrote:

> To explain what I mean: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:QUICKREF


YES. We need this horribly urgently.

It should also pop up when someone clicks on a "[citation needed]" tag
- that's a blue link that looks like a direct invitation, after all.


- d.

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Re: [Foundation-l] Newbie recruitment: referencing

[Nathan]

To explain what I mean: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:QUICKREF

On Wed, Nov 2, 2011 at 5:11 PM, Nathan  wrote:
> A button or link that says "Add a reference?" that brings up a box
> with several lines, labelled "URL" "Source" "Author" "Date". Click
> "Ok" and the reference is inserted, no ref syntax or other ugly
> interface necessary.
>
> Put it automatically at the end of a paragraph or somewhere else,
> maybe even include a section selector as step 1 of the box. Allow it
> to be manually inserted, so if a reference is needed but someone
> doesn't have one, they can make it easy for someone else to add it.
>
> On Wed, Nov 2, 2011 at 5:07 PM, David Gerard  wrote:
>> http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/wikipedia_is_a_mess_wikipedians_say_1_in_20_articl.php
>>
>> Now, we have a lot of work to do, it's obviously encyclopedic and it
>> would be hard to get really wrong.
>>
>> What needs to be in place to make it possible to recruit newbies for
>> the task of referencing things? (Alleviate the citation syntax
>> problem. Make the results easily checkable by the experienced. Ban the
>> use of Twinkle or similar semi-botlike mechanisms on the resulting
>> edits, as nothing repels good-faith new users like instant reversion.
>> What else?)
>>
>>
>> - d.
>>
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Re: [Foundation-l] Newbie recruitment: referencing

[Nathan]

A button or link that says "Add a reference?" that brings up a box
with several lines, labelled "URL" "Source" "Author" "Date". Click
"Ok" and the reference is inserted, no ref syntax or other ugly
interface necessary.

Put it automatically at the end of a paragraph or somewhere else,
maybe even include a section selector as step 1 of the box. Allow it
to be manually inserted, so if a reference is needed but someone
doesn't have one, they can make it easy for someone else to add it.

On Wed, Nov 2, 2011 at 5:07 PM, David Gerard  wrote:
> http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/wikipedia_is_a_mess_wikipedians_say_1_in_20_articl.php
>
> Now, we have a lot of work to do, it's obviously encyclopedic and it
> would be hard to get really wrong.
>
> What needs to be in place to make it possible to recruit newbies for
> the task of referencing things? (Alleviate the citation syntax
> problem. Make the results easily checkable by the experienced. Ban the
> use of Twinkle or similar semi-botlike mechanisms on the resulting
> edits, as nothing repels good-faith new users like instant reversion.
> What else?)
>
>
> - d.
>
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[Foundation-l] Newbie recruitment: referencing

[David Gerard]

http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/wikipedia_is_a_mess_wikipedians_say_1_in_20_articl.php

Now, we have a lot of work to do, it's obviously encyclopedic and it
would be hard to get really wrong.

What needs to be in place to make it possible to recruit newbies for
the task of referencing things? (Alleviate the citation syntax
problem. Make the results easily checkable by the experienced. Ban the
use of Twinkle or similar semi-botlike mechanisms on the resulting
edits, as nothing repels good-faith new users like instant reversion.
What else?)


- d.

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