On Tue, Dec 28, 2010 at 5:16 PM, George Herbert <george.herb...@gmail.com> wrote: > On Tue, Dec 28, 2010 at 4:47 AM, Ray Saintonge <sainto...@telus.net> wrote: >> On 12/23/10 1:31 PM, George Herbert wrote: >>> >>> The social stuff which is complex is something which is a barrier, but >>> one that all western society members who are modern communications >>> literate are fundamentally equipped to handle. Some will fail at it << >> This seems to beg the question: How do you define "modern communications >> literate"? > > Facebook, Gmail, Twitter, smartphone user. > > Those are a 95%+ solution for kids and young adults, if not 99%, and > are easy enough for older adults (my parents, etc) to the point that > they're arguably better than an 80% solution for the US population.
Those examples are also widely used all over the world, including in regions where the Internet is still new. Most highly popular services start by letting each participant define themselves, and the default contribution that people are encouraged to make is usually permament and not subject to removal by others. One of the unkind and awkward aspects of the Wikipedia experience is, that the default requested contribution is an edit, new page, or upload, all of which may be reverted or followed by warnings and challenges, by people who expect you to RTFM to learn how to behave. Some possible improvements: - add new things that all users are encouraged to contribute (first-class citizens of the list 'ways to further the project'), which are entirely within the user's control: information about themselves and their environment, joining wikiprojects and work groups, taking part in polls and usability studies, answering questions from other users and readers - make a user's contributions permanently visible to them, if not to others (modulo vandalism), taking advantage of permalinks and file histories, even when those contribs have for now been removed from the default public view(s) of an article, or when they have been quarantined from view by other users for concerns about copyright status. this improves on the crude tool of deletion and keeps contributors from feeling that their hard work has been destroyed or disrespected, often due only to it being incomplete or not-yet-proven-notable. - develop better sandboxing policies, tools, and effective sandbox environments, so that new users can truly experiment and get used to editing before they are challenged, reverted, deleted, and blocked. Sam. _______________________________________________ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l