On 6/1/14, 11:53 AM, Ting Chen wrote:
And I think it is essential to tell the beginner to do the same: Don't bother with things that are too complicated, it is the content that counts.
Yes, I think we need to publicize this more widely. People are usually surprised when I tell them that as a new editor it's perfectly fine to just ignore a wide range of formatting instructions and templates, as long as the essential content is there. All they really need is good text and *any* readable way of citing where they got the information from. There is no need to create an infobox, and you don't even need to deal with citation templates. Once I've convinced people they don't *really* need to learn how to use {{cite book}} and such, they tend to be more willing to contribute.
When I'm giving people a miniature intro for how to contribute referenced information to a Wikipedia article, I tell them to just put a plaintext reference in any format they're used to inside <ref></ref> tags, like this:
"This is a sentence supported by a reference.<ref>Author, Book title, Publisher, year, pp. xx-xy</ref>"
As long as the essential information for the reference is included, this should be fine, and someone who knows the markup can prettify it later, if necessary. (If newbies contributing in this manner are getting bad reactions, then the message that this is a perfectly fine way to contribute should be better publicized to existing editors/admins, too.)
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