Wikipedia's Participation Problem 372
holy_calamity writes "More people use Wikipedia than ever but the number of people contributing to the project has declined by a third since 2007, and it still has significant gaps in its quality and coverage. MIT Technology Review reports on the troubled efforts to make the site more welcoming to newcomers, which Jimmy Wales says must succeed if Wikipedia is to address its failings."
I was planning to help out... (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Unfriendly Elitists (Score:5, Funny)
Real experts don't want to go to the trouble of battling with presumptuous morons over the Internet.
The more you know, the less you say. And vice versa.
Re:Unfriendly Elitists (Score:3, Funny)
On a related note, they should share with Google a Nobel Peace Prize for the countless nasty arguments settled by a simple search.
Don't forget all the arguments won with a quick edit followed by a "Let's check Wikipedia!"
Re:How Does One Become an Editor? (Score:5, Funny)
Switch them to Slashdot's system? Ha. You must want to take all of Wikipedia and flush it down the toilet. Good idea.
Re:Unfriendly Elitists (Score:4, Funny)
P@ssword1234 worked for me.
Re:I was planning to help out... (Score:5, Funny)
And there's the single greatest problem. There are assholes out there who spend their days sprinkling "citation needed"s around like they were pixie dust.
[citation needed]
Re:Unfriendly Elitists (Score:4, Funny)
It's paid with my tax dollars, so I should have access to it.
After all there is no private or sensitive information in there, it's only metadata, right?
(and yes, I do need to re-read when I change sentence structures just before posting, but how can the preview annoy me if it's useful?)
Re:How Does One Become an Editor? (Score:4, Funny)
If you post anything at all expected it to get deleted.
Re:How Does One Become an Editor? (Score:4, Funny)
Not quite. I've told this before but it's worth repeating. I live in a very small town (>50 people), the wiki article says that the town was devastated by a fire in the 60s. I removed it because there was no fire, at all. It was reversed and added back and I was told I needed a reference or cite. How do you cite something that didn't happen?
The fire wasn't cited either, but it's still there.
Re:How Does One Become an Editor? (Score:5, Funny)
Dude, you like totally saw the wrong movie...