Proposal:Sandbox for each article

From Strategic Planning
Status (see valid statuses)

The status of this proposal is:
Request for Discussion / Sign-Ups

Every proposal should be tied to one of the strategic priorities below.

Edit this page to help identify the priorities related to this proposal!


  1. Achieve continued growth in readership
  2. Focus on quality content
  3. Increase Participation
  4. Stabilize and improve the infrastructure
  5. Encourage Innovation



Summary

Each article on Wikipedia or other wikis should have their own sandbox to add any bites of random info that a user might have or post new content... that should provide faster integration for new users and makes improving articles easier

Proposal

Every user on Wikipedia has their own playground following his user name to draft his works/other stuff, yet only experienced ones know exactly how to make good benefit of it, while others can find it difficult to draft what they want to contribute and spend lots of time editing the main article trying to avoid mistakes, etc.. and not to destroy the article while making their edits.

Another aspect is new/anonymous contributors, who happen to just throw in the information they want to say in the article, not knowing well about Wikipedia's policies or even sometimes how to edit correctly, and what happens is that an admin/autopatrol removes their edit, or at best case, spends some time organizing what they did if it was worthy..

The whole idea is that articles can make use of parallel revisions, (maybe only one), that can absorb all the drafts an anonymous/not confirmed user can put in the article.. instead of revisiting revisions by other users and posting only one in the end


Motivation

  • Lots of good faith contributions, and resources end up being reverted because the language/context didn't meet the NPOV policy or any other policy..
  • Discussion pages are to discuss the possibility of adding/removing info to/from the article, but not showing the information itself, and the discussion might not represent it very well and therefore get refused/contracted..
  • Allocating user input to a topic can easily provide raw sources of information that other contributors can make use of adequately, and more efficiently than wasting time looking for these resources again themselves
  • Inexperienced users can easily put what they want to contribute anywhere without damaging the current revision, and without having to spend much time learning how to put things fit in place, or entering 50K long discussions about that input..

Key Questions

  1. How much time new users spend to learn how to make a good, useful, wikified edit?
  2. How much of new information gets lost daily by deleting edits that were inappropriately placed?
  3. How much time does new and even current users spend until they learn they can use their own personal space for drafting?
  4. What much time admins waste fixing good faith "false edits" or reverting ones, while they can be archived for later, better use?

Potential Costs

  • Some work hours from MediaWiki developers / sysops.

References

Community Discussion

Do you have a thought about this proposal? A suggestion? Discuss this proposal by going to Proposal Talk:Sandbox for each article.

Want to work on this proposal?

  1. .. Sign your name here!