Conversion hurdle race

I'm skeptical of the premise of a campaign that says "everyone has some good information to share with others" (in the context of Wikipedia, at least; for some future version of Wikinews, that might be true). Everyone with basic literacy skills could potentially contribute usefully, but that's not based on having information to share, it's based on being willing and capable of doing the necessary research to collect, organize and present information. It's not about having information, it's about being able to find information. Most good work on Wikipedia is the product of editors learning about a topic as they go, not sharing knowledge they came to the project with.

I definitely agree about "creating a large variety of activities", and (per my other comment about the game-like features proposal) I think a lot of this could be done algorithmically without much need to hand-write one-off tasks.

I sometimes wonder if the fairly well-known "no original research" clause doesn't discourage people who don't realize that "no original research" does not mean "no research", it means that research that goes into building and editing wikipedia articles should be based on incorporating the work of others from other sources into this central repository.

I was thinking the other day that an orientation around "research that is good for wikipedia" or somesuch might help.

I mean I think it might help.

In case you didn't know (it took me quite a while to notice it) it's possible to edit your posts, or even other people's, via the "More" pulldown at the end of each post.--71.235.36.97 14:53, 10 November 2009 (UTC)