Cautionary thought on Wikipedia core policies in less technical countries

  1. Explain the idea of V, NPOV, RS, OR in simple terms - why they matter, what we hope for. There's nothing wrong and everything right with explaining it. Just don't expect to get too much of it or be too demanding of unfamiliar editors in small or new projects. But explain it? Yes :)
  2. People unfamiliar with the benefits or uses will probably grasp the ideas and benefits more by being shown (TV style) than by reading it in text. Even if some like and seek textual information, others will not, and many countries have significant populations with no cultural norm on text-based looking up of data and information. For them, multimedia will convey much more, and much wider.
  3. Yes.
  4. Appropriate for all. A smaller project may not have a culture able to produce high quality content, but there's no reason to avoid developing that approach in other ways. "Create your new article here [= Draft:NAME] then post a link HERE and ask users to add it to the encyclopedia if they think it's good enough" will probably encourage peer review and a bit of a trend to higher standards in a culture that has neither, better than "post to mainspace and wait to see what happens or ignore it".
FT2 (Talk | email)02:36, 3 January 2010

I think 1 and 2 is covered in the "Promoting Wikipedia in developing countries and minor languages" thread now, 3 should be included as a cautionary thought in the local language recommendation and 4 is something for the quality task force. Right?

Dafer4515:37, 3 January 2010
 

Overlapping recommendations are fine; I passed these all your way as requested and because they could be useful there as well. But some equally apply here too.

Overall I think you are right, 4 is more "quality related". It's about how to introduce quality in a wider culture or an editing community that doesn't have that background or is new to wiki, needs leeway to get going, but should aim to begin quality work somehow even so.

FT2 (Talk | email)18:57, 3 January 2010