User:It's Been Emotional/Suggestions

Just starting my suggestions page, which I will improve as time goes by. I welcome comments, so I know how this comes across, and how I might improve it, or at least refine some of my ideas.

1. Wikipedia is a social encyclopedia, and an online community. People don't come here for purely altruistic reasons; if it were about altruism, we would be working in an orphanage in Afghanistan, not editing Wikipedia. Consequently, we need to think about why people come here, and how to use that knowledge to good effect.

2. I think the two obvious reasons are: to be a part of an intelligent/ thinking community, and for the kudos from seeing your work on google, or from everyone reading your scintillating answer to a question on the reference desk. So I think we need to make the community aspects as strong as possible, and perhaps we need to change the reward structure somewhat.

3. The rewards system of barnstars and comments on userpages is good, but I feel we should try, at least once, a voting system. Everyone would get, say, 20 points to distribute, they would have a week to give them out, and would just select other Wikipedians and give them points anonymously according to how much they like their edits, or their overall contribution to the project. People would be told how they went via email, and given the option of publishing their score on their userpage. If not enough active users vote, it would be deemed a failure; if they all vote, it would probably be deemed a success. I would call anyone who has made one edit in the past 2 months active; anything over 75% turnout would be pretty successful. Below 50% and I expect I would never suggest it again.

4. For the community angle, the French Wikipedia has something called "Workshops" (Ateliers), where experts and novices work together on various projects. I honestly don't know how this works (I don't know enough French) but we could implement something similar. If started on a vast scale, it would dilute energies and fail miserably, but I'm not talking about anything huge. The best thing would be to try just one or two workshops which would help us in general ways - I would love to see a writing workshop, focusing only on improving the style of Wikipedia articles, to bring them up to encyclopedic standard. I have seen many articles that are impressive in their content, but where the writing is clearly of an amateurish nature, or at any rate not encyclopedic. For sure, they get tagged, but that doesn't mean they get improved. A writing workshop would enable talented writers to concentrate in one location, meet each other, and get credit from novices like me who are capable enough, but in need of some sort of apprenticeship. We would start the redrafting, and get help from people with more experience.

5. Another community thing, that could be the by-product of a workshop, or could just be started as its own fresh project, is some kind of current affairs newsmagazine. I know we have Wikinews, but I don't have the time to read it in full. I read The Guardian, but I don't have much time for that either. What I really want, and what I believe there is a market for, is a monthly or quarterly free publication which doesn't tell us everything going on in the world at just that moment, but rather gives updates on what has happened since the last issue. To round out the coverage, it could also provide "behind the news" feature articles to explain what is going on, as well as having cultural sections and so forth. It could be a testing ground for new encyclopedic content, as well as a way of attracting new people to Wikipedia, such as journalism students. Wikipedia is in danger of losing people, as the most interesting articles have all been written, so talented contributors need a new challenge to keep them motivated.

6. The Humanities Reference Desk gets a lot of silly questions about God from people looking for a debate. We really need a separate forum on Wikipedia, not because debating forums are a good idea, but because, without them, people use the Ref Desks inappropriately. With a debating forum, we could easily move these controversial questions there; without one, we can just delete the questions, but no one ever does. I'm theorising that, with a kind of compromise, people would get more proactive in getting rid of silly nonsense. I'm like this myself: I don't want to be a stickler by deleting every one of these questions, but then I don't want the ref desks to get abused.