Wikipedia's Participation Problem

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."

Comments

Re:How Does One Become an Editor?

[Elbereth]

Yes, that happens sometimes. People get a bit fanatical about reverting vandalism. The best thing to do is to always use an edit summary with polite, neutral language that directly cites Wikipedia policy. For example: "remove unverifiable, unsourced statement, per [[WP:V]]" or even just say something terse like "unsourced". That will signal to people that you're at least vaguely familiar with Wikipedia's policies and not a simple vandal who likes to randomly remove sentences.

When people challenge you, tell them the burden of proof lies on them. You can cite [[WP:BURDEN]], Wikipedia policy which explicitly states this.