User:Doc James/Essay

Attracting editors

The question is how do we attract not those who make one or two edits but Wikipedians. Many things have been tried but unfortunately most have had little effort or even resulted in harm to our encyclopedia. There are about 422 million readers and 80,000 editors a month meaning that less than 2 hundredth of 1% of people reading edit.

Scholarships

This year I offered a $1000 scholarship to the Canadian university students who made the greatest contribution to a disease related article.[1] It unfortunately did not generate much interest in editing despite a fair bit of media coverage [2]

Global education program

This was meat with some success but also some failures. The learn term effects are yet unknown

Unfortunately much of the emphasis seem to be on quantity rather than quality of which the Library of Babel has something to say. We have Sue Gardner standing by a pile of paper and we have ranked students by amount of text added. There are some quality metrics as seen [3] [4]

Collaboration with other organization

This has garnered mixed success. Unfortunately many just wish to add links to themselves. (the Epilepsy Society primarily added links to their own pages even when the content was already supported [5] or their page did not support the content to which it was attached.[6])

Invitation to come edit

This is the fundraiser for editors. One of my fellow editors User:Anthonyhcole over at Wikiproject medicine attempted this after getting consensus. The community was fairly disruptive during the process removing the banners from a number of pages and hindering the collection of data.

Speak and teaching at universities

So far I have spoke at four universities around the world. Turn out was fairly good 20-40 students and professors at each. All where intrigued by the idea. But going over their involvement subsequently it has been limited.

Twisting arms of friends and family

I have tried to get my wife to take up editing but she is just not interested preferring to watch Japanese dramas than become seriously involved. She tried to do a translation from English to Japanese of an article on an object featured at La Lovre but here page was twice deleted and even with my wiki prowess I was not able to alter the communities opinion over their.

Paying experts to edit

Another Wiki (http://wikemerg.ca/) has tried paying experts to edit with very little success. They where offering 600-1000CAD per article and where not able to find sufficient interest within the medical community.

What is left to be tried

One of the main contributors to the Oxford English Dictionary was William Chester Minor who was confined in a lunatic asylum during the writing. May be this says something about what it takes to stick it out writing an reference works for neither pay nor recognition.