User talk:Whiteknight/WritersUA Conference

Hey WK, I figured I'd take a look at what you have here and see what I can do to suggest, you have quite a long time to be talking so you can go into some of the details.

I'd say be sure to mention here that one of the things that's most attractive to many people about the wiki project is that even anonymous users can edit most pages, which encourages people to try things out. May also want to mention our be bold philosophy, encouraging people to make changes where they see fit, if they "mess up" it can easily be corrected.

You may want to put a section in there on the successes we've had as a project, for example the publishing of Wikijunior:Big Cats, and the featured book system which has identified a lot of high-quality work. You may also want to mention some of the potential project goals for the future (i.e. where is the project headed?) somewhere towards the end. It's probably risky to put something like this in but it may be worth thinking about.

The NPOV, NOR, and Verifiability criterion should probably be mentioned somewhere, probably under "administration" or even in the description of the Wikibooks project.

I'd say overall the plan looks very good, I wish you luck in preparing the speech and if you need an extra set of eyes to look over it come March I'd be willing to take a look. Regards. Mattb112885 (talk to me) 03:10, 7 November 2007 (UTC)


 * Thanks Matt for the input! I definitely do want to cover the things that you mention, such as our various policies, our successes, etc. A big part of my focus is going to be to try and dispel any fears or doubts that the audience may have about using wiki. This is why I am putting such emphasis on the common criticisms so early in the pesentation. I also want to give plenty of examples of community-driven volunteerism, such as bit-torrent file sharing, Wikipedia, help forums, open-source software, etc. That is, I want to show examples of how content users are demonstrated to be willing to participate in the content creation and distribution processes. For this audience, that can mean an increase in productivity because significant amounts of work can be offloaded to the users, not just the writers.
 * I am really pushing to advertise wikibooks and make people realize what a great opportunity it can be for writers. --Whiteknight (Page) (Talk) 13:17, 7 November 2007 (UTC)