User:Senior Cit

This user account was set up by User:Moriori specifically for a group of senior citizens who are members of SeniorNet in a small New Zealand town.

Like the hundreds of thousands of members of SeniorNet worldwide, (see [1]), they come from all walks of life and experiences and have valuable knowledge they could share in Wikipedia. They are 50 plus, and most are retired people with lots of spare time and little to do.

Moriori hopes to talk to the group soon about Wikipedia to explain its workings (yeah, yeah - blind leading the blind!). The purpose of this page is to provide a place where they as a group can experiment to their hearts content, can initiate an article and collaboratively edit it to become a worthy Wikipedia contribution. That can't be done in the sandbox, and remember, most SeniorNet people are totally new to computers and the internet so they need a private place to make a few boos boos here and there

It is hoped to encourage the group to write its initial article about SeniorNet, and then those who want to contribute to Wikipedia as individuals can create their own user accounts and go to it. If we get only a couple of new editors, that's still a plus. This user account will then be closed.

The following basic information was prepared for the SeniorNet group.

What Wikipedia is....

Wikipedia is a free content encyclopedia written collaboratively by contributors from around the world. The site is a wiki, which means that anyone can edit articles, simply by clicking on the edit this page link that appears at the top of each page.

Wikipedia was started on January 15, 2001 by founders Jimmy Wales, Larry Sanger, and a few enthusiastic English-language collaborators. A bit over three years later, in March, 2004, there were 6,000 active contributors working on 600,000 articles in 50 languages. As of today, there are 6,817,724 articles in English; every day hundreds of thousands of visitors from around the world make tens of thousands of edits and create thousands of new articles.

All text in Wikipedia, and most images and other content, is covered by the GNU Free Documentation License (GFDL). Contributions remain the property of their creators BUT anyone may lift information from Wikipedia and distribute it. And remember, anything you contribute can be rehashed for better or worse by other editors, so there can be disappointments. Basically, all but a few people here are working to make Wiki a better encyclopedia, so if you submit a well written article it won't be edited harshly, if at all.

What Wikipedia is heading for

Wikipedia aims to create a reliable and free encyclopedia, indeed, the largest encyclopedia in history, in both breadth and depth. It has made a superb start.

Who are the contributors?

Don't know. There are thousands of them from all corners of the world. However, newcomers need to know that a lot of the very enthusiastic and able editors here are young, highly educated compugeeks. Some of the interaction between editors here is in compuspeak which may be unfathomable to those who never had computing as a core subject at school. The upside is that some older editors are often better communicators, and can identify and fix grammar or whatever in articles.

How many Kiwis are involved?

Don't know. Probably over a hundred or so. There is a list of Kiwis but it only includes 40 people who voluntarily put their names there. Why have some people not bothered? Maybe because many people are happy with anonymity, especially those with previous experience of bulletin boards, newsgroups, IRC etc. (which is a reason so many people use pseudonyms as well).

Some basics for new contributors

• Policies and guidelines for contributors
• When all else fails, read the instructions. A guide to editing pages
• Further general help with editing, and with navigating the site.
• Reference desk, for requesting help or research information.
• The village pump, good place for meeting other Wikipedians
• Ready to join the project ? Then create an account. It's easy.

Opinions and objections

Pros and cons of Wikipedia and comments on objections.

The Wikipedia FAQ?

Yep, it's at FAQ.

Image demos

• Wrote this article and added image obtained from RNZAF and used with permission.

• Wrote this article about Kerikeri and included my own photo specifically taken for Wikipedia.

• Illustrated this existing article by adding an image, my own photo