About Me
editNitin Gadia
My website [1]
I'm interested in everything, more or less.
On Wikipedia
editWikipedia is immensely empowering. I feel that as knowledge is power, if you ever want to inform people, the first thing you should do is edit a Wikipedia article. Wikipedia has provided a key foundation of the work I do and the way I see the age we live in. I find it to be a powerful institution that has sound policies and governance. It has the right mix of bottom-up governance and the ability to mediate and arbitrate on decisions. It's almost a reflection on governance in general.
I have built on the inspiration of Wikipedia to help create MapStory [2], a "Wikipedia of mapping" that allows anyone to create any map, which can show change over time. MapStory is in development, but a major piece will happen when MapStory is fully able to be integrated or embedded into Wikipedia.
I've been editing Wikipedia articles since 2008. Am active in and out.
I have been to Wikimania in DC in 2012.
Ideas to Improve Wikipedia
editI also feel that Wikipedia has very large shortcomings. It is taking too long for Wikipedia to develop basic features, especially the Visual Editor. Almost no one likes text editing more than a visual editor. I know this because at Wikimania, someone did a talk featuring the Visual Editor, and asked everyone if they would prefer a visual editor, and almost everyone raised their hand, while only one person raised their hand when asked if they like the text editor better. This makes editing difficult, and it puts up immense and elitist barrier for people to edit articles. It comes across as being completely uncaring for users. It is not clear to me whether there is fear that there will be a torrent of editing, or that they are having trouble finding resources developing it. On the latter subject, I feel that we in the Wikipedia community act more like a beggar than we need to. There is no reason why money cannot be raised for a particular project when it is needed. It appears that the Foundation wants to stick to an ethic of being minimally involved in running Wikipedia, and money and development and editing being done by the community. This is something I very strongly respect. That is why I think that we as Wikipedians need to go out and get resources for Wikipedia, and not expecting others to do it. That is the spirit of Wikipedia.
So how do we go about this? As far as ideas to improve Wikipedia, I believe that anything from individual projects like the Visual Editor to editing articles en masse can be done by going to foundations and running campaigns using resources like Kickstarter. As long as this is designed well they would not undermine the underlying culture and democracy of Wikipedia, and not overpower volunteers. See my opinion about creating kickstarters for Wikipedia editing, archived from an earlier talk page on the reward board.[3] It also appears to me that the Foundation does not want to pay people to do things