Escaping the tech ghetto

More about the foundation's experiment in turning middle-aged and elderly people into wikipedians.

Even if some of us were long-time Wikipedia contributors we learned a lot about Wikipedia within the first week:

• the longer Wikipedians contribute to Wikipedia the more they forget that Wikipedia is a very complex system. Newcomers are overwhelmed by this complexity and often don't know where to start.
• Wikipedia's help pages are confusing. The printed brochure "Das kleine Wikipedia-Einmaleins" we distributed at the opening (see the picture on the right hand; click on the picture to download the PDF) was much more useful as older people prefer printed material to online material.

I think this is a good time to plug my book, How Wikipedia Works