User talk:Andrew Davidson

Invitation
There's a meeting this Friday: Editing team/Community Conversations that will ask some questions about what reviewers/experienced editors want from newcomers. Please join if you are interested. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 21:46, 28 February 2023 (UTC)


 * Thanks for the invitation. I'll try to attend but find it easier to work on such things in writing.  For example, I started some discussion about the relevance of the proposed feature to Sub-Saharan Africans but didn't get any response from the WMF team.
 * As a fresh example of an article created by a new editor which I have been looking at lately, see Windsor Framework.
 * For myself, I have some technical concerns about list-defined references which I prefer but they don't seem well-supported by the Visual Editor. I also prefer the  template to the confusing family of  templates generated by the Visual Editor.  This stuff is plenty confusing for experienced editors, let alone newcomers or Sub-Saharan Africans.
 * Andrew Davidson (talk) 22:22, 28 February 2023 (UTC)
 * Well, you got a reply from me today. That's why I thought you might be interested in this meeting.  :-)   Comments on wiki are good.  Some people, and some subjects, are easier in different formats.  Please use the one that fits you/your subject best.
 * One of the problems I'd love to have you thinking about is the reviewers' unfamiliarity with African sources. It's not much help to cite your source, if the reviewer is going to dismiss it because he's never  heard of the newspapers or magazines in your country and therefore assumes that it is unreliable.  Some basic information, such as independently certified circulation, may also not be available, so it's difficult to say, e.g., which newspaper is the biggest daily.  Is this something worth worrying about?  Or am I worrying about something that is very irritating when it does happen, but which doesn't really happen that often? Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 22:30, 28 February 2023 (UTC)
 * The typical patroller tends to be perfectionist rather than pragmatic and this especially hurts regions like Africa. I'm quite atypical in this respect.  To see this in a relevant discussion, please see Articles for deletion/Railways Africa.  I managed to save that one but am currently forbidden to help in this way now and so this would be exceptional.
 * Andrew Davidson (talk) 23:40, 28 February 2023 (UTC)