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Raleigh, NC
Ruth Suehle is the community leadership manager for Red Hat's Open Source and Standards team. She's co-author of Raspberry Pi Hacks (O'Reilly, December 2013) and a senior editor at GeekMom, a site for those who find their joy in both geekery and parenting. She's a maker at heart who is often behind a sewing machine creating costumes, rolling fondant for an excessively large cake, or looking for the next great DIY project.
Authored Comments
I am a Wikipedia cynic. All I can think when I watch these people is, "Yeah, you look so nice, but I know you're going to delete anything as soon as I write it."
There's a massive barrier to entry to joining the Wikipedia community, and it's other Wikipedians. My experience says that even if you follow all of the rules--contribute sourced information, organized correctly on the page, grammatically correct, etc., chances are good that it will be deleted pretty quickly by the page's "owners" within an hour, possibly without even having been read first. A few years ago, I also heard Elonka Dunin, who is (among many, many other interesting things) a Wikipedia administrator, give a talk about the Wikipedia hierarchy, which I suspect most non-Wikipedians are completely unaware of.
On the one hand, I expect this all helps with the accuracy of Wikipedia. On the other, making it so difficult for newcomers to get involved acts against the openness philosophy and discourages growth of the contributor base.
Thanks for commenting, Jason. I'm glad to hear you're open to, well, more openness. :-) And we're fans of Drupal here--this site runs on it as well.