Wikipedia:Making editing easier

This idea is in the brainstorming stage.
Feel free to add new ideas; improve, clarify and classify the ideas already here; and discuss the merits of these ideas on the talk page.

Editing is too hard. You would of course disagree, being an experienced Wikipedia editor, but it is objectively true that a lot of new contributors try to get into editing and run into various problems:

It's tough to edit well after just reading our policies.
The editing interface will happily let you cite Facebook, add unsourced sentences to a BLP, or any number of things that have a good chance of getting reverted.
We don't provide any intermediate steps between making "tiny" edits (copyediting, adding a link) and making "small" edits (adding a sentence and a source, fact-checking), even though the amount of additional policy you need to know is much larger for even those "small" edits.

We should try fixing them. It will be hard, but if we don't make editing more accessible, what's our motto for?

Here are a couple of ideas:

Break editing into smaller pieces (see Enterprisey's talk on this at WikiConference North America 2021, titled "WikiConference 2021 - Red Stage - Day 2 Saturday" start time 2:58:36)
Have the editor give tips and guidance while edits are being made ("I see you're trying to cite Facebook. Is there another source you could cite instead?")

These are not new problems, or new solutions, but people seem to be thinking about them now - so why not do our best.

Discussion on the talk page. (And please feel free to edit this page, too!)

Enterprisey (talk!) 00:13, 17 October 2021 (UTC)[reply]

Hello, I'm an academic librarian trying to support faculty teaching with the Wikipedia Dashboard. As I reviewed WCNA2021's content, your presentation caught me eye. Now I see the video recording link and time stamp to follow up. I appreciate your posts and sharing the thought space. Thank you. JenniferNM (talk) 21:48, 7 June 2023 (UTC)[reply]

See also