More than funds, what Wikipedia really needs is more good editors. The number of people who regularly edit articles in English Wikipedia hasn't grown substantially in years, while the number of articles has, and editor demographics remains skewed. The foundation itself largely stays away from editing, leaving it to volunteers. While articles that get a lot of attention are often good, it's not hard to find ones with biased and promotional content in less-visited topics, and in other languages.

@JMarkOckerbloom When I tried to do AllatRa (aka Creative society aka pretty crazy UFO-cult) article on wikipedia, it looked like contributions are pretty much not welcome these days. That sect has thousands of members, youtube channels in multiple languages, abused law to harras journalists, but apparently you can't make article about it.

@JMarkOckerbloom @davidgerard I wrote an article a couple of years ago about Rowden White library at Melbourne Uni. It was edited down to a husk and then deleted for being not important enough or something. 75 years of history and a few references in actual books. I never bothered with it again.

@erici @JMarkOckerbloom well that obviously disproves its utility in all cases, well done on your useful post that adds to the world

@JMarkOckerbloom I used to contribute a very large amount to Wikipedia but I stopped because whenever I added subjects on transgender subjects there was nothing in the site policy to prevent transphobia being added (or when I could prevent the transphobia, it meant spending many weeks fighting on talk pages to remove a single word; the "assume good faith" rule gives a lot of power to people acting in bad faith!). It can be a rly unfriendly place, esp if you don't share the majority demographics.

@JMarkOckerbloom Comprehensive list of contemporary media in need of additional good editors:

- all media

@JMarkOckerbloom For what it's worth, I began editing English Wikipedia in the last year or so, and I have had a good experience. Some good things about the new editor experience were:

1) The Wikipedia Adventure, which was immediately presented to me upon registration, was very helpful: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:The_Wikipedia_Adventure

2) The automatic assignment of a mentor / experienced editor to me, as a real person who I can reach out to for questions.

3) The Suggested Edits feed on my homepage. I can select topics I am interested in and the difficulty level of edit I want to do. The Suggested Edits feed then presents me with articles that meet this criteria, which I can click on and start editing. Actually, most of my edits came out of this Suggested Edits feed.

It looks like some of the features I'm talking about only came about in the last 2 years: https://wikimediafoundation.org/news/2022/12/06/new-wikipedia-editor-features-make-it-easy-for-everyone-to-contribute/

It's good that they're here now, though, because they did make my editing experience a lot better.

From my experience, there is indeed a lot of work to do on less visited topics. There are a lot of articles on important topics which are sadly neglected.

#wikipedia