Wikipedia:WikiProject Military history/News/August 2013/Op-ed
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Productivity secrets of an absurdly prolific contributor |
Gold Award |
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Sturmvogel_66 representing Colorado |
In the six years that I've been on Wiki I have taken a very large number of articles to Good article status and above. I thought that I might share some of the techniques that I used to maximize my productivity despite being quite lazy and often unmotivated. In no particular order:
- I find that creating links to other Wiki articles is very time consuming because the types of articles that I like to write use a lot of jargon that I usually need to disambiguate from more common usages. So I've built a page in a text editor program (I like Textwrangler on my Mac, but Windows users can use Notepad) that contains many of the terms that I often use, properly formatted for Wiki. Using the pipe trick can help to reduce your typing as well.
- Develop a standard format for similar articles. I've been writing ship articles these last few years and I use a standard layout for all of them. After filling out the infobox and adding references, I generally format the article into two main sections, Design and description and Career. In the first section I discuss the reasons why the ship was designed and/or developed and then go on to describe the ship in general terms, then cover propulsion, armament and armor in that sequence. I usually put construction details in the career section and I almost always follow a chronological sequence in its career to minimize confusion (and to make things easier for myself).
- To quote Tom Lehrer, "Plagarize, Plagarize, Plagarize!". Ship articles are particularly amenable to plagarizing yourself as you can use the same descriptive text for all of the ships in a particular class. Furthermore you can copy that same text over to a different ship article and then make any necessary changes.
- I find that my motivation to work on articles fluctuates over time. I help keep my interest up and give myself a little extra motivation by providing an achievable target to aim at, usually in the form of a good topic of related articles. Since the minimum number of articles to create a topic is only three, it's not too hard to accomplish. This does require that all the individual articles be assessed as good articles, but since I normally write to that standard anyway, that's not a big deal. I have a whole page of topic boxes that I use to track my progress and to help me decide what to work on next as I like to mix up the subjects that I'm working on to prevent burnout. It's very efficient to work on related articles one after another, but I find that my interest in finishing off the last few disappears rather quickly as they become a chore rather than a pleasure. Best to indulge my Attention Deficit Disorder and work on whatever grabs my interest.
- I find that qualifying an article for the Did you know? (DYK) section of the front page is also a motivator. The main downside is that it has a five-day limit in which the article has to be essentially complete. That can be a problem, but I've taken to creating stub articles with complete infoboxes and reference sections and only a single sentence of text in the main body. That makes it very easy to meet the 5x expansion requirement for DYK whenever I decide to resume working on the article. This has the added virtue of creating the skeleton of the article to my standards if someone else starts work on it before I get back to it. You can also create the article in userspace before moving it to mainspace as the five-day limit doesn't start until it's in mainspace.
- Participation in article-creation contests like the WikiCup is another way to motivate myself. While I'm not hugely competitive, I find that these contests can provide enough of a push to get me to work on an article when I'm otherwise disinclined to spend the time and effort.
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