Talk:Wikipedia Surgery

This is an interesting idea. It isn't reasonable to expect people to sit through a one hour lecture in order to get someone to amend their Greatuncle's Wikipedia Article to say that he died in 1986. But it is reasonable to ask people to bring documentary evidence with them - such as a newclipping from their local newpaper from 1986 with an obituary for their Great Uncle. I'm also concerned that if you operate three of these a year around the country it really doesn't give a very quick way to fix things. Perhaps one way to build on this would be to broaden the remit, and include things like "If you have a better photo of your village, or a better photo of any other Wikipedia subject, bring it along on a memory stick and we will help you upload it." WereSpielChequers (talk) 12:23, 5 October 2012 (UTC)

I think the "lecture" is somewhat important because a big portion of OTRS work consists of saying "Hi, sorry we can't do that because of reliable sources policy", followed by an explanation. If you say "bring documentary evidence", even if you are quite specific, I guarantee they will do things like bring along a birth certificate :)

I agree that forcing them to sit through a lecture is not optimal, it would certainly be optional!

Certainly we could consider widening the scope to other activities. --ErrantX (talk) 14:42, 5 October 2012 (UTC)

This is certainly an interesting idea, and it might be worth trying to see how well it works, but I don't think it would deal with the problem of people not wanting to have to jump through hoops to get problems fixed. Dedicating a day to going to something like this is just a different hoop for them to jump through. --Tango (talk) 17:28, 6 October 2012 (UTC)

I think the suggestion is half a day, and this is an alternative hoop for people to jump through - OTRS will still exist. There may be a niche for this to fit into, I'm sure some people will very happily attend this sort of thing and bring a scrapbook full of newspaper articles that they don't know how to send by email. WereSpielChequers (talk) 14:08, 9 October 2012 (UTC)