Wikipedia

Wikipedia is one of the wonders of the Internet. Containing over 20 million encyclopedia style articles, Wikipedia has over 100,000 active contributors and is visited by tens of millions of readers each month. If you visit the “stamp collecting” and “philately” entries on Wikipedia  you will see how cursory and elementary the articles are. For the most part the discussions of the origins of collecting or postal history or the various collecting paradigms that have been developed are good. But largely they never go quite far enough. They seem to be written by contributors with a good but not deep knowledge of their subject. Perhaps this is because most Wikipedia contributors tend to be younger, as you need to be quite computer literate to figure out how to contribute (and most expert philatelists are older). Too, contributors must provide references for every factual assertion and this is off putting to many who know things but don’t want to go running to our reference sources to figure out where we know it from. After spending some time reading the Wikipedia entries on our hobby, it is clear that an enormous amount of work needs to be done to explain the history and depth of philately to the world at large and that this work has not yet been done. It would seem a worthy APS project to assemble a Wikipedia group devoted to enhancing the articles about our hobby on the world’s encyclopedia. After all, Wikipedia is the entry portal through which enormous numbers of new collectors hear about our hobby. Well written, informative and enticing articles on Wikipedia can do far more to recruit new collectors than just about anything else the philatelic community can do.