I'm appreciative that we're having this conversation - not in the sense
that I'm happy with the status quo, but I'm glad that some of us are
continuing to work on our persistent difficulties with contributor
retention, civility, and diversity.
I've spent several hours on ENWP recently, and I've been surprised by the
willingness of people to revert good-faith edits, sometimes with blunt
commentary or with no explanation. I can understand how a newbie who
experienced even one of these incidents would find it to be unpleasant,
intimidating, or discouraging. Based on these experiences, I've decided
that I should coach newbies to avoid taking reversions personally if their
original contributions were in good faith.
I agree with Jonathan Morgan that WP:NOTSOCIAL can be overused.
Kerry, I appreciate your suggestions about about cultural change. I can
think of two ways to influence culture on English Wikipedia in large-scale
ways.
1. I think that there should be more and higher-quality training and
continuing education for administrators in topics like policies, conflict
resolution, communications skills, legal issues, and setting good examples.
I think that these trainings would be one way through which cultural change
could gradually happen over time. For what it's worth, I think that there
are many excellent administrators who do a lot of good work (which can be
tedious and/or stressful) with little appreciation. Also, my impression is
that ENWP Arbcom has become more willing over the years to remove admin
privileges from admins who misuse their tools. I recall having a discussion
awhile back with Rosie on the topic of training for administrators, and I'm
adding her to this email chain as an invitation for her to participate in
this discussion. I think that offering training to administrators could be
helpful in facilitating changes to ENWP culture.
2. I think that I can encourage civil participation in ENWP in the context
of my training project
<https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Grants:Project/Rapid/Pine/Continuation_of_educational_video_and_website_project>
that I'm hoping that WMF will continue to fund. ENWP is a complex and
sometimes emotionally difficult environment, and I'm trying to set a tone
in the online training materials that is encouraging. I hope to teach
newbies about the goals of Wikipedia as well as policies, how to use tools,
and Wikipedia culture. I am hopeful that the online training materials will
improve the confidence of new contributors, improve the retention of new
contributors, and help new editors to increase the quality and quantity of
their contributions. I hope that early portions of the project will be well
received and that, over time and if the project is successful as it
incrementally increases in scale and reach, that it will influence the
overall culture of ENWP to be more civil.
Regards,
Pine
(
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Pine )