[WikiEN-l] How friendly are we to Newbies? Create an article as a newbie challenge now paused

[George Herbert]

On Mon, Nov 16, 2009 at 3:14 PM, David Gerard <dgerard at gmail.com> wrote:
> 2009/11/16 Ryan Delaney <ryan.delaney at gmail.com>:
>
>> No argument there. What's important about this case is that (as it has been
>> explained to me, anyway) someone was deliberately writing a bad article with
>> the express intention of being a pain in the ass. That's gaming the system
>> in a disruptive way to make some kind of political point, and we generally
>> frown on that for obvious reasons.
>
>
> Yes, that's just being silly. A test is to write an article as if
> you're not a known experienced editor, but still try to do a
> reasonable job on it.


I partially disagree.

Writing a "bad article" - unreferenced, poor grammar, etc - on a
subject which is not yet covered and yet which clearly meets our
notability and topic requirements and whose notability and validity
can be easily established with web searches - is an excellent
experiment.

Part of the challenge here is not just "What if a nobody comes along
and creates an ok article".

Part of the challenge is whether we handle new clueless nobodies well,
when they have a good article idea but no idea how Wikipedia does
things, yet.  That's what doing a bad-ish article tests.

Writing an intentionally bad article in the "there's no reason to have
an article on this" isn't particularly good - we can find enough of
those in new page patrol logs and CSD deletion logs - spam, opinion
pieces, vandalism, random graffiti, BLPs of schoolchildren, etc.
without doing experiments, I think, unless we think we need some
control cases done by the same testers.

Keep in mind that this was a very ad-hoc experiment, and by normal
protocols horribly run.  That said, it's also horribly important, and
has (despite the flaws) given some extremely important data.



-- 
-george william herbert
george.herbert at gmail.com