[WikiEN-l] Newbie and not-so-newbie biting

[Charles Matthews]

David Goodman wrote:
> " the overwhelming majority of speedily deleted articles deserve to be
> so." -- yes, so they do. But of the people who contribute them, many
> can be encouraged to learn how to write adequate articles and perhaps
> become regular contributors. People who write inadequate unsourced
> promotional articles can be simply rejected, or alternatively  helped
> to write good ones or at least realize and understand  why their topic
> is unsuitable and respect us for our standards.  If one out of ten
> respond favorably to our endeavors, we'll gain 100 good contributors a
> day.
>
> What is required is the patience to deal properly with all of them,
> although only a minority will respond as we would like them to. 
OK, I have been doing a lot of speedy patrol since the topic last came 
up on the list. Initially I was interested to see if one became 
punch-drunk by intensive sessions (not too bad, in fact). I now have 
some feeling for statistics. The one that matters most to me is that 
something of the order of 2% of speedy nominations are just cleanup 
cases (sometimes extreme, but not nonsense as often tagged). Very 
largely these are of Asian origin. I think we might all agree that the 
"market for Wikipedians" in (anglophone) Asia is nothing like saturated.

The next number that occurs to me is that perhaps 5% of speedy deletion 
generate queries. You can see them on my usertalk, where most are better 
than the "Thanks alot jerkoff!" section. They all need an accurate 
answer that is also reasonably helpful. Note that the more polite 
queries tend to be from "spam"-type deletion taggings. The assumption is 
that helping people who really are trying to get their company or 
product a Wikipedia page is part of the job if you patrol CSD. Well, I 
agree with that but it consumes time.

My own feelings are that the "presentist" bias of submissions is a 
terrible skewing of the encyclopedia idea, but I quite see that this 
should never enter my admin work. David's argument seems to need 
shading: an editor who is only really interested in creating a company 
or product article may not become a general-purpose Wikipedian. But of 
course he or she may, and we just don't know. (It's the old argument 
about advertising being mostly wasted money, and the argument is valid 
here.)

Charles