I think, especially given that the Foundation has indicated some
willingness to review their stance regarding such community initiatives,
it's time to revisit the idea of a time-limited trial of restricting
mainspace new page creation to autoconfirmed (and manually confirmed)
editors. The concern there was that it would hurt in attracting new
editors, but I think it'd be immensely helpful in doing so.
The problems indicated on this thread are the exact ones this was intended
to fix, from two angles. The first is that it will help to stem the tide of
true garbage from editors who don't ever intend to be helpful.
Copy-pasters, spammers, and vandals will probably largely be put off by
that requirement rather than bothering to fulfill it. Right now, new page
curators are spending so much time dealing with that crapflood that they
just don't have time to personally engage those whose articles are deleted,
especially when many of them just wanted to post an advertisement or "JOHN
U SUCK LULZ!!!!!" and have no interest in anything else.
The second benefit, though, allows us to take that time saved to focus on
the good-faith but green new editor, who's maybe about to start writing a
page about their friend's garage band. A lot of people have no idea that
type of thing isn't accepted on Wikipedia, and really think they're being
helpful by writing it. They might be the type who's willing to engage a
bit, make a few helpful edits, get some contact with experienced editors,
and realize that their article idea isn't going to fly. That's a great deal
better than getting the "Your article will be nuked from orbit, sorry"
message after they actually did put some time into learning markup and
writing halfway decently. At the very least, they'll be funneled into a
guided process instead, where they hopefully can be given more helpful
feedback.
At the very least, it's worth taking another look at the proposal to try it
and use the trial period to gain useful data on its effects.
On Tue, Aug 26, 2014 at 9:36 AM, Joe Decker <joedecker(a)gmail.com> wrote:
On Tue, Aug 26, 2014 at 5:03 AM, svetlana
<svetlana(a)fastmail.com.au>
wrote:
- Look at newly created pages and collaborate on those with due care and
attention to the new people? That'd be nice. (although imo the drafts
process at English Wikipedia creates an unnecessary hierarchy -- I'd love
to remain a peer and treat the newcomer as a source of wonderful
knowledge,
not as a reviewee or mentoree. For this reason, I
might perhaps only do
this to articles created in main namespace.)
Take a look through WP:PAFC--you'll find lots of new people, and many of
them getting burnt not just by rude comments but by waiting weeks for any
comment at all.
Quite a bit of gatekeeping is necessary there, however. There's more
advertisements and copyvios than serious content coming in through that
channel. I would prefer, however, that AfC head more toward quickly
assessing that, and take on a more collaborative role beyond the most
serious issues.
The gatekeeping function would be a lot easier if the New Pages Feed tool
was modified to work in this arena, but I'm told that there's been
resistance to this idea from engineering. If that's true, and it may not
be, it's a pity.
Our automation for copyvio detection is also pathetic, I can catch more
copyvios by "pick a sentence, Google it" than CorenBot and its kin identify
automatically. Smarter technology there built into the right tool for the
job would be extremely helpful, why are we throwing away the limited
resource of experienced editor's time doing mechanical checks?
- I had written a script [2] which makes draft review things more personal
by not using a template in review comments, but I
couldn't figure out
whom
to approach to get it deployed, or how to prevent
ugly [3] templates on
talk pages of people who submitted a draft for review.
There are a couple folks to talk to, but they all follow WT:AFC, and I'd
start there. But better would be to figure out how to integrate that work
into Special:NewPagesFeed.
However, while all of this is true, I think it's not the biggest problem.
What is? Right now, there are around 2600 new editors waiting for a
friendly word from anyone, and over 1000 of them have been waiting for
three weeks or more.
Endless waiting is not engaging.
Any discussion which attempts to imagine we can help attract and hold new
editors without finding a plausible, constructive solution to that backlog
is missing the forest through the trees. Improved automation
(Special:NewPagesFeed, copyright detection improvements), nicer wording,
and so forth could both make the process more pleasant for experienced
editors to participate in and focusing attention away from serious problems
and onto engagement with editors with serious potential. There is room for
technology to play a significant supporting role.
The whole process of new articles from new editors needs a fresh look as
well.
80% of those new editors are going to fail at what they are trying to
do--their articles will get deleted. In most cases, no amount of help would
have saved their particular article idea. It's a damn shame that
Foundation policy the editing community prevents us from educating them
before they invest quite a bit of work into articles that are doomed to
failure, because I'm pretty sure that "I put a good deal of work into
something over a couple months and it all came to nothing" is a recipe for
whatever the opposite of editor retention is. And we need to face that
fact straight in the eye and come to some sensible way of fixing it.
--Joe
--
Joe Decker
www.joedecker.net
_______________________________________________
Wikimedia-l mailing list, guidelines at:
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines
Wikimedia-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org
Unsubscribe:
https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l,
<mailto:wikimedia-l-request@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe>