On 2/6/2011 1:19 PM, Brandon Harris wrote:
On 2/6/11 10:10 AM, Fred Bauder wrote:
Cracking down on hasty deleters and new-page patrolers is productive of much heat and little light. It amounts to a lot of heavy lifting for very little outcome.
I think many women have enough patience or insight to stick around long enough to get though preliminary unpleasantness, survive the systemic problems we have, and make substantial contributions to content and policy, particularly if there is social support.
I don't think this is a wise perspective.
The treatment that new users receive is very clearly one of the reasons why they don't stick around. Simply saying "oh, they'll get over it in time" doesn't do anything to help solve the problem, it only perpetuates it.
Yeah, I'm not the only person on this mailing list who has stated that I stopped editing in the beginning due to this issue. The main reason that I decided to start editing again was because I was a member of a team, a team that stands by one another when an outsider stirs the pot. :)
And yes, that's from social support, but, new editors rarely have that.
Sarah
I speak from experience here as a former arbitrator, heavy-handed enforcement campaigns are bad news.
We need to value all new editors and support them; the practical question is how to notice when a new editor is getting into this kind of trouble. Editing as a group is a way of accomplishing that as you can communicate between yourselves when this kind of nonsense starts.
On BatMUD, where I wasted a few years, they finally created a special group of experienced players called Newbie Helpers; there has always been a newbie channel and a FAQ on Getting Started. We might think about some way to facilitate communication. On a MUD a channel is pretty much instant messaging; we might actually use a telnet connection to set up a "talker" and combine it with our software. Kind of like IRC but I've never had much patience with all the coding involved with that.
Conversation on a MUD channel is much simpler:
Newbie: Help the big rabbit is killing me! Newbie: Run!
Fred