Yesterday I gave a presentation about community policing at the Cascadia Wikimedians' end of year event with Seattle TA3M [1][2][3]. An issue that came up for discussion is the extent to which, on English Wikipedia, experienced Wikipedians conducting New Page Patrol create collateral damage during their well-intentioned efforts to protect Wikipedia. Another subject that came up is the need for more human resources for mentoring of newbies who create articles using the Articles for Creation system [4]; one comment I've heard previously is that the length of time between submission and review may be long enough for the newbie to give up and disappear, and another comment that I've heard is that newbies may not understand the instructions that they're given when their article is reviewed. These comments correlate with the community SWOT analysis that was done at WikiConference USA this year, in which "biting the newbies", NPP, and "onboarding/training" were identified as weaknesses [5]
Personally, I would like the interaction of experienced editors with the newbies in places like NPP and AFC to look more like
this and less like
this. Granted, it's hard for a relatively small number of experienced Wikipedians to keep all the junk and vandals out while also mentoring the newbies and avoiding collateral damage, so one strategy could be to increase the quantity of skilled human resources that are devoted to these domains. Any thoughts on how to make that happen?
I am currently especially interested in this topic because of my IEG project which officially starts this week. [6] It would be very helpful to retain the new editors that are trained through these videos, so improving editor retention via improved newbie experiences at NPP and/or AFC would be most welcome.
