Maybe it's just the circles that I happen to circulate in, but it seems to
me that a very small percentage of Wikipedians tend to be consistently
harsh or toxic, and that small number of people tends to have
disproportionately negative influence on the atmosphere in the community.
Aligned with Jimbo's comments at Wikimania 2014 in London, I do wonder if
their caustic nature rises to the level where they should be excluded from
the community, and if so, on what grounds we would make that exclusion.
Being a relentless critic doesn't necessarily rise to the level of
harassment if it's done broadly rather than directed at a particular
individual or group, but looking at the problem from an HR perspective
rather than a judicial one, I agree that maybe more should be done to
exclude toxic personalities. I wonder, though, how we can do that; our
process for excluding people from the community is more like a judicial
process than like an HR process. Maybe we need more of an HR approach?
Pine
On Tue, Dec 15, 2015 at 3:51 PM, Oliver Keyes <okeyes(a)wikimedia.org> wrote:
We can probably talk about the nature of new page
patrol without
resorting to comparisons to violent, real-world overreactions with
multiple serious injuries.
To be perfectly honest as a new page patroller the biggest issue I've
seen is toxic senior members of the community making the prospect of
patrolling particularly unpleasant. It doesn't do much for patroller
numbers.
On 15 December 2015 at 18:28, Pine W <wiki.pine(a)gmail.com> wrote:
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
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Presentations_at_Cascadia_Wikimedia…
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:SWOT_analysis_of_Wikipedia_in_2015.…
[6]
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Grants:IEG/Motivational_and_educational_vid…
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Oliver Keyes
Count Logula
Wikimedia Foundation
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