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@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@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
> retention via improved newbie experiences at NPP and/or AFC would be most
> welcome.
>
> Pine
>
> [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Community_policing
> [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Police_reform_in_the_United_States
> [3]
> https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Presentations_at_Cascadia_Wikimedians_and_Seattle_TA3M_meetup,_December_2015.jpg
> [4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Articles_for_creation
> [5]
> https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:SWOT_analysis_of_Wikipedia_in_2015.jpg
> [6]
> https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Grants:IEG/Motivational_and_educational_video_to_introduce_Wikimedia
>
>

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>

--
Oliver Keyes
Count Logula
Wikimedia Foundation

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