This pretty much matches my own
observations.
I think it’s not uncommon for new editors
to first write about something they know well, which often means some level of
conflict of interest. But that doesn’t necessarily mean the person is
writing lies or being completely over-the-top with lavish praise; they can
write quite reasonable content too. And generally new editors don’t know
that CoI editing isn’t welcome. Similarly a lot get blocked for 3 reverts
and get accused of edit warring, but I suspect it is often not the case. I
suspect often they look back at the article and can’t see the edit they
did, so they just do it again because it didn’t “stick”. I am
not convinced they do know that other people are reverting their edits because
I don’t think they know about the article history and the edit summaries
and the user talk pages.
We make some awfully big assumptions that
new editors know what we do; it’s amazing how much stuff in a UI you
mentally filter out. I did a talk about Wikipedia about a year ago for a group
of librarians. They asked for some “tips and tricks” to be included,
so for the first time I systematically scanned the article UI and found cute
little features I never knew were there (even on menus I often used). And of
course the UI changes over time and probably I didn’t notice new things
appear. But not noticing is consistent with “mission focus”, which
has been studied in retail settings. A customer “on a mission” (a
specific transaction that must be dealt with, as opposed to a customer “just
browsing”) is oblivious to promotions until the “mission” is
complete and then becomes aware of their surroundings as they turn to leave the
store (which tells you where to put promotional signs relative to your “mission”
products). I think Wikipedia editing is very mission-focussed (I must fix that
error) so we see nothing but what we want to see on the way in and then have no
“exit screen” to talk to the editor as they leave (unlike a
bricks-and-mortar retailer). It’s hard to communicate with new editors
on-wiki.
I actually think doing a user experience
experiment (ideally with eye tracking) with new users would be very informative.
Given them a “mission” and watch what they look at, what they do
and if they succeed in their task, and whether their edits survives over time
(and if it doesn’t survive, why is that). Indeed, seeing what they do
when their edit disappears would be interesting too.
It is difficult for many of us as
experienced Wikipedians to see Wikipedia as the new contributor sees it. I have
some sense of the new editor experience because I do edit training and it certainly
shows why nothing is fool-proof because fools are so ingenious. It’s
amazing how new editors dive into parts of the UI I’ve never even noticed
and then tie themselves up in knots. They often get so interested in Preview that
they never Save (and then suddenly oops, all their work is gone). They generate
continual edit conflicts (often entirely on their own, I think by going back in
the browser and editing the article in multiple browser windows, leading to
their contributions being smeared across a number of edit windows, none of
which can be saved, or so it seems). And if they are editing in mainspace, they
panic if the article changes in some mysterious way and they don’t know
how they did it (it was another concurrent editor). In fact, if there is one
thing I would like is for the watchlist notification to be slower than normal
when a new editor is involved as having someone alerted by the watchlist coming
and “fixing” things (even if it’s well-meant) puts the new
editor into a spin because they don’t understand what’s going on
(they have no experience with collaborative document editing). And, a perennial
favourite, why is the Reference section empty when they’ve added all
those citations (they don’t expect them to be in-line, they expect them
in the References section). When I look at the constant questions and problems
I have to deal with in edit training, I am not surprised that people trying to
learn on their own give up. Seen through the eyes of the beginner, it’s so
much harder than we realise both technically and collaboratively.
Kerry
Hi, if we are analysing new editors creating new articles then there
are two groups I would expect to see, individual spammers and corporate
spammers.
The individual spammers are the kids writing about the band that will be the
next big thing on the ....... Scene in their town, and their first gig is next
Tuesday provided they can recruit a drummer.
The corporate spammers are writing about some business, but in a style
that makes a corporate flyer look neutral.
There are some implicit assumptions that we make as new page
patrollers, and which some research might help by proving or disproving.
1 people whose first article is an attack page or vandalism will very
rarely turn into productive editors. I have met or heard of three former
vandals who made good editors, there may be more, but I've never heard of a
good editor who started out creating attack pages.
2 people who are paid to spam this site are unlikely to turn into good
editors, but a large proportion of good editors made COI edits among their
early edits. The classic wikipedian is a time rich altruist with Internet
access that they can make personal use of, I'm not seeing much overlap there
with corporate spammers, but people who make COI edits other than about their
employment clearly have personal access to the Internet.
3 neutral point of view is something that new editors need to pick up,
and POV editing amongst a new editor's early contributions is so common that if
a new account writes neutrally they are assumed by some to be sock
puppets or returning editors.
4 we live in a copy paste world, and while a student plagiarising to
try to get better marks is clearly doing so in bad faith, a wikipedia
contributor using copy paste is still a good faith contributor, they just need
to be taught not to use copy and paste. Presumably these people are in Aaron's
group 3, again we have a lot of former copyright violators in the community,
and a lot of new articles get deleted as copyright violations.
My suspicion is that much of our tolerance of vandals is wasted effort.
We would save a lot of time and not lose any good editors by moving from the
current five strikes and you are out approach to vandals to one of blocking any
new editor after their first edit if that edit was blatant vandalism. Copyvio
by contrast is something where we could probably retain more of the editors by
trying different approaches to explaining why their edits had to be rejected
and how they could contribute.
Regards
Sure! You'll find the hand-coded set of users here
within the next half hour (cron job copies datasets over).
- Vandals - Purposefully malicious, out to cause
harm
- Bad-faith - Trying to be funny, not here to help
or harm
- Good-faith - Trying to be productive, but failing
- Golden - Successfully contributing productively