Ron Ritzman wrote:
On 12/1/07, Guy Chapman aka JzG guy.chapman@spamcop.net wrote:
The problem is not the diagnosis that this was an experienced Wikipedia user; by his own admission, he was. The problem is assumption of bad faith. A lot of assumption of bad faith, liberally distributed.
And I've been guilty of that myself when I've seen AFD nominations on the first edit.
Ever since Usenet was started in the late 70s, old timers lamented that newbies didn't [[RTFM]], didn't read FAQs, and made the same old mistakes over and over again and that experienced users were answering the same questions over and over again. Oh how nice it would be if newbies would step back and learn how things worked before diving in. (or as we like to call it "being bold")
So when did this trend of suspecting editors who don't have a history of "newbie mistakes" of being potential troublemakers start? I can think of several good faith explanations for this...
The "newbie" might be a long time anon editor who finally took common advice and registered an account.
The "newbie" might have experience on other wikis.
The "newbie" might have started out using his real meatspace name, which is common on some classic wikis such as Meatball but thought twice about it due to net.kooks who like to make trouble for people in real life.
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Or the "newbie" may be a sock. But all the others are real possibilities too. The important part is to look for -actual- disruption. If someone's editing non-disruptively, and doing good work right when new, well, there's a very good chance that they're simply a conscientious person who bothered to RTFM, and in the absence of evidence otherwise, we should assume that is the case.