Yes, good people do things properly. But as one person said to me once, "you're the only person here who actually tried to help." -- and there were 4 or 5 conventional notices of help on that page. She wanted some simple practical advice about exactly what was best to do to save the article. I'm not the only person, and neither are you. The secret which we both use is to never use copy and paste, or a template. But, as you say, most people are trained to interpret offers of assistance as the conventional "Please let us know if t here is anything more that we can do to help" at the bottom of all negative form letters. Just as some people at WP end their negative warnings with "Have a good day!"
Not to mention that the effective use of a warning list is limited to those who are on WP essentially full time. Look at the time between placing a speedy tag and a the deletion of the article. Look at even AfD and see the decreasing percentage that run the full five days.
On Feb 8, 2008 9:32 AM, Amir E. Aharoni amir.aharoni@gmail.com wrote:
On 08/02/2008, David Goodman dgoodmanny@gmail.com wrote:
Even more amazingly, requiring notice has been rejected repeatedly by the long-term experienced users: "they should be using their watchlists" ;
Yes, they should. It took me a while to learn about Categories, Images and Templates, but i grasped the Watchlist very quickly.
"if people had to notify them, AfD deletions would go slower--they might protest more often".
That's bad. Let them protest. It's good to see that people care.
I had to deal with arguments and protests over deletions. These protesters are usually not stupid at all, even though they often don't understand our rejection of original research. But i don't mind replying to them personally in each case: every time i do it, it makes me understand even better why NOR is a good thing.
One thing nobody could say about WP, is that we are friendly to newcomers. it's the usenet heritage. At most we give them a list of 30 long help pages to read, but not a single personal word.
Not all of us: I listed myself as "willing to adopt" new users. I receive adoption requests every couple of days and stopped counting my adoptees a long time ago. Many of them never return after their initial request, but a few of them keep asking me questions. The questions are all quite the same, but i always give a full personal reply and add a link to a help or policy "for more info ... and feel free to ask me again if you don't understand anything". I never use copy n' paste in these conversations.
Some of my adoptees have already become good contributors...
-- Amir Elisha Aharoni
English - http://aharoni.wordpress.com Hebrew - http://haharoni.wordpress.com
"We're living in pieces, I want to live in peace." - T. Moore
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