On 1/5/06, Stan Shebs shebs@apple.com wrote:
You're very generous with other people's time! We have "contributors" with reading-comprehension problems, for whom pointing at a page does no good, we have some who are simply not smart enough to be of any help, we have some whose social skills are too limited even to manage basic spelling fixes without driving everybody else up the wall.
No one's forcing anyone to do anything. If you don't feel like explaining policy to a newbie, you don't have to. Of course, good policy should be rather obvious anyway.
While I'm generally in favor of broad latitude for user behavior, there are some people who are simply net negatives, and it is in our interest to get them to go away. I've come to steer away from most of that kind of debating, because the encyclopedia benefits more from me applying myself in areas where I have specialized skills, knowledge, and reference sources. But sooner or later we're going to have to develop better ways to filter out the unhelpful.
Stan
You could always turn Wikipedia into an exclusive club that people can only get into if they can prove themselves worthy. Along the same lines, you could eliminate user pages for non-admins altogether. But apparently there are a lot of Wikipedians (maybe even most), that would be opposed to that. Let them deal with the unhelpful.
Anthony