Last week George Herbert requested that I update this list on the progress of my test [[User:WereSpielChequers/Newbie treatment]] where I and other volunteers create new accounts which submit new articles to Wikipedia.
The results so far, with 5 editors creating 7 "newbies" who've submitted 9 articles.
Firstly the guarantee that someone would tag your new article for deletion within two minutes. Well six out of nine were tagged for deletion, though with times ranging from one minute after creation to almost an hour; so the good news is that most survived their first two minutes untagged. The bad news is that yes we do have a problem with overenthusiastic speedy tagging, there are various possible solutions to this including http://strategy.wikimedia.org/wiki/Proposal:Speedy_deletion_-_24_hour_pause_...
As for surviving seven days, three have gone, three had to be rescued, and three have survived the week unscathed. Again, not as bad as our critics may think, but yes we have a problem.
Of our newbies, one has received a template welcome, two "welcome warnings" for their unloved offerings, and four have not been welcomed. My own unloved alter ego whose unpatrolled article has yet to be edited by anyone else, still has a redlinked talkpage as does his article. Possible responses to this include http://strategy.wikimedia.org/wiki/Proposal:Welcome_all_useful_new_users,_if...
On the plus side one editor declined a speedy and rescued one of these articles, so I gave them a Barnstar.
WereSpielChequers
Message: 2 Date: Thu, 8 Oct 2009 18:21:58 -0400 From: Gwern Branwen gwern0@gmail.com Subject: Re: [WikiEN-l] Accepting the challenge to create a new article as a newbie and see if it lasts 2 minutes - or 7 days To: English Wikipedia wikien-l@lists.wikimedia.org Message-ID: cbf55b100910081521v1923edd1k5682ed9e7ceb551a@mail.gmail.com Content-Type: text/plain; charset=UTF-8
On Thu, Oct 8, 2009 at 4:55 PM, WereSpielChequers werespielchequers@googlemail.com wrote:
Apologies for reviving a thread from three weeks ago. But the idea that we had degenerated into a newbie biting place where one could "challenge a newbie to create an article on Wikipedia and have that article exist for an entire week. Guaranteed, your article will be marked for ?speedy deletion? within about two minutes of its creation." bugged me, so I thought I'd unscientifically test it.
I made a suggestion at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Requests_for_comment/new_users#Lets_a...
Nobody including myself knows how many articles have so far been created as part of the test, and yes one has already been deleted under the novel speedy deletion criteria of "the wikilinks did not have the proper markup".
But there are at least two other articles that have survived more than 24 hours.
Anyone else who is interested in following the test is welcome to watch http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:WereSpielChequers/Newbie_treatment
Two articles at least should be unveiled in the next few days.
WereSpielChequers
I particularly enjoyed WilliKing's comment:
My bad...I sincerely apologize. If I knew about the "challenge", I would have kept the article. It did have, though, words without proper wikilinks. Willking1979 (talk) 02:32, 6 October 2009 (UTC)
I sympathize with him entirely; if I had known about the cop around the corner, I wouldn't've casually shoved that woman off cliff. In my defense, though, she was ugly.
-- gwern
Message: 3 Date: Thu, 8 Oct 2009 16:04:17 -0700 From: George Herbert george.herbert@gmail.com Subject: Re: [WikiEN-l] Accepting the challenge to create a new article as a newbie and see if it lasts 2 minutes - or 7 days To: English Wikipedia wikien-l@lists.wikimedia.org Message-ID: 38a7bf7c0910081604t551d26fbu2f7f0ea13d434999@mail.gmail.com Content-Type: text/plain; charset=windows-1252
This is very good data in the "how friendly are we to newbies" question.
Thanks for running the test.
Please send another update in a couple of more days at least, I am too busy to follow on-wiki but I want to see more of the results of this.
-george
On Thu, Oct 8, 2009 at 3:21 PM, Gwern Branwen gwern0@gmail.com wrote:
On Thu, Oct 8, 2009 at 4:55 PM, WereSpielChequers werespielchequers@googlemail.com wrote:
Apologies for reviving a thread from three weeks ago. But the idea that we had degenerated into a newbie biting place where one could "challenge a newbie to create an article on Wikipedia and have that article exist for an entire week. Guaranteed, your article will be marked for ?speedy deletion? within about two minutes of its creation." bugged me, so I thought I'd unscientifically test it.
I made a suggestion at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Requests_for_comment/new_users#Lets_a...
Nobody including myself knows how many articles have so far been created as part of the test, and yes one has already been deleted under the novel speedy deletion criteria of "the wikilinks did not have the proper markup".
But there are at least two other articles that have survived more than 24 hours.
Anyone else who is interested in following the test is welcome to watch http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:WereSpielChequers/Newbie_treatment
Two articles at least should be unveiled in the next few days.
WereSpielChequers
I particularly enjoyed WilliKing's comment:
My bad...I sincerely apologize. If I knew about the "challenge", I would have kept the article. It did have, though, words without proper wikilinks. Willking1979 (talk) 02:32, 6 October 2009 (UTC)
I sympathize with him entirely; if I had known about the cop around the corner, I wouldn't've casually shoved that woman off cliff. In my defense, though, she was ugly.
-- gwern
WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
-- -george william herbert george.herbert@gmail.com
On Thu, Oct 15, 2009 at 2:20 AM, WereSpielChequers werespielchequers@googlemail.com wrote:
Last week George Herbert requested that I update this list on the progress of my test [[User:WereSpielChequers/Newbie treatment]] where I and other volunteers create new accounts which submit new articles to Wikipedia.
The results so far, with 5 editors creating 7 "newbies" who've submitted 9 articles.
Firstly the guarantee that someone would tag your new article for deletion within two minutes. Well six out of nine were tagged for deletion, though with times ranging from one minute after creation to almost an hour; so the good news is that most survived their first two minutes untagged. The bad news is that yes we do have a problem with overenthusiastic speedy tagging, there are various possible solutions to this including http://strategy.wikimedia.org/wiki/Proposal:Speedy_deletion_-_24_hour_pause_...
As for surviving seven days, three have gone, three had to be rescued, and three have survived the week unscathed. Again, not as bad as our critics may think, but yes we have a problem.
Of our newbies, one has received a template welcome, two "welcome warnings" for their unloved offerings, and four have not been welcomed. My own unloved alter ego whose unpatrolled article has yet to be edited by anyone else, still has a redlinked talkpage as does his article. Possible responses to this include http://strategy.wikimedia.org/wiki/Proposal:Welcome_all_useful_new_users,_if...
On the plus side one editor declined a speedy and rescued one of these articles, so I gave them a Barnstar.
WereSpielChequers
Message: 2 Date: Thu, 8 Oct 2009 18:21:58 -0400 From: Gwern Branwen gwern0@gmail.com Subject: Re: [WikiEN-l] Accepting the challenge to create a new article as a newbie and see if it lasts 2 minutes - or 7 days To: English Wikipedia wikien-l@lists.wikimedia.org Message-ID: cbf55b100910081521v1923edd1k5682ed9e7ceb551a@mail.gmail.com Content-Type: text/plain; charset=UTF-8
On Thu, Oct 8, 2009 at 4:55 PM, WereSpielChequers werespielchequers@googlemail.com wrote:
Apologies for reviving a thread from three weeks ago. But the idea that we had degenerated into a newbie biting place where one could "challenge a newbie to create an article on Wikipedia and have that article exist for an entire week. Guaranteed, your article will be marked for ?speedy deletion? within about two minutes of its creation." bugged me, so I thought I'd unscientifically test it.
I made a suggestion at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Requests_for_comment/new_users#Lets_a...
Nobody including myself knows how many articles have so far been created as part of the test, and yes one has already been deleted under the novel speedy deletion criteria of "the wikilinks did not have the proper markup".
But there are at least two other articles that have survived more than 24 hours.
Anyone else who is interested in following the test is welcome to watch http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:WereSpielChequers/Newbie_treatment
Two articles at least should be unveiled in the next few days.
WereSpielChequers
I particularly enjoyed WilliKing's comment:
My bad...I sincerely apologize. If I knew about the "challenge", I would have kept the article. It did have, though, words without proper wikilinks. Willking1979 (talk) 02:32, 6 October 2009 (UTC)
I sympathize with him entirely; if I had known about the cop around the corner, I wouldn't've casually shoved that woman off cliff. In my defense, though, she was ugly.
-- gwern
Message: 3 Date: Thu, 8 Oct 2009 16:04:17 -0700 From: George Herbert george.herbert@gmail.com Subject: Re: [WikiEN-l] Accepting the challenge to create a new article as a newbie and see if it lasts 2 minutes - or 7 days To: English Wikipedia wikien-l@lists.wikimedia.org Message-ID: 38a7bf7c0910081604t551d26fbu2f7f0ea13d434999@mail.gmail.com Content-Type: text/plain; charset=windows-1252
This is very good data in the "how friendly are we to newbies" question.
Thanks for running the test.
Please send another update in a couple of more days at least, I am too busy to follow on-wiki but I want to see more of the results of this.
-george
On Thu, Oct 8, 2009 at 3:21 PM, Gwern Branwen gwern0@gmail.com wrote:
On Thu, Oct 8, 2009 at 4:55 PM, WereSpielChequers werespielchequers@googlemail.com wrote:
Apologies for reviving a thread from three weeks ago. But the idea that we had degenerated into a newbie biting place where one could "challenge a newbie to create an article on Wikipedia and have that article exist for an entire week. Guaranteed, your article will be marked for ?speedy deletion? within about two minutes of its creation." bugged me, so I thought I'd unscientifically test it.
I made a suggestion at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Requests_for_comment/new_users#Lets_a...
Nobody including myself knows how many articles have so far been created as part of the test, and yes one has already been deleted under the novel speedy deletion criteria of "the wikilinks did not have the proper markup".
But there are at least two other articles that have survived more than 24 hours.
Anyone else who is interested in following the test is welcome to watch http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:WereSpielChequers/Newbie_treatment
Two articles at least should be unveiled in the next few days.
WereSpielChequers
I particularly enjoyed WilliKing's comment:
My bad...I sincerely apologize. If I knew about the "challenge", I would have kept the article. It did have, though, words without proper wikilinks. Willking1979 (talk) 02:32, 6 October 2009 (UTC)
I sympathize with him entirely; if I had known about the cop around the corner, I wouldn't've casually shoved that woman off cliff. In my defense, though, she was ugly.
-- gwern
WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
-- -george william herbert george.herbert@gmail.com
WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
Thank you for the update.
I want to personally look at the articles and responses in more depth before I comment more, but this has been exceptionally valuable research.
On Fri, Oct 16, 2009 at 4:55 AM, George Herbert george.herbert@gmail.com wrote:
I want to personally look at the articles and responses in more depth before I comment more, but this has been exceptionally valuable research.
Yes, can you please post the usernames and the articles that were created? If some were speedied, do you have the original text? Obviously we shouldn't be having an "omg rampant speedyism" debate if the articles were actually speedyable...
Steve
WereSpielChequers wrote:
On the plus side one editor declined a speedy and rescued one of these articles, so I gave them a Barnstar.
You are missing a very important barnstar -- the trout. A certain requirement for all of the speedy deleters in this case.
George Herbert wrote:
I want to personally look at the articles and responses in more depth before I comment more, but this has been exceptionally valuable research.
George, top-posting is actually easier to read in the archive when the quoted text is three pages long.
-Stevertigo