In response to Denni and Christopher,
I have been in my company's mentoring program for over two years, providing guidance to high school students at LaGuardia High School, which prepares public high school students for professional careers in dance, music or drama (the movie and TV series Fame both dramatized student life there).
Now in it's 14th year, it is the longest running and most successful of my company's volunteer programs.
The key is sponsorship and organization.
First of all, New York City _has_ a mentoring program for its schools. There are mentoring coordinators both at my company, and at the local high school. We organizers all meet each other at least three times a year.
At Wikipedia, I used to follow newbies around and offer them help, but then I got swept up in Jimbo's proposal to have a Mediation Committee and an Arbitration Committee. I agreed to serve as a mediator, both on the official (appointed) committee and later in Alex's grassroots (elected) Member Advocate project.
These things didn't bear much fruit, because they are "courts of last resort". Advocacy, mediation, arbitration -- these are all legal mechanisms by which we turn the gears of justice.
Wouldn't it be better to plant seeds? And water them? And give them sunlight and fresh air? (That is, guidance and praise and encouragement?)
My response to the Six Month Experiment of having committees is that it takes a lot of the work load off of Jimbo's shoulders and that it performs a necessary task rather well. But it is not sufficient, in and of itself, to provide the nurturing and nourishment needed for Wikipedia to grow to full flower.
We need something more, like a Mentoring System.
Ed Poor, aka Uncle Ed
--- "Poor, Edmund W" Edmund.W.Poor@abc.com wrote:
Wouldn't it be better to plant seeds? And water them? And give them sunlight and fresh air? (That is, guidance and praise and encouragement?)
yes, of course.
My response to the Six Month Experiment of having committees is that it takes a lot of the work load off of Jimbo's shoulders and that it performs a necessary task rather well. But it is not sufficient, in and of itself, to provide the nurturing and nourishment needed for Wikipedia to grow to full flower.
Agreed.
We need something more, like a Mentoring System.
Also agreed, but it needs to be informal. People don't need to be admins to be mentors. Also, it needs to be completely voluntary. Offer help on talk pages, offer help on personal pages, etc.
I wonder to what extent it sould be possible to allow for system messages, to be seen by the person the next time they refresh... This would be more like a slow im, with no history being kept, but rather an informal communication. This way, next to the anon's IP, there could be a "send text message" which would appear the next time the user requested a W page.
Just kicking up dirt as usual.
You know, the occasional "nice work" and "wow, thanks for fixing my typo" go a long way to encourage people.
===== Chris Mahan 818.943.1850 cell chris_mahan@yahoo.com chris.mahan@gmail.com http://www.christophermahan.com/
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I wonder to what extent it sould be possible to allow for system messages, to be seen by the person the next time they refresh... This would be more like a slow im, with no history being kept, but rather an informal communication. This way, next to the anon's IP, there could be a "send text message" which would appear the next time the user requested a W page.
We already have it: Edit the User_talk page of a user, even one only known by an IP address; the message "You have new messages" will appear on their screen until they follow the link. It is indeed very encouraging as a new user (I must start doing it more myself...) :)
--- Rowan Collins rowan.collins@gmail.com wrote:
We already have it: Edit the User_talk page of a user, even one only known by an IP address; the message "You have new messages" will appear on their screen until they follow the link. It is indeed very encouraging as a new user (I must start doing it more myself...) :)
Well, i was thinking of putting the message itself. Few newbies will click on "You have a new message" because that sounds like spam.
===== Chris Mahan 818.943.1850 cell chris_mahan@yahoo.com chris.mahan@gmail.com http://www.christophermahan.com/
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Christopher Mahan wrote:
--- Rowan Collins rowan.collins@gmail.com wrote:
We already have it: Edit the User_talk page of a user, even one only known by an IP address; the message "You have new messages" will appear on their screen until they follow the link. It is indeed very encouraging as a new user (I must start doing it more myself...) :)
Well, i was thinking of putting the message itself. Few newbies will click on "You have a new message" because that sounds like spam.
Maybe not spam, but many adverts on the Internet say something like "You have new messages" to get naïve people to click on them.
I generally quite like the idea, and I think it would have a lot of very useful and productive uses. However, I would very much like to see a "message log" - maybe something like [[User:Timwi/Received messages]] and [[User:Timwi/Sent messages]]. Of course, those should be wiki-editable, so the user can manually delete them or move them to an archive page if they think it's getting too long.
Timwi
Timwi wrote:
Christopher Mahan wrote:
--- Rowan Collins rowan.collins@gmail.com wrote:
We already have it: Edit the User_talk page of a user, even one only known by an IP address; the message "You have new messages" will appear on their screen until they follow the link. It is indeed very encouraging as a new user (I must start doing it more myself...) :)
Well, i was thinking of putting the message itself. Few newbies will click on "You have a new message" because that sounds like spam.
Maybe not spam, but many adverts on the Internet say something like "You have new messages" to get naïve people to click on them.
I generally quite like the idea, and I think it would have a lot of very useful and productive uses. However, I would very much like to see a "message log" - maybe something like [[User:Timwi/Received messages]] and [[User:Timwi/Sent messages]]. Of course, those should be wiki-editable, so the user can manually delete them or move them to an archive page if they think it's getting too long.
Timwi
And what about "User:Timwi wrote you a message" instead of "You have new messages"
It removes anonymity, sounds less like spam and is more informative (requires probably a little tech tweak I suppose though :-))
ant
On Thu, 1 Jul 2004, Rowan Collins wrote:
I wonder to what extent it sould be possible to allow for system messages, to be seen by the person the next time they refresh... This would be more like a slow im, with no history being kept, but rather an informal communication. This way, next to the anon's IP, there could be a "send text message" which would appear the next time the user requested a W page.
We already have it: Edit the User_talk page of a user, even one only known by an IP address; the message "You have new messages" will appear on their screen until they follow the link. It is indeed very encouraging as a new user (I must start doing it more myself...) :)
Just as something for all to think about, for the last couple of months, I've been making edits to WP from work without logging in. I'm not adding anything controversial thru my "sock puppet" -- unless fixing typos & bad grammar is considered insidiously pushing a POV -- & I would rather not draw my employer's attention to my online activities between 8:00 & 5:00 (after all, I should be working ;-).
However, I just noticed today that I've managed to make something like 70 edits from a single IP address, & no one's seemed to notice. Not that I care, but one has to wonder how many more anonymous contributors are quietly working away on a regular basis, adding positively to Wikipedia without anyone noticing.
I guess it's true what they say about squeaky wheels.
Geoff
--- Geoff Burling llywrch@agora.rdrop.com wrote:
Just as something for all to think about, for the last couple of months, I've been making edits to WP from work without logging in. I'm not adding anything controversial thru my "sock puppet" -- unless fixing typos & bad grammar is considered insidiously pushing a POV -- & I would rather not draw my employer's attention to my online activities between 8:00 & 5:00 (after all, I should be working ;-).
<humor> You insidious POV pusher!!! Ohhh, the Irony! SockPuppetry at its finest!!! Plus, getting paid while doing it... </humor>
However, I just noticed today that I've managed to make something like 70 edits from a single IP address, & no one's seemed to notice. Not that I care, but one has to wonder how many more anonymous contributors are quietly working away on a regular basis, adding positively to Wikipedia without anyone noticing.
Your point is well taken. I imagine people have many reasons not to log in at times, from fear of the Dreaded Year-End Employee Evaluation, to fear of governmental retribution.
Effectively, anons cannot be assumed to be newbies.
===== Chris Mahan 818.943.1850 cell chris_mahan@yahoo.com chris.mahan@gmail.com http://www.christophermahan.com/
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--- Geoff Burling llywrch@agora.rdrop.com wrote:
Just as something for all to think about, for the last couple of months, I've been making edits to WP from work without logging in. I'm not adding anything controversial thru my "sock puppet" -- unless fixing typos & bad grammar is considered insidiously pushing a POV -- & I would rather not draw my employer's attention to my online activities between 8:00 & 5:00 (after all, I should be working ;-).
If you are editing from work then your employer's IP address (which is probably assigned just to your work computer) will be displayed. *That* makes you much less anonymous. I see nothing wrong with having a separate account for this type or thing so long as you don't double vote, agree with yourself on talk pages, or use it in an edit war.
However, I just noticed today that I've managed to make something like 70 edits from a single IP address, & no one's seemed to notice. Not that I care, but one has to wonder how many more anonymous contributors are quietly working away on a regular basis, adding positively to Wikipedia without anyone noticing.
Lots (especially small copyedits and adding interlanguage links). But most of our vandalism and other newbie behavior also comes from IP addresses, meaning people on RC patrol have to check *each* one (lots of duplicated effort). A unified log-in system will cut down on the proportion of good anon edits vs bad simply by displaying user name's of people who are adding interlanguage links.
But what we really need is a way to share the workload by excluding or graying out and reducing the font size of edits in a special RC once they have been viewed more than x times (3 perhaps) by a certain group of users (a preference choice between admins or non-newbie logged-in users would be nice, for example). To be maximally useful, this would have to be applied to the newbie RC that Brion gave a link to and the anon RC as well.
In the long term though, we need a web of trust system where each logged-in user can select the people they trust and even the people whose trust opinions they trust - thus trusting by proxy. See http://mail.wikipedia.org/pipermail/wikipedia-l/2004-February/014300.html
Somebody created a page in the Wikipedia namespace about this, but I can't find it. :(
But baby steps first since I understand the coding and the computing power needs of such a web of trust would be significant. An enhanced newbie/anon RC, as described above, should work real well in the meantime. As it is, I rarely look at RC anymore since there are way too many edits (20 a minute is not uncommon). I simply get bored reviewing edits since the great majority of them (by volume) are good. But since the volume of edits is so great, even a small percentage of bad edits will result in a lot of damage in an absolute sense. So we need to work on ways to share the workload and reduce duplicated effort - otherwise RC burnout will become more common.
-- mav
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Daniel Mayer wrote:
In the long term though, we need a web of trust system ... Somebody created a page in the Wikipedia namespace about this, but I can't find it. :(
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Trust_network maybe?
Angela.