I do not want anyone to be denied the opportunity to participate in Wikipedia to its fullest extent, except for three groups of people: the presently banned, anons, and newbies (he said, seeing keyboards around the planet ignite spontaneously).
I have no great sympathy for most of those banned; while mistakes happen, MNH and friends are "away" for good reason. However, anons and newbies have, as a group, no less ability to create havoc.
I come at this as remembering my own first days here - trying to find my way around, trying to navigate what appeared to be darkness, editing a bit here and a bit there until I had the nerve to do my own userpage or submit a small article (can't remember which came first). Yes, I screwed up, not through bad intent, but through ignorance, and posted a couple of articles that got me leapt upon by irate sysops. There are also those "anons" who are only anonymous to us. They know who they're dealing with, and sock puppetry is the least of their bad manners sometimes.
I put forward as a suggestion that newbie and anon postings be screened, similarly to VfDs, for the first few weeks or first few dozens worth of posts. The software is in place to track x number of posts and shunt those not meeting certain criteria through to a fastedit page; while newbies/anons can edit in what seems to be a transparent manner to them, Wikipedia can also monitor for malicious edits, edits made out of ignorance (an article submitted intended as a userpage, for instance, that ends up in article namespace), or edits made similarly (as was my error - editing the article instead of its related talk page). The process is, of course, a tad more complicated than this - there need to be, for instance, some fundamental criteria for holding a page back; unlike VfD, these pages need to proceed to (mostly) articlespace without hindrance. While this does not negate Wikipedia's promise of being able to "edit this page right now", it does add the caveat that the edit may not be immediately visible.
VfD has a big group of vigilant eyes, myself among them. But if I could be of help in screening anon vandals, and helping newbies find the right way, I'd sure rather spend my time on such a page. I propose this to the powers that be for consideration.
Denni
-- "Computers are stupid They only know the answers." -- Pablo Picasso _______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
Visit my Wikipedia user page at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User%3ADwindrim Do you ICQ? I do - 276534369 Magpie
--- Denni dwindrim@shaw.ca wrote:
I do not want anyone to be denied the opportunity to participate in Wikipedia to its fullest extent, except for three groups of people: the presently banned, anons, and newbies (he said, seeing keyboards around the planet ignite spontaneously).
Anon, in general, do not bother me. I am an anon at times. It helps me gauge the response of active sysops. Newbies do not bother me either. They are like teens trying to figure sex out.
I have no great sympathy for most of those banned; while mistakes happen, MNH and friends are "away" for good reason. However, anons and newbies have, as a group, no less ability to create havoc.
People are banned for various reasons. Just because a user is banned does not mean they are worthless. They may have heated up too much in the wrong situation.
I come at this as remembering my own first days here - trying to find my way around, trying to navigate what appeared to be darkness, editing a bit here and a bit there until I had the nerve to do my own userpage or submit a small article (can't remember which came first). Yes, I screwed up, not through bad intent, but through ignorance, and posted a couple of articles that got me leapt upon by irate sysops.
That fumbling around in the dark is hopefully now better addressed. Perhaps there should be a sysop "Guided tour" feature.
There are also those "anons" who are only anonymous to us. They know who they're dealing with, and sock puppetry is the least of their bad manners sometimes.
I put forward as a suggestion that newbie and anon postings be screened...
And who monitors the screeners? And define newbie. And define anon. Someone who comes for ten minutes per month will be a newbie for a very long time. Jimbo may be a anon.
While this does not negate Wikipedia's promise of being able to "edit this page right now", it does add the caveat that the edit may not be immediately visible.
That would not be good. The very idea of transparency and immediacy is highly critical to the W's success.
VfD has a big group of vigilant eyes, myself among them. But if I could be of help in screening anon vandals, and helping newbies find the right way, I'd sure rather spend my time on such a page. I propose this to the powers that be for consideration.
I propose the opposite: that the powers that be not spend any time on this. Rather, newbies need better help.
Heck, publiching a hardcopy Wikipedia Guide would go far to alleviate newbieism.
===== Chris Mahan 818.943.1850 cell chris_mahan@yahoo.com chris.mahan@gmail.com http://www.christophermahan.com/
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On 06/29/04 23:26, Denni wrote:
I put forward as a suggestion that newbie and anon postings be screened, similarly to VfDs, for the first few weeks or first few dozens worth of posts. The software is in place to track x number of posts and shunt those not meeting certain criteria through to a fastedit page; while newbies/anons can edit in what seems to be a transparent manner to them, Wikipedia can also monitor for malicious edits, edits made out of ignorance (an article submitted intended as a userpage, for instance, that ends up in article namespace), or edits made similarly (as was my error - editing the article instead of its related talk page).
This is a technical solution to what is, after all, a social problem. Worse, it's a harsh and exclusionary one.
Let me suggest an alternative:
The above requires someone to care to check the newbie/anon queue. As such, let's assume we have sufficient people on hand who care about this enough to do it.
Instead of putting the newbie/anon posts in an approval queue, let them go through to the wiki live and direct as they do now - but create a special: page specifically to display those contributions.
Then the sufficient people to monitor this stuff will have technical help in doing so, and we would have avoided putting a restriction on the wiki we could do without.
What do you think?
(I have no idea if this would be easy or hard or what to code. I can see it being very useful. Though I doubt I'd be monitoring it a whole lot myself.)
This should probably be discussed on wikipedia-l, not wiki-en - I've crossposted it there and set reply-to there.
- d.
David Gerard wrote:
Instead of putting the newbie/anon posts in an approval queue, let them go through to the wiki live and direct as they do now - but create a special: page specifically to display those contributions.
Like this? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Contributions/newbies
This was added as a quick hack a week or so back and doesn't show the usernames, hopefully it'll be fleshed out when someone has time.
-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)
That would be great if it had usernames, but what happens if someone is using the username 'newbies' ?:=)
On Tue, 29 Jun 2004 19:06:46 -0700, Brion Vibber brion@pobox.com wrote:
David Gerard wrote:
Instead of putting the newbie/anon posts in an approval queue, let them go through to the wiki live and direct as they do now - but create a special: page specifically to display those contributions.
Like this? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Contributions/newbies
This was added as a quick hack a week or so back and doesn't show the usernames, hopefully it'll be fleshed out when someone has time.
-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)
On Wed, 30 Jun 2004 02:06:46 UTC, Brion Vibber brion@pobox.com wrote:
David Gerard wrote:
Instead of putting the newbie/anon posts in an approval queue, let them go through to the wiki live and direct as they do now - but create a special: page specifically to display those contributions.
Like this? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Contributions/newbies
This was added as a quick hack a week or so back and doesn't show the usernames, hopefully it'll be fleshed out when someone has time.
Nice feature.
I'd like to toss a couple of ideas out, without attachment to the results, having been on the receiving end of enough "why don't you just program this" items to last a lifetime.
These lines could be sorted by the submitter ot the change, turning the faceless entities into something resembling people. At present, of course, if an edit looks like vandalism, one can check User Contributions to see if that's the user's pattern of behavior; but having the user's edits grouped together in this way would encourage looking at them together, which would automatically bring out any patterns.
Further: a list of recent edits by randomly selected anons & newbies could be a sort of alternate watchlist. When I've made my daily check that the articles I know about haven't been crapped on, I click on the alternate list, and see what a few random new editors are doing. Somebody else clicks and gets a different list. If a bunch of people did this, we'd have a much improved spotting of new vandals, misguided flaming newbies, and astoundingly good new contributors. It could feed into some kind of mentoring, as advocated by Ed Poor.
If the practice of watching Recent Chagnes is getting overwhelmed by the mass of new data, something like this might be a useful replacement.