On 9/5/06, dmehkeri(a)swi.com <dmehkeri(a)swi.com> wrote:
True, we should care for newbies, but we should
have the good of the
project
at number one. I can't find a single policy
that we don't need (can
you?).
Policies we don't need probably won't get
promoted to policy to begin
with.
Even if you can't point to a policy page and say "we'd be better off if
that
whole page were deleted", it seems to me that after promotion to policy
level,
the process of annotating and expanding that policy happens slowly, under
much
less scrutiny, and at a much lower threshold of acceptance.
I have in mind WP:U. The general idea -- no offensive usernames -- may be
good,
but read all of the fine print that has accumulated over time. Do not
think this
is idle policy cruft that nobody acts upon. Newbies now get instantly and
permanently blocked for what in my opinion are really stupid, arbitrary
offences.
Perhaps WP:U is an extreme case, but I suspect something like this happens
on
many policy pages, and never mind guidelines.
Dan
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Ah, a great example of something where both policy and its practical
implimentation are biting newbies.
At unblock-en-l we are getting a slow but steady stream of unblock requests
(a few a week) of people who were username blocked. In most cases they
don't understand why, because there wasn't nearly enough information left on
their talk page at block time and there was no polite discussion prior to
the block informing them of the policy and asking them to chose another name
and use the name-shift functions to switch to it.
As a general rule, I think that unblock-en-l is getting an interesting view
into newbie interactions with Wikipedia. One thing that concerns me is that
it's hard to tell what fraction of people who should contact unblock-en-l
actually do, as opposed to just walking away from the project. That could
be a very high ratio and as far as I know we have no way to tell what it is.
If we exclude the well-known, work-in-progress AOL block problem, we see a
slow steady stream of problem editors complaining about their latest block,
innocent people caught in autoblocks on shared IP space, people who didn't
think 3RR applied to them or didn't understand 3RR, and other minor issues.
The problem users are not particularly a problem worth otherwise addressing.
People caught in autoblocks on shared IP space seems to be high enough
volume to be a potential real problem.
People who don't understand 3RR seems to be a possible big deal. It also
comes up a few times a week. We may have a communications issue telling new
users about it...
--
-george william herbert
george.herbert(a)gmail.com