Only people who are fluent in Spanish have a prayer of solving problems on the Spanish Wikipedia. Somebody's got to grasp the nettle, maybe not you, but somebody, actually a determined group of somebodies. Faith...
Fred
Greetings all. I have been monitoring exchanges regularly, but never felt the urge to respond to any topic, here is my first.
As a beginner, I found Wikipedia, in addition to unfriendly, very abstract and complex.
Wikipedia Spanish has a problem with editors, and I can see in the text below some of the things I have experienced, where is why:
I am a big archaeology fan and decided to undertake a personal project, enhancing the quality of archaeology articles, mainly because I noticed that many articles did not exist in Spanish or in English.
What was worst was that many articles exist in English and not in Spanish, naively I set out to fix some of it, by investigating, researching and adding bilingual articles, in some cases simply translating from English and a few from German, Italian, etc. So I guess I found the reason why there are far too few Spanish articles.
At a point in time, I encountered empowered and authoritarian Spanish text editors that vandalized my contributions, deleted articles, made Wikipedia rules on the go, etc., and offered no explanations. The last resort measure I had was to stop creating Spanish articles. In English, however it has been a pleasure, I have found people very proactive, friendly, helpful, etc. For details about my contributions and comments, see my user page, under http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Gumr51. I have a lot of time to research on my personal project, however very little time or interest in arguing or engaging in sterile debates with Text Editors, that I have no clue who they are, what is their knowledge, or actual interest are, since the environment is very impersonal, few even provide their real name.
Since this is voluntary work, I would have liked or expected for the text editors to advise or comment on problems they encountered, I spent a few weeks last year asking for help and advice, I did get support in English, but not in Spanish.
I believe that in addition to "quality" text editors and their "power levels", somebody may require to qualify the editors expertise in the content of articles, beyond the Wikipedia rules.
I will continue adding English archaeological articles.
Regards from a frustrated Mexican bilingual "Wikipedian",
Raul Gutierrez
-----Original Message----- From: foundation-l-bounces@lists.wikimedia.org [mailto:foundation-l-bounces@lists.wikimedia.org] On Behalf Of Neil Harris Sent: Thursday, February 24, 2011 12:13 PM To: Wikimedia Foundation Mailing List Subject: [Foundation-l] Friendliness: a radical proposal
Thesis:
The main reason why Wikipedia seems unfriendly to beginners is the reduction in the assumption of good faith. A lot of this could be resolved simply by creating large numbers of new admins. This should be done automatically. So why not just do it?
Argument and proposal:
Many admins and edit patrollers find themselves forced into an aggressive stance in order to keep up with the firehose of issues that need to be dealt with, a surprising amount of which is fueled by deliberate malice and stupidity and actually does require an aggressive and proactive response.
This is not the admins' fault. The major reason for this is the broken RfA process, which has slowed the creation of new admins to a trickle, and has led to an admin shortage, which in turn has led to the current whack-a-mole attitude to new editors, and a reduction in the ability to assume good faith.
I'd like to move back to an older era, where adminship was "no big deal", and was allocated to any reasonably polite and competent editor, instead of requiring them to in effect run for political office.
If, say, over the next three years, we could double the number of admins, we could halve the individual admin's workload, and give them more a lot more time for assuming good faith. And, with the lesser workload and more good faith, there will be a lot less aggression required, and that will trickle outwards throughout the entire community.
I can't see any reason why this shouldn't be done by an semi-automated process, completely removing the existing broken RfA process.
Now it might be argued that this is a bad idea, because adminship confers too much power in one go. If so, the admin bit could be broken out into a base "new admin" role, and a set of specific extra "old admin" powers which can be granted automatically to all admins in good standing, after a period of perhaps a year. For an example of the kind of power restrictions I have in mind, perhaps base new admins might be able to deliver blocks of up to a month only, with the capability of longer blocks arriving when they have had the admin bit for long enough.
All existing admins would be grandfathered in as "old admins" in this scheme, with no change in their powers. Every new admin should be granted the full "old admin" powers automatically after one year, unless they've done something so bad as to be worthy of stripping their admin bit completely.
None of this should be presented as a rank or status system -- there should only be "new admins", and "old admins" with the only distinction being the length they have been wielding their powers -- admin "ageism" should be a specifically taboo activity.
Now, we could quite easily use a computer program to make a pre-qualified list of editors who have edited a wide variety of pages, interacted with other users, avoided recent blocks, etc. etc., and then from time to time send a randomly chosen subset of them a message that they can now ask any "old admin" to turn on their admin bit, with this request expected not to be unreasonably withheld, provided their edits are recognizably human in nature. (The reason why "new admins" should not be able to create other admins is to prevent the creation of armies of sockpuppet sleeper admin accounts riding on top of this process -- a year of competent adminning should suffice as a Turing test.)
So: unless there is a good reason not to, why not do this?
-- Neil
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