Would it make sense to have a "be nice" session at Wikimania to share all
kinds of experiences and best practices around this topic?
Phoebe, you sound like the ultimate person to organize such a session (in
case you did not yet propose such) :)
Lodewijk
2011/2/22 phoebe ayers <phoebe.wiki(a)gmail.com>
On Mon, Feb 21, 2011 at 8:47 PM, Renata St
<renatawiki(a)gmail.com> wrote:
This is to some degree a question of balance in approach.
Every day, thousands of absolutely idiotic, non notable articles get
started that really have no point or hope. Every day, new page
patrollers find (most) of those, and they go "kerpoof". It would
largely be a waste of time to prod them, mark them "citation needed"
talk to the new user. The user never had any intention of
contributing legitimately to an online information resource /
encyclopedia, they're just trying to insult/promote/blab about their
friend/school/work/favorite whatever.
We could emphasize a more positive engagement intended to get the
message to these people about what an encyclopedia is, what Wikipedia
is, and what contributions would be appropriate. But by and large
these driveby contributions aren't intended to really stick. They're
an advanced form of vandalism, and the perpetrators know it.
That's what I though: "There is too much garbage coming in, too few
admins
to police. There is no way that we can deal with
this other than nuke on
sight and who cares about collateral damage -- we have a war to fight!"
Then one day I stumbled upon Distributed Proofreaders (
http://www.pgdp.net/c/) and proofread a few pages. I couple days later I
received *three* *personalized* welcoming messages & evaluations "this is
what you got right, this is what you should improve". I was shocked.
These
people are overworked, they have huge backlogs,
they are stricter about
quality than the pickiest FAC reviewer, yet three of them found time,
energy, and good will to write lengthy personalized messages for a newbie
who reviewed 30 book pages... If it was Wikipedia and I was a newbie with
30
edits, best case scenario I would have been
slapped with {{welcome}} and
my
articles with endless variations of {{cleanup}}.
This opened my eyes
that
there *is* an alternative -- an unthinkable idea
for someone born and
raised
up in the Wikipedia battlefield zone.
This is a really interested (and lovely) experience.
I am curious, apropos of this discussion: how many people remember
their welcome message? Did it make you want to stick around?
I do mine, and it did; it was short and to the point and led me into a
little discussion about grammar with my welcomer. I was kind of a jerk
about it, but they (an editor who sadly left the project not long
after) were kind enough to walk me through best practice. Then later
someone else recommended a topic for me to work on, and pointed me to
Wiktionary. It was nice, and gave me the impression there were real,
quirky people behind the project. This was all pre-templates, to date
myself.
I know we've had this discussion many times before -- welcome messages
help, they don't help, they don't make any statistical difference when
it's measured. But I'm actually curious about people's anecdotal
experiences. Presumably if you made it to Foundation-l you did stick
around, after all :)
-- phoebe
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