On Sat, Oct 29, 2011 at 10:51 PM, Brandon Harris bharris@wikimedia.orgwrote:
On 10/29/11 8:36 PM, Jorgenev wrote:
So far my only experience with extension:wikilove is having a new user prefer it to just editing my talk page, and so over the course of a mundane conversation about sourcing I earned myself two civility barnstars and three trophies. Hooray!
One take away from this experience of yours could be that theprocess of utilizing talk pages is extremely arcane and horrible from a user experience perspective, while using WikiLove to communicate - even though it is the "wrong" channel - is far easier and preferable to new users.
Sure. Is easier more educational? There's the rub.
I'm all for making editing a more inviting experience, but progress has a way of feigning ease and making things more simple for building an encyclopedia removes the intellectual from the exercise. Wikipedia is one of the last places on the internet where it's not acceptable to write in all caps, ignore rules of grammar, write in text message speak, or in general not know how to write a paragraph. We should whole-heartily embrace mundane conversations about sourcing over shiny stickers, because what we learned and retained from school wasn't from the gold star reward system.. I don't approve or disapprove of the Wikilove extension- I simply don't use it in my setup because it's my preference. I do, however, worry to an extent about quality over quantity. I'd rather have someone write one nice talk page note a year than drop barnstars for niceties. But that's just me.