On Fri, Jun 17, 2011 at 8:24 AM, Amir E. Aharoni < amir.aharoni@mail.huji.ac.il> wrote:
So, are we doomed to experience such things every once in a while? Or does anyone have a bright idea about improving the balance between ownership and wiki-ness?
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Speaking for the en.wp and OTRS volunteer perspective, this breaks down into three subtopics:
1. Fancruft, as we impolitely call it. 2. Professional/amateur specialists. 3. Living persons issues.
In each of the three cases, the big warning is intimidating and causes a negative reaction. People do not like to be warned when they are invited to edit, and they do not like to see content removed when they do not even know how to check a history page- which is simple but complicated at the same time. So we do have negative feedback and there are surely unthought of ways to help this.
The warnings on en.wp, because of its size and notoriety, need such a warning in some form. I'd rather have someone look for help pointers (like we provide) when feeling discouraged to get personal contact. We don't have raw data, but I'm sure that most that encounter this just leave and don't say boo. Again, we're speaking about the English Wikipedia, where authors with potential ownership issues are much more community managed because of popularity.
(All in my opinion from experience) So for fancruft, these users generally stick around. Specialists are more accepting of the community and get frustrated but still don't give up, and BLP subjects are either drastically confused or bound and determined to own the article. We work with them no matter the context when they seek the help.
We don't have a static system, it really depends on the project.