I have 15 years experience on the coal face, and now more than 10 years
actively encouraging others to part of that. I come from the time where
the community was growing really fast and templates werent available for
every action, that meant we had to leave personal message explaining what
had taken place. Currently anyone can react at the twinkle of an eye to do
the same thing 100 times in a minute with all the necessary policy links
already there, nothing is written with a personal touch, there is no
measure of encouragement its just a cold machine response even the edit
summary is a cold you've been twinkled upon. We have forgotten to Assume
Good Faith when its appropriate.
Doing outreach, workshops, editathons and other such events we need to step
away from retention being the be all of these events, the aim of these
events is content, connection, and community every edit whether its just
one or one million is to improve and share knowledge. The more we get hung
up on volume the less we value quality and diversity, outreach is building
access to knowledge creating a path for others follow.
Twinkle is great tool in combating vandalism, and spam but its very poor
tool for building community and becomes extremely dangerous when its
applied as a training aid or for contributor there are no workshops, no
outreach, no twinkleathons to teach people how to use it effectively just
log a few edits ask nicely at a notice board and voila you're armed to zap
template where ever, when ever. Twinkle needs to have limits placed on
actions, some review process of those actions - 100 actions in your first
30 days then its disable until some reviews. We could even consider a
limit to its use until a person has gained community trust as an admin, if
person can only whack 100 people a month they are going to consider/value
their decision when they do so, we might see a lot less templates and more
talking.
On the subject of a twinlkeathon, twinlkeshop Wikimania 2020 is looking for
such activities maybe you can help improve its use
On Wed, 26 Feb 2020 at 14:32, Peter Southwood <peter.southwood(a)telkomsa.net>
wrote:
Also, overworked groups with large backlogs struggling
to maintain high
quality tend to have less patience with the inexperienced and
not-yet-competent than we might like. It is also possible that some of the
workers in those groups are not as competent as we would like them to be,
but at those wages, what can you expect? The work probably also attracts a
share of people who get their kicks out of telling other people what they
can't do. Again, they are volunteers, we accept their offer to help in good
faith until they prove otherwise. The competent and really incompetent are
the easy cases. The not quite competent are harder to deal with. Will they
get better or worse with experience?
Some competence is required to edit Wikipedia. A suitable personality also
helps a lot. However, an enormous amount of work gets done quietly and
without fanfare and drama, if one chooses the topic carefully, and edits
with discretion and a reasonable level of willingness to cooperate.
Cheers,
Peter
-----Original Message-----
From: Wikimedia-l [mailto:wikimedia-l-bounces@lists.wikimedia.org] On
Behalf Of Paulo Santos Perneta
Sent: 25 February 2020 20:03
To: Wikimedia Mailing List
Subject: Re: [Wikimedia-l] Treatment of newbies with mild CoI
As a rule, (at least) in Wikipedia, with very rare exceptions, established
communities of editors treat newbies as unwelcome invaders.
No idea how to solve that, since it's a problem related to the nature of
humane beings, not something technical.
But the result is a very low rate of retention, indeed - and increasingly
reduced diversity and cultural richness, which eventually ends up reflected
on content. At some point those established editors also start preying at
other established editors, specially when newbies are not available. The
environment is awful and toxic in general.
For outreach activities to have at least a minimal rate of success, the
participants need to have some kind of protection shield, such as some
privileged contact with established editors willing to help them.
Otherwise, edithatons and other outreach activities are basically sending
lambs to the slaughterhouse. As for newbies that come to Wikipedia by
themselves, they are generally on their own.
Best,
Paulo
Aron Demian <aronmanning5(a)gmail.com> escreveu no dia domingo, 23/02/2020
à(s) 23:30:
On Wed, 19 Feb 2020 at 22:35, Andy Mabbett
<andy(a)pigsonthewing.org.uk>
wrote:
I have just come across a case on en.Wikipedia
where the daughter of
an article subject added details of his funeral (his death in 1984,w
as already recorded) and his view about an indent in his life.
[...]
As well as being reverted, she now has
three templates on her talk
> page; two warning her of a CoI, and sandwiching one notifying her of a
> discussion about her on the COI noticeboard. These total 4094
> characters or 665 words.
This is a topic that's seldom discussed and somewhat taboo in certain
areas, therefore not many people are aware of what experiences many
newcomers have. These events go generally unnoticed, but if you were
wondering why editor retention is a constant issue, the pattern that lies
behind this single case you brought to our attention is a top reason.
I've tried to help in a similar case of a footballer unknown in
English-speaking countries. She was repeatedly reverted without the edits
being evaluated or the rules being explained. She never returned and I
was
frowned upon by the admin, who was involved, for
trying to help.
I've noticed this "shoot first, ask later" pattern in many cases, not
just
with newcomers. Unfortunately, this is all too
common and a contributing
factor to the toxicity.
I've noticed the following issues:
1) The general unwelcoming treatment of newcomers: "noobs" are considered
lacking the proper understanding and necessary knowledge, unless they
jump
right into RC patrolling, which is not the sign
of a new editor.
2) The lack of protection given to newcomers: "You have no rights" being
explicitly said to one newcomer, that I recall.
3) Preferential treatment and authority bias: the experienced/established
user is "trusted", thus must be right, therefore unwelcoming - and often
hostile - conduct is not considered uncivil or it's "not actionable".
4) The excessively vilifying application of the most frowned-upon rules
such as COI, socking. Editors tagged as such are treated the same
regardless of the effect of their actions and whether that has caused any
damage, which can scale from none to introducing bias to many articles
for
years.
Currently, there is no effort to mitigate these issues, to improve the
policies and community practices. It's also a problem that while the
"biting newbies" and "civility" policies are very well written, these
are
almost never applied and definitely not in the protection of newcomers.
By
that I don't mean these should always result
in sanctions, but that the
community - and primarily who get involved with handling disputes -
should
take these seriously, approach with a neutral
mindset and remind the
editors about our policies, but that almost never happens and such
complaints are either ignored or blindly decided in favor of the editor
with more supporters, enabling the abuse of newcomers.
Tl;dr: newcomers don't enjoy the safety net created by editors who know
and care for each other and the community processes are not set up to
create a welcoming and/or safe environment, this purpose is not
manifested
in any kind of endeavors or practices. If the WMF
and the movement take
the
Mid-Term target of a welcoming environment
seriously, that's a difficult,
long-term target that will take a lot of effort.
Aron (Demian)
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