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>

Precisely. Renata

On 22 February 2011 12:02, Erik Moeller <erik(a)wikimedia.org> wrote: +1 :-) I spent some time this weekend on New User Contributions on the English Wikipedia, reading the talk pages of new people who'd been trying to make constructive edits. I was trying to imagine the world through their eyes --- what their early experiences felt like. Some had welcome templates and some didn't, and many also had templates added that were probably intimidating for new people (warnings and corrections of various kinds, mostly). So yes, I think efforts to make templates and bot notices friendlier would be time well spent. I also wonder if we do any templating that's meant to be purely encouraging good behaviour. Like, "Your edits to [x] article were constructive and useful: thank you for helping Wikipedia," or "You have just made your 100th edit: congratulations." That kind of thing. Does anyone know: do we do much of that? And if not, should we? Thanks, Sue

On Tue, Feb 22, 2011 at 4:47 PM, David Gerard <dgerard(a)gmail.com> wrote: Not on Wikipedia, but I recently wrote to my senator and got a template e-mail response that totally didn't address my inquiry. They totally didn't look at what I wrote! Boo!!!! That left a terrible impression of my senator! Why would I ever want to deal with them again? Why waste my time! Why ever vote for them? They don't care enough to listen to their constituents. (duh, we know that, but still) Quite sure if was a Wikipedia newbie and got templates on my talk page, I would feel quite the same way. Why bother with Wikipedia? It's important that a human listens and there is human interaction, and ideally it would be awesome to expand the ambassador program and have people to help out newbies more. I don't know how much capacity we have but definitely would like to see that. Cheers, Katie (aude)

on 2/22/11 4:38 PM, Sue Gardner at sgardner(a)wikimedia.org wrote: I don't know whether or not it's done now, Sue, but it's a great idea! Marc Riddell

On Tue, Feb 22, 2011 at 6:00 PM, MZMcBride <z(a)mzmcbride.com> wrote: These we should handle in automated fashion. These people who love helping others should handle in script-assisted fashion. This is a peculiar perspective. The # of potential welcomers scales with community size, along with the # of new users. The only question is what channels are in place to attract long-term contribution and collaboration, and what sorts of activities are amplified by good tools. Currently, we honor and respect page deletion, anti-vandalism, and user blocking, for two reasons. 1) there is a constant battle involved; it is one of the self v. other wars that shapes our group identity 2) we have created a group of 'special' users defined around access to those tools, so people who want to become admins spend time on that work; and people who do that work are confirmed as special and imbued with a halo of authority that (despite some claims that adminships should be no big deal) seeps into all aspects of policy and process-creation. To be clear: those 180,000 edits per day are the source of future active users. By rejecting them or dealing with them summarily we are simply committing ourselves to remaining at our current community flavor and size (if there is no channel for becoming a champion welcomer, people who like to socialize with and welcome others will never join the community) The idea that we have finite human/community resources is interesting, but a red herring. 30% of the entire Internet visits our sites every month. We can dream up any community structure we want, any combination of collaborative channels, any set of creative or repetitive, simple or complex tasks -- and find people interested in making that idea happen. We could be our own social network; we could ask people to participate in a local photography project like geograph.co.uk and cover dozens of countries in a matter of weeks; we could start randomly matching millions of readers with one another as knowledge-seeking penpals. Each of these would require designing appropriate channels and tools; naming the work we'd like to see; and welcoming people who do that. We're far from covering 'the worlds knowledge' in any language, dramatically so in most languages, participation is dropping, and many of our best / most prolific current participants feel that it's unpleasant rather than rewarding to contribute. Whereas there is no known impact on article quality stemming from being more welcoming (aside from 'No September!' fear-mongering), and in fact history suggests that more and more diverse participants likely has a positive effect on overall quality despite the need to teach newbies how to be an effective contributor. SJ -- Samuel Klein          identi.ca:sj           w:user:sj          +1 617 529 4266

On Tue, 22 Feb 2011 18:42:25 -0500, aude <aude.wiki(a)gmail.com> wrote: Actually, this is smth we implemented in Russian Wikipedia about a year ago (mainly due to user Samal). We have a subspace called Wikipedia/Incubator (not to be confused with incubator.wikimedia.org which is a separate project). This is kind of a school for beginning editors. They usually get spotted, get an invitation to move (together with their first article) to Incubator, and there they can quietly learn the policies without having to save their articles from speedy deletion. We have a dedicated team of people who are mostly active in Incubator helping the newbies, and we already have the first generation of users who went through the Incubator, had their articles moved to the main space, and some of them even have GAs and FAs. Cheers Yaroslav

tl;dr: we can attract thousands of new contributors with almost any combination of skills and availability, if we ask nicely. what should we ask for first? == Herring talk == On Tue, Feb 22, 2011 at 6:50 PM, MZMcBride <z(a)mzmcbride.com> wrote: Red herrings are real, but only seem to be related to the problem being solved. When discussing how to remove barriers to participation, a premature limiting of what we consider based on currently-identified resources is a (common) red herring. Depending on context, the investment of energy into removing barriers to entry may net additional community resources. Or it may leave total 'available' community resources the same, while expanding the community or changing its balance. == Tech talk == I love these large projects. but the ones that make the most difference to newbies and contributors (AWB, Twinkle, pywb) are often 'small' or bootstrapping projects. There's a shortage of core developers. There are quite a lot of PHP developers who have built some sort of MediaWiki extension, or otherwise hacked on it to make their own fork, however. We have some opportunities here to recruit more of them as well -- some way of encouraging each downloader to get involved, or one-click sharing of their local hacks with a global community? I'm not sure; but this is certainly another case of "how can we embrace people who take the first step to join us" worth solving. A projects-wide campaign to improve mediawiki or attract new technical contributors would also be a fine idea. == Grep talk == This is my point: a significant portion of our readers would be glad to help Wikipedia, but don't know how. (possibly half of all readers never see an 'edit' tab, thanks to semi-protection. many edit anonymously. roughly 10,000 new editors start editing en:wp each month [over 1/4 the total "active" population!], but most quickly leave, never even reaching the "10 edits" threshhold for autoconfirmation on en:wp) If we create a clear way to help -- for instance, by inviting people who don't themselves feel they have anything to write to help others learn how to write effectively -- we will start drawing on a pool of "actively interested" users who are not editors but have time and expertise to share. Is it good for advertising? (advertising what?) I'm simply pointing out what a large, diverse readership means for our capacity to attract involvement from groups with targeted combinations of interest, talent, and availability. Often a 'channel' is nothing more than the definition of a project, a wiki space for trying something new, and a social guideline for what a group should be doing... a 'tool' can be nothing more than a new template and a few modified bots. We should perhaps be training another few hundred editors to maintain and use bots and client-side scripts (this may be a good channel to work on; anyone who'se made a thousand edits should get a basic tutorial in this to help them make routine tasks easier), but I don't see this as a bottleneck yet. S

To be clear about what I meant: On Wed, Feb 23, 2011 at 2:33 AM, MZMcBride <z(a)mzmcbride.com> wrote: The design of an effective request / campaign for a certain type of contribution likely takes a significant amount of time and tweaking, and a body of people available to respond to the initial interest generated. It would be cool to see data from that campaign. A list of specific "make editing less painful" problems that we know how to solve but haven't found time to solve yet, pointing to related bugs/feature requests, might be helpful here. [do we have the equivalent of long-term bug reporting for known brokenness on-wiki that requires policy or process fixes?] SJ.

Samuel Klein wrote: Forgive me, but I'm still a bit lost here. Are you saying you can or can't crowdsource your crowdsourcing? The initial comments were about red herrings and the illusion of finite resources. Now you're pointing at resource limitations that exist before we can even get more resources? Is that about right? (Yes, it's still turtles all the way down.) MZMcBride

On 23 February 2011 10:07, phoebe ayers <phoebe.wiki(a)gmail.com> wrote: yeah -- I actually did both. And yes, I have sympathy for Recent Changes / new article patrollers too. it was an interesting experiment. I used Twinkle to nominate an article for speedy deletion (or something like that, I don't remember exactly) and immediately felt awful about deterring the poor newbie, who was maybe misguided, but not a vandal. What I learned from that: some Wikimedians --like me-- are likely better psychologically suited to new editor _rescue_ type work, rather than deletions/reversions. (If you've read Nicholson Baker's New York Review of Books article on Wikipedia, he describes the addictive nature of New Article Rescue Squad really well.) Those people should be encouraged to rescue/support/guide new editors. It also made me wonder if patrollers find themselves over time starting to dehumanize new people, as a kind of coping mechanism, or just because they feel beleagured. The experience, for me, felt a bit like a videogame. (And yeah, I am a person who, when playing Pikmin, felt terrible when I didn't rescue all the little guys before nightfall, and the predator bug ate them. LOL.) To belabour the videogame analogy a little further: Zack Exley and I were talking about new article patrol as being a bit like a first-person shooter, and every now and then a nun or a tourist wanders in front of the rifle sites. We need patrollers to be able to identify nuns and tourists, so that they don't get shot :-) Thanks, Sue

David Gerard wrote: In my opinion, this would be suboptimal. The truth is, that tool made my life easier when I was admin-ing on a regular basis. But perhaps cutting out particular problematic "features" wouldn't be a terrible idea. pb -- ________________________ Philippe Beaudette Head of Reader Relations Wikimedia Foundation, Inc. philippe(a)wikimedia.org

Which is to say that new article patrol is a task requiring more skill rather than less; it is not a quiet corner for people who are unable to edit productively and lack people skills. Fred

On Wed, Feb 23, 2011 at 5:26 PM, SlimVirgin <slimvirgin(a)gmail.com> wrote: Great examples :-) Building on them for a moment: Spam script: "welcome! the article you recently created, [[Quksace agjke]], was considered unhelpful, and has been deleted. Please do not spam Wikipedia. Read the following [long detailed policy pages pages] to learn how to edit, and how to create your new article." Newbie encourager; "very funny. please keep the bad jokes in your userspace ;) there are actually a bunch of Aggie articles that need work [link to category]. you might want to add some [userboxes] to your page to indicate where you are from. also: welcome! [link to a quick newbie's guide]" Spam script; "An article you created has been nominated for deletion. Please go there to discuss it." Newbie greeter: "Moulin Rougue! Look out for the rougue admins, who are even now deleting poor Mama Wiggles. If you're from around Saskatoon, there's a WikiProject for your area [link] and some requests for articles and images... maybe you can get a photo of poutine featured on the main apge one day. Welcome :)" NPP: "your article had no sources and did not indicate notability. BALEETED" Greeter: "Hi, who is Todd Marcus? You should list some of his achievements if you want to write an article about him; or just add him tothe roster of [[Santa Barbara F.C.]] (hmm, that article doesn't exist... is that the UC Santa Barbara Gauchos?)" Both greeters and quality-patrollers do :) Their work doesn't have to conflict. S.

On Tue, 22 Feb 2011 12:02:09 -0800, Erik Moeller <erik(a)wikimedia.org> wrote: I do not see why it would be impossible to abandon warning templates. I actually only use the copyvio warning template, because it is technically advanced, and it would be difficult to write all these issues without the templete. For the rest, if I warn someone, I just write smth myself, it does not take any longer time. Bots are a different issue altogether, I agree. Cheers Yaroslav

Hello SJ, and all the others, I think SJ's mail has a lot of points. And I think the most important thing is not to talk about this, but to change one's own attitude. Most people who are talking here are also the most heavy contributors in our projects, and as these, they have a heavy mindsetting function in the projects. And if everyone of us work in our projects in another way as earlier, this would have an impact in the project. This is exactly what I do in my home project, zh-wp. Earlier it was also for me a easy one to say: Hey, this is spam, speed delete. But meanwhile I see this in a different way. Speed deletion is initially introduced to battle against deliberate destructive behavior. Deliberate spam is such a behavior, so there is need to speed delete deliberate spam. But a new user who put in an article about a product is not necessarily deliberately spamming. It is far more important to tell him what he did wrong and give him the chance to improve his article. So meanwhile I got to change my own behavior. If a user is not proven to be a notorious spammer, I would not speed delete his contributions. I would tell him his article is considered too one sided and as an advertisement. As such it would be deleted in seven days. But he can try to improve it, so that it would not be deleted. And I try to convince other patrolers and admins to do the same. The same is with badly formated new articles. They tend to be considered as destruction and tend to be speedy deleted. If I see them now I try to make a few formattings so that they don't looks really ugly, and try to find a category for them, so that they would not be speed deleted because they are uncategorized. Yes this all makes more work for me, and I cannot say if it really pay back, if more new editors would stay. But my hope is, and I fancy that I do have some success, that this changes also the behavior of other admins and patrolers, at least some of them. And they would change other people's behavior. So this is really something that everyone of us can really change, by changing our own behavior. And there is no reason not to do it just now. Greetings Ting

----- Original meddelelse ----- This is certainly part of the problem. I would point also to the overwhelming amount of policies (and their corresponding abbreviations, WP:NOT etc. etc.) and procedures as being practically impossible to cope with for newbies. Question is, of course, what to do about it all? Could we create a procedure for admin appointment that puts the ability to communicate with people way above the persons need for tools and buttons for doing clean-up? Should we have a special "welcoming" staff instead of random people or bots inserting {{welcome}}? I think it could also be considered to divide our huge language wikis into smaller parts. The existing WikiProjects could be made virtual wikis with their own admins, recent changes etc. That way, each project is in fact like a small wiki to which the newbie could sign up according to 'hers' area of interest and where the clarrity and friendlier atmosphere of the smaller wikis could prevail. Regards, Sir48 (Thyge)

On Sat, Feb 26, 2011 at 5:02 AM, Nikola Smolenski <smolensk(a)eunet.rs> wrote: On English Wikipedia there is a http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Welcoming_committee -- John Vandenberg

On Fri, Feb 25, 2011 at 11:18 PM, <dex2000(a)pc.dk> wrote: At the moment, we need admins who press buttons more than we need to welcome new users. It is unfortunate, but that is how it is. We need to find ways of reducing the amount of work needed, or radically increase the number of admins. This is the best solution, in my opinion. -- John Vandenberg

On Fri, Feb 25, 2011 at 5:17 PM, Ryan Kaldari <rkaldari(a)wikimedia.org>wrote;wrote: I agree. We point new users who do not know how to get involved to visit WikiProjects to find common ground with other editors. We do that as helpers, at conferences, at WMF presentations on introduction to editing. t's quite clear that as a community our best chances for retention is a sense of belonging in a specific project or task whether it's WikiProject Fungi to WikiProject Countervandalism. Finding a specific project when being new to templates that point to the projects do not offer a whole lot of guidance. I've wondered since I joined in 2005 why they don't have their own project-space. The only reason I can come up with is that Wikiprojects are loose affiliations of editors and an independent namespace is related to a Wikimedia task-oriented mandate that Wikiprojects do not have. How would such a proposal be set up? An RfC? Village Pump? The whim of developers for a bug report? It would be quite useful. -- ~Keegan http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Keegan