I propose something like "Don't bite the newcomers" page, pref. located on Meta where new Wikimedians especially the ones from India can ask question to more experienced editors. It would be along the lines of Admin noticeboard, RfC page in terms of structure but any experienced editor would be able to answer a newcomers question. They can watch their edit history and even promote our "adopt a user" feature by experienced editors.

On Sat, Nov 20, 2010 at 8:20 PM, Srikanth Lakshmanan <srik.lak@gmail.com> wrote:

Hi all,

While we are all working on reaching out to more and more people to join wiki community in India, I see an area we need to focus before it becomes a problem.Few days back there was a thread posting a link to article[1] in which a user claimed "Foreigners deleting Wikipedias India content". In the Chennai meetup that happened last week too, there was a person claimed new users are being BITEN by admins among other things which indicated his lack of understanding in wiki policies / guidelines. I just came across another ANI incident[2] involving an Indian editor and 3 admins. Without going to details / commenting on it, am quoting part of this comment about[3] "cultural gap that exists from being an Indian editor editing from India in an English Wikipedia dominated by Anglophone people. He needs to know when to persist, when to back off and needs to learn the general etiquette of the Western world"

There are few common patterns / misconceptions among a set of new Indian editors most of whom never come back to wikipedia.
  1. Admins have superpowers, remove content and BITE.
  2. Lack of understanding of wiki policies. Neutrality and Copyrights seem to be problem areas.POV Pushing happens quite a lot and there is general lack of awareness about copyright.

  3. Then this "cultural" differences.

While the examples are from English wikipedia, these issues might be common to Indic as well as they grow.

If we could address these, we could avoid newcomers leaving wikipedia.

[1] http://www.ciol.com/News/News/News-Reports/Are-foreigners-deleting-Wikipedias-India-content/142555/0/
[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Administrators'_noticeboard/Incidents#Yogesh_Khandke_and_Three_Admins

[3] http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia:Administrators'_noticeboard/Incidents&action=historysubmit&diff=397820910&oldid=397820751

Regards
Srikanth.L
Google Profile

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