Morley Chalmers wrote:
This is **most** discouraging. Certainly not a skilful way to bring new volunteers into the fold.
Be reassured. It took Wikipedia at least three years to develop skills in welcoming newcomers. It is probably still hit and miss but I do not know as I am no longer a newcomer and contribute mainly by correcting typos or unclear paragraphs in the course of personal research.
Over the past several weeks I've been attempting to engage an improvement to how the Wikiversity introduces itself to new users. As a new user myself I was particularly struck by the lack of clarity to statements of purpose. Indeed I encountered outright controversy, very muddy waters indeed.
This is a quite natural result of the initial process where we agreed more on what to disagree about than significant agreement regarding what will "obviously" work in what is after all .... an experimental project. We are breaking new ground with Wikiversity. A great deal of confusion and controversy is quite natural.
In that light I attempted to engage discussion towards a redefinition of how the Wikiversity describes itself to new comers. I proposed a change in copy from the present "all over the map" vague introduction to one that makes explicit what the Wikiversity includes and what it does not.
This discussion has been posted to the Wikiversity mailing list at wikiversity-l@wikimedia.org and on the Colloquium. With some supportive and no negatives, I then proceeded to add the new copy to http://en.wikiversity.org/wiki/Wikiversity:Welcome%2C_n
Two days later I find my proposed new copy has been removed, replaced by the original.
I am **not** an old hand at Wikimedia, which is exactly the point. I'm as good a guinea pig for assembling a functional newcomer section as you are likely to find, at least in the short term.
Perhaps you should integrate your new material with the pre-existing material. While we try to avoid personal ownership of the text it is quite natural that people like their version more than your new version regardless of which is better. By integrating the two versions it may help others who retain pride of authorship accept the new material as augmenting the original material. As an interesting annecdote: There is a paragraph definition of a tensor still in the awesomely expanded and detailed article which some mathematician graciously left in place even though it results in a bit of a dislocation for the reader because of the disparity in styles. Perhaps it was a rebuke to a troublemaker who had been wikistalking me and who claimed the definition was a copyright violation. Perhaps it was merely a courtesy to a lower level student of math. It still made me feel good to see my written version of the definition last time I used the article. It will no doubt eventually disappear when someone decides to improve the article. Ah !!! The incremental power of the wiki way!
I've attempted to be a responsible participant in a co-operative collaborative enterprise. Yanking my edit after prior consultation is not encouragement to collaborative participation.
What's going on? What do I not get?
Perhaps the person who yanked your material is a relative newcomer or unskilled in wiki collaboration. A good place to nicely ask what is going on is the person's user talk page. A good approach might be to ask for the person's assistance via feedback about what they did not like about the new material to help you integrate the new material into the old material.
If you get a snotty non helpful response please remember you are dealing with a single individual, not the entire editing community. Also, everybody has a bad hair day once in a while.
Morley Chalmers
Do not worry if you have built your castles in the air. They are where they should be. Now put the foundations under them. -- Henry David Thoreau
Please consider the extra time coordinating how to integrate your material with the existing material to others' satisfaction as not wasted. Rather it is helping build the foundation under the grand fuzzy vision that is currently Wikiversity. Keep in mind that if easy consensus is not achievable there are other mechanisms to be borrowed or built from Wikipedia or scratch to figure out the best compromise version for today. Then another newcomer with an editing gleam will inevitably arrive.
May the best weighted average evolve somehow to coincide somewhat with high quality prose.
sincerely, mirwin