[Foundation-l] Friendliness (was: Missing Wikipedians: An Essay)

[Samuel Klein]

Renata,  I really loved this message of yours, and the reminder of how
awesome PGDP is :-)

On Mon, Feb 21, 2011 at 11:47 PM, Renata St <renatawiki at gmail.com> wrote:

>> We could emphasize a more positive engagement intended to get the
>> message to these people about what an encyclopedia is, what Wikipedia
>> is, and what contributions would be appropriate.  But by and large
>> these driveby contributions aren't intended to really stick.  They're
>> an advanced form of vandalism, and the perpetrators know it.

I don't think they are advanced  vandalism.  I see them as the first
step towards becoming a solid contributor.  Anyone who doesn't intend
to spam or vandalize, and has already done the hardest part --
learning that there is an edit button! -- is a community asset to be
helped and supported.

> That's what I thought: "There is too much garbage coming in, too few admins
> to police. There is no way that we can deal with this other than nuke on
> sight and who cares about collateral damage -- we have a war to fight!"
>
> Then one day I stumbled upon Distributed Proofreaders (
> http://www.pgdp.net/c/) and proofread a few pages. I couple days later I
> received *three* *personalized* welcoming messages & evaluations "this is
> what you got right, this is what you should improve". I was shocked. These
> people are overworked, they have huge backlogs, they are stricter about
> quality than the pickiest FAC reviewer, yet three of them found time,
> energy, and good will to write lengthy personalized messages for a newbie
> who reviewed 30 book pages...

We can learn a lot from them.

We need significant, persistent attention to this problem; not simply
a few social gatherings to talk about it at annual meetings.  Some
cross-project banner campaigns to promote being welcoming might help
-- but first we need specific welcoming projects that could use the
input of thousands of participants.

Two places to start:

1. Make a few newbie-helping pages *really* friendly -- moderate how
we use them, change local policy there, make them sources of joy and
acknowledgement.  Ask newbies mentored through those channels to give
back time to help others there, after their first week. (this helps
make it sustainable even if thousands of people show up there)

2. Set up a noticeboard to discuss hard problems involving supporting
/ biting newbies.  A place to discuss improving New Page Patrol,
improving and shortening template style used by major bots, improving
bot friendliness and sensitivity.  A place to review incidents needing
attention by welcomers and supporters (to balance attention by
vandalfighters)

To address 1.,  I've started monitoring [[WP:EAR]] and [[WP:WQA]]
(editor assistance requests, and wikiquette alerts) on en:wp, and
encourage others to do the same (or to choose other newbie pages to
watch).

To address 2., I am drafting a noticeboard about editing and
supporting editors, and welcome comments and contributions there:
   http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Sj/EN
In my mind, this noticeboard would be a place to discuss how to fix
talk-templates, how to improve the guidelines for approving bots to
make sure they are sufficiently friendly, &c.  It could also have a
subboard for tracking 'incidents' to counterbalance pages like AN/I.

Regards,
SJ