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

[Sue Gardner]

On 23 February 2011 10:07, phoebe ayers <phoebe.wiki at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Tue, Feb 22, 2011 at 3:00 PM, MZMcBride <z at mzmcbride.com> wrote:
>> Sue Gardner wrote:
>>> 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).
>>
>> You should try gaining the other perspective: thousands of edits each hour
>> from people all over the world, a decent-sized percentage of which are
>> purely malicious and another decent-sized percentage of which are completely
>> clueless.

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