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

[Keegan Peterzell]

On Wed, Feb 23, 2011 at 4:36 PM, Philippe Beaudette <
pbeaudette at wikimedia.org> wrote:

> David Gerard wrote:
> > Ban Twinkle? The tool seems to directly encourage problematic behaviour.
> >
> 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 at wikimedia.org
>
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Suboptimal?  Yes.  This gets into a dirge...

Automated tools like Twinkle, Huggle, Igloo, the now defunct VandalProof and
RickK's tool serve useful purposes.  It allows review through an interface
and easy clicks to solve the issue at hand.  Misuse comes when Wikipedia is
viewed as the massive multi-player online role-playing game that anyone can
edit, and speed, edit counts, and first to report to AIV or a noticeboard
are psychologically construed as "points" toward building your character.
 What has been lost is instilling that there is no deadline, things can be
removed, so take a moment to *check* what you're doing with these tools.
 For me, Lupin's tool is the only one I still use because it provides onwiki
.js links to show edit, history, diff, rollback, undo, and warn options.
 With time to check these features, I'm usually too late and the rollback
has been undertaken by one of the faster tools.  However, this gives me the
opportunity to review the use of them and in probably 15% of the cases undo
what the patroller acted upon with far too much haste to get the rush of
vandal fighting.

On the flipside, with so many page views an edits exponentially increased
since the first scripts rolled out over six years ago, such haste may make
waste but it is quite impossible to scan all recent changes and be swift
without such tools.  Two edges to the sword.

-- 
~Keegan

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Keegan