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

[dex2000 at pc.dk]

----- Original meddelelse -----

> Fra: John Vandenberg <jayvdb at gmail.com>
> Til: Wikimedia Foundation Mailing List
> <foundation-l at lists.wikimedia.org>
> Dato: Fre, 25. feb 2011 04:01
> Emne: Re: [Foundation-l] Friendliness (was: Missing Wikipedians: An
> Essay)
> 
> 
> The systems are designed so that the cliche '15 year old
> admin-want-a-be' is expected to handled any newbie/new page, and they
> do.
> 
> Wikimedia Commons is going the same way.
> 
> Smaller projects are far more welcoming and friendly to newbies, as
> the project participants know the value of every new person.
> Also each person participating in a smaller project has a sense of
> achievement in 'the project'.
> On smaller projects it is also possible for *one* person to watch
> RecentChanges and see *everything*, and when more than one person
> does
> that, the project has peer review of the newbie welcoming processes.
> On many of the Wikisource projects, we have *edit* patrolling; if a
> newbie makes five edits, up to five different people will be brought
> into contact with the newbie.
> 
> We need systems which ensure that, on large projects, each newbie end
> up in contact with more than one established users who *care* about
> the specific topical area that the newbie is interested in.
> And they need to be reliable enough that we don't end up with 50%+ of
> newbies being left to be managed by the admin-want-a-bes who have
> more
> interest in pressing buttons than they do in the topic that interests
> the newbie they are 'processing'.
> 
> --
> John Vandenberg

This is certainly part of the problem. I would point also to the
overwhelming amount of policies (and their corresponding abbreviations,
WP:NOT etc. etc.) and procedures as being practically impossible to cope
with for newbies.

Question is, of course, what to do about it all? Could we create a
procedure for admin appointment that puts the ability to communicate with
people way above the persons need for tools and buttons for doing
clean-up? Should we have a special "welcoming" staff instead of random
people or bots inserting {{welcome}}?
I think it could also be considered to divide our huge language wikis
into smaller parts. The existing WikiProjects could be made virtual wikis
with their own admins, recent changes etc. That way, each project is in
fact like a small wiki to which the newbie could sign up according to
'hers' area of interest and where the clarrity and friendlier atmosphere
of the smaller wikis could prevail.

Regards,
Sir48 (Thyge)