[Foundation-l] Show community consensus for Wikilove

Bjoern Hoehrmann derhoermi at gmx.net
Sat Oct 29 21:15:52 UTC 2011


* Mateus Nobre wrote:
>Why any Wikipedia would not want the Wikilove feature?
>
>This is inconsistent for me. Wikilove's a global improvement,
>there's no reason to disagree improvements.

If you create a new account and edit a bit, on some projects odds are
some other editor will place on your Talk page some template saying they
saw you editing and wanted to personally welcome you. Some might find
that nice, others might feel they are being stalked because someone is
monitoring them, ridiculed as there is nothing personal about placing
templates, most probably with a single click, on talk pages, and exposed
as the first thing anyone visiting the talk page would see is that they
are a newbie. Some may think of http://www.despair.com/motivation.html
when they find themself as recepient of this kind of Wikilove. And they
would have a hard time showing their discomfort because society expects
you to appreciate when someone appears to try to be nice to you, which
would add to their discomfort.

Some editors just want to edit articles and regard the "social" and
"meta" dimensions of the project as annoying distractions, while other
editors see those as the main attractions. Some prefer "You are nice.",
others are far more motivated hearing "You did a good job." Some might
be thrilled if they see someone clicked them a kitty, others might find
it far more meaningful if another editor takes the time to manually go
to their talk page and manually write, say, "I signed in this morning
and saw you added a great picture to the article I created yesterday.
That made me smile, thank you." without hearts and beers and single
clicks (similarily, adding the picture might be a far better show of
appreciation than a clicked kitty with thanks for the new article.)

It's hard to smile online.
-- 
Björn Höhrmann · mailto:bjoern at hoehrmann.de · http://bjoern.hoehrmann.de
Am Badedeich 7 · Telefon: +49(0)160/4415681 · http://www.bjoernsworld.de
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