[Foundation-l] Editor retention (was "Announcement: New editor engagement experiments team!")

[En Pine]

Responding to MZMcBride's question, "And a bit larger than this, what's an 
acceptable cost for keeping new editors around? For example, deleting a new 
user's article is probably the easiest way to discourage him or her, but is 
the alternative (allowing their spammy page to sit around for a while) an 
acceptable cost for the potential benefit?"

First, I think that the new visual editor will help.

Second, I think that the NOTFACEBOOK policy is a bit counterproductive in 
its current form. Wikipedia is a collaborative work and I've seen the 
NOTFACEBOOK policy pushed in the faces of people who engage in personal 
conversation on their talk pages. We want people to develop collaborative 
relationships here, right? I don't mean to suggest that people should turn 
userpages entirely into personal blogs, but I also think that the statement 
"Wikipedians have their own user pages, but they may be used only to present 
information relevant to working on the encyclopedia" is overkill and 
discourages people from forming friendly collaborative relationships. I 
think that we should move in the opposite direction, permitting and possibly 
even encouraging people to be social (within reasonable limits) while 
working collaboratively on our collective project of Wikipedia.

Pine