[Foundation-l] [Wikimedia Announcements] Fwd: Announcement: New editor engagement experiments team!

[David Gerard]

On 21 March 2012 22:32, Zack Exley <zexley at wikimedia.org> wrote:

> Today those kinds of communications happen much more rarely. My hunch is
> that templates caused that. Now, we just leave template messages instead of
> writing a personal note about a specific edit.


And it turns out the new editors often assume the templates are
completely bot-generated.

That is: the editors using templates are, literally, failing the Turing test.


> I know the solution is not
> to just stop using templates.


I think it should be given serious consideration. I realise why
Twinkle and Huggle exist, but they turn Wikipedia into a first-person
shooter with the newbies as the targets. I suggest that this is not
the sort of gamification that is useful.

That said, anyone who's ever done Special:Newpages will deeply
empathise with ax-crazy newpages patrollers, because Special:Newpages
is a firehose of *shit*. How's the article wizard's output looking?


- d.