[Gendergap] Hello and a (small!) manifesto

[Daniel and Elizabeth Case]

> However, she has written a couple of music articles. She is a former music
> journalist and says the thing that turned her off most about trying to
> contribute here was that her first article was deleted within hours, 
> because
> it had a key word that set off a bot (the article cited three mainstream
> press sources that had in-depth coverage of the subject). The comments by
> the new-page patroller made it clear to her that he hadn't even read the
> article. Her second article was speedied by a new page patroller within
> minutes of her first clicking Save, while she was still in the process of
> expanding the article and adding sources. This patroller is a chap who,
> somewhat unusually, has awarded himself eight barnstars on his user page –
> one of them patting himself on the back for the fact that "You play 
> whack-a-
> mole with terrible new pages like no one I've ever seen! Awesome!" He made
> himself look ridiculous in her eyes, and she resented having to discuss
> music with someone who clearly had none of the prerequisites required to
> judge the notability of the topic concerned, and just seemed keen to get
> another deletion under his belt in his private whack-a-mole fantasy.

Yet more evidence, as if some of us needed it, of the negative impacts of 
Huggle, Twinkle and other such tools.

Yes, they can and do make a tedious job easier. But it imposes a 
responsibility on the user to not forget the human element. I started doing 
newpage patrol back in 2005, before the Seigenthaler incident, back when IPs 
were still allowed to create articles and there was a lot more crap to sift 
through, when the process took several steps and the human had to do 
*everything*. Including look closely at the article.

It was a good way to learn policy. You had to know the G* and A* speedy 
criteria like the back of your hand (and there were more of them then). You 
had to know when you could speedy something and when you had to list 
something at AfD. And sometimes in the latter instance, it got saved or 
kept. I didn't take it personally if it didn't (in contrast to, of late I 
see on UAA, when I take any action short of blocking a user I sometimes get 
complaints that I haven't. And as far as discouraging new users I feel the 
too-rigid enforcement of one aspect of the username policy, WP:ORGNAME, also 
does exactly that).

Today, the use of those tools encourages, I have no doubt, the exact sort of 
gamer mentality that has been called out elsewhere on these threads. I have 
bee surprised, pleasantly, to hear some of the stereotypical young men in 
their early 20s amongst the WM-NYC meetup regulars complain about the impact 
of Huggle and Twinkle.

At our (WM-NYC) midyear WikiConference in New York last year, one of those 
younger users, J. delanoy, gave absolutely the best lightning talk I've ever 
seen, a short primer of sorts on the use of Huggle. It was riotously funny 
and still informative. And one of his slides explicitly said that Huggle was 
not a video game. I think he'd seen too much of this as well.

Again, one of those basically good things—finally creating the rollbacker 
user right separate from the full admin toolset and creating the reviewer 
user right to accomodate the implementation of flagged protection—has had 
the unintended side effect of creating a "leveling up" structure for users 
used to online games, who see their presence on Wikipedia as pretty much the 
same thing.

There is, at least, some correction to this in that when some of these users 
get to RfA, at times it has been noted they've done precious little article 
work, and they don't get the tools. At least not that time.

Daniel Case