On 3/15/11 9:34 AM, Nicole Willson wrote:
Lastly, I had a question about Fred's statement about rules. If following rules isn't that important in the beginning, how come I have only gotten feedback once about what I've done wrong with date formatting and never gotten a message about what I've done right on Wikipedia? I've made at least 150 edits, so one of them must have been good, right? Instead I get a message about date formatting (which someone else could probably fix easily) and told to look at the MoS (which assumes that I know that it stands for Manual of Style). It seems to me that there may be a disconnect here.
Yes, there is definitely a disconnect. I proposed adding some positive user feedback templates to the widely-used Twinkle gadget a while back, but was shot down due to concerns that it would be "abused"(?!). So instead, I created a new "WikiLove" user script and have proposed it as a new gadget. This script makes it just as easy to add barnstars, cookies, kittens, cupcakes, etc. to user talk pages as it is to add warning templates via Twinkle. The response to my proposal was baffling: "doesn't seem to have any practical purpose", "I don't think most people would be pleased to see an increase in barnstar-giving", "the current level of barnstar-giving is sufficient". Apparently the community puts little to no values in positive user feedback. This is probably a symptom of the Eternal September effect mentioned by Sue in the March Update. I think the culture can change, but it's going to take a sustained and concerted effort.
Kaldari