Yesterday I gave a presentation about community policing at the Cascadia
Wikimedians' end of year event with Seattle TA3M [1][2][3]. An issue that
came up for discussion is the extent to which, on English Wikipedia,
experienced Wikipedians conducting New Page Patrol create collateral damage
during their well-intentioned efforts to protect Wikipedia. Another subject
that came up is the need for more human resources for mentoring of newbies
who create articles using the Articles for Creation system [4]; one comment
I've heard previously is that the length of time between submission and
review may be long enough for the newbie to give up and disappear, and
another comment that I've heard is that newbies may not understand the
instructions that they're given when their article is reviewed. These
comments correlate with the community SWOT analysis that was done at
WikiConference USA this year, in which "biting the newbies", NPP, and
"onboarding/training" were identified as weaknesses [5]
Personally, I would like the interaction of experienced editors with the
newbies in places like NPP and AFC to look more like this
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Police_Week_May_15,_2010_on_Court_Avenue_Bridge,_Des_Moines,_Iowa,_USA-1.jpg>
and less like this
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Ferguson_Day_6,_Picture_44.png>.
Granted, it's hard for a relatively small number of experienced Wikipedians
to keep all the junk and vandals out while also mentoring the newbies and
avoiding collateral damage, so one strategy could be to increase the
quantity of skilled human resources that are devoted to these domains. Any
thoughts on how to make that happen?
I am currently especially interested in this topic because of my IEG
project which officially starts this week. [6] It would be very helpful to
retain the new editors that are trained through these videos, so improving
editor retention via improved newbie experiences at NPP and/or AFC would be
most welcome.
Pine
[1]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Community_policing
[2]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Police_reform_in_the_United_States
[3]
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Presentations_at_Cascadia_Wikimedia…
[4]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Articles_for_creation
[5]
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:SWOT_analysis_of_Wikipedia_in_2015.…
[6]
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Grants:IEG/Motivational_and_educational_vid…
