On 10/6/05, Kelly Martin kelly.lynn.martin@gmail.com wrote:
On 10/6/05, Michael Turley michael.turley@gmail.com wrote:
Well, the amount of policy a person has to absorb to become socialized at Wikipedia IS stupefying. There's a lot to think about and remember when you just get started.
I never really noticed that. I was here for months before I read all that much of policy. There are quite a few I still haven't read and I've been an admin since June.
If you have some basic common sense, and access to a trusted peer group (i.e. Kat, who *has* read all of the policy and is easy to talk to on IRC...) who also has common sense, you barely need to read the published policy.
Kelly
By this she means that I've spent too much time burying my head in the Wikipedia namespace and hanging around chattering instead of doing anything useful. ;-)
I do think that the Simplified Ruleset should be enough policy for anyone to jump in with, and that newbies should get a lot of leeway for a while if they're genuinely trying to contribute well.
The peer group is useful. For all the criticism the IRC channel gets, I've seen quite a few people talked out of poor decisions and helped with procedures and understanding of them; the immediacy of responses and the large numbers of people around does help, when there are people around who will offer good advice. (When there aren't, well... not so much.)
-Kat [[User:Mindspillage]]
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