On 08/02/2008, David Goodman dgoodmanny@gmail.com wrote:
Even more amazingly, requiring notice has been rejected repeatedly by the long-term experienced users: "they should be using their watchlists" ;
Yes, they should. It took me a while to learn about Categories, Images and Templates, but i grasped the Watchlist very quickly.
"if people had to notify them, AfD deletions would go slower--they might protest more often".
That's bad. Let them protest. It's good to see that people care.
I had to deal with arguments and protests over deletions. These protesters are usually not stupid at all, even though they often don't understand our rejection of original research. But i don't mind replying to them personally in each case: every time i do it, it makes me understand even better why NOR is a good thing.
One thing nobody could say about WP, is that we are friendly to newcomers. it's the usenet heritage. At most we give them a list of 30 long help pages to read, but not a single personal word.
Not all of us: I listed myself as "willing to adopt" new users. I receive adoption requests every couple of days and stopped counting my adoptees a long time ago. Many of them never return after their initial request, but a few of them keep asking me questions. The questions are all quite the same, but i always give a full personal reply and add a link to a help or policy "for more info ... and feel free to ask me again if you don't understand anything". I never use copy n' paste in these conversations.
Some of my adoptees have already become good contributors...