Yes, good people do things properly. But as one person said to me
once, "you're the only person here who actually tried to help." -- and
there were 4 or 5 conventional notices of help on that page. She
wanted some simple practical advice about exactly what was best to do
to save the article. I'm not the only person, and neither are you.
The secret which we both use is to never use copy and paste, or a
template. But, as you say, most people are trained to interpret
offers of assistance as the conventional "Please let us know if t
here is anything more that we can do to help" at the bottom of all
negative form letters. Just as some people at WP end their negative
warnings with "Have a good day!"
Not to mention that the effective use of a warning list is limited to
those who are on WP essentially full time. Look at the time between
placing a speedy tag and a the deletion of the article. Look at even
AfD and see the decreasing percentage that run the full five days.
On Feb 8, 2008 9:32 AM, Amir E. Aharoni <amir.aharoni(a)gmail.com> wrote:
On 08/02/2008, David Goodman
<dgoodmanny(a)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...
--
Amir Elisha Aharoni
English -
http://aharoni.wordpress.com
Hebrew -
http://haharoni.wordpress.com
"We're living in pieces,
I want to live in peace." - T. Moore
_______________________________________________
WikiEN-l mailing list
WikiEN-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org
To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit:
https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
--
David Goodman, Ph.D, M.L.S.