[WikiEN-l] New way to discourage newcomers invented

[Samuel Klein]

> > > Wikipedia has no "management style" because there are no managers. We
> > > should not be a bureaucracy in any sense of the word.
>

Right.


> > That is the point of WP:BURO. It's not that "We are a bureaucracy, but
> > > if you cut some corners we'll look the other way." That's not what it
> > > says at all. It says "We are NOT a bureaucracy" and so "Knowing where
> > > to go" should be much, MUCH less than half the "battle" of
> > > contributing to Wikipedia.
>

Absolutely.  And for 90% of contributors, that is happily the case.

However, on the fringes; somewhat active pages, pages with at least one
editor conflict, new pages, anon and newbie contributions, policy pages,
pages somehow turned up for deletion : lots of different policies,
aggregated over many years, come into play.


> face every now and again. The way we operate is a hybrid of pure wiki
> editing with other stuff.

Yes.

> And being in denial about the scale issue
> seems head-in-the-sand to me. A wiki with 10,000 pages is a big wiki.
> And we have 1000 times that, one way and another.

This argument isn't so simple.  90% of editors of our 10 million pages
manage with fully distributed groups of 1-2 editors, wikiprojects of a dozen
people, and a hundred automated bots and scripts.  They dont need to know
more than a couple of policies and guidelines, and can basically just look
at a similar page elsewhere to figure out how to contribute.

10% of a project this size is still a lot, and that produces all of the
light and noise.  but it's not 'in denial' to say that our core policies of
not being bureaucratic, ignoring rules where necessary, and being rightfully
indignant when it seems bureaucracy rules the day in some corner of the
project*, are what should guide 90% if not 100% of work on the Projects.

SJ

* even to the point of getting together and fixing that as an acknowledged
problem :)