[WikiEN-l] The story of an article

[Gregory Maxwell]

On Sun, Jan 3, 2010 at 9:51 AM, altally <altallym at googlemail.com> wrote:
>On Sun, Jan 3, 2010 at 12:23 AM, Apoc 2400 <apoc2400 at gmail.com> wrote:
>> This goes in the same category as:
>> "Anyone with good intentions can get through the 6757836 step New Article
>> Wizard, so it's not too complicated"
>> "It doesn't matter if someone gets wrongly blocked, because they can just
>> request to be unblocked."
> When I started, I created an account from the beginning. Why? Because it
> wasn't hard to notice the big "Sign in/create account" link in the corner.
> Newbies aren't all clueless idiots. You are making the mistake of assuming
> newcomers all have no idea what they are doing.

Where did you get this clueless idiot thing from?

It's not a question of competence, its a question of putting barriers
up in front of someone you're trying to get things from.  Perhaps when
someone is a highly motivated POV pusher a sign up process, a
multi-day wait, and a tedious 'wizard' are not material impediments,
but to someone who wants to just casually make an improvement they
are.  I don't think anyone can quantify exactly how much of an effect
this kind of impediment has, but it seems enough that we don't have to
assume any lack of competence.

I do know with absolute certainty that if some admin had blocked me in
error early in my editing my response would have been to forget about
the site and not attempt to edit it again for many years, if ever.
This has nothing to do with information and everything to do with the
fact that people editing for the site are giving a gift of their time
and effort. If we treat it as something they should be grateful that
we permit, then the site will preferentially attract the kind of
people who should be grateful that they are allowed to edit (e.g.
spammers). I don't think we want that.


[I edited articles for some time (over a year, I believe) without
bothering to make an account and only bothered making one when I
wanted to make some argument about project policy; I wish now that I
never had— the project would likely have gotten a lot more useful work
out of me if I'd continued just anonymously improving articles.]