[WikiEN-l] declining numbers of active EN wiki admins

[David Goodman]

Emily, your approach to patrolling has it backwards. The priority is
not removing  articles; the priority is adding contributors. Without
new contributors   the inevitable attrition of existing active people
will cause the quality to decline and the potential for covering new
or neglected topics to diminish.

With new contributors, we can both improve the articles and gain new
ones. It does not matter how someone gets here: if they care enough to
create nonsense, they can be persuaded to create sensible material.
The key hurdle is not persuading people to contribute usefully, but of
persuading them to contribute at all.

For patrolling, nothing is easier than to remove impossible articles.
One step harder,  not all that much harder, but only a minority of New
page patrollers do it, is figuring out which articles are improvable.
A good deal harder is doing what Martijn asks for: to convert the
people wandering into to make their mark, to  mark their mark by doing
something useful. It can be enormously rewarding.

I do not know how frequently he is able to try it.  Myself, of the two
or three dozen articles I deal with each day, I have time and energy
to work with only one or two of the contributors.  Martijn and I
cannot do it all ourselves, but perhaps we can persuade you to join
us, and try to rescue  one contributor a day. It doesn't even take
being an admin--if each of the thousand or so people who actively
screen the incoming material did this for just one person, we could
make an attempt to help the writer of every one of the unsatisfactory
articles.  If one in a hundred responded to us and became a
significant contributor, 3,000 new  really active people a year would
deal with a great many of the problems of wikipedia. If we   could get
one in ten,   it would totally rejuvenate the project.

On Fri, May 28, 2010 at 4:45 PM, Emily Monroe <bluecaliocean at me.com> wrote:
>> I'll add that it doesn't take much to simply create an account and
>> create an article that says "I luv Jane Doe she iz so awsumtastic!!"
>> While banning anonymous creation in the mainspace had its good
>> intentions, it's probably not as useful now as it was intended.
>
>> For instance, just today I speedy deleted a whole group of articles
>> about some classmates in a primary school somewhere in the UK. If
>> anons were allowed to create mainspace articles, and instead of a
>> registered user creating these articles we had an IP, then not only
>> would their be more transparency in who is creating them and where
>> (as only CheckUser can see underlying IPs from registered accounts),
>> but if blocks are needed to prevent disruption, we can make them
>> relatively short-term (instead of the common practice of
>> indefinitely blocking registered accounts as "vandalism-only").
> <snip>
>
> Bad idea. I think we need to have a level above "autoconfirmed", where
> people can do things like gain additional rights (rollback, adminship,
> the like), and create articles. They need to have enough edits, and
> been here long enough so we can pass judgement on whether or not they
> are good faith.
>
> Emily
> On May 28, 2010, at 1:31 PM, MuZemike wrote:
>
>> I'll add that it doesn't take much to simply create an account and
>> create an article that says "I luv Jane Doe she iz so awsumtastic!!"
>> While banning anonymous creation in the mainspace had its good
>> intentions, it's probably not as useful now as it was intended.
>>
>> For instance, just today I speedy deleted a whole group of articles
>> about some classmates in a primary school somewhere in the UK. If
>> anons
>> were allowed to create mainspace articles, and instead of a registered
>> user creating these articles we had an IP, then not only would there
>> be
>> more transparency in who is creating them and where (as only CheckUser
>> can see underlying IPs from registered accounts), but if blocks are
>> needed to prevent disruption, we can make them relatively short-term
>> (instead of the common practice of indefinitely blocking registered
>> accounts as "vandalism-only").
>>
>> Of course, it can also be argued that disallowing such editing may
>> indeed help in smart article creation by reducing the number of crap
>> articles (I mean complete crap) that gets created. There is probably
>> some tradeoff there in new page creation as far as anon creation is
>> concerned.
>>
>> -MuZemike
>>
>> On 5/28/2010 11:29 AM, Alan Liefting wrote:
>>>
>>> AGK wrote:
>>>
>>>> On 28 May 2010 16:48, Alan Liefting<aliefting at ihug.co.nz>  wrote:
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>> A lot of rubbish articles get created
>>>>> that need to be speedied.
>>>>>
>>>>>
>>>> That's very true. And the CAT:CSD workload is more prone to backlog
>>>> than it was a couple of years ago, perhaps because RfA is not as
>>>> sympathetic to the 'recentchanges patrol' editors (the kind who keep
>>>> such backlogs down) of years gone by.
>>>>
>>>> AGK
>>>>
>>>>
>>> Keeping editing as a *very* open model makes extra work for the
>>> active
>>> editors. Since the anons cannot create new articles we are now
>>> getting
>>> millions (?) of bad faith editors creating an account to make edits.
>>> There are now over 12 million editors - many of them are blocked and
>>> many are "drive by" vandals with only a few edits.
>>>
>>> Account creation or new article creation by new users needs to be
>>> changed.
>>>
>>>
>>> Alan Liefitng
>>>
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>>
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-- 
David Goodman, Ph.D, M.L.S.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:DGG