[WikiEN-l] declining numbers of active EN wiki admins
Emily Monroe
bluecaliocean at me.com
Fri May 28 23:18:38 UTC 2010
First off, let me say that you have influenced my editing a bit. Just
read my whole email.
Let me respond to your statements one at time, in no particular order.
> 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.
I've improved articles, particularly during lulls when new pages
aren't being created (or, at least, when new, nonsense articles aren't
being created--I know, I should do this all the time, and I think I'll
least do it much more often). I've copyedited, I've wikified, I've
added categories, I've removed POV statements, and I've added to
wikiprojects. Every so often, I'll do so to see if it really does fit
deletion criteria. Sometimes, when I do this, I get an edit conflict
with somebody else adding a deletion tag. 99% of the time, it's a CSD
tag. If it's a CSD tag, then I usually give up. I don't have the time
to improve the article before it gets deleted, for one. Plus, if my
intuition is verified by someone else, then perhaps my intuition is
correct.
If an article is highly technical, I'll just not mark that page as
patrolled. I'm sure that's forgivable.
> The priority is not removing articles; the priority is adding
> contributors.
I partially agree with you on this. The point of new page patrol isn't
removing articles. The point isn't adding contributors, either,
though. It's catching problem articles early on, and then actually
doing something about it.
> It does not matter how someone gets here: if they care enough to
> create nonsense, they can be persuaded to create sensible material.
I guess this falls under "assumption of good faith". The sad truth is
that we're not always dealing with good faith. If somebody writes
about the awesomeness of their newest crush, or insulting their hated
teacher as their first article, it tells me that they don't take
Wikipedia very seriously. While these editors have good faith, they
lack maturity. If they inserted such nonsense into an existing
article, we wouldn't have so much patience. This is particularly true
if they don't log in. We'd give them four chances, and ban them. Like
I said, it isn't an issue of good faith. It's an issue of competence.
If somebody, on the other hand, posts their resume or writes about
their garage band, this is probably true. We can point to the
notability guidelines and be like "Look. It isn't personal, but if
your band doesn't even have a consistent name yet, then you probably
shouldn't write an article about it."
My main concern is that I see new contributors' writing articles, and
it's obvious that they are biting off more than they chew. Templated
or no, there is no way to say "No, your article doesn't fit criteria
for inclusion" to a newcomer, who doesn't even have a talk page yet,
without violating WP:BITE. Every time I have to tag an article written
by such a person, I know that chances are good they are never coming
back. The problem is, most of them never bother to read the message.
I'm not sure how to completely fix this. If I write out, "Hey! Your
article might be speedily deleted! Quick! Slap a {{hangon}} tag and
write why your article should be included in Wikipedia on the talk
page! You might also try actually improving the article really, really
quickly!", the article might be deleted by the time I'm done. That's
why templated messages exist.
Maybe we can remove the scary-looking red, exclamated triangle from
the template, and remove any mention of speedy deletion from the
subject header (just have it be like "Your article, [insert article
link here]). This bothers me a bit philosophically because it's
euphemistic, but it might be necessary.
All I'm proposing is giving space between autoconfirmation and being
able to create articles.
I think I'll try out writing the deletion warning message for the
articles that I PROD. I will also try to improve the less obvious
articles that I think might fit the CSD criteria more often (Its good
practice for editing less difficult articles, anyway ;-).
And at this point, I think I'll at least temporarily bow out of the
debate.
Emily
On May 28, 2010, at 5:21 PM, David Goodman wrote:
> 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
>
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