[WikiEN-l] NY Times article on gender gap in Wikipedia contributors

[WereSpielChequers]

I agree that Arbcom could and should act against any incivil admins.
But I'm not convinced that incivil admins are a big part of our
civility problem.

Nor do I think it is primarily about Vested contributors, who know
that their contribution history means they can get away with rudeness
that would be unacceptable in real life or for that manner from an
admin. Though I concede we have a problem there which Arbcom could
easily fix by desysopping the next admin who unblocks a vested
contributor because they are so valuable that we have to tolerate
their incivility.

I think we have two major areas where we see newbies bitten:

Firstly Newpage patrollers who template bomb or  tag articles for
deletion with little regard for our actual deletion policies and scant
regard for the sensitivities of the contributors. You really don't
have to spend long at
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Candidates_for_speedy_deletion
to find some bad examples

Secondly editors who revert unsourced edits from newbies without
checking if they are true or tagging them with a citation needed tag
for a few days. We currently have a policy of verifiable rather than
verified, but many editors think it is the opposite, hence the
conflicts when editors who think they can change things without
quoting a source have their edits reverted by other editors who think
they do. My preferred solution would be to change our editing
interface so that we have the reverse issue, editors who think they
need to cite their source patrolled by editors who help the newbies
who add info without citing sources.


WereSpielChequers