[Foundation-l] Friendliness (was: Missing Wikipedians: An Essay)

[Renata St]

>
> This is to some degree a question of balance in approach.
>
> Every day, thousands of absolutely idiotic, non notable articles get
> started that really have no point or hope.  Every day, new page
> patrollers find (most) of those, and they go "kerpoof".  It would
> largely be a waste of time to prod them, mark them "citation needed"
> talk to the new user.  The user never had any intention of
> contributing legitimately to an online information resource /
> encyclopedia, they're just trying to insult/promote/blab about their
> friend/school/work/favorite whatever.
>
> We could emphasize a more positive engagement intended to get the
> message to these people about what an encyclopedia is, what Wikipedia
> is, and what contributions would be appropriate.  But by and large
> these driveby contributions aren't intended to really stick.  They're
> an advanced form of vandalism, and the perpetrators know it.
>

That's what I though: "There is too much garbage coming in, too few admins
to police. There is no way that we can deal with this other than nuke on
sight and who cares about collateral damage -- we have a war to fight!"

Then one day I stumbled upon Distributed Proofreaders (
http://www.pgdp.net/c/) and proofread a few pages. I couple days later I
received *three* *personalized* welcoming messages & evaluations "this is
what you got right, this is what you should improve". I was shocked. These
people are overworked, they have huge backlogs, they are stricter about
quality than the pickiest FAC reviewer, yet three of them found time,
energy, and good will to write lengthy personalized messages for a newbie
who reviewed 30 book pages... If it was Wikipedia and I was a newbie with 30
edits, best case scenario I would have been slapped with {{welcome}} and my
articles with endless variations of  {{cleanup}}. This opened my eyes that
there *is* an alternative -- an unthinkable idea for someone born and raised
up in the Wikipedia battlefield zone.

The core of Wikipedia culture is battleground: fight vandals, nuke their
articles, whack them and quick! Yes, it is important for the integrity of
the encyclopedia. Yes, spam was prophesied to be the end of Wikipedia. But
what will surely kill it is lack of participation. And we are killing the
participation by whacking it with deletions, clean ups, bans, etc.

We have to make a profound choice in the culture here:
1) we continue with the whacking and scaring the newbies away (content
priority #1, people #2), or
2) we embrace the newbies and we let some spam through (people priority #1,
content #2).

So far we are steadily moving along the first route. I believe, it is time
we switch the priorities. People are important. It's the people who will be
creating content in the future, and not the other way around. Wikipedia will
inevitably fail without participation. And content... we are already the
largest and the best...

Renata