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

[phoebe ayers]

On Mon, Feb 21, 2011 at 8:47 PM, Renata St <renatawiki at gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>> 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.

This is a really interested (and lovely) experience.

I am curious, apropos of this discussion: how many people remember
their welcome message? Did it make you want to stick around?

I do mine, and it did; it was short and to the point and led me into a
little discussion about grammar with my welcomer. I was kind of a jerk
about it, but they (an editor who sadly left the project not long
after) were kind enough to walk me through best practice. Then later
someone else recommended a topic for me to work on, and pointed me to
Wiktionary. It was nice, and gave me the impression there were real,
quirky people behind the project. This was all pre-templates, to date
myself.

I know we've had this discussion many times before -- welcome messages
help, they don't help, they don't make any statistical difference when
it's measured. But I'm actually curious about people's anecdotal
experiences. Presumably if you made it to Foundation-l you did stick
around, after all :)

-- phoebe