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

[Lodewijk]

Would it make sense to have a "be nice" session at Wikimania to share all
kinds of experiences and best practices around this topic?

Phoebe, you sound like the ultimate person to organize such a session (in
case you did not yet propose such) :)

Lodewijk

2011/2/22 phoebe ayers <phoebe.wiki at gmail.com>

> 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
>
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