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

[MZMcBride]

Sue Gardner wrote:
> I spent some time this weekend on New User Contributions on the
> English Wikipedia, reading the talk pages of new people who'd been
> trying to make constructive edits. I was trying to imagine the world
> through their eyes --- what their early experiences felt like. Some
> had welcome templates and some didn't, and many also had templates
> added that were probably intimidating for new people (warnings and
> corrections of various kinds, mostly).

You should try gaining the other perspective: thousands of edits each hour
from people all over the world, a decent-sized percentage of which are
purely malicious and another decent-sized percentage of which are completely
clueless.

Wikipedia's treatment of new users is a response to the fire hose of edits
that come into the site. The only way to fight such a stream has been to
develop quick or automated tools. Based on my numbers, the English Wikipedia
gets about 4800 new users per day. While it'd be nice to be able to welcome
every user individually, for example, it isn't practical on any large site.
If you were going to do something more useful than welcoming users, you're
talking about dealing with about 180,000 edits per day and an active user
base of ... maybe 10,000 users?

It might be nice to improve some of the language in welcoming templates and
give personalized thank you messages for particularly good contributions,
but with finite resources, there are much bigger issues that need focus and
attention. (I'll side-step the issue of _why_ participation, as opposed to
article quality, is viewed as so important by Wikimedia for now.)

MZMcBride