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

[aude]

On Tue, Feb 22, 2011 at 4:47 PM, David Gerard <dgerard at gmail.com> wrote:

> On 22 February 2011 21:38, Sue Gardner <sgardner at wikimedia.org> wrote:
>
> > +1 :-)
> > 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).
>
>
> People see these templates and assume they're bot-created and nothing
> to do with humans. Which is pretty close, considering many are placed
> on pages using automated tools.
>
> The wording on almost all needs severe culling. [[m:Instruction
> creep]] was written in 2004 and remains largely unheeded in practice.
>
> http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Instruction_creep
>
>
Not on Wikipedia, but I recently wrote to my senator and got a template
e-mail response that totally didn't address my inquiry.  They totally didn't
look at what I wrote!  Boo!!!!  That left a terrible impression of my
senator!  Why would I ever want to deal with them again? Why waste my time!
Why ever vote for them? They don't care enough to listen to their
constituents. (duh, we know that, but still)

Quite sure if was a Wikipedia newbie and got templates on my talk page, I
would feel quite the same way.  Why bother with Wikipedia?  It's important
that a human listens and there is human interaction, and ideally it would be
awesome to expand the ambassador program and have people to help out newbies
more.  I don't know how much capacity we have but definitely would like to
see that.

Cheers,
Katie (aude)




>
> - d.
>
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