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

[aude]

On Tue, Feb 22, 2011 at 6:19 PM, Samuel Klein <sjklein at hcs.harvard.edu>wrote:

>
> On Tue, Feb 22, 2011 at 6:00 PM, MZMcBride <z at mzmcbride.com> wrote:
> >
> > 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?
>
> To be clear: those 180,000 edits per day are the source of future
> active users.  By rejecting them or dealing with them summarily we are
> simply committing ourselves to remaining at our current community
> flavor and size (if there is no channel for becoming a champion
> welcomer, people who like to socialize with and welcome others will
> never join the community)
>

One aspect that bites particularly hard is the rapid speedy deletions of new
articles.  Yes, many are nonsense and should be deleted immediately.  Some
are more borderline, not obvious nonsense but have some major issue.

What about having some staging area to put articles in that otherwise would
go to speedy deletion?  Maybe userfy pages or some other place for them? One
possible way to do this is to require new users to make their first article,
with use of the article creation wizard (or similar tool) and have the pages
go into a review queue like:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:WikiProject_Articles_for_creation/Submissions

Once they get one approved here, then automatically give them permission to
directly create articles.  Still, keep the wizard somewhere handy for
newbies if they want if for their second, third, ... article.

One aspect, not that easy to find, of the article creation wizard is there
is a live chat feature where you can ask questions and get help.  It's a
wonderful feature and the people in the channel are very helpful. (but we
would need more helpers there, if we were to scale this up)

I suggest we look at refining the article creation wizard and chat tools,
and evaluate ways to better incorporate into the experience for new users.

Cheers,
Katie (aude)




> SJ
>
> --
> Samuel Klein          identi.ca:sj           w:user:sj          +1 617 529
> 4266
>
> _______________________________________________
> foundation-l mailing list
> foundation-l at lists.wikimedia.org
> Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
>