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

[Yaroslav M. Blanter]

On Tue, 22 Feb 2011 18:42:25 -0500, aude <aude.wiki at gmail.com> wrote:
> 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)
>>
> 


Actually, this is smth we implemented in Russian Wikipedia about a year
ago (mainly due to user Samal). We have a subspace called
Wikipedia/Incubator (not to be confused with incubator.wikimedia.org which
is a separate project). This is kind of a school for beginning editors.
They usually get spotted, get an invitation to move (together with their
first article) to Incubator, and there they can quietly learn the policies
without having to save their articles from speedy deletion. We have a
dedicated team of people who are mostly active in Incubator helping the
newbies, and we already have the first generation of users who went through
the Incubator, had their articles moved to the main space, and some of them
even have GAs and FAs.

Cheers
Yaroslav