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

[Ting Chen]

Hello SJ, and all the others,

I think SJ's mail has a lot of points. And I think the most important 
thing is not to talk about this, but to change one's own attitude. Most 
people who are talking here are also the most heavy contributors in our 
projects, and as these, they have a heavy mindsetting function in the 
projects. And if everyone of us work in our projects in another way as 
earlier, this would have an impact in the project. This is exactly what 
I do in my home project, zh-wp. Earlier it was also for me a easy one to 
say: Hey, this is spam, speed delete. But meanwhile I see this in a 
different way. Speed deletion is initially introduced to battle against 
deliberate destructive behavior. Deliberate spam is such a behavior, so 
there is need to speed delete deliberate spam. But a new user who put in 
an article about a product is not necessarily deliberately spamming. It 
is far more important to tell him what he did wrong and give him the 
chance to improve his article. So meanwhile I got to change my own 
behavior. If a user is not proven to be a notorious spammer, I would not 
speed delete his contributions. I would tell him his article is 
considered too one sided and as an advertisement. As such it would be 
deleted in seven days. But he can try to improve it, so that it would 
not be deleted. And I try to convince other patrolers and admins to do 
the same. The same is with badly formated new articles. They tend to be 
considered as destruction and tend to be speedy deleted. If I see them 
now I try to make a few formattings so that they don't looks really 
ugly, and try to find a category for them, so that they would not be 
speed deleted because they are uncategorized.

Yes this all makes more work for me, and I cannot say if it really pay 
back, if more new editors would stay. But my hope is, and I fancy that I 
do have some success, that this changes also the behavior of other 
admins and patrolers, at least some of them. And they would change other 
people's behavior.

So this is really something that everyone of us can really change, by 
changing our own behavior. And there is no reason not to do it just now.

Greetings
Ting