[Foundation-l] Friendliness: a radical proposal

[Fred Bauder]

Only people who are fluent in Spanish have a prayer of solving problems
on the Spanish Wikipedia. Somebody's got to grasp the nettle, maybe not
you, but somebody, actually a determined group of somebodies. Faith...

Fred

> Greetings all. I have been monitoring exchanges regularly, but never felt
> the urge to respond to any topic, here is my first.
>
> As a beginner, I found Wikipedia, in addition to unfriendly, very
> abstract
> and complex.
>
> Wikipedia Spanish has a problem with editors, and I can see in the text
> below some of the things I have experienced, where is why:
>
> I am a big archaeology fan and decided to undertake a personal project,
> enhancing the quality of archaeology articles, mainly because I noticed
> that
> many articles did not exist in Spanish or in English.
>
> What was worst was that many articles exist in English and not in
> Spanish,
> naively I set out to fix some of it, by investigating, researching and
> adding bilingual articles, in some cases simply translating from English
> and
> a few from German, Italian, etc. So I guess I found the reason why there
> are
> far too few Spanish articles.
>
> At a point in time, I encountered empowered and authoritarian Spanish
> text
> editors that vandalized my contributions, deleted articles, made
> Wikipedia
> rules on the go, etc., and offered no explanations. The last resort
> measure
> I had was to stop creating Spanish articles. In English, however it has
> been
> a pleasure, I have found people very proactive, friendly, helpful, etc.
> For
> details about my contributions and comments, see my user page, under
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Gumr51. I have a lot of time to
> research
> on my personal project, however very little time or interest in arguing
> or
> engaging in sterile debates with Text Editors, that I have no clue who
> they
> are, what is their knowledge, or actual interest are, since the
> environment
> is very impersonal, few even provide their real name.
>
> Since this is voluntary work, I would have liked or expected for the text
> editors to advise or comment on problems they encountered, I spent a few
> weeks last year asking for help and advice, I did get support in English,
> but not in Spanish.
>
> I believe that in addition to "quality" text editors and their "power
> levels", somebody may require to qualify the editors expertise in the
> content of articles, beyond the Wikipedia rules.
>
> I will continue adding English archaeological articles.
>
> Regards from a frustrated Mexican bilingual "Wikipedian",
>
> Raul Gutierrez
>
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: foundation-l-bounces at lists.wikimedia.org
> [mailto:foundation-l-bounces at lists.wikimedia.org] On Behalf Of Neil
> Harris
> Sent: Thursday, February 24, 2011 12:13 PM
> To: Wikimedia Foundation Mailing List
> Subject: [Foundation-l] Friendliness: a radical proposal
>
> Thesis:
>
> The main reason why Wikipedia seems unfriendly to beginners is the
> reduction
> in the assumption of good faith. A lot of this could be resolved simply
> by
> creating large numbers of new admins. This should be done automatically.
> So
> why not just do it?
>
> Argument and proposal:
>
> Many admins and edit patrollers find themselves forced into an aggressive
> stance in order to keep up with the firehose of issues that need to be
> dealt
> with, a surprising amount of which is fueled by deliberate malice and
> stupidity and actually does require an aggressive and proactive response.
>
> This is not the admins' fault. The major reason for this is the broken
> RfA
> process, which has slowed the creation of new admins to a trickle, and
> has
> led to an admin shortage, which in turn has led to the current
> whack-a-mole
> attitude to new editors, and a reduction in the ability to assume good
> faith.
>
> I'd like to move back to an older era, where adminship was "no big deal",
> and was allocated to any reasonably polite and competent editor, instead
> of
> requiring them to in effect run for political office.
>
> If, say, over the next three years, we could double the number of admins,
> we
> could halve the individual admin's workload, and give them more a lot
> more
> time for assuming good faith. And, with the lesser workload and more good
> faith, there will be a lot less aggression required, and that will
> trickle
> outwards throughout the entire community.
>
> I can't see any reason why this shouldn't be done by an semi-automated
> process, completely removing the existing broken RfA process.
>
> Now it might be argued that this is a bad idea, because adminship confers
> too much power in one go.  If so, the admin bit could be broken out into
> a
> base "new admin" role, and a set of specific extra "old admin" powers
> which
> can be granted automatically to all admins in good standing, after a
> period
> of perhaps a year. For an example of the kind of power restrictions I
> have
> in mind, perhaps base new admins might be able to deliver blocks of up to
> a
> month only, with the capability of longer blocks arriving when they have
> had
> the admin bit for long enough.
>
> All existing admins would be grandfathered in as "old admins" in this
> scheme, with no change in their powers. Every new admin should be granted
> the full "old admin" powers automatically after one year, unless they've
> done something so bad as to be worthy of stripping their admin bit
> completely.
>
> None of this should be presented as a rank or status system -- there
> should
> only be "new admins", and "old admins" with the only distinction being
> the
> length they have been wielding their powers -- admin "ageism"
> should be a specifically taboo activity.
>
> Now, we could quite easily use a computer program to make a pre-qualified
> list of editors who have edited a wide variety of pages, interacted with
> other users, avoided recent blocks, etc. etc., and then from time to time
> send a randomly chosen subset of them a message that they can now ask any
> "old admin" to turn on their admin bit, with this request expected not to
> be
> unreasonably withheld, provided their edits are recognizably human in
> nature. (The reason why "new admins" should not be able to create other
> admins is to prevent the creation of armies of sockpuppet sleeper admin
> accounts riding on top of this process -- a year of competent adminning
> should suffice as a Turing test.)
>
> So: unless there is a good reason not to, why not do this?
>
> -- Neil
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> foundation-l mailing list
> foundation-l at lists.wikimedia.org
> Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> foundation-l mailing list
> foundation-l at lists.wikimedia.org
> Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
>