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

[John Vandenberg]

On Tue, Feb 22, 2011 at 3:47 PM, Renata St <renatawiki at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> Then one day I stumbled upon Distributed Proofreaders (
> http://www.pgdp.net/c/) and proofread a few pages. I couple days later I
> received *three* *personalized* welcoming messages & evaluations "this is
> what you got right, this is what you should improve". I was shocked. These
> people are overworked, they have huge backlogs, they are stricter about
> quality than the pickiest FAC reviewer, yet three of them found time,
> energy, and good will to write lengthy personalized messages for a newbie
> who reviewed 30 book pages... If it was Wikipedia and I was a newbie with 30
> edits, best case scenario I would have been slapped with {{welcome}} and my
> articles with endless variations of  {{cleanup}}. This opened my eyes that
> there *is* an alternative -- an unthinkable idea for someone born and raised
> up in the Wikipedia battlefield zone.
>
> The core of Wikipedia culture is battleground: fight vandals, nuke their
> articles, whack them and quick! Yes, it is important for the integrity of
> the encyclopedia. Yes, spam was prophesied to be the end of Wikipedia. But
> what will surely kill it is lack of participation. And we are killing the
> participation by whacking it with deletions, clean ups, bans, etc.

I heartily agree, with one minor difference of opinion about the
underlying cause.

In my opinion, the 'English Wikipedia' response mechanisms are not
driven by the size of the backlogs, but by the perceptions regarding
the 'need' for new contributors.

English Wikipedia is now sufficiently well known and culturally
important, that 'we' no longer need to care about new contributors.
Even if only 1% of new contributors work their way past the rejections
and through our maze of rules, we will still have significant growth.
Many new contributors on English Wikipedia are seen by peers and
treated with respect, like in the old days, however many more are not
found by people who care, and end up driven through the gates of our
systems of escalating warnings and the like.
'we' allow our systems to become automated and depersonalised, and any
newbies lost as a result are collateral damage:
  "They were never suitable anyway."
The systems are designed so that the cliche '15 year old
admin-want-a-be' is expected to handled any newbie/new page, and they
do.

Wikimedia Commons is going the same way.

Smaller projects are far more welcoming and friendly to newbies, as
the project participants know the value of every new person.
Also each person participating in a smaller project has a sense of
achievement in 'the project'.
On smaller projects it is also possible for *one* person to watch
RecentChanges and see *everything*, and when more than one person does
that, the project has peer review of the newbie welcoming processes.
On many of the Wikisource projects, we have *edit* patrolling; if a
newbie makes five edits, up to five different people will be brought
into contact with the newbie.

Contrast this with English Wikipedia, which has *new page* patrolling.
 Once the page has been 'actioned' by one person, nobody else in the
community will see the newbie while they work on that new page.

We need systems which ensure that, on large projects, each newbie end
up in contact with more than one established users who *care* about
the specific topical area that the newbie is interested in.
And they need to be reliable enough that we don't end up with 50%+ of
newbies being left to be managed by the admin-want-a-bes who have more
interest in pressing buttons than they do in the topic that interests
the newbie they are 'processing'.

--
John Vandenberg