On Tue, Aug 26, 2014 at 5:03 AM, svetlana svetlana@fastmail.com.au wrote:
- Look at newly created pages and collaborate on those with due care and
attention to the new people? That'd be nice. (although imo the drafts process at English Wikipedia creates an unnecessary hierarchy -- I'd love to remain a peer and treat the newcomer as a source of wonderful knowledge, not as a reviewee or mentoree. For this reason, I might perhaps only do this to articles created in main namespace.)
Take a look through WP:PAFC--you'll find lots of new people, and many of them getting burnt not just by rude comments but by waiting weeks for any comment at all.
Quite a bit of gatekeeping is necessary there, however. There's more advertisements and copyvios than serious content coming in through that channel. I would prefer, however, that AfC head more toward quickly assessing that, and take on a more collaborative role beyond the most serious issues.
The gatekeeping function would be a lot easier if the New Pages Feed tool was modified to work in this arena, but I'm told that there's been resistance to this idea from engineering. If that's true, and it may not be, it's a pity.
Our automation for copyvio detection is also pathetic, I can catch more copyvios by "pick a sentence, Google it" than CorenBot and its kin identify automatically. Smarter technology there built into the right tool for the job would be extremely helpful, why are we throwing away the limited resource of experienced editor's time doing mechanical checks?
- I had written a script [2] which makes draft review things more personal
by not using a template in review comments, but I couldn't figure out whom to approach to get it deployed, or how to prevent ugly [3] templates on talk pages of people who submitted a draft for review.
There are a couple folks to talk to, but they all follow WT:AFC, and I'd start there. But better would be to figure out how to integrate that work into Special:NewPagesFeed.
However, while all of this is true, I think it's not the biggest problem.
What is? Right now, there are around 2600 new editors waiting for a friendly word from anyone, and over 1000 of them have been waiting for three weeks or more.
Endless waiting is not engaging.
Any discussion which attempts to imagine we can help attract and hold new editors without finding a plausible, constructive solution to that backlog is missing the forest through the trees. Improved automation (Special:NewPagesFeed, copyright detection improvements), nicer wording, and so forth could both make the process more pleasant for experienced editors to participate in and focusing attention away from serious problems and onto engagement with editors with serious potential. There is room for technology to play a significant supporting role.
The whole process of new articles from new editors needs a fresh look as well.
80% of those new editors are going to fail at what they are trying to do--their articles will get deleted. In most cases, no amount of help would have saved their particular article idea. It's a damn shame that Foundation policy the editing community prevents us from educating them before they invest quite a bit of work into articles that are doomed to failure, because I'm pretty sure that "I put a good deal of work into something over a couple months and it all came to nothing" is a recipe for whatever the opposite of editor retention is. And we need to face that fact straight in the eye and come to some sensible way of fixing it.
--Joe