> 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. > > We have to make a profound choice in the culture here: > 1) we continue with the whacking and scaring the newbies away (content > priority #1, people #2), or > 2) we embrace the newbies and we let some spam through (people priority #1, > content #2). > > So far we are steadily moving along the first route. I believe, it is time > we switch the priorities. People are important. It's the people who will be > creating content in the future, and not the other way around. Wikipedia > will > inevitably fail without participation. And content... we are already the > largest and the best... > > Renata
To me it sounds too much black and white. Indeed, there are points you better not stumble across as an editor: engaging into battles over disputed content (like Middle East conflict), writing articles on smth with disputed notability, pushing POV or not getting immediately the image upload rules. But I assume this is a relatively minor fraction of editors (though of course it still represents a problem). I can not recall that I ever got any templates in my articles (I have written over 500 of them since 2007), except for a couple of times from a bot that there are no links to the article, and that I ever got any angry comments from admins/other editors concerning the articles I have written. The only serious problems I got was when several trolls started to request a source on every word in two of my articles, and this had nothing to do with the quality of the articles, but with me being a sysop. So I believe the problem exists but is grossly exaggerated (though for someone who has to fight for the notability of his/her only article it may very well be the most serious and grave problem). Cheers Yaroslav _______________________________________________ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l