----- Original Message -----
From: "Steven Walling" <steven.wall...@gmail.com>
To: "Wikimedia Foundation Mailing List" <foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org>
Sent: Wednesday, March 21, 2012 10:57 PM
Subject: Re: [Foundation-l] [Wikimedia Announcements] Fwd: Announcement: New
editor engagement experiments team!
On Wed, Mar 21, 2012 at 3:49 PM, David Gerard <dger...@gmail.com> wrote:
And it turns out the new editors often assume the templates are
completely bot-generated.
That is: the editors using templates are, literally, failing the Turing
test.
> I know the solution is not
> to just stop using templates.
I think it should be given serious consideration. I realise why
Twinkle and Huggle exist, but they turn Wikipedia into a first-person
shooter with the newbies as the targets. I suggest that this is not
the sort of gamification that is useful.
If anyone wants to help work on these template-related issues, Maryana and
I are still in the midst of work on this in a couple wikis... I don't
want
to flood the thread with a report on its status, but let me know if you
want to join in our not-so-secret effort to make the current user talk
template system more human.
Steven
I don't know what you're doing, or where, but it seems to me that templates
often seem to be trying to do too much. One solution might be to have some
generics for particular issues with a mandatory freetext field, in which the
templater would be required to explain exactly what is wrong with the
templatee's edit, in the templater's opinion. I realise this might be a
hostage to fortune in possibly amplifying discord, but good templaters
should be happy to help and explain their reversions, and it would focus the
minds of those others who issue templates willy-nilly.
I think the above comment about Twinkle and Huggle is perfectly valid; after
all, if you can push a button rather than engage and educate an editor,
those tools make it all to easy so to do.
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