[snip] hi Charlotte, sorry to hear you had a bad experience on WP. I hope you will decide to come back to editing at a later stage.
I am a new editor too (since the 13% women article earlier this year - I think I did sign up years ago but didn't do anything until this year). (a little of my history) I've been enjoying my WP editing. I started just finding/adding references (I like this part), then changing some grammar, then adding a sentence here or there to match the ref, then I did a new article, added more refs etc. I'd joined a wikiproject page and was watching some of the pages I'd worked on, then one was put up for AfD. so then I learnt where to add my decision/comment on it, then found out how to watch the alerts pages for more of these from the projects. there was one editor who seemed to raise many for older articles without much research, so I commented about this. then it seemed to turn into a wikiwar that I'd heard about but not experienced yet. others were commenting too with similar thoughts (actually some of the other comments became much more heated). I don't think it was a male/female issue (against me) - it was more an issue of one editor wasting our time & seemingly controlling the time we spent on WP because we had to work on the articles they AfD'd to try keep them (when they were justified as being kept). I found out about inclusionists & deletionists during this process! anyway, it's calmed down now, as some made suggestions for the editor on other places they could search (besides a single google news search) (as it was obvious, because when we did it, many good results/RS were found & people suggested perhaps the deleter could help improve/edit the articles also with us), and the deleter has taken the suggestions onboard and slowed down with the number of AfDs and has done better research before proposing them since. (well, it's only been a week, so perhaps time will tell). in the process, I have learnt more of the rules (seem to find new ones every day) one of the best parts I like with WP editing, (besides being able to add/contribute when I come across things in research I do at home anyway), which just happened naturally, was helping and being helped by others to work on the articles. I see a few regular names on articles I come across (from the project), and it's nice to help out with their work as well as my own. I put up a second article last night, and another editor had helped me work on this one. they'd said one of the best feelings was getting their articles to GA/FA status and it was nice to work with others on this goal. I agree. I hope you get to have this feeling one day too. cheers kath
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