Boldness.... In some way I am starting to believe, that we should start to reconsider/rethink the rule/recommendation BE BOLD in English Wikipedia. It really is one of our philosophical cornerstones and it has it's validity, but unfortunately, if applied by/to newbies, it ends up by their frustration almost in all the cases. (to correct one spelling error is kind of exception, but it really is not that bold action at all).
I mean it. If a newbie comes to existing article - most of the time, it is already written to such a complex degree, that his addition gets reverted very often and very quickly (going to improve some good article or featured article without appropriate sources is not warmly welcomed, most articles are complex with history of reverts and balancing the facts from several POV and even well intentioned newbie is going to start with rejection..) , if he tries to write something anew, it - most of the time would fall bellow notability. The stubs worthy of the revamp are not having much of spotlight.. I believe, that rejection after well intentioned start is pretty agonizing experience, especially if there were any expectation on the side of the nebie.. for newbie retention it might be even worse than their confusion or hesitation to start.... While I believe in BOLD, I believe, that in such a large projects like en:wp, it should be carefully reworded, to not bring unrealistic expectation and it should bring some preparedness, that (now) the editation of wp is somewhat learning process. It should build some preparedness that the communication with rest of community might ensue, however the learning process might be actually quite a fun by itself, no one is really discouraging you by talking back to you (whatever the wording you suggest... just to not rise the expectation after few first edits too high) In sum, I believe more in slow start of newbies, because it is going to hurt them less and it is going to let them get more of appreciation of their work. Petr Skupa [[u:Reo On]] On Mon, Oct 10, 2011 at 3:44 PM, Ron Ritzman <ritz...@gmail.com> wrote: > On Sat, Oct 8, 2011 at 4:24 AM, David Gerard <dger...@gmail.com> wrote: > > > Deleting newcomers' hard work is one of our big PR problems. Even if, > > after contemplation, we decide we were actually right to do so. > > > > When someone wanders into the sausage factory and the very first thing > > that happens is that they fall head-first into the meat grinder ... > > this is an *unfortunate* circumstance. > > And it's also unfortunate that the first thing many newbies think of > doing is creating a new article. In some cases it's because they have > a [[WP:COI]] and are only [[WP:HERE]] to write that article. In > others, they are honestly creating articles that interest them but run > into a gauntlet of [[WP:NPP|new page pouncers]]. Here's a case of an > editor who got frustrated with all his "submissions" being tagged for > deletion so he tagged them all for G7 and is trying to get them back > at WP:REFUND. > > http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Contributions/Abbythecat > > The advise I would give newcomers is to not create new articles but > start out by editing existing ones. Another alternative is to expand > stubs and redirects in Category:Redirects with possibilities. > > Ron > > _______________________________________________ > WikiEN-l mailing list > WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org > To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: > https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l > _______________________________________________ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
