Hi Oliver, Yes my criticism of your requiring new authors of new articles to have "a familiarity with policy" and "several references" was about what you said you intend this new software to do, not on how close the current prototype is to achieving that. If your intent is other than you said then please clarify your intent, don't expect me to disregard your stated intent simply because the current prototype doesn't fully implement it yet.
I'm well aware of last year's studies which showed that despite an increasing proportion being spammers and far more being vandals than in our early years, most new editors are still editing in good faith. But that doesn't mean they don't make mistakes, a large proportion of them do, much of my editing is fixing mistakes made by new editors. One of the divides in the community is between those who think that newbies need to be accepted indeed welcomed, their mistakes corrected without criticism and their good stuff celebrated; As opposed to the majority who supported the idea of stopping editors creating articles until they'd been autoconfirmed, and who believe in template bombing newbies articles or simply reverting their edits as "unsourced". Your comment "we'd been led to believe that in the eyes of the community, new pages can be a serious problem. One of the most vocal editors telling us this was an issue was you." is potentially misleading. Yes I've been concerned about the new page process since at least 2009. Remember my mystery shopping exercise when I demonstrated that new articles by new editors face a significant risk of being incorrectly tagged for speedy deletion and sometimes even deleted? But I approach this from an Article Rescue Squadron perspective. To me the major problems are in the loss of good faith contributions and contributors. Others took a very different tack and the community voted by a clear majority for the ACTRIAL proposal - which you and I both opposed. So the majority of the community consider that new pages by newbies are a serious problem; I consider that the new page process has serious problems. The difference is crucial, your comment implies that I was a vocal supporter of ACTRIAL rather than an opponent of it. I do talk to some of our more deletionist colleagues, and we have a lot of common ground in ways to improve new page patrol to more effectively sift the goodfaith from the Badfaith articles. There are several flaws in the new page process and even a number of proposed improvements that I have been able to agree with vocal supporters of ACTRIAL. Where we disagree is in whether we think that the best way to improve quality is to raise barriers to newbies or to help the goodfaith ones and collaborate with them. WSC On 11 March 2012 03:37, Oliver Keyes <oke...@wikimedia.org> wrote: > WSC, have you actually tried using the prototype, as suggested? It makes > very clear precisely what we're suggesting of newbies. I may be mistaken, > but your questions above about what exactly is included, and the idea that > we "require" anything, strongly implies you haven't actually tested it. It > might be a good idea to use the prototype before commenting on it. > > Nobody has said "we want our existing articles filled with errors". Nobody, > anywhere, has said that. Nor have we any evidence to suggest this is the > case; Steven and a few others did a small study last year that showed the > vast majority of edits by new and anonymous people are good edits, and > we've just wrapped up a larger one with Aaron Halfaker, Stuart Geiger and > Maryana Pinchuk that provides more data on that. Of course we want quality: > this idea that quality and openness are somehow opposed in a titanic battle > to the death is simply incorrect. The reason we're starting off by seeing > if we can improve quality and inform newbies with Special:NewPages rather > than Special:RecentChanges is, firstly, because it's a lot easier to trial > there (less stuff going on), and secondly because we'd been led to believe > that in the eyes of the community, new pages can be a serious problem. One > of the most vocal editors telling us this was an issue was you. > > On 11 March 2012 03:00, WereSpielChequers <werespielchequ...@gmail.com > >wrote: > > > Hi Steven, > > > > I'm quoting from OKeyes' description "a familiarity with policy" and > > "several references" and responding to that proposal. If the experiment > is > > going to be nothing like that, then how would you describe it? > > > > WSC > > _______________________________________________ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
