On 23 February 2011 10:07, phoebe ayers <[email protected]> wrote: > On Tue, Feb 22, 2011 at 3:00 PM, MZMcBride <[email protected]> wrote: >> Sue Gardner wrote: >>> I spent some time this weekend on New User Contributions on the >>> English Wikipedia, reading the talk pages of new people who'd been >>> trying to make constructive edits. I was trying to imagine the world >>> through their eyes --- what their early experiences felt like. Some >>> had welcome templates and some didn't, and many also had templates >>> added that were probably intimidating for new people (warnings and >>> corrections of various kinds, mostly). >> >> You should try gaining the other perspective: thousands of edits each hour >> from people all over the world, a decent-sized percentage of which are >> purely malicious and another decent-sized percentage of which are completely >> clueless.
yeah -- I actually did both. And yes, I have sympathy for Recent Changes / new article patrollers too. it was an interesting experiment. I used Twinkle to nominate an article for speedy deletion (or something like that, I don't remember exactly) and immediately felt awful about deterring the poor newbie, who was maybe misguided, but not a vandal. What I learned from that: some Wikimedians --like me-- are likely better psychologically suited to new editor _rescue_ type work, rather than deletions/reversions. (If you've read Nicholson Baker's New York Review of Books article on Wikipedia, he describes the addictive nature of New Article Rescue Squad really well.) Those people should be encouraged to rescue/support/guide new editors. It also made me wonder if patrollers find themselves over time starting to dehumanize new people, as a kind of coping mechanism, or just because they feel beleagured. The experience, for me, felt a bit like a videogame. (And yeah, I am a person who, when playing Pikmin, felt terrible when I didn't rescue all the little guys before nightfall, and the predator bug ate them. LOL.) To belabour the videogame analogy a little further: Zack Exley and I were talking about new article patrol as being a bit like a first-person shooter, and every now and then a nun or a tourist wanders in front of the rifle sites. We need patrollers to be able to identify nuns and tourists, so that they don't get shot :-) Thanks, Sue _______________________________________________ foundation-l mailing list [email protected] Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
