We have had endless discussions about this in the new page patrol community. 
Basically there is a divide between those who think it important to communicate 
with people as quickly as possible so they have a chance to fix things before 
they log off and people such as myself who think that this drives people away. 
So before we try to make people more aware that they are dealing with a newbie 
it would help if we had some neutral independent research that indicated which 
position is more grounded in reality. Simply making it clearer to patrollers 
that they are dealing with newbies is solving a non problem, we know the 
difference between newbies and regulars, we just disagree as to the best way to 
handle newbies. Investing in software to tell patrollers when they are dealing 
with newbies is unlikely to help, in fact I would be willing to bet that one of 
the criticisms will be from patrollers saying that it isn't doing that job as 
well as they can because it doesn't spot which editors are obviously 
experienced even if their latest account is not yet auto confirmed.

There is also the issue that some patrollers may not realise how many edit 
conflicts they cause by templating and categorising articles. Afterall it isn't 
going to be the templater or categoriser who loses the edit conflict, that is 
almost guaranteed to be the newbie. Of course this could be resolved by 
changing the software so that adding a category or template is not treated as 
conflicting with changing the text.

Regards

Jonathan Cardy


> On 25 Sep 2014, at 23:23, Luca de Alfaro <[email protected]> wrote:
> 
> Re. the edit conflicts happening when a new user is editing: 
> 
> Can't one add some AJAX to the editor that notifies that one still has the 
> editing window open? Maybe editors could wait to modify work in progress, if 
> they had that indication, and if the content does not seem vandalism? 
> 
> Luca
> 
>> On Thu, Sep 25, 2014 at 12:17 PM, James Salsman <[email protected]> wrote:
>> Aaron, would you please post the script you used to create
>> https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Desirable_newcomer_survival_over_time.png
>> ?
>> 
>> I would be happy to modify it to also collect the number of extant
>> non-redirect articles each desirable user created.
>> 
>> > Aaron wrote:
>> > >... You'll find the hand-coded set of users here
>> > > http://datasets.wikimedia.org/public-datasets/enwiki/rise-and-decline
>> > >...
>> > > Categories:
>> > >
>> > >   1. Vandals - Purposefully malicious, out to cause harm
>> > >   2. Bad-faith - Trying to be funny, not here to help or harm
>> > >   3. Good-faith - Trying to be productive, but failing
>> > >   4. Golden - Successfully contributing productively....
>> 
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