It's not 50 out of 13000. It's 50 out of 200. That's 3250 out of 13000. I
am a large fan of the welcome followed by a personal message. If you edit
one of the wikis I contribute to, you are guaranteed that. An interesting
side-note: many wikis that don't send welcomes turned off the automated tool
anyway. They're just not friendly. It has nothing to do with the effort
required.
As for automating more tasks, I can't and wouldn't stop you, but I can
predict that people who take pride in performing those tasks will be
offended while some others will be annoyed for no reason. I assure you that
I personally mean no offense at all. What you are doing is great where it
is needed. The problem is size of the elsewhere.
//masterConjurer
2009/3/28 Danny Horn <da...@wikia-inc.com>
> I used to be a much bigger fan of human effort vs automated features on
> Wikia, back when I was just an admin on Muppet Wiki, and we had lots of
> humans making the effort.
>
> Now that I work for Wikia, and I look at thousands of wikis all the time, I
> can see how much effort the human effort takes, and how relatively few
> humans are making the effort.
>
> Before we launched the welcome tool, I did a survey of the top 200 wikis to
> see how many communities were consistently leaving messages for new
> contributors. Turns out about 50 communities were. It's a great thing that
> they were doing it -- but that's only 50 out of 13,000 wikis.
>
> I think it'll be interesting to see if there are other routine tasks we can
> automate and take out of people's way. If an automatic process can clean up
> after vandalism, or follow up with people who have accidentally blanked
> pages, or fix broken links, or whatever... then the humans can spend their
> time doing interesting things, like writing content and learning things and
> being nice to each other.
>
>
> -- Danny
>
>
>
> On Sat, Mar 28, 2009 at 5:23 AM, Jimmy Wales <jwa...@wikia-inc.com> wrote:
>
>> I used to feel exactly the same way, but I think we both agree that it's
>> an empirical question. "In my experience" you write - and I agree.
>> However, I'm very impressed with the data: "The fact that such a message
>> set for page blanking turned 56 of 78 page blanking actions into
>> constructive wiki edits is very intriguing."
>>
>>
>>
>> Master Conjurer wrote:
>> > I disagree. In my experience on Wikia, human effort has always been
>> > superior to automated features. Whenever somebody blanks a page on one
>> > of the wikis I use, it never takes more than an hour to undo it and
>> > leave a pleasant message on their talk page (below the usual {{Welcome}}
>> > ) along the lines of, "Hi there. I saw what you did. Any chance you'd
>> > rather help us out?" It works just as often and has no chance of
>> > stopping a genuinely helpful edit the way automated features often do.
>> >
>> > //masterConjurer (talk
>> > <http://www.wikia.com/wiki/User_talk:Master_Conjurer>)
>> >
>> >
>> > On Thu, Mar 26, 2009 at 10:47 PM, Jimmy Wales <jwa...@wikia-inc.com
>> > <mailto:jwa...@wikia-inc.com>> wrote:
>> >
>> > I really support this kind of thinking... I missed whatever
>> follow-up
>> > there was about this, but I love the concept of turning page
>> blanking
>> > actions into constructive edits, etc.
>> >
>> > I think most vandalism is just people testing to see if they can
>> really
>> > edit (even after all these years of wiki, people don't believe it),
>> and
>> > if the filter pops up and says "hey, how are you? maybe you'd like
>> to
>> > spend your time more usefully, you might be happier that way" then
>> most
>> > people will respond well to it.
>> >
>> > Daniel Friesen wrote:
>> > > There was an interesting posting to wikitech earlier about Abuse
>> > Filter.
>> > > Any thoughts on getting the extension on Wikia?
>> > >
>> > > Rather than just serious filtering of bad behavior it looks like
>> > there
>> > > are interesting soft filters that can spit out a message to the
>> > user and
>> > > ask for confirmation.
>> > > The fact that such a message set for page blanking turned 56 of
>> > 78 page
>> > > blanking actions into constructive wiki edits is very intriguing.
>> > >
>> > > I can definitely see a good use for that kind of feature,
>> especially
>> > > fitting in with Wikia's ideas for getting new contributors to a
>> wiki.
>> > > I can think of a good number of filters I could put on the
>> > Narutopedia
>> > > which would give a friendly message telling a newbie "You're
>> > trying to
>> > > do this? It's not normally considered polite here, maybe you
>> > wanted to
>> > > do this instead?" to help point out things which normally would
>> > end up
>> > > with someone from the community reverting, tagging for deletion,
>> > or whatnot.
>> > > Bleh, to bad it can't catch C&P page moves or copyvios from
>> > LeafNinja.com.
>> > >
>> >
>> >
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