https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=30208

--- Comment #36 from Ryan Lane <[email protected]> 2011-08-09 16:56:50 UTC ---
(In reply to comment #34)
> That statistic was never intended to prove that everyone in the world has bad
> faith.  It was intended to show that the vast majority of articles created by
> brand new users are utter crap (and if you've ever done any new page
> patrolling, you'd be quite aware of this).  It's extreme bad faith to say that
> the people who are deleting these articles are "trigger-happy deletionists"
> trying to game the system at the expense of new users.  Seriously, that is
> ridiculous and you should be ashamed of making a comment like that which
> disparages the hard work of dozens of editors, particularly considering you're
> on the WMF staff.  If it weren't for patrollers filtering out these terrible
> articles, Wikipedia would be a laughingstock by this point.
> 

You know, in the old days of Wikipedia, crap articles caused people to edit, to
improve them. People see stubs and poor quality articles, and that prompts them
to edit.

By deleting poor quality articles from newbies you kill off the newbies, and
you kill off newbies that are willing to add information to poor quality
articles. You can't expect every new article to be awesome. The current
articles all started off as crap.

Why don't we instead make a policy that marks "crap" articles as being poor
quality, then funnel our efforts into make them good? Instead of deleting
something, why don't you take a few minutes to make it better?

It's the community that has the problem, not the newbies. This policy will
simply reinforce the poor social norms that have formed within our own
community.

> I disagree on both points.  There is no data which proves that this change 
> will
> harm editor retention, and there is nothing in this trial which violates the
> five pillars.  Wikipedia is the encyclopedia that anyone can edit, not
> necessarily the encyclopedia on which anyone can create new articles.  I would
> suggest that your opinions are myopic, based on gut reactions rather than
> experimental data, and appear to be mired in stereotypes and bias (based on
> your bad-faith "trigger-happy deletionists" comment above).  In any case, the
> community has clearly spoken, and re-arguing these points on bugzilla is not
> what I came here to do.  I'm going to attempt to not argue the politics of 
> this
> trial in this venue any further, and defer to the devs who are wiser than
> myself to ensure that this trial is correctly implemented.  Feel free to email
> me if you'd like to discuss the politics of this trial further.

Creation is a form of change. Editing is simply the ability to change. Creation
and editing are the exact same concept. We should be giving people more freedom
to change over time, not less.

You know, if we disabled editing for everyone except people who have been
forced to recite by memory all of our policies word for word or restricted it
to known good editors, we would have *way* less reverts for new editors,
because we'd have no new editors.

This policy is just one step towards turning Wikipedia into an encyclopedia
only elitists can change.

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