https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=30208
--- Comment #39 from The Blade of the Northern Lights <[email protected]> 2011-08-09 20:22:06 UTC --- (In reply to comment #36) > (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. I'd advise you to read a little Han Feizi. His argument was that the Sage Kings of China did what was right for them 8 centuries ago (at the time), but that the kings of his day needed to do what was right for here and now, and that concept applies here. We can't delude ourselves into thinking our reputation will be improved by letting newbies pour heaps of crap on us and leaving. We should be driving away a large percentage of people, because a large percentage don't want to help us; vandals and SEO upstarts are a huge percentage of our "new editors". I myself joined only in March 2010; I didn't join because I saw articles that looked like shit, but because I was so impressed with the quality of some articles that I figured it'd be neat just to fix a few typos and do a little bit of work. Over a year later, I'm still here; I wouldn't have been affected by this change at all, because I didn't create my first article until January this year. Instead of resorting to the methods of 2001-2002, get with the times NOW. You won't know until you try. -- Configure bugmail: https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/userprefs.cgi?tab=email ------- You are receiving this mail because: ------- You are the assignee for the bug. You are on the CC list for the bug. _______________________________________________ Wikibugs-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikibugs-l
