Look again at those messages. The succeed in sounded cold, formal, and sent by a computer without human intervention--which is just what twinkle etc. make it so easy to do. They talk too much about complicated rules, and they sound more defensive than helpful.
I almost never use them, except when I'm dealing with someone I suspect to be in bad faith. And even there they don't send a true warning--people treat them as forms. a personal message to say that one is personally and specifically watching can be much more effective. They've gotten a little better over the last year or too, but most of them need to be thought out differently. when one starts off criticising, most people don't read to the bottom. and the reason people don't complain, is indeed because the unsophisticated editors move on. They move on out of Wikipedia and we lose them. But some people do complain: that's why we have the rule about not templating the regulars. the regulars get insulted. They're right to get insulted. Anyone would. But we only care about those who are already regulars. Don't routinely direct people to our overlong, overcomplicated, inconsistent, and frequently ignored guidelines, explain it simply: A wording I sometimes use is "you need to become famous first, & then somebody will write about you" . Now, that's not exact, but it's understood, and nobody gets insulted--they know perfectly well they're not famous, and it sort of makes a joke out of it. and for unsourced, "you really need a published reference for that" -- they've heard that sort of thing in school, they'll understand. David On Sat, Feb 14, 2009 at 9:06 AM, Phil Nash <[email protected]> wrote: > creating good content through practice, the latter > may need educating, and this is normally done through templated messages, > the first level of which assumes good faith; however, it is often easier > when time is short to revert with an edit summary of "unsourced", > "irrelevant" or something equally blunt. >Again, in my experience, very few > "unsophisticated" (and this is not meant to be an insult) editors complain, > because they edit and move on. > _______________________________________________ > WikiEN-l mailing list > [email protected] > To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: > https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l > -- David Goodman, Ph.D, M.L.S. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:DGG _______________________________________________ WikiEN-l mailing list [email protected] To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
