Talk:March 2011 Update
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Contents
| Thread title | Replies | Last modified |
|---|---|---|
| Feedback from New Editors | 31 | 16:18, 16 June 2011 |
| Diminishing retention rates | 14 | 13:52, 21 May 2011 |
| Newbies or Better information? | 19 | 13:57, 17 May 2011 |
| en:WP:RequestedArticles has 400 groups asking 450,000 articles | 2 | 05:37, 10 May 2011 |
| 建议开发词条编辑软件 | 6 | 12:19, 6 May 2011 |
| I think GFW cause this ,we blocked to edit some pages. | 3 | 07:37, 6 May 2011 |
| Insisting no easy articles remain to write | 0 | 05:20, 4 May 2011 |
| A modest proposal for "incubating" new articles | 5 | 02:59, 4 May 2011 |
| Consider the en:WP:Article_Incubator | 0 | 01:56, 4 May 2011 |
| 维基的继续发展我觉得应该用到本身的优势 | 0 | 11:49, 30 April 2011 |
| 关于中文维基百科Wikipedia:快速删除的标准中存在的问题 | 0 | 11:09, 29 April 2011 |
| 或許可以考慮從讀者這部分討論這問題 | 0 | 08:53, 29 April 2011 |
| Open letter to Sue Gardner | 0 | 20:17, 28 April 2011 |
| Another simple explanation of editing trends | 8 | 19:07, 26 April 2011 |
| Bullying in Wikipedia | 4 | 03:57, 25 April 2011 |
| Schools/colleges banned Wikipedia use in 2007-2008 | 4 | 23:16, 21 April 2011 |
| The role of Discussion Page, the proper place to requests and discussions. | 0 | 13:55, 19 April 2011 |
| WP:WikiBullying to empower bullying | 3 | 04:36, 18 April 2011 |
| The core of it all | 1 | 03:34, 18 April 2011 |
| Not a change in Wikimedia, but a change in society | 5 | 06:32, 16 April 2011 |
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Feedback from New Editors
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I am a new editor myself, and to me, the logical way to go about solving this mystery is to ask us what the problem is. I wanted to create this discussion so that newer editors could post their comments, and get feedback from more experienced editors. This way, we can get all the feedback from new editors in one place instead of a couple dozen places.
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Bronsonboy,
I think this is an absolutely fantastic thing, and thank you for it. Welcome to Wikimedia! Would you be willing to share your initial experiences? What kept you around and what could have scared you away?
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One thing I did was to create a Wikipedia article for a number which was redlinked in a chart. I was upset to find my article rejected, as I did not initially understand notability. It took me about twenty minutes of talking to others on the help chat room thingy (I forget what it's called) to figure out why redlinks don't need to have articles created for them. I thought that making stubs would be better than having redlinks, and felt very discouraged to be informed otherwise. The basic problem is we don't know where to start editing. It feels like every time you make a contribution, you worry someone will tell you how bad it is. There's no shallow end, and jumping in at the deep end is not very appealing.
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I am sort of a new user. I created my account years ago, but have very seldom done any edits. Mostly because markup is just not for me. In the meantime, I've participated in a couple of discussion pages. On one of them an experienced user was downright hostile from the very start. As if I was being a naughty kid or I was disrupting the article on purpose. I hadn't done any changes, I was just suggesting it be done. As I see it I had a logic argument that would suffice anywhere in the world. What they told me (or what I interpreted I was being told) was that according to WP policies my argument meant nothing. I found that profoundly unfair and frustrating. Add to that the fact that this editor were completely uncivil and hostile from the start and it's miracle I'm still here. A second experience was slightly civil. Once again I posted a comment on a discussion page of an article suggesting a change. This time a very civil experienced editor showed me the ropes and give all kinds of information on WP policy to explain why this change was unfitting. I did my homework, followed all the links, read them, ask questions to other users and came back to argue my case just to be confronted with a veiled threat that I was rocking the boat for no good and it may have repercussions. As I've never been blocked before and I don't intend to be, I just gave up. From then, I drifted towards the conflict-solving pages in WP. I thought I might be part of the solution instead of the problem. To my surprise I found the editor from the first story I recounted (easily a couple of years after I first crossed paths with him or her) in a wikiquette alert. All administrators participating in the discussion wanted nothing to be done, as this was an experienced user and a new user should know better than upsetting an experienced user. That is my experience as a new user, and this is the reason why I don't really contribute to article writing, except for correcting a typo here and there. Also, the site is not user friendly and it's really hard to A)find a project where to participate and B)learn how to actually participate. Help pages and templates should be written in really easy English, not the opposite. Asinthior 14:19, 17 May 2011 (UTC)
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I can understand that, Asinthior. I don't think that more experienced editors should have "Diplomatic Immunity", so to speak. On the other hand, more experienced editors should hold benefit of the doubt/innocent until proven guilty. This testimony is evidence for the necessity of the Assume Good Faith policy.
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Couldn't agree more, as long as one keeps on sight the fact that experienced users shouldn't be given more "benefit of the doubt" than new users. I mean, even when an experienced user has a good track record, he can still lose his cool and be despotic once (although I would argue some make a habit of it, creating a pattern of abuse). If that were the case, he should at least be sanctioned as a new user would be, if not harder. After all, they are abusing their position and experienced to harass new comers. It's like they are committing a double fault: they are being uncivil or hostile and they are abusing their power (their relationship to other moderators, their experience with WP policies, their know-how in general) to do it.
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I also showed up and edited a few pages. One, the page for the CETME Model C, got completely re-written to be about the company, rather than the rifle. Did the old (useful) information get moved to a sub-page? Nope. Just deleted.
Welcome to Wikipedia.
You can tell by my editing history since then how successful that welcome was. Did I make some newbie mistakes? Sure. Did anyone offer to help correct them? Nope. I'd like to go back and make the CETME page useful at some point, but where's the payoff? At the time it was pretty obvious to me that my contribution was not welcome.
Wikipedia's useful, but take a look at the Metafilter discussion page about this topic if you want to see some comments from other editors that have not been retained. I'd still like to help wikipedia succeed, but I think the fifteen or twenty minutes I spent putting this reply together is about all I'm willing to contribute at this point.
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I had similar issues with communication. If you read a bit further, you'll see this post, which was the first I'd been made aware that this lack of communication was not the accepted norm.
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yes i do....
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Last edit: 21:13, 12 March 2011
I'll start. Bulleted lists (Alt+0149) are nice.
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- As a new editor, it takes a lot of courage to make any edit much bigger than fixing typos.
- (One of my first mistakes was to create an article that did not meet the notability guidelines--I was confused by the fact that a redlinked article might not need to be made, and assumed a stub was better than nothing. Something this teaches me is that first timers will not always understand the existing rules (and they were definitely not offered up early on to me by anyone or anything) and will not understand why their articles/edits are rejected. I'm not sure that all of you veterans out there think of things like that. Sometimes you assume that everyone knows the "basics". So far, notability is the only guideline I know, and then only because I got a rejection and then looked it up. People don't want to read thirty thousand articles on seemingly common sense/irrelevant guidelines.
My Ideas for Improving the System (which I'll add to as the discussion progresses):
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- Channel our enthusiasm-tell us how we can help so we can do something useful instead of wasting time by making editors undo changes.
- Ask us about our interests and recommend projects for us to join.
- In these projects, designate leaders who will delegate small duties to newer users, as well as mentors to help them if they need assistance (You'd not believe what seemingly simple things I still don't have figured out. Indenting this required about a minute and a half of screwing around with the formatting bar.)
- Show us how we can be useful. Personally, I feel that I have nothing valuable to contribute, because I feel as if I am blundering around causing problems and not fixing any. This is very discouraging, and I still (after several weeks) have made no contribution longer than three words, simply because I cannot find anything to contribute to, and don't have very hopeful prospects of doing so in the near future. This is actually probably the longest thing I have written.
- Channel our enthusiasm-tell us how we can help so we can do something useful instead of wasting time by making editors undo changes.
•Another idea would be to add rollover explanations: "Takes you to the _______ page", "Inserts a section of _______ text", "[verb]s a(n) [adjective][noun]", etc.
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The biggest annoyance for myself was the lack of a "quick reference" page. I can't easily know which parts of a page are meant to be bolded/italicized without learning from experience. The editing window is also overwhelming...most of my complex edits involved looking for articles that used the formatting I wanted (reference/citation styles, lists, etc) and then copying and modifying them. Technician Fry 20:43, 12 March 2011 (UTC)
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