User:Filll/Encouraging Newbies

I am an inclusionist by nature, so I have a bit of a problem with someone who's main stated purpose is to delete more stuff on Wikipedia. A lot of that stuff is something that someone like me has written, or is in the midst of writing.

We worry so much about discouraging newbies with WP:BITE and WP:CIVIL, but we do not worry much about what a newbie feels like when they are just trying to write an article and it gets deleted by someone who is a bit too zealous, and they do not understand the rules for speedys and AfDs? A lot of them do not even realize they can retrieve deleted articles. So they are excited about a chance to contribute, and they start writing, and then we drop a bomb on them. Well you do not think that will discourage newbies? For an example, take a look at this.

Growth paranoia

One topic I frequently read about is worrying over the slowdown or potential slowdown or putative slowdown of growth of Wikipedia, measured in a variety of ways. Immediately someone claims that this is because of some pet issue or another, and used as a justification to deal with this issue aggressively, or more aggressively. For example, I have read people who claim that Wikipedia's growth is slowly because:

• editors are too uncivil on the talk pages and we need to enforce WP:CIVIL and WP:BITE more aggressively
• our markup language is too complicated and we need a WYSIWYG interface
• Wikipedia is too geeky and have too many acronyms
• Wikipedia is finished and we have documented everything already

None of this is based on any information or evidence. These are just declarations of someone or other (and in the case of CIVIL claims, are just echoes of something the Wiki God King has said, and so are related to butt-kissing). However, what other potential hypotheses for a slow down or reputed slow down are there:

• more effort put into time consuming article improvement, rather than new article creation
• effect of deletionists, as above
• more energy devoted to pointless talk page warfare, as above
• competition from other wikis and websites
• more difficult to write articles about more obscure and more technical subjects
• rate-limited growth by lack of easy online sources for many topics
• higher standards on Wikipedia
• driving away more marginally productive and unproductive editors and trolls than before
• more complicated and time consuming unproductive wikiprocesses that do not involve article writing than before
• discouraging expert contributions by troll coddling
• discouraging expert contributions by CIVIL creep
• less obvious topics to write about
• higher profile of Wikipedia attracting more FRINGE advocates and POV warriors to promote their offbeat ideas
• more effort required now because complicated citing of sources etc mandatory or necessary
• larger fraction of effort consumed in vandalism patrol
• larger fraction of effort consumed in maintaining ever growing pile of articles rather than producing new articles or expanding old articles
• more wiki projects in Wikimedia family to absorb new editor talents and energies
• too large and bureaucratic and too impersonal now that it has grown so large
• increasingly complicated set of policies and instructions that are inconsistent and contradictory and vague
• novelty has worn off
• any new article has to run the gauntlet of established editors in an area, and satisfy them, and fit in with collection of articles already in this area. As there are more and more articles, this becomes tougher to do.
• requirements to translate sources in other languages can slow things down.

I could probably come up with many other potential reasons. Without studying this carefully and gathering evidence, it is not at all clear that if we just pound on the existing editors harder to limit the use of profanities that Wikipedia will start growing again at the same rate that it did previously. This is just some unproven conjecture someone has made.

Another question that arises is, do we actually want the kind of production that previous the rapid growth rate was associated with? One could argue that the product of this sort of growth, while impressive in volume, was sadly lacking in quality and reliability and a bit dissappointing. Now that this has become more and more painfully obvious, editors have to go back and correct the previous shoddy work, which is far more time-consuming. --Filll (talk) 16:51, 1 April 2008 (UTC)