User:Jasper Deng/The outsider's view

Note:While this essay describes an outsider's view of Wikipedia, its intended audience is experienced editors.

Editor retention has been a difficult topic for new users, and indeed, Wikipedia's public image is very different from the experienced editor's view.

Our policies and words

Despite the welcome templates, our policies almost always remain unclear to new users. I personally did not understand the importance of WP:BLP when I first started actively editing Wikipedia, and got blocked for a violation of it. The policies are very thorough, but, outsiders find them strange compared to most internet sites. This is inheritant of the world's largest internet encylopedia, a site very different from other sites. Many people have never read an encyclopedia other than Wikipedia.

For example, take the 3RR. Many new users do not understand the concept of edit warring. They think that anyone making reverts of their edits is also edit warring, but unfortunately, 3RR is a bright line, and users are often confused by it. In my experience, new users who were blocked for edit warring often do not return after that.

New users also do not understand that we have no such thing as moderators and that our talk pages aren't forums. I doubt many new users actually use the Reference Desk, and, this reduces the value of Wikipedia as an information source in this way.

In addition, on the many admin talk pages I watch, I see many comments asking about deletion. The admin usually provides a shortcut in reply, but, the new user does not understand the meaning of those shortcuts.

Perhaps the least understood policy is the one on notability. It's always tempting to be able to have bragging rights that you have your own article here. In other words, however, you are trying to show that you are notable by being on Wikipedia. The outsider sees this policy as one that is an excuse for unfriendliness (i.e. accidental biting of editors) and rejection.

Our culture

Our culture is vastly different from most internet communities. Our prohibitions against vulgar language (i.e. incivility), rants, and other things normally considered the standard of the internet often give new users unusual impressions of us. Our wording too is very different - we often use shortcuts to refer to policies, and we use lots of abbreviations. Instead of rants about which product is better, we have pretty formal discussions with few normal internet slang terms compared to other internet sites.

A newspaper article said that our culture is one of mainly male and educated people. People outside that find our culture hard to blend in to. Not everyone understands IP addresses and other technical things we take for granted in our discussions.

In addition, we differ from other sites in that we are totally volunteers (with the exception of a few people who are foundation staff), and our site relies on donations, not ads. Many people think that our goals at that are absolutely futile, but, hey, we've been around a decade!

Our content

The most famous stereotype of Wikipedia is unreliability. Indeed, it is a problem to an extent, but, our articles are mostly good sources of information, and we don't take hoaxes easily.

Another problem is our treatment of BLPs, which sometimes cause uneasiness for their subjects. This is however, a problem mostly relegated to experienced editors instead of new users, but, it's a big factor to our public profile.

Solving these problems

Changing the views of outsiders is never going to be easy. Even our welcome templates have not been very successful at it. Many problems cannot be fixed at all, as they are natural to our editing model. There are many debates going on, like requiring autoconfirmed status to make pages, requiring account registration to edit, and others. But there are also things like getting a full-featured word processor editor for our pages and showing short overviews of policies at the account registration page that can be done in order to make us more appealing to outside editors.