User talk:The Arbiter/Adoption Questions

Adoption Questions:

• I see you're an adopter with multiple adoptees... how did you get into that role?
  • I noticed some other users who adopted other users to help them around. I had been on Wikipedia for a while at the time, and I was quite interested in helping others too. So, I would check the Adoption backlog every so often to see if there were any users who wanted adoption. I would offer adoption, and once they accepted, they would ask me questions, and I would help them get used to and learn about Wikipedia.
• Were you an adoptee yourself, or did you discover the program through other means?
  • No, I was never an adoptee. If you look at the very first edit on my user page, it was actually a cry for help…which of course never got answered. I discovered the program because after I got used to Wikipedia, I looked for a system somewhere where users help other users start editing Wikipedia. And adopt-a-user is what I found.
• Obviously, not all newbies ask to be adopted... have you a sense of what distinguishes those editors who do choose to be adopted, in terms of their goals, their behaviors, or their experiences?
  • I feel like the “newbies” who want adoption are the ones that were actually able to find Adopt-a-user. They normally want help to take it to the next level, as someone might say. For example, I helped a few adoptees on their first articles, and I gave them pointers on how to navigate and get accustomed to using Wiki. To be honest, goalwise they have all had different goals, and I have been glad to help them! As for behavior…well they are normally well-behaved, although if I remember correctly one of my adoptees was constantly in conflict…eventually he decided he didn’t need an adopter.
• In analyzing historical data, I've seen that the most common behavior is for adoptees to edit for a short while, then vanish or reduce to sporadic editing. In dealing with multiple adoptees, have you a sense of what distinguishes the adoptees who succeed and stay vs. those who drift away? Do you sense something different in what they want, or how they communicate with you, or who they are, or ...?
  • Actually, no. I never noticed any specific differences. Of course, there were those editors whose only edits were to ask for adoption and accept it. One editor edited sporadically always, but never really left Wiki. Another editor was eager to begin editing and even finished an article, but kind of drifted off. My feeling is that in a group of all new editors, adopted or not, many will stop editing Wiki after a while. I think that Adopt a user is representative of that.
• Some of your adoption relationships likely went better than others. Could you speculate as to what helped those relationships succeed? (I'd toss out ideas such as shared interests or frequency of communication, perhaps, but I don't want to put words in your mouth.)
  • I never had any conflicts with adoptees…not sure why I would lol. Of course, it all begins with the adoptee. If they want to edit Wikipedia a lot, and want to learn and get better and more proficient at it, I am more than happy to help them. We Adopters are doing what we do because we want to help the new users.
• You've suggested that you've helped folks navigate, get accustomed to using Wiki, etc. Have you any thoughts, based on what you've seen from your adoptees, on what I might be able to directly measure in an adoptee's edits that would show advancement to the "next level," as you put it? (Like, I dunno, use of templates, or talk page archives, number / types of articles edited, or... again, I don't want to answer this for you.) What sorts of changes in adoptee editing behavior might you expect to see from your successful adoptees? SeparateWays (talk) 19:52, 1 December 2010 (UTC)
  • That’s a pretty tough question to answer. I would say that if you watched a typical adoptee as he or she progresses, they would need help less and less. They would start being able to answer questions that other users might pose to them. Also, they would care less about unimportant things like user page decoration and more about actual articles and projects to improve the mainspace (That’s certainly how I progressed myself). If an adoptee needs no more help, that means I’ve done my job well. We are not trying to make adoptees be adoptees forever…eventually, they should act as independent users who are well-versed in Wikipedia policies. Finally, this may not apply to all, but early users sometimes tend to get in conflicts with others. Hopefully after they’ve been “mentored” for a while, they will not do that so much.

Thanks so much for your answers -- this has been really helpful! I'll be back in touch if I have more questions, but this gives me plenty to think about. SeparateWays (talk) 20:42, 8 December 2010 (UTC)