Wikipedia talk:Wikipedia Signpost/2009-04-27/News and notes

Usability study

Given the amount of crap that, frankly, only serves to waste the time of new article patrollers and the admins who have to do their speedies, do we really want to lower the editing bar? It's well-intentioned but misguided. It might not be politic, but if editing makes you feel stupid, maybe there's a reason. 208.54.4.69 (talk) 17:39, 27 April 2009 (UTC)

The problem is that editing is difficult, but vandalizing is easy... You don't have have to know any wikimarkup to place obscenities all over the page. And don't pretend it's a piece of cake to edit an article interspersed with zillions of ref tags, even for a seasoned wikipedian. --Zvika (talk) 07:34, 30 April 2009 (UTC)

Also: every user that gets turned away from Wikipedia, because they can't handle the interface or they don't know the etiquette or their first article gets speedily-deleted, is one less potentially useful and productive editor we could have had. Remember that most people editing Wikipedia - even anon users - are trying to help out, not vandalise. If they can't do that, then we don't benefit from all the value they could have added. We don't want vandals, but we do desperately need more good, skilled contributors, and we won't get that if would-be editors never start editing in the first place. Robofish (talk) 13:08, 1 May 2009 (UTC)