New Users creating New Articles

No! The project does not improve by welcoming new editors who write crap so they will continue writing crap. There is already too much advertising (a lot of it well written by corporate PR flacks), spam, and articles about trivia. The goal is to help new editors understand and conform Wikipedia's content standards, which are already much looser than the standards of traditional, professional publishing. A lot of experienced editors treat well meaning newbies badly, with nasty edit summaries on their reverts, nasty talk page posts ("Welcome to Wikipedia, thanks for your contribution, but what you wrote is utter nonsense ..."), and overly aggressive use of warning templates.

Finell09:22, 12 March 2011

I disagree with you about "articles about trivia". One man's trivia is another woman's hobby, and if it meets notability, it's not trivial. Moreover, in some cases it seems to me the notability guidelines are too strict; many academics only meet them once they die, when obituaries become available, even though they are major figures in their fields.

I agree about the rest though.

One question is what is perceived as "nasty edit summaries". I recently observed a non-native english speaker edit warring on english wikipedia about grammatical correction made by a native speaker, who as it happens writes extremely well. I don't remember the edit summary used by the corrector, but it was probably "copy edit" or similar.

Kobnach18:09, 12 March 2011

Re: edit summaries - when I correct what I think is a grammatical error, I try to link to a Wikipedia article that explains it, such as Dangling modifier from the edit summary. Links are especially necessary in edit summaries with Wikipedia jargon or shortcuts. Unlinked jargon annoyed me when I was a newb, especially after I learned how easy it was to link. I realized there were other editors who couldn't be bothered to make themselves understandable by typing a few extra bracket characters. So I vowed not to make the same mistake too much.

Teratornis04:13, 13 March 2011