It's all about hostility

Everybody knows what the problems are.

• Hostile editors
• Deleting articles
• Reverting edits

Deleting and reverting is inherently hostile and we have employed hostile editors to take care of vandalism. We have allowed this hostility in an effort to increase "quality". We now have quality so it's time for change.

Wikipedia's hostility drives away new editors, drives away existing editors and creates new vandals. The new vandals annoy existing editors, which makes Wikpedia more hostile. It's a downward spiral. If we don't do something, it will get to the point where there are only a handful of extremely hostile editors and a world full of vandals.

The ideas below are not about vandals. Vandals don't have an expectation that their articles or edits will last. New users, on the other hand, do expect their contributions to last and that they be valued.

Hostile editors

Can you imagine walking in to a store and seeing a sign saying, "Don't be rude or disrespectful to other customers"? Of course not. Those people are thrown out. Can you imagine seeing a sign at your workplace saying "Don't be hostile towards your fellow coworkers"? Absolutely not. Those people are fired. It's absolutely appalling that we have the WP:BITE policy. That should be common sense and we should block people that BITE others. A thousand of people are driven away by each BITEY editor. Get rid of the BITEY editors and you get a thousand editors to replace them.

Easy fix - rate editors. Every editor should have "Thank you" button where you can leave a small note of appreciation and a "Bite" button where you can leave details of a "bite". "Bites" would come in 2 flavors; "reported" and "confirmed". Any user could report a "bite" but only an uninvolved editor could confirm a "bite". Once an editor hits a predefined level of "confirmed" bites, they are blocked for a period of time. Too many "bites" and they are banned. This would drive away the hostile editors and we'd have a flood of new editors.

Deleting articles

There is absolutely no reason to delete articles ever. Let me repeat that. There is absolutely no reason to delete articles ever.

We have people desperately trying to contribute articles to Wikipedia. This is not a problem; it's a blessing. We get about 1,000 new articles each day and some say that 80% of those are deleted. We are driving away 80% of the people we want. Stupid.

Easy fix - make problem articles invisible to the public. Articles could be marked as visible only to logged in users in the same way Pending Changes works. This would make committed editors want to learn the rules in order to make their articles visible.

Wikpedia has a few thousand users that log in each day and a few million people that just view each day. That's 0.1%. Of the people that are logged in, maybe 1 in 1000 would run across a problem article. That means that only 0.0001% would ever see the problem. How in the hell could anybody say that impacts our quality? Seriously. That's just bullshit.

Deletion is all or nothing. We don't have to throw out the baby with the bath water. We have other options. If there is a copyright problem, remove the part that's a problem. If there is an attack page, remove the attack. If there's a BLP violation, remove the violation. There is no need to delete the entire article. An entirely blank page is better than nothing. Articles should be given at least a year to grow. If it's invisible to the public, how could it matter to anybody?

If there is something that would never be notable, or if it's so-called "fancruft" or if it just doesn't belong in an encyclopedia, then move it to a new sister project. Wiki-non-notable or Wikitainment which was proposed years ago for fan related articles. We should strive to keep new editors somewhere in the Wikimedia fold. We shouldn't be driving away people that desperately want to contribute.

Reverting edits

I can't think of an easy solution to reverted edits, but removing hostile Wikipedians will certainly help. Using talk pages also helps. If people just talked to each other before reverting good faith efforts, Wikipedia would be a much friendlier place. Automated tools should be used only for vandals and not for good faith edits. It's too easy use the automated tools for everything.

Conclusion

The way Wikipedia operates today, new users are forced to run a gauntlet and take several bullets just to prove they are worthy of contributing. This is not the way to encourage new users to participate.

Are the ideas above perfect? Of course not. There are all sorts of problems with these ideas. But they are a start. Please WMF, please do something. Anything. Even the slightest movement in a positive direction is better than nothing. Letting things spiral down is not a solution. Please do something to address the hostility before the graph of declining users hits zero.

Jimbo said "Don't bite the newcomers"...because they might have RABIES. It's just a precaution :)

Rabies? Well, I learned something else today: Don't try to help newbies and encourage them, as it only attracts the Vampires and they do a whole lot more than just bite the newbies! ;-) The more areas of Wikipedia I've explored, the more I'm convinced we've already passed the tipping point. 'Back in the day', people added material to an article, and cut other contributors a lot of slack while the article was 'in development' (as long as the material wasn't libelous, of course). Now it's not just looking for any excuse to delete a new article, it's looking for an excuse to delete any and all material in existing articles as well. It's like watching two-year-old boys who love nothing more than to knock over whatever some other child has just built. They love being destructive, and they laugh hysterically when all that work is destroyed. I was under the impression from the surveys that Wikipedia was filled with male teenagers and twenty-somethings, but based on what I'm seeing (and hearing from others), I suspect the age range is a whole lot lower. Emotional age, anyway. Maybe this is what living in the midst of gang terrritory is like? Crips and Bloods? Flatterworld 03:33, 27 March 2011 (UTC)

A few years ago, I was chatting on IRC with a Wikipedia Bureaucrat about some of the problems arising from their over-reliance on a "Police Culture" to keep unwanted material out of Wikipedia and its sister projects.

The problem was that they couldn't distinguish between pointless vandalism and someone sincerely and prophetically speaking the meaningful truth to their over-reliance on administrative power.

In the course of this conversation, I quoted a relevant passage from Genesis — probably the most famous passage of all — about eating the "Fruit of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil." The warning in Genesis is that it's a deadly mistake.

My correspondent evidently was so unfamiliar with the quoted passage that he imagined I had just leveled a death threat at him. And so he committed the very mistake the Biblical passage warns against. He summarily (and erroneously) adjudged me to be an existential threat. He unceremoniously booted me off the system, thereby eliminating my presence from the project and effectively assassinating the avatar that represented me in his curiously cloistered world.

Dear Moulton, please come back.

From Moulton's Facebook Page...

An IP address at the MIT Media Lab engages the Keystone Kops ("Respect Mah Authoritah") in an exercise in Scientific Hypothesis Testing. As expected, Barney Fife's gun goes off, fatally wounding the hapless Visiting Scientist from the MIT Media Lab.

Moulton says, "File this one under Alienation and Disaffection."