The reward complex

One thing I've noticed in my two or three very active years at the english wikipedia, is the level of discouragement to give out prizes, or to hold contests. The general disdain is that editors are then working and cutting corners for the final reward, rather than taking their time and doing things right the first time. I think this is a case of WP:DEADLINE; the thought that articles can't ever look incomplete, or in a partially finished state, discourages smaller edits, and often leads to reversions when those edits are saved (and I'm not talking about a featured article here. Just a stubby geography article, for example).

Barnstars, icons, and the like are a huge method of encouragement for all users. While some WikiProjects have made barnstars, they all are meant to be given voluntarily. Contests not only encourage participation, but recruiting. They provide a sense of accomplishment, and a realistic and attainable goal for short term commitment.

We should encourage friendly competition between related wikiprojects. A metric known as wikiwork was created (I believe by the Military History project) to measure the average class of articles in a project, where 0 is all featured articles and 6 is all stubs. The US and Canada Road Wikiprojects both have these metrics broken down by province. It has created a great incentive to improve articles, encourage newcomers, and make a better encyclopedia.

There are two areas of wikipedia that newcomers struggle with:

• Sourcing: Very few newbies indicate where they found the information they are adding. Most experienced editors (myself included) will revert that, stating "please provide a source", but to no avail. The activation of reftools would certainly help with this, but better still would be to encourage newbies before they make their first edit to read a basic guide to sourcing, NPOV, original research and synthesis. The less newbie edits that are reverted, the more newbies that will stick around and continue editing.
• Communication: Very few newbies respond or acknowledge contact. I believe it is because they aren't prepared for how rapidly people will descend on them and flood them with messages. Newbies should be encouraged from sign up to try and make contact with others in a subject that interests them, as well as with an administrator who can help assist them when they run into a seemingly unclimbable wall. - 99.227.69.133 16:27, 11 March 2011 (UTC) (Floydian)

Why revert newly added unsourced information, particularly immediately, if it's not obviously implausible and/or potentially libelous? There's a lot of unsourced information already in e.g. english wikpedia, and much of it is accurate. I also see unsourced information in other language wikpedias. Why the double standard for newly added information? Perhaps a more constructive reaction to unsourced information is to look for sources that either support it or contradict it, or at worst tag it somehow.

Because verification is a key policy. Perhaps in 2001, when content creation was the focus, unsourced articles were ok. Today we need to improve these articles. Too many stubs and innaccurate articles tarnish our reputation and further perpetuate the idea that nothing reliable comes from wikipedia. The only way to change that is to make it verifiable. I'd rather lose half our long-term editors than gain twice as many trivia-adding opinionated non-neutral fly-bys that reduce the quality of Wikipedia.

And continuing to add to our immense backlog is counter-productive. Even adding a bare url between two ref tags provides an invaluable platform from which to launch research.

The days of quantity are over. Quality should be the focus now. - 99.227.69.133 19:08, 12 March 2011 (UTC)

Obviously I disagree. As long as the backlog of no longer acceptable material remains, people who use it as a model are going to feel "bitten" - with justification. Add to this the phenomenon of autopatrolled people who continue to create new material to the standard that was current when they began editing, or below - and newbies are correct in feeling abused.

As examples of new material, exempt from patrolling, I offer two recent cases from english wikipedia (not citations, sorry; this is from memory)

Exhibit A - an _admin_ who completely failed to understand the concept of plagiarism and copyright violation, and eventually quit wikipedia when the state of their articles, and those they approved, became a scandal. (I believe this erupted in the did-you-know arena, if someone wants to hunt for details.)

Exhibit B - a long time editor, autopatrolled, whose idea of fun was to create incoherent stubs, generally full of errors. He apparantly used cut and paste and a template, not google translate; in any case, he didn't even proofread basic facts. The results had to be seen to be believed; even then, the full impact required some knowledge of the obscure areas he chose to write about (e.g. train stations in France, on english wikipedia, with info boxes giving the wrong line, wrong location, etc.) He did this in several language wikipedias, including english and greek; no one could find a language he was capable of writing coherently. He had a name like "pumpee", but I don't have a clue how to spell it.

These people created 1000s of articles, many of them quite recently, and while they are no longer active, I'm sure there are other similar editors remaining. Meanwhile some poor newb gets reverted for unreferenced (but accurate) information, perhaps while s/he's trying to figure out how to use the rather impenetrable reference templates.

Of course s/he feels abused.

The second editor's username is Pumpie, whose userpage is here. If you read his talk page, you'll see that he was a problem contributor for quite a few years. While I disagree with you that he was doing all of this as an "idea of fun", the rest of your comment is spot-on: various other editors worked hard to get him to contribute usefully, got frustrated, & those who tried to help him either quit or came close to it.

I don't recognize enough from your description of the first editor to identify him.

But what happened with Pumpie made it hard for the other editors to assume good faith to the next editor who doesn't understand Wikipedia rules, regardless of the nature of the misunderstanding. That's one reason I had no problem with being the heavy & blocking users like Chuck Marean & Mcjakeqcool for incompetence: there are other editors who are far more deserving of attention & TLC -- not all of whom are newcomers -- than goofballs like these who you have to honestly wonder how they manage to remember how to breathe. These 3 not only wasted the time of useful editors who could have been improving content, they led some of them to burn out. Which helps no one.

The problem from the point of view of a new editor, though, is that Pumpie remained autopatrolled until he was finally banned. The only people reviewing his articles were those who made it their business to try to do something about him, and only after he'd splashed his ineptitude all over areas they cared about.

What % of objectionable newbies are actually worse than he was? Yet everyone makes it their business to review newbies, and too many use terms like "new editor" as a synonymn for "incompetent."

From a newbie's POV, maybe the rules applied to newbies should be applied to everyone. After all, at least some of the existing frequent editors are clearly incompetent. Or maybe evidence of competence should be accepted in lieu of enormous edit counts, to get one treated like a useful contributor. _Including_ in Rfa discussions, which sure seems unlikely to happen ;-)

Likewise, perhaps evidence of moderate incompetence should lead to downgrades - admin -> autopatrolled -> ordinary "newb," depending on the extent of the ineptitude. With spot checks, such as perhaps some % of privileged actions going to automatic review, perhaps mixed in with actions of the non-privileged.

But of course this implies a rules oriented group, rather than a social connection oriented group. Wiki editors ought to be more rules oriented than most groups, because of the proportion of nerds and geeks (complimentary terms in my lexicon, since they tend to be honest, hard working, and logical). But I doubt that exempts wikipedia from the clique problems common in mature organizations - even geeks aren't saints, and not all wiki editors or admins are geeks.

If I recall, the English Wikipedia had something like this, called the Award Center where anyone could post goals with rewards of barnstars or other virtual kudos, but it was deleted in a MFD because it was thought to emphasize quantity over quality for edits and new articles, so if we were to do this, then we would have to find a way to make sure that quality was also key and not just quantity or it could very well meet the same fate (maybe the example of the English Wikipedia's Wikicup could serve as a basis for other competitions). Best, Mifter 18:50, 13 March 2011 (UTC)

I think the quantity over quality thing is a red herring, or an argument that is basically deletionist in its assumptions. Of course articles start out lower quality; at least, I hope later edits don't generally reduce quality, though sometimes I'm not so sure.

IMHO, there's nothing wrong with that, unless the new material is exceptionally bad - which I'd define as _significantly_ worse than material which is not being contested, either because it's grandfathered, because its authors are autopatrolled, or because its topic fits the systemic biases of a majority of reviewers.

If it's a crap edit (i.e. wrong or cruft), then I have no issue with the biting the newbie for not reffing. but when a quick Google would allow the BITER to have reffed the content input then...I HAVE A PROBLEM WITH THE BITER. So maybe we should say "don't template newbies with unreffed if you haven't done a quick google yourself". The problem is we have a whole class of busybodies that ONLY criticize and practically never "research" or "write" and their ONLY input is a critical facility. And there's too many of them...and not enough of the workers.