Newcomers often make mistakes, and that's OK. When newcomers with good intentions are punished or scared off for their mistakes, that's not OK.
In this blog post I will describe how not to scare off newcomers.
Summary[]
The following points summarise the advice in this post:
- Assume good faith
- Revert responsibly
- Prefer improving over removing
- Explain your reasoning in edit summaries
- Prefer undo over rollback
- Ignorance of the rules may excuse breaking them.
- Encourage new users to continue editing.
- Try to avoid the notice template.
Why it's important[]
Newcomers are an important part of our community. They bring us new perspectives and information about articles and our community. Without them, we would miss the essential Water of Life, without which we would go stale and our community would die out.
Remember that you too were a newcomer once, and every newcomer that you bite is a potential you lost.
If that doesn't convince you, let's look at some statistics. On Nukapedia, the average user has only 66.57 edits, and 36,521 of the 38,287 users (that's 95%) has 66 edits or fewer. Clearly, experienced editors are the exception rather than the rule.[1]
In his research on Wikipedia contribution patterns, Seth Anthony found that two thirds of all substantive edits are made by anons or users without a user page, and that none of the substantive edits were made by admins. A study by Denise Anthony, Sean W. Smith, and Tim Williamson even found a negative correlation between a user's edit count and how much of their edits survived it to the latest version of the article.
All this shows how incredibly important the less experienced users are for our wiki, and they are to be treated as such.
Ignorance may excuse[]
Nukapedia has many guidelines and policies, and newcomers cannot be expected to have familiarised themselves with each of them. In fact, our policy to be bold directly encourages newcomers to edit a page when they think it can be improved. Since our policies require you to assume good faith, you should excuse newcomers for their mistakes. Punishing them for accidentally violating rules will only deter prospect contributors.
Instead, it is much better to inform them of their mistakes and to subtly point them to the policies or guidelines they violated and explain why they are relevant, allowing them to change their behaviour in the future. You should do this in a friendly rather than threatening manner. Consider beginning your message with a "Welcome to Nukapedia!".
You should also write personalised messages rather than using the notice template, for several reasons. Firstly, a notice template feels bureaucratic, and no one likes that. Secondly, a notice does not reference the particular situation, causing a disconnect. Thirdly and finally, a notice does not invite discussion.
- Doesn't this allow vandalism?
No, it doesn't. Ignorance is only an excuse when edits are made in good faith. Vandalism and otherwise disruptive editing should never be tolerated. Refer to my other blog post about reverting responsibly for details on when and how (not) to act in good faith.
Encouragement[]
In addition to simply "tolerating" the existence of newcomers, you can also go as far as explicitly encouraging and helping them. (Maybe it's time to look at the New User Network again?) If they forget to sign their messages, add the {{unsigned}} template to their post. If they write unnecessarily complicated links, explain them how to shorten links in a short but friendly message on their page. You can also leave messages to explain how and why you changed their edit.
When writing such messages, make sure to be constructive. Only telling them what went wrong or composing long lists of things that can be improved are not constructive. Instead, start by thanking them for their efforts, then describe what you saw, and finally suggest how they can improve this. In the last part, it can be very useful to link to examples for them to look at.
Newcomer errors[]
Finally, there are several errors commonly made by newcomers that I'd like to take a closer look at:
- Edit warring. Newcomers may unintentionally start or participate in edit wars. You should not assume that this is done to disrupt Nukapedia. Instead, such behaviour is often the result of one of three reasons:
- It can be the result of a misunderstanding; be it a misunderstanding of the rules or of the other's intentions. (The latter is why you should always write an edit summary for your revert.)
- Alternatively, newcomers may not be aware that Wikia keeps a revision history, and when they see that someone removed their hard work they will insist that it is retained, at least until after its contents have been discussed. (This is why you should prefer improving over removing.)
- A third possibility is that they do not realise that it would be more constructive to use talk pages. This becomes apparent when multiple reverts have edit summaries replying to the other reverter's summaries.
- Creating empty articles. Because newcomers usually do not know how Wikia works, they may accidentally publish the article before finishing it. When this happens, have some patience, and see if they later fix this. Give it some time, perhaps a few hours (or days). If nothing happens, you can always delete it later. You should refrain from adding {{delete}}, {{stub}}, or similar tags because these may discourage the user from editing.
- Creating articles in the wrong namespace. When a newcomer creates an article in the wrong namespace, just move it to the right namespace instead of deleting it. You should also leave an explanation of what you did on their talk page, as they might otherwise think their article was deleted.
See also[]
Footnotes[]
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