User:Senra/Editors

A post I intended to place at the Village pump notice board and chickened out. It needs further work --Senra (Talk) 19:58, 8 September 2010 (UTC) This essay was copied to Village pump notice board 20:53, 11 September 2010 (UTC) --Senra (Talk) 12:56, 12 September 2010 (UTC)

SUBJECT: I come to bury editors, not to praise them ...

It is believed that the deletion policy is not being properly followed. Whilst I am not experienced in patrolling pages and therefore do not have a broad overview of the issues, the small amount of evidence I do see gives me cause for concern. I believe part of the problem is that the ATD section of the deletion policy should be described in the lead as per LEAD. This would hightlight to editors that articles can, in many cases should, be improved by the main contributing editor, in this context, usually an inexperienced editor. The processes, CSD's, PROD's and AFD (have I missed one?) are being applied to articles by nominators that, in the cases I have seen, are not topic aware enough to make such judgements. In one case, a PROD occured within two minutes of the page creation. The net result is that new editors are being driven away by our over-prescriptive approach when common sense suggests a more gentle and sympathetic treatment of such editors is required.

I am a relatively new editor, who wishes to write articles of interest, with some limited success. I am however distracted by what I see as an unjust deletion process against new or inexperienced editors. I am frustrated because I do not feel I can express the issue properly, as I do not have the experience nor tools necessary, am too new to see the wider picture and the examples that I can give will unfairly single out a few patrollers and limited topic areas. What follows is a list of articles that have been rescued

I guess what I am trying to alert you to is that new editors are not being treated with respect. Each one I come across already has a bad experience via a csd, prod, or afd which are very aggressive processes to new people who do not understand the policy driven terminology we use. In all the articles above, a little gentle encouragement on the new editors concerned may have created a new editor; instead many of them have gone.

As a community, we should resolve to do the following

1. Patrol editors are not using AGF nor are they considering please do not bite the newcomers
2. aggressive posting on new editors talk pages should be punished, this includes writing wiki-speak which has no meaning to a new person - perhaps for every such post found, 5,000 edits are removed from the editors "edits since" count! That would stop them
3. Cease and desist posting negative sections (prods, afd, policy violations etc) on new editors talk pages without first considering if the new editor needs sympathetic help
4. be more proactive with the mentor programme. If necessary wikipedia should be prescriptive with established editors, such as every wikipedian must adopt one new editor a month or something similar

If you have read this far you deserve a little light relief. You have probably quite rightly ignored the subtle message embedded in the list above. In addition, you have probably interpreted the mis-quote from Julius Ceasar in one particular way. Which way? If you are one of the patrollers I have been describing, then cynically, the mis-quote is your mantra. My original meaning was not to praise the patrollers!