User:Newyorkbrad/Ten suggestions for the improvement of Wikipedia

This page will be written in installments over the next few days as I organize my thoughts and as time permits. Please hold comments until it's ready, as isolated sections may not make much sense until the page is complete, and the sections are not at all being posted in order of importance. Newyorkbrad (talk) 05:20, 17 December 2008 (UTC)

4. Reduce our tolerance for vandalism

Wikipedia:Don't bite the newcomers ("WP:BITE") is one of the fundamental policies of Wikipedia. It teaches us that new editors are our future contributors, and therefore are to be eagerly welcomed, forgiven their mistakes, and helped along the path to becoming regular contributors. I certainly appreciated this precept when as a newbie, I unthinkingly created my first article as "Hamilton, Peter J." rather than "Peter J. Hamilton" because I had in mind encyclopedic alphabetical order, and someone just gently moved it to the proper title rather than told me what a dummy I was.

In some responds, WP:BITE is not implemented as well as we might like. For example, a new editor who uploads an image or media file is likely to be greeted by a complicated set of warnings and regulations, and I do not believe that my suggestion in the Betacommand 2 arbitration case that a community discussion be convened to discuss whether the image tagging system and rules could be made more user-friendly was ever followed. Similarly, a new editor who creates an article about a topic that falls slightly below what another editor feels is the applicable notability threshold is likely to see it slapped with an AfD tag almost at once, and to be introduced to the world of deletion, probably our most complicated and at times offputting policy area. There are kindly worded templates intended to let new users down a bit gently, but even so it must be a shock, and in any event, many patrollers don't think to use them.

The one area where we bend over backwards to be gentle with new users is when they begin by vandalizing Wikipedia. In a profusion of good faith, we assume, or pretend to assume, that virtually any set of initial edits represents "testing" of how or whether editing works. Of course, oftentimes this presumption and policy are justified: some new editors do innocently begin their editing careers with "Can I really edit this??" or "JOHN WAS HERE" or "my English teacher is making me read this boring book for homework, I hate him." Giving the newbie the benefit of the doubt over a couple of these edits is a perfectly plausible policy. If the user's intention was to edit legitimately and he or she really was "just testing," the template reminds the user that someone is watching and offers pointers toward editing help and the sandbox. If the user's intention was less benign, I'm sure there is some group whom we catch and who think "this seems like a friendly place, maybe I should edit properly after all."

On the other hand, our current policy is that a new user (whether an IP or a registered user) may receive up to four warnings before being blocked. Of course, users may skip warning levels, such as by escalating to a "bv" right away, but often enough, vandals who clearly intend to mess around until they are stopped are allowed to continue vandalizing through the laborious four-step warning process, and some administrators will reject a report to AIV with a curt "not sufficiently warned" even where it is clear that the user is here to play games rather than edit constructively (or even, as in userspace, harmlessly).

All of this may have made more sense a few years ago when Wikipedia and the Internet in general were newer and more people really were "just testing." But while we have new editors every day, I don't think there can reasonably be as many people asking themselves "hey, can I really change the page?" as there used to be. In the meantime, the amount of vandalism that is malicious as opposed to just silly, such as personal attacks and BLP violations, seems to my subjective eye to be increasing. Meanwhile, every vandal edit takes time to revert and risks damaging the reputation of Wikipedia (and potentially promulgating an attack or BLP violation) if it isn't caught.

I don't advocate premature blocking, both because of the risk of losing what could have been a good editor and because of the risk of collateral damage to other editors' access, but I do think we should consider being a bit less tolerant of vandalism before blocking for it than we have been to this point. In particular, I would like to see discussion of a change in the usual sequence so that three, rather four, warnings are presumptively sufficient for a block.

5. Address unblock requests more promptly

An obverse of this problem is that there have been repeated instances of excessive delays in dealing with unblock requests by blocked users. Despite the preceding section, blocking is a serious matter. Wikipedia is meant to be "the encyclopedia that anyone can edit"; to a blocked user (who doesn't evade the block), Wikipedia has become "the encyclopedia that anyone can edit—except you." A block stops an individual from editing; a wrongful or overly harsh block, or even a good block prolonged unnecessarily after the lesson has been learned, risks driving an editor away for good. Most unblock requests, frankly, are meritless, but some are not, and they should be responded to promptly.

There is a dedicated cadre of administrators who patrol the on-wiki unblock requests category and the unblock-en mailing list, but they need more help. If possible, there should be a presumption that a good-faith unblock request should receive scrutiny from an uninvolved administrator almost immediately. And to accept my own share of the blame where it is due, longterm-blocked and banned users are told "you may appeal by e-mail to the Arbitration Committee," but often their e-mails pile up in the committee's inbox and do not receive attention; that needs to be corrected post haste as well.