Hello SJ, and all the others, I think SJ's mail has a lot of points. And I think the most important thing is not to talk about this, but to change one's own attitude. Most people who are talking here are also the most heavy contributors in our projects, and as these, they have a heavy mindsetting function in the projects. And if everyone of us work in our projects in another way as earlier, this would have an impact in the project. This is exactly what I do in my home project, zh-wp. Earlier it was also for me a easy one to say: Hey, this is spam, speed delete. But meanwhile I see this in a different way. Speed deletion is initially introduced to battle against deliberate destructive behavior. Deliberate spam is such a behavior, so there is need to speed delete deliberate spam. But a new user who put in an article about a product is not necessarily deliberately spamming. It is far more important to tell him what he did wrong and give him the chance to improve his article. So meanwhile I got to change my own behavior. If a user is not proven to be a notorious spammer, I would not speed delete his contributions. I would tell him his article is considered too one sided and as an advertisement. As such it would be deleted in seven days. But he can try to improve it, so that it would not be deleted. And I try to convince other patrolers and admins to do the same. The same is with badly formated new articles. They tend to be considered as destruction and tend to be speedy deleted. If I see them now I try to make a few formattings so that they don't looks really ugly, and try to find a category for them, so that they would not be speed deleted because they are uncategorized.
Yes this all makes more work for me, and I cannot say if it really pay back, if more new editors would stay. But my hope is, and I fancy that I do have some success, that this changes also the behavior of other admins and patrolers, at least some of them. And they would change other people's behavior. So this is really something that everyone of us can really change, by changing our own behavior. And there is no reason not to do it just now. Greetings Ting _______________________________________________ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
