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User talk:Milar Kayne: Difference between revisions
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In your message, you stated that you have read talk pages of users and admins. Just how many of my posts on other users' pages have you read? Because I post to other users quite a bit, and while I can sometimes get frustrated when I have to constantly remind the same user over and over again, in the main I try to be as polite as an impersonal medium allows. I don't know if you are aware of this, but admins don't get paid for this. It's volunteer work. And if you think the admins are rude here, you don't know how much worse the rudeness '''against''' the admins is. I'll admit I can try to be more patient with inexperienced users if you'll admit that it can be frustrating to have to clean up the same edits by the same users over and over. Deal? [[User:Shambala108|Shambala108]] [[User talk:Shambala108|<span title="Talk to me">☎</span>]] 14:58, October 12, 2014 (UTC) | In your message, you stated that you have read talk pages of users and admins. Just how many of my posts on other users' pages have you read? Because I post to other users quite a bit, and while I can sometimes get frustrated when I have to constantly remind the same user over and over again, in the main I try to be as polite as an impersonal medium allows. I don't know if you are aware of this, but admins don't get paid for this. It's volunteer work. And if you think the admins are rude here, you don't know how much worse the rudeness '''against''' the admins is. I'll admit I can try to be more patient with inexperienced users if you'll admit that it can be frustrating to have to clean up the same edits by the same users over and over. Deal? [[User:Shambala108|Shambala108]] [[User talk:Shambala108|<span title="Talk to me">☎</span>]] 14:58, October 12, 2014 (UTC) | ||
== New users == | |||
Thanks for your feedback. You're quite wrong to assume that I wouldn't care about your comments, or that I had certain pre-fabricated answers at the ready. Reaching and retaining new users is of paramount interest to us here, and your comments don't fall on deaf ears. | |||
'''We don't want to alienate new users.''' | |||
The tension between keeping order and offering a helping hand is one of the central issues in wiki management — not just here, but on any wiki, offered by any wiki hosting service. All admin can do is explain things when we do them, and/or make sure that it's obvious what we expect of our editors. | |||
I know that there are times where we've just said the same thing six times to six different users, and when we get to the seventh user, we're not quite as hospitable as we were the other six times. That's bad — but we're human. I think it's also important to point out that the new user has a responsibility to read the rules, and to take criticism well. We don't take the time to write out a response to someone because we want to be jerks. We're spending that time because we want the new user to become a better user. At least some of the responsibility for good communication must rest with the new user being able to take constructive criticism. | |||
You say you read our user talk pages, but I wonder how closely you looked. At around the same time as the conversation with Rufus was another conversation, also about our image policy. That user took the same advice quite differently. Instead of railing against the policies, she took the criticisms onboard and revised her editing practices. And that's just one example. I can point to several instances where people respond differently to the same advice. | |||
One particular area of concern is the edit summary, which is often used to explain why a new user's edit got reverted. It's sometimes hard to be fully sociable in the context of an edit summary, since it has a limited number of characters. We find it's best to try to link to a specific rule or policy, and let that do the talking for us. While this can, admittedly, come across as abrupt, it is at least thorough. Which is one hell of a lot more than you get at most wikis. Indeed, on the scale of the wikis here at Wikia, Tardis generally gives a '''great''' deal of instruction to its new users. Again, how newer users receive that instruction is, in a sense, beyond our control. | |||
We also listen quite a bit to our community when it comes to the creation and maintenance of our ruleset. Few wikis have the huge archive of discussions on policy creation that we do. But because we're an older wiki, new users have to accept that they aren't necessarily the first person to have thought about a certain policy. Obviously, we don't want to end up having the same discussions each year as new users join us. We allow for users to open up discussions on existing policy, obviously, '''but only if they have something new to offer'''. If we didn't have that approach, we'd spend a lot of our time re-litigating the same policies, rather than adding pages to our actual content. | |||
And because our policies have largely gone through community discussion, we can't just allow people to disregard them. That would be disrespectful to the work of people who have come before. That's something new users frequently forget. They think we're just being stupid and inventing rules that make no sense. But actually quite a bit of work has gone into the creation of these rules. | |||
And some of the rules are the way they are because of technical requirements. Sometimes these technical requirements are not well understood by other wikias. Thus when people, like Rufus, come here and question the rules '''in the light of what's happening at other wikias''', we're not really able to accommodate him. For instance, we will delete images that are 3MB without discussion because they're indefensible from a technical point of view. | |||
In closing, I'd challenge you to think of this wiki the way that most of the admin staff do. We consider this a publication, and ourselves as the chief editors. Now, if you were working at a newspaper, wouldn't you think it reasonable that a set of rules, a manual of style even, existed, so that Sally the sports reporter and Linda the lifestyles editor created their articles along similar lines? If they didn't, those two sections of the paper might not look like they belonged to the same publication. | |||
And that's all we're trying to do. Not squash your creativity and fun. Merely to channel it in directions that make Tardis as consistent and appealing as possible. Of course, that does sometimes mean we have to say no, or mark a big red X over certain columns of text. But we try, really hard, to make sure that we always explain things when we have to do that. {{user:CzechOut/Sig}}{{User:CzechOut/TimeFormat}} 19:47: Sun 12 Oct 2014</span> | |||
