Wikipedia:Deletions and Openness

The Editor Retention problem and the Openness Resolution

In a unanimous vote, the Wikipedia Foundation Board enacted the Openness Resolution. That resolution discusses the importance of the issues surrounding Openness. Additionally, the resolution directly calls upon the community to, among other things, "improve and make friendlier policies and practices regarding templates, warnings, and deletion".

• Rejection of good-faith contributions is a major factor in editor attrition.
• Therefore: We should improve Editor Retention by reducing the Rejections of good-faith contributions.

Details

In 2009, just 10% of new editors remained after a year, compared with about 40% who had remained in 2004 after a year of editing—a really severe drop (red line). The number of active editors had dropped from March 2007 (blue line).

What is Rejection of good-faith contributions?

• Rejection can be mere communication-- from honest criticism to vicious BITEing.
• Rejection can be a total reversion of a large contribution.
• Rejection can be a total deletion of an article, image or a cateogory.

Why do we need a solution?

• Potential existential issue for Wikipedia.
• Rejection is most likely to affect people who perceive themselves as part of a "out group"-- new editors, older readers, people not tech-savvy, people not 100% fluent in English, people not highly literate, etc. In short, the very people we most need to include.

What isn't the solution:

• Generic calls for civility.
• Status quo

How do expert users cope with Rejection of good-faith contributions?

• They create their own wikis or blogs, so they move rejected contributions there.
• They participate in online discussion outside of Wikipedia, telling others about their experiences.
• They write reviews of Wikipedia on sites such as Alexa.
• They move their rejected contributions to their userspace.
• They create articles in their own userspace until the article has matured.
• They quit or go off in a huff just like newbies.
• They look for websites such as Deletionpedia

Recommendations

1. Enact 'cosmetic' changes to try to lessen impact of rejections.

• Rename "Articles for Deletion" to "Articles For Discussion".
• Replace "Delete" !votes with "Rename/Merge/Userfy" !votes whenever possible.
• Reword warning templates to avoid driving away those who read them.
• Avoid "officialness" in warning templates, make it extra clear the message is coming from a user, not software.
• Encourage a culture of discussion over a culture of 'drive by' tagging.
• Slow down speedy deletion process to 1-6 hrs (or longer—what's the hurry?) for good-faith non-libelous contributions.
• Automate the process of an editor viewing their own deleted contributions.

2. Create a Shared Draft namespace to encourage mentorship and collaborative drafting.

• Add an additional namespace in software.
• Restrict viewing of this namespace to logged in users.
• Designate this namespace as "shared", welcoming editing by both newbies and mentors.
• Designate this namespace as "draft"; Like userspace, it is not a part of Wikipedia and carries no endorsement of quality.
• Both WP:Articles for Creation and WP:Incubator have overlap and would benefit from use of the Shared Draft namespace.

3. Create new venues for conflict-free contribution

• At the foundation level, create new programs or projects to facilitate conflict-free contributions of information.

e.g. New projects, User sandboxes, Oral histories, genealogical data, etc.

• Create new tools for rating or tagging content so that deletion is not our only tool for quality control.