[WikiEN-l] newbie culture

Fri Jun 16 10:59:26 UTC 2006

 From the famous Herostratus RfA: "There's no excuse to not use the 
warning templates for users vandalising, especially IP users."

And the perpetrator of this idiotic statement is, according to his 
userpage, an RC patroller (although, blessedly, not apparently a member 
of CVU).

Once we were worried about the newbie contingent getting so large that 
new users were in fact starting to consider themselves old hands and 
influencing Wikipedia (see: CVU admins, userbox fiasco).  It's gone 
beyond that, now: these days, the newbies are offering *advice* to more 
clueful users, and expecting it to be taken.

I'm not just extrapolating from the RfA we've been discussing, of course 
--- it's just that us having fallen so far that people are pompously 
demanding on RfA that users do the Wrong Thing is rather shocking to me. 
  Newbies-who-think-they-aren't-new saying bloody stupid things is 
something I've gotten used to, thanks to the speedy deletion thing.

The other day I got reverted for removing a speedy tag from a good 
article (the thing was tagged as vanity, which is not a reason for 
deletion).  That's not the good bit.  The good bit is: I removed it 
again, and got reverted by a completely different user, and was told 
that nobody may remove speedy tags, but must use {{hangon}} until a 
discussion at [[Wikipedia:Speedy deletions]] has been concluded.

I suspect it's my own fault --- I've forgotten how to suck eggs.

What do we do about this sort of stupidity?  I'm very much against, as 
y'all know, the biting of newbies in general, but the biting of people 
who still don't know how Wikipedia works but want to run around 
insisting that they know better than those who *do* is very tempting indeed.

-- 
Mark Gallagher
"What?  I can't hear you, I've got a banana on my head!"
- Danger Mouse