[WikiEN-l] newbie culture

Fri Jun 16 12:16:58 UTC 2006

G'day geni,

> On 6/16/06, Mark Gallagher <m.g.gallagher at student.canberra.edu.au> wrote:
> 
>> 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.
> 
> So in other words the next generation is comeing through. Experence
> suggests that complianing that "It wasn't like that in my day" doesn't
> work too well.

When I felt comfortable enough to start saying "this is how Wikipedia 
works" rather than "um, I think this is how things go, isn't it?  Please 
correct me if I'm wrong, I'm kinda new, but that seems to make sense, so 
... yeah, what do you think?", there weren't any old hands who got upset 
with me for not merely lecturing them on how things work, but getting it 
Wrong.  I've been criticised, quite fairly, for any number of things ... 
but *not once* for a tendency to, for example, tell a user who has done 
good work in vandalism cleanup and warning vandals and testers that his 
behaviour when RC patrolling is unconscionable, because he's not robotic 
enough.

I don't have a problem with "the next generation coming through" --- I 
*was* the next generation less than a year ago --- but the members of 
that generation telling people the Wrong Thing and acting like it's 
gospel (it's bad enough when *I* get lectured like this; what happens if 
it's a newbie getting bad advice?), well before they've matured enough 
to be considered to have "come through" that get my goat.

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