UESPWiki:Archive/CP Changes to Introductory Pages

This is an archive of past UESPWiki:Community Portal discussions. Do not edit the contents of this page, except for maintenance such as updating links.

Changes to Introductory Pages

Looking back on some changes that I made yesterday to UESPWiki:Helping Out and UESPWiki:Getting Started (and earlier to UESPWiki:Policies and Guidelines) I realized that I introduced a shift in some policy, and wanted to point the changes out to the community and make sure that I didn't make any unacceptable changes. The issue is whether new editors should be encouraged to read all the policies and guidelines before getting started, or whether they should be encouraged to just start editing first and come back and learn about the policies and guidelines later.

A pre-existing statement on Helping Out described the policies and guidelines as:

Important rules and guidelines that you should try to become familiar with before editing

That statement is still there (under See Also). But I added a paragraph to Getting Started that basically says start editing without worrying about making mistakes; learn the rules later. And I earlier changed the introduction to UESPWiki:Policies and Guidelines, in particular stating explicitly:

New editors on the site are not required to read through all of these policies and guidelines; they are not a list of rules that must be understood before participating in the site.

My basic feeling is that the new editors who most need to read the rules (i.e., those who add first-person stories or even those who vandalize) are the ones who are least likely to ever even look at pages like "Helping Out", "Getting Started", and "Style Guide"; they'll never even see any warnings placed there. The editors who will read through these pages before starting to edit are those who are fundamentally concerned about doing things properly and basically aren't going to be breaking any rules. I think it's important to tell those editors not to worry and just dive in; I don't want anyone to be so intimidated by the rules that they never get involved.

This isn't really an earth-shattering change to the wiki :) But I think it does perhaps represent some of the basic assumptions that we make when interacting with new editors who make mistakes. Do we say "you should have already read all the rules" and assume that they are aware that they made a mistake? Or do we assume that they probably don't know the rules and instead say "you probably didn't know this, but this is how we generally do things around here".

Or maybe my recent spree of policy-writing has left me paranoid about the little things and I should just stop worrying about obscure details that nobody else will ever read ;) In any case, let me know if you have any thoughts. --Nephele 18:54, 16 February 2007 (EST)