Wikipedia:How Wikipedia looks to newbies
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Summary
Editors are busy people with their own concerns, and, often, deep inside knowledge of how Wikipedia works, and (therefore) of what a Wikipedia article consists of - citations, external links, footnotes, sections, lead-in, imageboxes, categories, past discussions, previous visits to AfD, edits by sockpuppets and so on and on.
Newbies have no such knowledge. To the newbie, Wikipedia articles look like text: which, astonishingly, they can edit. So they do.
What's there and what the newbie sees
To the newbie, Wikipedia articles are made of text. And indeed, the newbie is right: read it, and it's text, one word after another. Press the edit button, and a text editor appears.
As text, Wikipedia articles look (to the newbie) much like traditional encyclopedia articles, except that they are editable parts of a website, like comment fields in a blog. If the newbie is constructive (this essay isn't about vandalism, so let's Assume Good Faith), and something seems wrong or missing, the logical response is to fix the error by tweaking the text. Which is fine if it was a typo or a grammatical slip; less good if it adds a true fact (without a citation); and less good still if it adds a valid opinion (but others think otherwise).
For a Wikipedia article isn't a text at all (or only at the base level of how it's physically implemented, just as at the physical level, a telephone call consists of electromagnetic oscillations: while at higher levels it consists of data structured by signalling protocols, and at the top level it consists of human conversation).
It is, probably, a mercy that the newbie doesn't know what goes on at an AfD or at NPP. If he did, he'd probably never contribute at all, or not more than the odd comma. Trouble is, the newbie does need some knowledge of how an article is to be judged, so he is motivated to spend time working on non-obvious things like looking up references (and let's not even mention image copyrights) rather than just venturing facts and opinions.
Would a template do the trick? Well, no, we know it wouldn't. How?
- For one, newbies using the Article Wizard frequently leave the sensibly-provided 'References' section, with its 'helpful' list of asterisks, as blank as they first found it. Incidentally, advice like "incorrectly formatted and unreferenced articles are often deleted" doesn't help either; the statement is true, but it glosses over the very different policies towards formatting and referencing – one is tolerated and cleaned up, the other provokes Wikipedia's wrath; and more importantly, the people who need to know they should be creating references don't read, mark, learn and inwardly digest that bit of guidance: it's literally 'off to the side', out of the newbie's field of attention to the task in hand.
- For another, we have all seen how newbie contributions to an existing article don't even glance down to the Notes, Bibliography, Citations, References, and External links sections – what a lot of apparatus we have! – since to the newbie, the article to his front is pure text. The text editor says so: Edit. After that, there's really no guidance, beyond the keyboard's invitation to QWERTY the text field, and the screen's simple command to Save page - and a page, obviously, is a container for text.
Suggestions
Perhaps it's none of an Essay's business to say what policy to adopt, what changes to make.
However, newbies create most new articles; good editors are in short supply; and everybody was a newbie once. Anything we can do to give newbies a more realistic view of what an article is, and how an article may correctly be edited, would be an improvement. So, here are some general suggestions. No doubt you can easily think of many ways of implementing these suggestions.
Wikipedia should
- help people to get things right, rather than letting them drift and then smacking them for getting things wrong.
- provide tools (word-processing software, templates, context-sensitive help, ...) that guide the newbie to make correct edits.
- steer newbies towards guidance (automated and human) when they attempt their first edits.
- provide suggestions and examples of how to edit correctly, in-place rather than far away in some undreamed-of policy document.