Thread:Talk:New Page Patrol Zoom Interface/Positive reinforcement

Thanks for getting this up :-). Let me focus a bit on the area of positive/negative reinforcement (with no prejudice to the importance of the area of workflow efficiency, which is clearly crucial for this type of feature to succeed).

I really like the fact that "welcome" and "WikiLove" are already part of the workflow. I think it's safe to say that the folks doing NPP work would appreciate having better tools as part of the workflow that also help them motivate and appreciate new editors. I would hypothesize that it would make NPP itself more appealing as an activity as well.

Perhaps instead of ".. but also", the "Mark as patrolled" should say ".. and also", and include things like:

[x] send thank-you system message [ ] send personal appreciation [ ] invite to WikiProject [ ] welcome new user

(Clearly, the relevance of these actions depends somewhat on whether/how new the user is.)

This would make it a more integrated part of the NPP workflow, as opposed to drawing a dividing line between "Flagging pages for problems" vs. "Welcoming and appreciating editors".

The idea of a thank-you system message is that any article that passes basic muster probably should lead to a standard thank-you. It would be worded to not imply that the article will definitely stay forever, but just simply express appreciation for the editor's effort. And I would suggest making it a system message (could be email, talk or both), because that would require less of a personal endorsement and raise fewer expectations by the receiving user, with the option of sending a personalized message if desired.

And of course, there's the template language, which we definitely need to keep in sync with vis-a-vis the ongoing efforts by Steven et al. in that area. I've experimented a little bit in my own time with changing messaging that is negative/didactic to messaging that is positive/helpful. Specifically, I rewrote the message that's placed on every user's talk page on Commons when they upload a file without categories:


 * Before: http://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=Template:Please_link_images/en&oldid=55610558
 * After: http://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=Template:Please_link_images/en&oldid=58988018

Essentially, I think a lot of the time when we're saying "Please do X", we want to be saying "Thanks! By the way, it's really nice to do X, because ..." That's obviously just a reasoned hypothesis and testing will bear out which approaches work best.