Translations:New Editor Experiences/Conceptual understanding/22/en

Finding 8

 * Some editors suggested that their communities could try softening some of the policies themselves (in addition to just explaining them better), but most felt that it would not be possible to do so without compromising the quality of the encyclopedia.
 * An increased emphasis on the policies can be counterproductive in some cases, if it makes good contributors doubt whether they comply.
 * One potential challenge is that policies are not always internally consistent or equally applied in all cases.
 * The "Wikipedia way" is not necessarily the same across all projects, so we need to be careful not to build tools that impose a false homogeneity.
 * An increased emphasis on the policies might drive away social changers (new users whose underlying motivation is passion about a social cause), whose underlying goals may be inherently contentious and who may disagree with some of Wikipedia's policies. It may be important to communicate that the rules can be changed and that new editors are allowed to argue their case.
 * Many people suggested that concrete, contextual guidance (for example, detecting when new users add content without references and suggesting that they add some before saving) is a better solution than general explanations of policies, although others were skeptical that automatic detection of issues would be accurate enough to be useful rather than annoying.
 * There are currently no real mechanisms for communities to learn how well readers understand different help and policy pages.