Topic on User talk:Trizek (WMF)/Flow

Hey, Trizek! :)

Lately I've been made aware of a situation in our homewiki (SqWiki) which you may already know but I thought I'd let you know anyway.

If you remember, I was very excited with the whole mentorship idea. We activated it as soon as possible but we have a small active community. We only have 3 mentors in total, myself included. The problem is that even though I tried to choose the most active users, the 2 other people still aren't fast enough in their answers. I've seen users on their pages ask 2 questions in a row or more because their first one never got an answer. We've set it so all questions get redirected to the mentors' talkpages but from the POV of most new users they don't fully understand what's happening. They just see a place where to ask a question and go with it. And when they don't get an answer, they ask again in the only place they know and therefore end up asking the same unresponsive user again. This may end up being very frustrating for them.

I was thinking that maybe we should "tweak the system" so that if you have unanswered questions by the help panel for X period of time on your talkpage you get a notification that reminds you to answer them. Or maybe automatically removes you from the list of mentors after giving you a notification about your "demotion deadline". Or maybe a notification telling the users that want to ask a second question after they have 1 unanswered one that maybe they should consider asking somewhere else. Anything really. The whole idea is to make users not get trapped in a single unresponsive page.

Hello Klein Muçi, and thank you for letting us know!

A agree on the fact that it is demotivating for newcomers to post on unresponsive pages.

The idea of the notification would be nice, but our wiki talk pages aren't structured. It makes it difficult to find which messages remain unanswered.

A possibility of improvement would be to have a centralized help desk instead of the mentoring system. This way, the page would be monitored by all users, and the ones who know the answer can participate. te.wikipedia posts these messages directly on the village pump (or equivalent) so that questions are immediately visible!

The mentorship system would return when the community would have grown up.

That's what we had (and we still have the Q&A page made specifically for that reason) but we changed it to using talk pages because unfortunately it wasn't working like that. At least some questions get answered like this. The only problem is that new members may get "trapped forever" with an unresponsive mentor. I think a system should be devised to protect against this kind of situation. Maybe by automatically removing names from the list once a certain criteria is reached. I can, of course, remove them myself now but in general it's not good practice to just count only on one user for a specific thing. I do understand that the lack of structured discussions proves a challenge though. If any changes happen in regard to this in the future, I'd be interested to read them.