Noise
(Redirected from Talk page noise)
 | This is an essay. It expresses the opinions and ideas of some Wikimedians but may not have wide support. This is not policy on Meta, but it may be a policy or guideline on other Wikimedia projects. Feel free to update this page as needed, or use the discussion page to propose major changes. |
Talk page noise, occasionally also termed as drama, is tendency of contributors to perform actions, perhaps most often talk page messages,
- whose contents is not to the point of a current discussion or page.
- which are more than fixing the content or approaching a real problem would require.
For instance, in light of superprotect, a contributor posted this message onto mw:Talk:Compact Personal Bar:
- Today I deactivated all Beta features. First: the talk-pages are only in English. I don't know whether I could only post feedback in English or in other languages and I know, many people don't give feedback at all because of this. Second: I will not test any software from the WMF, until the Foundation keeps the superprotect right, which is a thread to all communities. --here
- This message has some meaningful content.
- There are better venues for such complaint: there is an open RFC here at Meta already, and additional essays written by contributors on this topic: any of those may be brought to the attention of the WMF at a point.
- More meaningful things to do exist, such as investigating root causes of the phenomenon involved and helping to solve them.
A question is: why do some (very little, I need to say) Wikimedia contributors continue communicating and working with such low efficiency?
- Within the good faith assumption, such messages may be overlooked.
- People are spoilt with the notion of things being all-right as long as they're not vandalizing (and even then they'd receive a sincere apology for a supposed mistake and an encouragement to keep working).
- Unless such messages reach the point of a personal attack, such contributors aren't blocked (even if non-attack messages of dramatic sort are a habit which continues to waste everyone's time).
- ...
How can we aid in creating a mechanism to weed out drama and feeling of entitlement, so that contributors remain focused on content work and stop wasting eachothers’ time?
- Abandon the good faith assumption in favour of never assuming?
- Introduce robust control over specific instances of noise? (This is hard to design.)
- ...