Impact of editorial tags on the recruitment of new editors

The increasing hostility that Wikipedia has been showing towards new editors since 2006 includes the widespread and increasing use of flashy templates to tag articles with blanket disparaging comments, such as "lacks references", "needs cleanup", and so on. Often those tags carry an implicit or explicit threat that the article's content will be deleted if the demand is not met.

Impact on new editors

To experienceed editors, the editorial tags are merely another stupid annoyance, that they have learned partly to avoid, partly to tolerate — because they know that "resitance is useless" against robot-wielding taggers and their fans. The impact on novice editors is likely to be much more serious.

As argued in the [[first-time editor is unlikely to be "hooked" and become a regular contributor until he has created an article on a subject that is dear to him. have "learned the ropes"

Even if the new editor gets past the hurdle of registration, and is not scared away by the messiy wikisource, his first new article is unlikely to contain references: he probably does not know what "source" means in Wikipedia jargon (much less "reliable independent secondary source"), nor how to insert references in the article. In fact, if his first article is about his high school or his favorite anime character, he is probably drawing from his first-hand knowledge, and therefore would not even know where to look for the required "reliable independent secondary sources" — even if they exist and could easily be found by a more experienced editor. Therefore, a novice's first article, even if it is missed by the deletionist militias, will probably and promptly get stamped with a big framed orange-trimmed template that says, basically, "yecch, someone please take care of this piece of s**t, quick!".

Even Dilbert's company will easily beat Wikipedia when it comes to recruiting...