Wikipedia:Taxonomy of new users

Users who are new to Wikipedia generally fall into easily recognized categories. Below is a taxonomy of these categories, and some gentle advice on how to deal with them.

This taxonomy is not intended to be exhaustive, but to be a guide to the unwary.

The Good

Believe it or not, there are actually some new users who are genuinely here to help out and improve the encyclopaedia. Welcome them and move along. Some subcategories require more careful handling though:

• The utter newbie – These guys make what they think are helpful improvements, but what they add is wildly unencyclopaedic, either in content or style. It can often be hard to distinguish someone who has very poor English from someone who has no idea about style. Some patrollers prefer to revert these types of edits; I'd rather see their content worked into the articles and appropriate advice issued on their talk page.
• The drafter – Sometimes you will see an editor creating a truly terrible page. It duplicates an existing page, it's about a completely non-notable person, it's promotional, or it's full of grammatical errors. But they're doing it either in draft space or in their own sandbox. Leave them to it. If they respect our processes enough to make their terrible article away from the mainspace, they should be trusted with the chance to respect our processes when it comes to moving it to mainspace. However, consider that CSD criteria WP:G1, WP:G2, WP:G3, WP:G10, WP:G11, WP:G12, WP:U3 or WP:U5 may still apply and tag accordingly. Leaving a personal message at their talk page explaining why you've done what you've done can sometimes help direct these people to useful editing.
• The immigrant – Some new accounts are incredibly prolific and have an immediate deep understanding of wiki syntax. Before concluding that they are a sock, consider that they may be coming from another wiki. These users will often note their association with another wiki on their userpage, or have a global account.
• The careful learner – Some new accounts have complex edits to tables or infoboxes as their first edits. Before concluding that they are a sock, consider that they may have carefully read the documentation and thoughtfully used the preview button. Often the difference between these and other types of users is the rate of their edits; all that care and documentation-reading takes time.
• The adventurer – These initially look suspicious because they're making a large number of not-very-useful edits. Check the edit summaries - there's a fair chance they are on The Wikipedia Adventure.
• Students – These tend to arrive in large groups, all making similar newbie edits. If you're lucky, their instructor has got in touch with the education program, their first few edits will obviously be related to a registered course and their edits will be generally constructive. If you're unlucky, their instructor has just told them to "make an article about Julius Caesar" and let them get on with it. Your best bet in these cases is to try to make contact, find out what school they're from and make real-world contact with the school, explaining how to do education programs right. If this seems all a bit much, ask for help at WP:AN.

The Bad

Some are here for their five minutes of fun. They're never going to contribute anything useful, but their harm is fairly limited, too.

• The school 'fan' – You can spot these because all of their edits are to an article about a school and they happen to register their account at about lunch time in that school's time zone. They will generally change the names of staff to something humorous, change the school motto to something 'humorous', change the number of children at the school to something approaching the population of London or other highly amusing hijinks. This often looks like a whole drawer of socks attacking an article, when actually it's a whole class of children hitting the computer lab at lunch. Revert, AIV if looks particularly disruptive and move on. The Welsh seem particularly prone to this, for reasons unknown.
• The "friend" – These are an individual version of the school fan. They've got a 'friend' they just have to tell the world about. Some will tell the world how amazing they are, some will tell us what a douche they are, others will tell us what a big **** they have. Revert, AIV if they've got more than a few edits of this type and move on.
• The wit – These will usually blank a random article, replacing it all with the word 'gay', repeated anything up to six hundred times. Revert, AIV if it looks persistent and move on.
• The sports "fan" – These replace a paragraph of the article about a sports club with "Newcastle United are gay" or some similar witticism. Revert and warn - and then keep an eye out, as they are sometimes more determined edit warriors than other varieties of vandal. Inexplicably, they are just as likely to post "Newcastle United are gay" on the article about the Azerbaijani cricket team as they are on the article about Newcastle United.
• The guy with big dreams – These guys just know they're about to hit the big time and so decide to get in early on their article. If they're not notable now, it's only a matter of time. How to deal with them depends. If they're promoting a company, CSD under WP:U5 or WP:G11 is their fairly unalterable fate. If they're a musician or sportsperson and they're restricting their activities to userspace, a friendly word about WP:COI might be in order but otherwise it's probably best to let it go for now; in these cases a promotional userpage can be hard to differentiate from an informative one. In between these extremes, you need to use your judgement. You have various CSD criteria available to deal with articles about non-notable subjects, and AfD or MfD as a backup. Remember, there is always the possibility they are really notable.
• The company with big dreams – Company names as usernames are an unequivocal violation of the username policy; twinkle them to WP:UAA and move on.
• The advocate – Some turn up ready to right great wrongs and get on with it with no hesitation. The advent of extended confirmed protection has cut this breed down very significantly, as most things they're likely to care about are probably subject to it. Nonetheless, they occasionally turn up with a proper bee in their bonnet. There's a risk / reward judgement to be made here. If these people can be persuaded to channel their energies into collaborative editing, they can become a great asset. They are usually energetic, clever people who could do great things if they could only drop their enormous POV. Early on, it's generally best to have a quiet word on their talk page, explaining how things work around here. Don't be combative; that's what they're here for and they know how to respond to it. It's probably best not the use templates, too; there's a fair chance they'll treat them as combative. Drop them a genuine, gentle, friendly note explaining what our purpose is and how they can help. At least half will treat this as combative also, but the few who respond well to it can become very useful editors.
• Good, old-fashioned vandals – At first, you will leap at these with your fangs bared. But in time you come to view them with something approaching affection. They generally take a dislike to some extremely random subject and start editing willy-nilly. They'll open up The Grinch and replace all instances of 'Grinch' with 'Potato'. They'll pick a random BLP and change the birthplace to 'Mars'. Often they'll edit war over it, and create multiple accounts to continue the war as each gets blocked. However, in their defence, they are easy to spot and easy to revert. ClueBot will get there first, nine times out of ten. They usually get bored after, at most, fifteen minutes and go get on with their lives. Revert, where ClueBot hasn't beaten you to it, dispatch them to AIV and move on.

The Ugly

• I like to move it, move it – It's not that uncommon for a new account to make a few page moves in their first week or so. When that turns into tens or hundreds of page moves in their first few days, you're probably looking at disruption, and disruption on a scale that's going to take significant time to figure out. A note at WP:ANI might be in order, if you can bear to go there.
• ECP gamers – Some accounts will hit the ground running with an enormous number of trivial edits which, while not disruptive as such, are often not much of an improvement, either. Often they will make an edit to a page which makes it worse, but then self-revert, making it less worthwhile for another editor to do something about it. They'll repeat this pattern on different pages. If challenged, they will explain that they are just trying things out. Their purpose is likely to be to reach the 30 days / 500 edits requirement of extended confirmed protection to let them edit controversial articles. There's not a lot you can do about them, except keep an eye out for what happens when they do reach the threshold. Thankfully, they often get bored before they get there.
• The spammer – These users will usually paste the same URL, or variants of it, into multiple articles. The level of subtlety varies widely; some replace the entire content of multiple unrelated articles with their URL, while others will create multiple accounts, each adding the URL once to a page that is seemingly related. If done subtly enough, this can be extremely difficult to spot. This is the purpose for which WP:SPI and WP:AIV were made.
• The promoter – These turn up with a very polished article about a semiconductor foundry somewhere in Gujarat, or Leeds, or wherever. The company is only in the early stages of VC funding, but is certain to be the Next Big Thing. The editor is almost certainly being paid for the content, but dealing with it can be very tricky. Proving that someone is a paid editor is difficult and can get you in trouble for OUTING. If they're any good at their job, then the article will be good enough that CSD G11 is not an option, and there could well be significant debate at AfD over whether the organisation is notable. Sometimes the best strategy is to make some edits to the article yourself. Remove anything positive that's unreferenced, or add in anything you can reliably source that's negative. The more ferocious the response, the more likely you're dealing with PR.
• Bad, old-fashioned vandals – At first, you will probably not even notice them. These are the ones who pick an article about a sports team and change the heights of everyone in it, making the same change on all the articles about the individual players and with sensible-looking edit summaries pointing you to an offline reliable source. Unless you're a committed fan of the Slovakian women's handball team, you're unlikely to be able to tell if the edits are genuinely correcting errors or maliciously introducing them, or even to have any way of checking. There's not a lot to be done here, except perhaps add some 'citation needed' tags and hope there's someone who cares about the article enough to know what's what.