Board Thread:General Wiki Discussion/@comment-24351229-20140921012959/@comment-4050367-20140921170920

Ahmad15 wrote: First, we need to start a "Anti-Noobist Movement". This isn't against the n00bs themself, but against the social divition among us, particularly between noobs and others. That became rare recently, but at a point of time, this was a horrible issue that scared away more than 15 new users at that time. The 25 edits thing indirectly and unintentionally helped this.

We need to remove the concept of noob before this escalates yet again. A noob is a user who simply doesn't have as much experience or knowledge. Of course, over the last two years the term has regretabbly been used negativly, like other terms in human languages. The concept of the noob doesn't need to be removed, the negative usage of it is what needs to be removed.

The 25 edits policy was designed to 1) Making it harder for trolls to come on. Before, trolls could come on willingly with 0 edits, do something, and get blocked. Now, we make users have 25 edits before they can come on chat. This means the troll has to do work they don't want to do. 2) It makes sure users actually edit on the wiki. An issue is when the user has contributed little to the wiki. Chat is a privilege; not a right. You earn the right to chat by editing. You lose the right to chat by breaking the rules. That's how life works. You only get the good things if you don't break the rules. The more edits you make, the more trust we have with you being on chat.

While I admit that I do believe the policy has indeed hurt us in getting new users, its really a matter of what's more important. The good that the policy has done, or the bad it has done.