Perhaps the best way of doing this is the admittedly laborious method of personally communicating with new editors who seem promising and encouraging them and offering to help them continue. The key word in this is "personally". It cannot be effectively done with wikilove messages , and certainly not with anything that looks like a template. Template welcomes are essentially in the same class as mail or web "personalized"advertisements. What works is to show that you actually read and appreciated what they are doing, to the extent you wanted to write something specific.

Perhaps the best way of doing this is the admittedly laborious method of personally communicating with new editors who seem promising and encouraging them and offering to help them continue. The key word in this is "personally". It cannot be effectively done with wikilove messages , and certainly not with anything that looks like a template. Template welcomes are essentially in the same class as mail or web "personalized"advertisements. What works is to show that you actually read and appreciated what they are doing, to the extent you wanted to write something specific. On Mon, Aug 25, 2014 at 2:19 PM, Ilario Valdelli &lt;valdelli(a)gmail.com&gt; wrote: the -- David Goodman DGG at the enWP http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:DGG http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:DGG _______________________________________________ Wikimedia-l mailing list, guidelines at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines Wikimedia-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, <mailto:wikimedia-l-request@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe>

I agree with this wholeheartedly. When I think back to when I was new on Wikipedia, pretty early on I got an honest-to-god personal message from someone to thank me for correcting a typo ( https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=User_talk:Lankiveil&diff=564… ). It made me feel like this was a community of nice people that I wanted to collaborate on things with, and was probably instrumental in me sticking around. The editor retention problem will not be solved with technological gizmos and doodads, nor with top-down solutions imposed from above. It will be solved with positive human contact and creating a collaborative community that people actually want to be a part of, rather than one that they put up with. Template welcomes and messages that have all the warmth of a form letter enclosed in a utility bill won't make a lasting improvement in the long run. The intention behind things like the "thank" button are great, but they should be seen as at most an enabler, rather than as the actual solution to our problems. Cheers, Craig On 26 August 2014 10:09, David Goodman &lt;dggenwp(a)gmail.com&gt; wrote: _______________________________________________ Wikimedia-l mailing list, guidelines at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines Wikimedia-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, <mailto:wikimedia-l-request@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe>

The question here is about "editor retention". Honestly we can say "thank you" or we can use a lot of emoticons but the problem is always the same. At the first error the "thank you" and the pink sweet world disappears. There is always someone in the other side who is so gentle like the elephants in the a store of crystal things. The biggest problem in my opinion is to continue selecting administrators considering only their technical point of view and never their community management capacities. Every time I meet someone who left the Wikimedia projects the problem is the same: a conflict and frequently some block which seems to be "unclear" and "incorrect". Please introduce something that is able to associate the beautiful words to the beautiful actions. HELP APPRECIATE INVOLVE Are really good points and applied not only to the new editors but to all editors. On Tue, Aug 26, 2014 at 12:58 PM, Anders Wennersten < mail(a)anderswennersten.se&gt; wrote: message "unclear knowledge from on gizmos community the great, of this , harming https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, , -- Ilario Valdelli Wikimedia CH Verein zur Förderung Freien Wissens Association pour l’avancement des connaissances libre Associazione per il sostegno alla conoscenza libera Switzerland - 8008 Zürich Wikipedia: Ilario <https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Ilario> Skype: valdelli Facebook: Ilario Valdelli <https://www.facebook.com/ivaldelli> Twitter: Ilario Valdelli <https://twitter.com/ilariovaldelli> Linkedin: Ilario Valdelli <http://www.linkedin.com/profile/view?id=6724469 Tel: +41764821371 http://www.wikimedia.ch _______________________________________________ Wikimedia-l mailing list, guidelines at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines Wikimedia-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, <mailto:wikimedia-l-request@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe>

Il 26/08/2014 12:18, Craig Franklin ha scritto: This makes my first RFBOT on the Italian Wikipedia <https://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Bot/Autorizzazioni/Archivio/2013#SamoaBot> come to my mind. I was much less experienced than now, and ended up flooding Recent Changes. A bureaucrat threatened <https://it.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?diff=56154161&oldid=56152222> to block me, and I even retired <https://it.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?diff=56157910> for a day. But I was already 'addicted' to Wikipedia and came back soon after. Thanks to that episode, I gradually became a quite experienced operator. But... how many users would have given up in my place?

Hi, David Goodman wrote: read Thanks, I agree. I'm pretty passionate about making a difference in this area. I would personally go and start doing that /right now/, but the question remains open: Which activity should I engage in for all that to happen? - Look at recent edits and collaborate with new people? That's a most thankless item on this list, perhaps, as people edit more than anything else. - Look at newly created pages and collaborate on those with due care and attention to the new people? That'd be nice. (although imo the drafts process at English Wikipedia creates an unnecessary hierarchy -- I'd love to remain a peer and treat the newcomer as a source of wonderful knowledge, not as a reviewee or mentoree. For this reason, I might perhaps only do this to articles created in main namespace.) - I had written a script [2] which makes draft review things more personal by not using a template in review comments, but I couldn't figure out whom to approach to get it deployed, or how to prevent ugly [3] templates on talk pages of people who submitted a draft for review. - Reworking the welcome template into something else? Into what specifically? - There are other things I tried to do, such as leave simple short messages such as [4], but I have not been doing enough of them to figure out who likes them. - Many many examples, warning vandals for example, completely template thing, they get reborn as trolls, etc. see also [5]. But there is a need to not feed them still, i.e. put some effort into personal communication but not too much. - Figuring out how to provide IP contributors with more software, up to the point it's technically possible? ([1] lists some software limitations). - <add your thought here> How do I set priorities in such list? Where to start tackling the problem? svetlana [1] https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Musings_about_unregistered_contributors [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Gryllida/DraftsReview [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:Artistintown [4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:128.194.3.84 [5] https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Clogged_talk_pages _______________________________________________ Wikimedia-l mailing list, guidelines at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines Wikimedia-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, <mailto:wikimedia-l-request@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe>

On Tue, Aug 26, 2014 at 5:03 AM, svetlana &lt;svetlana(a)fastmail.com.au&gt; wrote: knowledge, Take a look through WP:PAFC--you'll find lots of new people, and many of them getting burnt not just by rude comments but by waiting weeks for any comment at all. Quite a bit of gatekeeping is necessary there, however. There's more advertisements and copyvios than serious content coming in through that channel. I would prefer, however, that AfC head more toward quickly assessing that, and take on a more collaborative role beyond the most serious issues. The gatekeeping function would be a lot easier if the New Pages Feed tool was modified to work in this arena, but I'm told that there's been resistance to this idea from engineering. If that's true, and it may not be, it's a pity. Our automation for copyvio detection is also pathetic, I can catch more copyvios by "pick a sentence, Google it" than CorenBot and its kin identify automatically. Smarter technology there built into the right tool for the job would be extremely helpful, why are we throwing away the limited resource of experienced editor's time doing mechanical checks? - I had written a script [2] which makes draft review things more personal whom There are a couple folks to talk to, but they all follow WT:AFC, and I'd start there. But better would be to figure out how to integrate that work into Special:NewPagesFeed. However, while all of this is true, I think it's not the biggest problem. What is? Right now, there are around 2600 new editors waiting for a friendly word from anyone, and over 1000 of them have been waiting for three weeks or more. Endless waiting is not engaging. Any discussion which attempts to imagine we can help attract and hold new editors without finding a plausible, constructive solution to that backlog is missing the forest through the trees. Improved automation (Special:NewPagesFeed, copyright detection improvements), nicer wording, and so forth could both make the process more pleasant for experienced editors to participate in and focusing attention away from serious problems and onto engagement with editors with serious potential. There is room for technology to play a significant supporting role. The whole process of new articles from new editors needs a fresh look as well. 80% of those new editors are going to fail at what they are trying to do--their articles will get deleted. In most cases, no amount of help would have saved their particular article idea. It's a damn shame that Foundation policy the editing community prevents us from educating them before they invest quite a bit of work into articles that are doomed to failure, because I'm pretty sure that "I put a good deal of work into something over a couple months and it all came to nothing" is a recipe for whatever the opposite of editor retention is. And we need to face that fact straight in the eye and come to some sensible way of fixing it. --Joe -- Joe Decker www.joedecker.net _______________________________________________ Wikimedia-l mailing list, guidelines at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines Wikimedia-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, <mailto:wikimedia-l-request@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe>