"Gregory Maxwell" gmaxwell@gmail.com wrote on Wednesday, November 07, 2007 3:31 AM:
What do people think of automatically assigning new users to a user advocate who speaks their language? Something where experienced users can sign in when they are around and new users will be assigned to them? Would that help? I don't think we need to worry about scaling it at first: if we are unable to assign advocates for everyone, we could at least help some.. and that would be an improvement.
We have something like that at German Wikipedia ( http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/WP:MP ). There is a list of people available as mentors with a brief description of their fields of work.
People interested in mentors have to put a template on their user page in order to be found. That would be a nice solution on Commons, too. Especially when people have to be active to get a mentor, you avoid all the zombies wasting your time.
What do you think?
Regards,
Flo