Hi list,
---Selon Gregory Maxwell gmaxwell@gmail.com:
On Nov 8, 2007 1:31 AM, Stan Shebs stanshebs@earthlink.net wrote:
Zombie users I'd say - I used to write personal notes instead of using templates, especially for stuff that I deleted on sight. Maybe one in twenty actually responded, for the others it's not clear if they even saw my note. I don't understand the psychology either.
I always thought the zombie users were users with the interface set to a language they didn't read fluently... I know that I'm a zombie when I edit some language I can't even remotely grok.
I believe that many users appear to be zombies when they don't speak English and get (a bunch of) automated templates written in English.
Even if the templates have links to other versions of them, I am personnally convinced that the templates should at least be put on the user talk page in the language that the user used to name the images or to set their descriptions or in their edit comments. Surely, this takes more time to browse their contributions and guess their preferred language, but this eventually increases the chances to get an actual contact with the user.
So I'd suggest anyone adding welcome/warning templates to do their best to guess the user language. I'd also would like to propose that bots would not add automatically welcome templates after only one or two edits: this should be let to users as long as the bot has no ways to guess the newbie preferred language... I understand that this would add to the current huge load of work, but I'm sure that would dramatically improve the warmth of the user first contact with the community :)
Best regards from France,