Asaf
This is a very interesting initiative. But can I get some clarification as
to the scope of "communities" under discussion here? Having read through
the material, I see "Sign up below if you are interested in implementing
this in your local community" appears on all 6 pages and there is mention
of face-to-face meetings, so I have the impression you mean a
geographically-co-located community but I have no real sense of the
intended scale here.
For example, in my own case, are you talking about Brisbane or about
Queensland or about Australia? Or are we discussing the entire en.WP
community here? From the references to face-to-face meetings, I think we
must be talking about Brisbane. But if we are discussing policies,
traditionally that is a whole of en.WP community issue, so is it being
proposed that local communities can adopt their own policies, e.g.
notability that applies within their region? If so, that sounds an
excellent idea.
In terms of welcoming new users, I am all for this. We already have an
Australian template {{subst:welcome-au}} for that purpose already (and of
course could easily create more localised variants of it). But can we tell
if a new contributor is Australian as new contributors rarely have user
pages that reveal such information? At the moment, it's a case of stumbling
over them in one's watchlist and assuming they are Australian because they
have contributed to some Australian-related article. It would be much more
helpful if we could we get some feed of new contributors that appear to be
coming from an Australian IP address to assist in this welcoming process.
And how do we prevent others from "welcoming" new contributors in a
not-so-pleasant way by undoing their contributions or a nasty message?
Because I suspect one negative experience can easily outweigh a positive
experience.
Could you provide some more clarity on the scale of the communities you are
considering as obviously that impacts on the kinds of solutions/proposals
that might be put forward.
Thanks
Kerry