On Tue, Nov 1, 2011 at 11:55 PM, Mateus Nobre mateus.nobre@live.co.uk wrote:
This hostility is being reflected in the drop at the number of the editors.I agree with the ''automatic-message theory''. None likes automatic messages. In my view, it should be reserved for vandals. Newbies needs a special priority. Something like: ''Hi, thanks for your edition! We hope you become part of our team. If you need anything, just talk to us''. It's not hard to do, is it?
It's not "hard" as in difficult but it would be "hard" as in laborious and time consuming.
I went through a phase of attending to my watchlist and whenever I saw a user-page red-linked and the associated edit was a positive contribution I went ahead and Twinkled them a user page welcome notice. I'd welcome tens of people a day this way.
I'm afraid there is little chance of me welcoming tens of users with even a personalised message I had written myself and could simply copy and paste. The task would simply be too dull and repetitive for me. Even with Twinkle it's still boring. If I wanted to bore myself in my free time I'd take up a job that paid.
If we wish to welcome the huge amounts of newbie editors with a form of personalisation, I suggest we invest in artificial intelligence. If nothing else the results would probably be hilarious and bring unintentional joy wherever it attempted to help, like those sites devoted to Engrish.
I read a quote recently which ran something like "enjoyment of one's tools is essential to great work". For the most part I find MediaWiki very pleasant to use and things have definitely moved in the right direction since I joined in 2004. But I was familiar with the concept of mark-up having dabbled with HTML when I began, so I can't really empathise with the average web user who is immediately baffled by what they see when they click 'edit' for that first time.
Bodnotbod