On 22 February 2011 21:38, Sue Gardner <sgardner(a)wikimedia.org> wrote:
+1 :-)
I spent some time this weekend on New User Contributions on the
English Wikipedia, reading the talk pages of new people who'd been
trying to make constructive edits. I was trying to imagine the world
through their eyes --- what their early experiences felt like. Some
had welcome templates and some didn't, and many also had templates
added that were probably intimidating for new people (warnings and
corrections of various kinds, mostly).
People see these templates and assume they're bot-created and nothing
to do with humans. Which is pretty close, considering many are placed
on pages using automated tools.
The wording on almost all needs severe culling. [[m:Instruction
creep]] was written in 2004 and remains largely unheeded in practice.
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Instruction_creep
- d.