Of the top 100 projects (according to # of articles[1]), here are some
statistics:
*only about 10 have made significant changes to
MediaWiki:Welcomecreation, the first page their new registered users
will see.
This is a big missed opportunity for projects to impress their
standards and methods on their newest user.
*23 either don't welcome new users by template, or if they do, their
template doesn't have an interwiki link to
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Template:Welcome and I was not able to
find the local equivalent. (For non-Wikipedia projects, I checked to
see if they had a template with the same name as their Wikipedia
equivalent, assuming *it* had a valid interwiki link.) These projects
are: EL.wikt, FI.wikt, DE.wikt, HU.wikt, VI.wikt, KU.wikt, BG.wikt,
TH.wp, ES.ws, CEB.wp, GL.wikt, ID.wikt, SQ.wp, KO.wikt, BPY.wp,
ET.wikt, FA.wikt, SU.wp, WA.wp, SH.wp, SCN.wp, KU.wp, LV.wp.
If you speak one of these languages PLEASE ADD THE INTERWIKI LINK to
the English one, or just reply and tell me the name of it! :)
This top 100 covered 4 special wikis (commons, meta, species,
nostalgia), 1 wikinews (EN), 1 wikibooks (EN), 1 wikiquote (EN), 5
wikisource (EN, PT, ES, FR, ZH), 26 wiktionaries (...) and 62
wikipedias (...).
If you want to improve these pages for your pet project, I recommend
"shopping around" and picking a design you like. Formulating the text
is also very important but much harder for one person to judge over 62
languages :)
Best so far (at least, these have elements that I think are worth
considering including in your redesign):
MediaWiki:Welcomecreation
* VI.wikt:
http://vi.wiktionary.org/wiki/MediaWiki:Welcomecreation
* FR.wp:
http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/MediaWiki:Welcomecreation
* KO.wikt:
http://ko.wiktionary.org/wiki/MediaWiki:Welcomecreation
* SR.wp:
http://sr.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D0%9C%D0%B5%D0%B4%D0%B8%D1%98%D0%B0%D0%92%D0%…
* ID.wp:
http://id.wikipedia.org/wiki/MediaWiki:Welcomecreation
Template:Welcome (or equiv.)
* ES.wp:
http://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plantilla:Bienvenido_usuario
* MK.wp:
http://mk.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D0%A8%D0%B0%D0%B1%D0%BB%D0%BE%D0%BD:%D0%94%D0…
* ZH.wp:
http://zh.wikipedia.org/wiki/Template:%E6%AC%A2%E8%BF%8E
* NL.wp:
http://nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sjabloon:Welkom
* PL.wp:
http://pl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Szablon:Witaj2
* EN.wikt:
http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Template:pediawelcome (as
a contrastive message)
cheers,
Brianna
[1] In hindsight I should have used the table ordered by number of
users rather than pages. Some projects have page numbers falsely
boosted by huge bot imports, for example VI.wikt.