On 13.01.2014 23:57, Risker wrote:
I dunno, guys. I certainly would take a talk page message over a mechanical "thank" any day of the week. More particularly, I notice a significant trend in using "thank" notifications to express agreement with people without having to actually say "yeah, I agree" somewhere.
That the loss of human contact, replacing it with another technological whizbang, is considered a net positive...well, I guess that's what can be expected from Wikimedia.
Risker
Actually, I think here there are two issues mixed here and this is why your message got such a reaction.
We do not have just two types of messages - human and automated ones. We actually have three: human custom, human templated, and automated templated messages. I do not see much of a difference between human templated and automated templated messages. For example, when I nominate a file for deletion on Commons, this is done by one mouse click, and the uploader gets an automated message on their talk page. I do not have any problems with this. Certainly not more than if I had to go myself to the talk page and leave a template. Well, may be if I did it manually, I also could add their talk page to my watchlist and potentially answer questions - but OTOH I would have by now thousands user talk pages on my watchlist, and it would be very difficult to manage. Anyway.
What does indeed make a difference and creates a sense of human interaction is custom messaging over templated messaging. I am myself a strong supporter of custom messages, and I do not use templates for communication except for the situations when I am legally bound to do it (deletion notices, copyvio notices, and block notices), and also welcome templates since they contain a lot of useful links. On my RfA in the English Wikipedia I was asked a question about it and went into some detail answering the question, and I am not going to repeat it here. I do believe that templates make Wikipedia more similar to MMORPG that we (at least I) would like to see it and in the sense contribute to the decline in number of active users. OTOH, I also see that someone who is overworked and had to communicate with dozens of users per day would choose over templating just to save time.
Cheers Yaroslav