On Sat, Dec 30, 2017 at 8:08 AM, John Erling Blad jeblad@gmail.com wrote:
As I recall, communication with newcomers by templates was found to be a negative factor.
The results from past research are Not easy to summarize, and definitely not that simple, because of all the varying factors in both the templates and the research projects. E.g. message-length/-linkcount/-tone/-formatting (all of which slowly change over the years), the reason/timing for receiving a welcome (account-creation, first-edit, random edit, time-after-event), whether anything else was communicated around the same time (e.g. additional warning templates) on the same page or elsewhere, whether the welcome was personalized at all, what username it was signed with (a human name in my language, a funny avatar name, a generic bot-name, etc), etc -- all of which can be different (subtly or significantly) at every project and every instance). Some relevant links include: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Research:New_editor_welcome_wishlist#Results... https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Template_A/B_testing/Results#Welcome_message... https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Research:Rhetoric_of_the_welcome_message but there are many more formal and informal attempts to understand and improve it all (from Enwiki's Teahouse initiatives, to all the scattered multilingual template_talk and wikiproject discussions (from Q6137590, to all the topic-specific wikiprojects)).
TL;DR: Onboarding is complicated. Many people are helped by welcome messages. Many welcome messages are (or were) imperfect (too long/dense/formal/informal/irrelevant/technical/etc). I do not know if there is any specific research that focuses purely on the timing (whether it is best to send at account-creation, after first-edit, after human-review of an edit, whilst the user is logged-in or offline, etc), but I agree it might be useful.
Here are some of the other research projects that look at welcome templates as one of the factors, but not the primary focus, https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Research:New_user_help_requests/Full_report https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Research:Ignored_period_and_retention https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Research:Framing_Support_for_Newcomers https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Research:Alternative_lifecycles_of_new_users
Lastly, regarding the specific instance of Arwiki - it's better than nothing, because some people will Not edit until given some encouragement, and some people like to read the rules before they start something. - It would be good if the bot could distinguish between accounts-made-locally (i.e. likely to be able to read Arabic) vs accounts-attached-via-Single-User-Login (and to only send those latter accounts a welcome message, after they've made 1 edit locally). I don't know if that is currently possible or feasible.
Quiddity