Some reactions to welcome bot or welcomes are a little bit "exaggerated"
sometimes. it's just a small red color spot in a corner. Two seconds to process it,
more time to complain about it.
I study user activities and sometimes I leave welcome messages here and there. 99.5% of
the time is because they have some sort of activities on the platform. it happened to me
one or two times per year that some users deleted a welcome message I have left here or
there. A scenario that occurred more than once is wikidata and old-term users that have
some issues with the fact that even if they don't want to be part to it, they do have
edits indirectly on such platform. Sometimes they spent more time writing in the object
why they are deleting it that simply ignoring it.
I stick to the fact that with "side" platforms 95% of the users don't care,
4% reply interested or thank for the welcome or similar, and 1% (or less) have issues.
Such 1% are mostly long term or established users. In the general framework, I think that
leaving such templates from real users to people with some activities is potentially
useful, at least to establish a connection.
I also have no direct experience of anyone complaining about bot messages on other
"side" platforms, I know about users discovering less "common" wiki
such as some of the "Asian" ones, but they are kinda amused. Such bot welcome
message arrives when you do something to log in, such as opening one of their articles for
example. Or maybe you use a computer when someone else have opened them recently.
We can write a meta policy to leave welcome message only with people with edits, but in
the end someone could point out that informing people before they do anything if they
actually entered the platform is a good strategy (why wait they have to do something?
maybe they need help). On some wiki you get the message as soon as you log in, for example
frwiki if I remember with a test from a friend. Why is that different?
The core issue is to be sure that the welcome message has a part in one or two main world
languages, and a link to the embassy page. That's the occasion to make it smarter not
to remove it totally, we have the expertise to do that. For example you leave the en-N
welcome message to people who have edits on enwikipedia and so on.
Alessandro
Il Venerdì 29 Dicembre 2017 10:27, K. Peachey <p858snake(a)gmail.com> ha scritto:
Have you asked the user how the finding the users?
Have you considered other steps than just jumping to mailing list?
Where are the complaints from the other users to show this is a long
running issue?
On 29 December 2017 at 19:20, John Erling Blad <jeblad(a)gmail.com> wrote:
Users on other projects are complaining about the
welcome messages at
arwiki. A bot at that project are welcoming people that has no activity at
that project at all. The bot operator claims the activity is valid, but I
can't see that this is a well-behaving bot at all.[1]
I suspect the bot is welcoming every user it can find, but using user
accounts from central login and not users that has local contributions at
arwiki.
Can someone shut down the bot until the user fix the spam problem.
[1]
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/User_talk:Meno25#Welcome_messages
_______________________________________________
Wikimedia-l mailing list, guidelines at:
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines and
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia-l
New messages to: Wikimedia-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org
Unsubscribe:
https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l,
<mailto:wikimedia-l-request@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe>
_______________________________________________
Wikimedia-l mailing list, guidelines at:
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines and
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia-l
New messages to: Wikimedia-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org
Unsubscribe:
https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l,
<mailto:wikimedia-l-request@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe>