On 22 February 2011 12:02, Erik Moeller erik@wikimedia.org wrote:
IMO every single Wikimedia project would benefit from dedicated community effort to 1) catalog the most widely used templates on talk pages, 2) systematically improve them with an eye on the impact they can have on whether people feel their work is valued and the environment in which they're contributing is a positive and welcoming one. This is something that anyone can help with, right now.
+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).
So yes, I think efforts to make templates and bot notices friendlier would be time well spent.
I also wonder if we do any templating that's meant to be purely encouraging good behaviour. Like, "Your edits to [x] article were constructive and useful: thank you for helping Wikipedia," or "You have just made your 100th edit: congratulations." That kind of thing. Does anyone know: do we do much of that? And if not, should we?
Thanks, Sue