On Fri, Jan 04, 2013 at 04:48:57PM -0800, George Herbert wrote: likely simply deter some goodfaith edits, focussing it at newbies would seem to me to be institutionalised newby biting. Targeted bespoke edit notices however are I hope a different kettle of fish http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Editnotice It is also possible to add a hidden comment that only editors see. For example "Please don't change this person's religion unless you have evidence that they have identified themselves as belonging to that particular religion - please see the talkpage for past discussions about this person's alleged religion". At their crudest such edit notices can bring people's attention to policies that regularly get contravened on this page - "this article uses a non-american version of English" or that this article is part of a controversial area with special rules such as Israel/ Palestine. They can also alert people that one aspect of an article is settled and unlikely to change without debate whilst other aspects are subject to normal editing. It would be good to see some research into the effectiveness of these edit notices and comments, my limited experience of them is that they are very useful and I believe a good way to alert people to very specific things that are contentious. My suspicion is that some may be being misused by those who WP:Own an article. Perhaps if someone wants to run an editor engagement experiment they could revisit a bunch of these templates and add a closing phrase such as "You are very welcome to expand and improve other aspects of this article in the same way that you may edit any normal article on Wikipedia". Then see if the articles subsequently get edited more frequently than under the previous notice. WereSpielChequers