[Foundation-l] Comparison of new user welcome efforts across projects

[Brianna Laugher]

Of the top 100 projects (according to # of articles[1]), here are some
statistics:

*only about 10 have made significant changes to
MediaWiki:Welcomecreation, the first page their new registered users
will see.

This is a big missed opportunity for projects to impress their
standards and methods on their newest user.

*23 either don't welcome new users by template, or if they do, their
template doesn't have an interwiki link to
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Template:Welcome and I was not able to
find the local equivalent. (For non-Wikipedia projects, I checked to
see if they had a template with the same name as their Wikipedia
equivalent, assuming *it* had a valid interwiki link.) These projects
are: EL.wikt, FI.wikt, DE.wikt, HU.wikt, VI.wikt, KU.wikt, BG.wikt,
TH.wp, ES.ws, CEB.wp, GL.wikt, ID.wikt, SQ.wp, KO.wikt, BPY.wp,
ET.wikt, FA.wikt, SU.wp, WA.wp, SH.wp, SCN.wp, KU.wp, LV.wp.

If you speak one of these languages PLEASE ADD THE INTERWIKI LINK to
the English one, or just reply and tell me the name of it! :)

This top 100 covered 4 special wikis (commons, meta, species,
nostalgia), 1 wikinews (EN), 1 wikibooks (EN), 1 wikiquote (EN), 5
wikisource (EN, PT, ES, FR, ZH), 26 wiktionaries (...) and 62
wikipedias (...).

If you want to improve these pages for your pet project, I recommend
"shopping around" and picking a design you like. Formulating the text
is also very important but much harder for one person to judge over 62
languages :)

Best so far (at least, these have elements that I think are worth
considering including in your redesign):

MediaWiki:Welcomecreation

    * VI.wikt: http://vi.wiktionary.org/wiki/MediaWiki:Welcomecreation
    * FR.wp: http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/MediaWiki:Welcomecreation
    * KO.wikt: http://ko.wiktionary.org/wiki/MediaWiki:Welcomecreation
    * SR.wp: http://sr.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D0%9C%D0%B5%D0%B4%D0%B8%D1%98%D0%B0%D0%92%D0%B8%D0%BA%D0%B8:Welcomecreation
    * ID.wp: http://id.wikipedia.org/wiki/MediaWiki:Welcomecreation

Template:Welcome (or equiv.)

    * ES.wp: http://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plantilla:Bienvenido_usuario
    * MK.wp: http://mk.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D0%A8%D0%B0%D0%B1%D0%BB%D0%BE%D0%BD:%D0%94%D0%BE%D0%B1%D1%80%D0%B5%D0%B4%D0%BE%D1%98%D0%B4%D0%B5
    * ZH.wp: http://zh.wikipedia.org/wiki/Template:%E6%AC%A2%E8%BF%8E
    * NL.wp: http://nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sjabloon:Welkom
    * PL.wp: http://pl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Szablon:Witaj2
    * EN.wikt: http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Template:pediawelcome (as
a contrastive message)


cheers,
Brianna


[1] In hindsight I should have used the table ordered by number of
users rather than pages. Some projects have page numbers falsely
boosted by huge bot imports, for example VI.wikt.