[Foundation-l] How to improve quality of Wikipedia?

[Federico Leva (Nemo)]

Przykuta, 11/10/2010 08:37:
> BTW - I've seen, that in some (smaller) Wikipedias newbies are welcome by bots. We try welcome only users with any activity and newbies are welcome by [[MediaWiki:Welcomecreation]] page with links to help pages.

[[MediaWiki:Welcomecreation]] is almost useless, IMHO: you can't read it 
again after account creation.
Welcome on talk page is useful because the user can read hints when he 
wants (I appreciated this a lot when I was a newbie) and because it 
offers help from another user (simplest form of coaching/mentoring).
Bots are ok, even if someone is worried about disk space (when 
substituting) or job queue (when leaving a template). Welcoming inactive 
users may be useful because 1) lots of users get lost and don't edit 
even if they would to, and some hint may encourage them, 2) usually bots 
won't re-check activity of older accounts and you may end up with lots 
of not welcomed users. Default configuration of welcome.py is to welcome 
every non-automatically created (SUL) account, if I remember correctly.
Recently some wikis have started to use 
http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:NewUserMessage

Nemo