[Foundation-l] Board Resolution: Openness

[Nikola Smolenski]

Дана Sunday 10 April 2011 06:36:22 MZMcBride написа:
> featured article requirements or anything like that. They might be
> inundated with too many links in welcome messages (which I view as a
> largely separate issue from policy creep), but I don't think the vast
> majority of editors pay any mind to the details of policies and pages that
> even established users can't be bothered to keep up with. This is what some
> argue is the actual meaning behind "ignore all rules." :-)

I too loathe the wall of text displayed to new users and believe it is highly 
ineffective. Some possible solutions I thought of are:

Perhaps each newbie could get a short welcome message from "their" experienced 
Wikipedian who will later mentor them with specific errors the newbie made.

Perhaps it would be helpful if, when creating a new account, a user could 
write a short message about what would they like to do on Wikipedia (this 
would become their user page). It would give us an idea on what part of 
guidelines to present to the new user, and also very needed insight on why do 
people just create account and leave.

And I believe the most helpful, but the most difficult, would be the ability 
of on-site chat. If I see a new user making a rookie mistake, I open a chat 
window, the user sees "someone would like to chat with you" message, and we 
could talk about the mistake. Bonus point: there is no good free software 
on-site chat that I know of so we give one to the world :)