[Foundation-l] Board Resolution: Openness

[FT2]

Both excellent ideas.

To which I'd add - a lot of websites have live chat support, "click here to
chat to a customer service agent".

A *"click to get help from an experienced editor"* button, along with the
reverse suggested *"An experienced editor would like to talk to you, click
to accept"* popup/notice, would probably work wonders in terms of support
and perceived friendliness.

You'd want user groups for "respond to request for help" and "initiate
dialog", and then to leave it to the community how those are given - whether
either is bundled with adminship, or handed out like rollback and reviewer
rights. Also you'd want "chat logs" as an item in *Special:Log* so that all
chats of this kind are "on the record". As a bonus feature, the
infrastructure to invite other users to join a chat (eg to add extra
expertize or to mediate a minor disagreement) would be worth noting for
future.

FT2

On Sun, Apr 10, 2011 at 7:49 AM, Nikola Smolenski <smolensk at eunet.rs> wrote:

> 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 :)
>
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