[Foundation-l] Board Resolution: Openness

[Pharos]

On Sun, Apr 10, 2011 at 2:49 AM, Nikola Smolenski <smolensk at eunet.rs> wrote:
> 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.

This is the best actually-practical idea I've seen in a long, long time!

++to making user page info for new accounts a simple box to fill in at
registration

Thanks,
Richard
(User:Pharos)