[Foundation-l] Friendliness (was: Missing Wikipedians: An Essay)

[Sue Gardner]

On 22 February 2011 12:02, Erik Moeller <erik at wikimedia.org> wrote:
> IMO every single Wikimedia project would benefit from dedicated
> community effort to 1) catalog the most widely used templates on talk
> pages, 2) systematically improve them with an eye on the impact they
> can have on whether people feel their work is valued and the
> environment in which they're contributing is a positive and welcoming
> one. This is something that anyone can help with, right now.

+1 :-)

I spent some time this weekend on New User Contributions on the
English Wikipedia, reading the talk pages of new people who'd been
trying to make constructive edits. I was trying to imagine the world
through their eyes --- what their early experiences felt like. Some
had welcome templates and some didn't, and many also had templates
added that were probably intimidating for new people (warnings and
corrections of various kinds, mostly).

So yes, I think efforts to make templates and bot notices friendlier
would be time well spent.

I also wonder if we do any templating that's meant to be purely
encouraging good behaviour. Like, "Your edits to [x] article were
constructive and useful: thank you for helping Wikipedia," or "You
have just made your 100th edit: congratulations." That kind of thing.
Does anyone know: do we do much of that? And if not, should we?

Thanks,
Sue