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

[Marc Riddell]

> 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 :-)
>
on 2/22/11 4:38 PM, Sue Gardner at sgardner at wikimedia.org wrote:

> 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?
> 
I don't know whether or not it's done now, Sue, but it's a great idea!

Marc Riddell