[Foundation-l] Show community consensus for Wikilove

[Oliver Keyes]

Surely making it only available to those users who understand markup
completely undermines one of the great unintended consequences - that it's
really useful for posting talkpage messages? New users can use those
templates in a *perfectly* meaningful way - as a way of communicating
instead of relying some pseudo-HTML markup language they're too new to
understand. They could communicate...ohh, I don't know, just off the top of
my head....maybe "can someone please explain to me how markup works?"

On Sun, Oct 30, 2011 at 7:18 AM, Fae <fae at wikimedia.org.uk> wrote:

> There is a general view amongst Wikipedia admins that excessive
> templating on user pages is poor practice. I frequently use an initial
> (customized) welcome template for new users and do use standard user
> warning templates for vandalism, though not for "regulars". However
> these templates are not available to brand new users as tools such as
> Twinkle will only be discovered after an editor has had a chance to
> learn the basics.
>
> Wikilove has been implemented differently as a user sees the tab as
> another early toy to play with and we now see a lot of new users
> trying it out on their own talk pages as their first edit. At the
> moment Wikilove works on an opt-out basis rather than an opt-in basis.
>
> PROPOSAL
>
> Let's change the Wikilove tab to only be visible to users after their
> first 10 edits. Before this point, it is unlikely that new users will
> be able to use templates in a meaningful way and this would also help
> to keep the interface as simple as possible for the first few edits
> made and targeted more on article content rather than user page fluff.
>
> Cheers,
> Fae
>
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