[WikiEN-l] WelcomeCommitteeBot?

[Kusma]

On 2/18/07, xaosflux <xaosflux at gmail.com> wrote:
> These usually get rejected over at [[WP:RFBOT]].  The last one rejected I
> can find is [[Wikipedia:Bots/Requests for approval/Welcomebot]], with the
> reasonable basis that it was being proposed by an operator that was indef
> blocked.
>
> Some of the issues that come up with this perenial proposal are:
> *Dealing with dynamic IP addresses when welcoming anons and
> *Being "personal", the idea below about putting  a random (rotating) contact
> on the message may address that, but without leaving specific instuctinos
> the new user may try to reply to "you the welcomer" by editing their own
> talk, and noone will be watching it.
>

I personally think welcoming should be done by new page patrollers and
recent changes patrollers and basically anyone, not by some sort of
welcoming committee or bot. Any time you see somebody with a redlinked
talk page create an article that does not merit a warning, welcome
them, thank them specifically for the article, and point them to a
useful page like a related WikiProject. Perhaps we could use the
sorting features of projects like  [[User:AlexNewArtBot]] a bit more
and get newbies welcomed by people from projects related to the
articles they create.

Any purely automatic welcome should not be done by bot, but coded into
the software, keeping the beautifully redlinked user talk page that is
useful for vandal patrolling. Anyway, why should we welcome anyone who
doesn't edit? Once people have edited, we can start talking to them,
thank them for their edits, and point them in new directions.
Enculturation of newbies cannot be done by bots, and a welcome bot
will lessen the chance that a newbie gets a personal welcome related
specifically to his edits.

Kusma