[WikiEN-l] Edit Wikipedia Week is coming. How not to bite the n00bs?

[joshua.zelinsky at yale.edu]

Quoting Gregory Maxwell <gmaxwell at gmail.com>:

> Instead we probably need so say things like "Don't assume that people
> have any clue what they are doing wrong. New users are often lost and
> confused. Our policy pages amount to megabytes of text.  Taking a
> moment to be kind and helpful will pay off over time. Vandalism can
> wait a moment."  ... and being able to provide *good* example of what
> to do and what not to do would be very helpful.

Agreed. One thing to do (and I don't have an example off the top of my 
head) is
to to mark for speedy deletion things without leaving a note on the talk page
of the person explaining why it has been marked for speedy deletion. 
This comes
across as very impersonal. Additioally, if the person is a new user, 
they should
first use  a welcome template and then mention the speedy deletion. It might
make sense to make some welcome-speedy templates for this purpose since the
standard welcome template combined with a standard speedy template is very
obvious a pair of form letters which can come across as biting by its
impersonal nature.