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

[David Gerard]

On 22 February 2011 21:38, Sue Gardner <sgardner at wikimedia.org> wrote:

> +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).


People see these templates and assume they're bot-created and nothing
to do with humans. Which is pretty close, considering many are placed
on pages using automated tools.

The wording on almost all needs severe culling. [[m:Instruction
creep]] was written in 2004 and remains largely unheeded in practice.

http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Instruction_creep


- d.