[Foundation-l] User talk templates

[En Pine]

I have two suggestions about templates. I don’t know if Steven’s the right person to ask about these particular ideas so I’m sending this email to him and CCing it to Foundation-l.

First, has anyone thought about automatically adding a welcome message to the user’s talk page when they first register, not only for EN but also for Commons, Simple, and other projects? Currently we require a human to do this, which means that lots of people seem not to get welcome messages which could contain useful information, and perhaps a link to the Teahouse for EN users. Could we implement an automated post to a user’s talk page that gives the user links to WP:WELCOME, WP:HELP, the Teahouse, and/or other similar resources as soon as the user has registered?

Second, has anyone looked at non-English Wikipedias, especially any that show better editor retention than EN’s, to check for best practices regarding the languages used on templates?

Thanks,

Pine