[Foundation-l] User talk templates

[Tim Starling]

On 22/03/12 19:37, En Pine wrote:
> 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?

There's an extension called NewUserMessage that does this. It's
enabled on 22 Wikimedia wikis, including Commons. It can be enabled on
en.wikipedia.org also if there's enough support for it.

-- Tim Starling