[Foundation-l] User talk templates

[WereSpielChequers]

Making sure that all goodfaith newbies get welcomed is a great idea, but at
registration is not the right time. One of the consequences of Single User
Login is that an active editor who starts clicking interwiki links will
quickly they find themselves registered on shedloads of wikis, even if they
haven't got the fonts installed to see the scripts on that wiki and were
just clicking to see if another language used the same photo or maybe had a
reference they could click. Combined with our steadily increasing
proportion of spammers and the large increase in our proportion of vandals
since 2005, there is a good case for not doing an auto welcome until
someone has done some goodfaith edits.

Another good argument that has come up on EN wiki is that manual welcomes
are probably better than blanket templated ones. I think it would be worth
testing this, we know that welcomed users are more likely to keep editing
than unwelcomed ones. But we don't currently know that a targeted welcome
is more effective than a bot one. My expectation is that if we tested this
we would find that a welcome from someone who has just interacted with you,
such as by categorising or wikifying the article you've just started, is a
more positive welcome than from someone who has tempated or even deletion
tagged your contributions. Of course newbies are unlikely to be aware that
many welcomes come from editors who have marked their new article as
patrolled or checked their edit and noticed that t wasn't vandalism.

One way to combine automated welcomes with manual ones would be to use
automation as a backstop. This could be done with an automated welcome
which only went to editors who met all the following criteria:

   1. Editor has done more than 10 edits
   2. Editor has  edited today
   3. Editor first edited more than 7 days ago
   4. Editor is not currently blocked
   5. Editor has not previously been welcomed
   6. Editor's  userpage does not have one of the templates declaring them
   to be an alternate account
   7. Editor is not flagged as a bot

WereSpielChequers

On 22 March 2012 12:00, <foundation-l-request at lists.wikimedia.org> wrote:

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> Today's Topics:
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>   1. Re: User talk templates (Ray Saintonge)
>   2. Re: User talk templates (Fae)
>   3. Re: User talk templates (Tim Starling)
>   4. Re: User talk templates (En Pine)
>   5. Re: User talk templates (David Gerard)
>   6. Re: User talk templates (En Pine)
>   7. Re: User talk templates (David Gerard)
>
>
> ----------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> Message: 1
> Date: Thu, 22 Mar 2012 02:53:47 -0700
> From: Ray Saintonge <saintonge at telus.net>
> To: Wikimedia Foundation Mailing List
>        <foundation-l at lists.wikimedia.org>
> Subject: Re: [Foundation-l] User talk templates
> Message-ID: <4F6AF6AB.30106 at telus.net>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=UTF-8; format=flowed
>
> On 03/22/12 1:37 AM, En Pine wrote:
> > 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?
> >
> This is a terrible idea, on a par with automated telephone messages
> which ask you to make selections by number.
>
> The other point is that many new registrants never edit at all, or they
> may be vandals or spammers.  Let them make their intentions clear before
> welcoming them.  The welcome should show that we are aware of exactly
> what they have done, and thank them for doing so even if it's only a
> simple spelling correction.
>
> Ray
>
>
>
>