Hi,
David Goodman wrote:
Perhaps the best way of doing this is the admittedly
laborious method of
personally communicating with new editors who seem promising and
encouraging them and offering to help them continue. The key word in this
is "personally". It cannot be effectively done with wikilove messages ,
and certainly not with anything that looks like a template. Template
welcomes are essentially in the same class as mail or web
"personalized"advertisements. What works is to show that you actually read
and appreciated what they are doing, to the extent you wanted to write
something specific.
Thanks, I agree. I'm pretty passionate about making a difference in this area. I would
personally go and start doing that /right now/, but the question remains open: Which
activity should I engage in for all that to happen?
- Look at recent edits and collaborate with new people? That's a most thankless item
on this list, perhaps, as people edit more than anything else.
- Look at newly created pages and collaborate on those with due care and attention to the
new people? That'd be nice. (although imo the drafts process at English Wikipedia
creates an unnecessary hierarchy -- I'd love to remain a peer and treat the newcomer
as a source of wonderful knowledge, not as a reviewee or mentoree. For this reason, I
might perhaps only do this to articles created in main namespace.)
- I had written a script [2] which makes draft review things more personal by not using a
template in review comments, but I couldn't figure out whom to approach to get it
deployed, or how to prevent ugly [3] templates on talk pages of people who submitted a
draft for review.
- Reworking the welcome template into something else? Into what specifically?
- There are other things I tried to do, such as leave simple short messages such as [4],
but I have not been doing enough of them to figure out who likes them.
- Many many examples, warning vandals for example, completely template thing, they get
reborn as trolls, etc. see also [5]. But there is a need to not feed them still, i.e. put
some effort into personal communication but not too much.
- Figuring out how to provide IP contributors with more software, up to the point it's
technically possible? ([1] lists some software limitations).
- <add your thought here>
How do I set priorities in such list? Where to start tackling the problem?
svetlana
[1]
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Musings_about_unregistered_contributors
[2]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Gryllida/DraftsReview
[3]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:Artistintown
[4]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:128.194.3.84
[5]
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Clogged_talk_pages