User talk:Timeshifter/More articles and less editors

driven away by welcome messages

Hi Timeshifter, you might want to have a think about that part of your essay. Recent changes patrollers may see a torrent of welcome messages being applied, but for most newbies it is far from a torrent, either they are welcomed or they aren't. Multiple welcomes are rare. I've no doubt that some welcomes are better than others, but the analysis on editor retention showed that they do have a positive effect. I'm sure they could be improved, but the evidence so far is that they are useful and from the newbies point of view, not torrential. ϢereSpielChequers 10:41, 26 May 2012 (UTC)

Bad wording on my part. I reworded it. --Timeshifter (talk) 10:42, 27 May 2012 (UTC)

Thanks, dense welcomes being counter-productive is an interesting proposition that would be worth testing. Last time we looked into it welcomed editors were significantly more likely to stay than unwelcomed ones. But it is entirely possible that some welcomes work better than others and even that some are counter-productive. Steve Walling and Maryana Pinchuk from the WMF have been running tests on various templates, you might want to ask them if they are yet in a position to test your theory that dense welcome's are counter-productive. ϢereSpielChequers 09:50, 28 May 2012 (UTC)

Thanks for the feedback. It is good to know that "welcomed editors were significantly more likely to stay than unwelcomed ones." I clarified and reworded my article further. I thought I read somewhere that overly detailed welcome messages are a little intimidating to new editors. Does the welcome message show up right away upon registration, or after the first edit? --Timeshifter (talk) 12:19, 28 May 2012 (UTC)

There are many different and often contradictory theories about various aspects of the pedia, some of those theories have been tested by research, and when that happens not every theory is confirmed. There is a welcome screen that people see during the registration process, but then find that they can't get back to it when they want to look something up. The welcome messages get added when another editor welcomes a new editor by putting a welcome template on their talkpage. Some people welcome new editors who edit articles in their subject area, others welcome new editors who they have interacted with in some way and yes some of the welcoming is done by those who patrol recent changes or new pages. Very few editors would ever bother to welcome a new account that hasn't yet edited, partly because you don't know if they will be a vandal or a Goodfaith editor, and partly because one of the features of Single User Login is that anyone who is logged in and visits another Wikimedia site is automatically registered there as well; So a new editor here who hasn't edited could be a long established editor in the Russian, Tamil or Japanese Wikipedias who has just looked at the English version of the article they are working on to see if we are using the same picture. Commons has a bot that welcome all new editors, but there is no consensus to do that here. ϢereSpielChequers 07:23, 29 May 2012 (UTC)