Welcoming, motivating & recruiting new users: suggestions

Hey Cordelia, thanks for your ideas. I definitely agree that for a lot of new users, their first interaction is negative. Even in cases where they are welcomed, it's very impersonal and overwhelming. You get a giant template that's about as personal as Wikipedia's front page.

I'm not sure we can change how people welcome new users (let alone the fact that a lot of them don't get welcomed at all). Remember that it's a volunteer project, and people will blow off anything that they don't have to do. And if we make it so that they *have* to do it, we're back to cookie-cutter, impersonal welcome messages.

But one area where we CAN have an impact is making it harder to get away with "biting a newbie". We can't force them to be nice, but we've been trying to force people to stop being rude. It hasn't been working, though, because there's a ton of excuses. The two biggest ones, "I didn't realize they were new", and "I was in a hurry".

I had two ideas for that:

  • Put a "new" marker next to all new users. (Now you have to realize they were new.)
  • Make it possible to drop a comment to a user without leaving the "article history" page. (Now you can leave a comment as quickly as you can put in an edit summary.)

Maybe people will still be jerks. But then they will have fewer excuses for getting away with it, and we can do something about those problem editors.

Randomran16:59, 22 January 2010