You don't know if contributors are coming back

As an established user, it's hard to know how "nice" to be to a newbie, because you have no idea if they're actually still around. You see an edit they made, but especially if they're an IP, you really don't know if they will ever get any message that you send them. So you end up just treating them like a random stranger: fix their edit, move on.

Wikipedia would work better if there were more socially aware features: allow us to build and maintain relationships with new editors, even if they don't visit Wikipedia again. Give us more information about them, like how many edits they've made, how recently etc, without us having to dig for the information.

I suggest you should behave as if they are coming back. That will never be wrong.

I do agree that it would be good to have the software automatically generate default homepage for each user with useful statistics would be a good idea - with the qualification that the user could of course edit this if they wanted to.Filceolaire 19:47, 5 December 2009 (UTC)