Welcoming, motivating & recruiting new users: suggestions

Hi, I'm a relatively new Wikipedian (started editing in November), and here are a couple of ideas I have on how to motivate & welcome new users.

A. Welcoming Users

1) I think that welcome templates that emphasize that the person adding the template is an actual friendly person who is happy to see a newcomer on Wikipedia are particularly encouraging (as opposed the informational templates with a whole bunch of links that look like they could have been placed by a bot). A friendly picture to accompany the message is nice too. Also, I'm guessing that the more the welcome is personalized, the better; ie, if a newcomer has just made a nice article on X topic, they'll probably appreciate knowing that you thought it's a nice article and were interested to see it. User:TeaDrinker did an interesting study on the affect of welcoming new users at: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:TeaDrinker/Welcome_study (Conclusion: welcoming new users who had not yet edited produced a small, but not statistically significant, increase in the probability that the new editor would edit). I wonder if it would be worthwhile to conduct other studies on the affect of welcoming new users of various types in various ways.

2) I was recently looking through the new article list, and noticed that quite a lot of new article creators had no welcome on their talk page. This was true even for a lot of the creators of new articles at the tail end of the list, with month-old articles. Some of these users had stayed active and had even made more than one new article; but no one had welcomed them yet. Maybe, welcoming new users could be part of the new page patrol? New users who have created new articles on the list but not been welcomed yet could be marked, just as new articles that have not yet been reviewed are marked. It might also be nice to post some friendly feedback about the article at this point.

3) One unfortunate affect of not welcoming new users rapidly is that the first communication with the new user is then likely to be something negative (like a message from a bot or a notification that their article has been nominated for deletion), which is discouraging. Maybe bots that are creating new talk pages could also place a notification somewhere to encourage welcoming of the new user? And people placing templates on new talk pages should be encouraged to place a welcome message first (which many people do seem to do anyway :-)

B. Motivating Users

1) One thing I personally find very exciting about writing for Wikipedia is that people actually **do** read the articles here. If I write an article for, say, my blog, my immediate family will see it; if I write for my school newspaper, my classmates will see it; if I write an article for Wikipedia, thousands of people who live around the world may read it. For users who are creating new content, I think that pointing new users towards the Page View statistics on the history page of their article, and suggesting how they can get more people to see their article (formatting their article nicely; linking from other appropriate articles; adding their article to categories; writing a DYK) will help to motivate them to remain active.

2) The other aspect of writing for Wikipedia that I find particularly exciting is that on Wikipedia, users with many different views who live around the world work towards a common goal. Where else could I collaboratively write an article with people currently sitting in New York, Islamabad, London, Tokyo, Mogadishu, and Brisbane? I'm not sure how to translate this extremely exciting aspect of the Wikipedia community into actual policies for motivating new users, except to suggest that Wikipedians actively work on improving the diversity of the Wikipedia community.

C. Recruiting Users

1) I wonder whether it would be a good idea for service organizations/school groups/etc to be encouraged to edit Wikipedia? I could imagine, for example, a college chapter of Amnesty International organizing efforts to improve Wikipedia coverage on journalists in Eritrea, or a grad student reading group on statistics organizing themselves to improve wikipedia coverage on the statistics topics that they are reviewing. Does much editing happen through locally organized groups, and would this be a good idea? I could imagine negative effects of this kind of organized editing, too (ie, POV pushing).

2) One major source of potential editors seems to be users in mainland China, since about a billion people are deterred from editing Wikipedia by the Great Firewall. I see that there are some efforts to allow people to edit through the Great Firewall, but wonder if it would be useful to look into how to make it easier and safer for users in mainland China to edit Wikipedia.

Thanks, CordeliaNaismith 15:26, 22 January 2010 (UTC)

Thanks for joining in.

You are welcome :)

More we are the merrier.

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.