On 26 August 2014 02:09, David Goodman <dgge...@gmail.com> 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. > > I believe there is a software-facilitated way of doing this. You are quite right that the most effective way of retaining new editors who have good potential is for them to have some personalised contact and a sense of community, but you are right that it is time-consuming and it is also difficult to identify people who are a) new, b) have potential and c) are people that you personally are interested in helping.
IMO the most likely way to help identify those people is to leverage the power of the WikiProjects (e.g. Birds, Military History, France, Mathematics...) to bring new users closer to communities-of-interest quickly. Erik Moller has spoken about this at Wikimania both this year and also a couple of years ago and I completely agree with him. Perhaps when a new user registers they can be asked to name a few things they're interested in (perhaps prompted from a list). This automagically connects them to the relevant Wikiproject and somehow tells the members of that wikiproject that a new user has just registered and expressed an interest in their topic. Proactive WikiProjects might set up some form of mentoring scheme, or welcoming committee, or 'tasks that newbies can do' list. It would be up to the WikiProject to work out the best ways to coordinate their work with newbies. Rather like the beginning of the academic year at a university - all the student clubs set up tables to compete to recruit new members :-) Yes - this requires software development and therefore needs to be put on a roadmap, budgeted for etc. etc. But, if we're talking about editor-retention and *personalised support, *I think it's high time that the WikiProjects receive some developer attention - in recognition of the fantastic work that they do in both coordinating the creation of good quality content and also in building a sense of community among editors (old and new). -Liam / Wittylama _______________________________________________ Wikimedia-l mailing list, guidelines at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, <mailto:wikimedia-l-requ...@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe>
