Template talk:Welcome

Making this template useful

Right now, this template doesn't seem to get used at all and I think that's a shame. I think with a little improvement, this could be made good enough to let a bot slap it onto every new user's talk page.
My suggested changes are the following (obviously with wiki formatting and rewording):

Welcome to the wiki, here's how stuff works
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Editing Pages | Editing Talk Pages | FAQ
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Style guides: Weapon | Trivia | Images
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If you're looking for work: Team Fortress Wiki:Tasks | Where to ask questions

Each one of those is actually a link to a page with the following content:

• Editing Pages: Explains basic wiki syntax, how to treat protected pages, edit summary and other basic stuff.
• Editing Talk Pages: --~~~~, :, replying on the same page, don't remove stuff etc.
• FAQ: How do I get wiki cap? My stuff just got reverted, what do I do?
• Where to ask questions: explains where to ask what, i.e. user talk page if it's a user, article talk page if it's about the article, list of helpful people ("mentors" and/or wiki staff) who are willing to help/IRC channel if it's general

That way the "Wall of text" is avoided and new users have a place where to look for answers (I remember that this was one of the biggest challenges for me at the beginning). --CruelCow 10:37, 8 November 2010 (UTC)

Show Preview button

I think we should insert text about Show preview button. Though that is explained in Help:Editing#Saving pages, it might be worth. What do you all think?  –  Kii (talk) 02:13, 10 June 2014 (PDT)

I'm not sure about this. It might be worth adding a little notice like "Use the 'Show preview' button to etc." under the recent changes note, but I think this procedure should be clear anyway, since the SP button is bold already. { TidB | t | c } 02:20, 10 June 2014 (PDT)

Well apparently no new editors are using that button so it might as well be worth noting. I don't see the harm in it. Only takes a few more bytes -- atf412 (talk) 06:09, 10 June 2014 (PDT)

Trivia

I know that reference to the Trivia guide is implicit under the Help:Style guide, but I think Trivia has been a common repeat problem for new editors and could be explicitly recommended in the Welcome. Mikado282 (talk) 05:32, 15 June 2014 (PDT)

Before editing

I would like to see added something like, "Before editing a page, it is recommended to first look at the page's History and Discussion pages." Mikado282 (talk) 05:53, 15 June 2014 (PDT)

Deprecation and deletion of the welcome template

Due to abuse by people thinking that they're helping by spamming new users this template has been considered for deprecation /or deletion in favor of a more helpful sidebar. Which has now been implemented as the help link goes to our help center page instead of the more wikitext-specific mediawiki help pages. Already the purpose of this template was questionable since the help center was already present and therefore it lead to useless spamming of the talk pages of new users and also created said page for no good reason. This is notable because new users often want to do these things of their own accord and populating their talk page should only be done when things like actual collaboration or warnings occur. Not to essentially paste a boilerplate welcome message. This decision is still under consideration however and it has been decided that further input is required from all parties. -- Lagg 17:16, 2 July 2014 (PDT)

I'm sort of torn about keeping and removing this. On one hand, there is a lot of useful information on the template, and getting a message on a user's talk page is a good way to alert them to it. On the other hand, I think that the majority of the users that get the template put on their page are people that only make a handful of edits for one or two things and then never come back, or are only around for a short period of time and don't return. In addition, I believe there are at least a few users who make high quality edits who have never had the template on their page, and have managed to get along fine.

However, if we do go ahead with removing this, I think that the help centre page should cover the information in an easily noticeable and obvious fashion, which I don't believe it does. For instance, the help page for editing is tucked away in small text in the nav at the top, as is anything related to the staff. The information on Recent Changes isn't that obvious either, seeing as it's "Keeping track of changes" on the help centre page, which I read more as keeping track of particular changes (it also links to a page over on Wikipedia which could confuse people). Some possible solutions could be either changing what the links to these changes are called, or creating a "Quick Start Guide" in the help centre, that would essentially contain all of the info from this template, but rewritten to be more general. I suppose additional, general wiki info could added to that in future too.

Finally, I believe that people should be made more aware of the information in the side bar. It doesn't particularly stand out, so new users on here could end up glancing over it and completely missing it. Compare that to an obvious red bar at the top of the screen that alerts a user to their talk page having been edited, which would likely lead them to at least acknowledging that the welcoming exists on their page. I'm not quite sure how this would be solved, though. I guess suggestions could be needed there. --Omolong (talk) 19:08, 2 July 2014 (PDT)

@ Lagg: I agree in that the welcome template repeats links in the sidebar. But, I disagree in that I see it provides much more context for those links than the sidebar does. I agree in that it provides much less context and advice for the novice editor to really be useful. But, I disagree in that I really did find the welcome template more useful than the sidebar when I started. But then I found both to be inadequately informative shortly thereafter.

@ Omolong: I don't support a Quick Start Guide, because such does not indicate (IMO) the importance of taking the time to learn the style, architecture, direction, experience, and values of this specific wiki.

IMO, what is missing is a reader-centered Missing Manual advice for someone new to TF2 wiki specifically. Maybe not in a welcome template, but definitely on the top of the Help:Contents. A lot of the information I needed I found, but I had to hunt and use intuition for a lot of it and for most of what I needed to learn specific to this wiki I garnered from history logs and talk pages. Such a manual would best acknowledge the range of readers: readers who have no experience with wikis; readers who have experience with encyclopedic or technical wikis, but none with game or fandom wikis; readers who have experience with game wikis, but none with this one; etc.

I realize some of this is a moving target; the experience, demographics, and values of the contributors changes over time and probably shouldn’t be codified, but that is part of the hidden curriculum that the novice is missing.

The points I raised under Trivia and Before editing are examples of weaknesses in addressing the perspective of the new, young editor. The effectiveness of any manual or guidance should be measured by how often the same mistake is made. Mikado282 (talk) 21:31, 2 July 2014 (PDT)

Although I may not have an issue with the Welcome template as a whole as it does provide some info. And I do agree on some points made above, Perhaps a new policy could be put in place in regards on the USAGE of the template? Although I have nothing to enlighten us on this policy but it is indeed sort of getting spammed like crazy. This is all I have to say at this moment, I'll add more when the time comes. Ashes (talk) 15:12, 4 July 2014 (PDT)

I don't think the template should be deleted, but instead we should make use of the NewUserMessage extension to automatically insert it on new user pages. This has the benefit of users not manually needing to do it for every user, we can hide its creation from the RC log, and the user will see they have a talk page message straight away that they should read. I think removing the welcome message is a bad idea and can only see benefits for having the message there on account creation. —Moussekateer·talk 15:26, 4 July 2014 (PDT)

This extension sounds like a good idea. i-ghost (talk) 13:12, 10 July 2014 (PDT)

I am in agreement with Mousse here. I do not believe that deleting this template is a solution at all, and would be detrimental to the Wiki as a whole.

For starters, we were discussing the deletion of this template because I brought up the issue that people are using it to try to seem helpful to the Wiki in a bid to earn the Wiki Cap (such has been a problem for years now). It does not require much effort to simply paste "{{subst:welcome}}" on a blank talk page and get a lot of output from it. An additional reason that I was concerned about this is that I use audio alerts to notify me in IRC whenever a new page is created (via the RC log), and it can be a bit grating when I get an alert in the middle of a game that a new page was created, only to see that it's only someone welcoming a new user.

However, I believe that this is no reason to simply delete the template, since it would remove a vital source of information for new users (they won't always want to click on the "Help" link, since most Wikis don't have very good help tools in the side bars in my experience). Having access to the links in your talk page, which is a vital part of any Wiki, is extremely helpful. I can recall several cases in the past when a user came onto IRC asking for help, and the welcome message was pasted onto their talk page as a result, which was a great help.

Mousse's solution is perhaps the best way to solve this. It will (1) give all new users immediate access to the helpful links that the welcome message provides, and (2) prevent people from spamming the welcome message to new users for the heck of it (in the past, this has resulted in welcoming spam bots). If you want to be helpful to new users, then you need to do more than simply copy-pasting a template onto their talk page en masse. -- LordKelvin 12:41, 8 July 2014 (PDT)

I'm going to trial the NewUserMessage extension, as proposed above, for a while to see if anyone has issues with its use. Installation will be carried out in a while. —Moussekateer·talk 14:29, 14 July 2014 (PDT)

Additional changes in the translated templates

Dereko mada some changes on Template:Welcome/zh-hans addition to translation to make it more useful for Chinese beginners.

The additional changes including:

• Extra link to zh-hans translation progress page, where there are many resources available.
• Advise beginners to leave their questions to experienced translators/editors before contacting staff member, and try solving the problem by themselves at first.
• Advise beginners NOT to name their files with Chinese characters, which would increase the difficulty of identification and management for people who cannot read Chinese.
• Ask beginners to be polite and respect to other editors and our visitors.

14:10, 2 June 2020 (UTC)