I read the page, skimmed the talk page and am still left with the sense that a big elephant in the room is missing. Please excuse me if I have missed this idea somewhere else. From the people I talk to and a few experiences I have had - the issue, as I see it, is that people who do some work on Wikipedia don't have their work honored. Tools are great steps forward, but if some sysop or another editor comes along and stomps all over my work, without a good reason or communication - it sucks. I learned this lesson, for myself, from the early days of WikiIndex. So how does one help a cultural shift happen - that tools can augment? Best, MarkDilley (talk)
Topic on Project talk:New contributors/Greeters
Would the w:Wikipedia:Teahouse work in the context of tech contributors at mediawiki.org? I have asked their promoters.
Just to clarify: the scope of this project is new technical contributors. Still, those also edit wiki pages and also write code. Arguably they could also feel their work is not honored if/when someone "stomps all over" their work.
Said that, I'm not sure what are you proposing. Do you mean highlighting meta:Founding principles to newcomers and have a version adapted to technical editors / free software contributors?
+1
The scope of this specific project might be about technical contributors, but Wikipedia also has a very similar problem with not enough new contributors. And I think the underlying problem is the same.
The founding principles look good but there should be much more focus on "4. The creation of a welcoming and collegial editorial environment."
In the past I've seen my work deleted on Wikipedia and also on mediawiki.org. I could not feel the slightest element of founding principle 4. from the people who deleted stuff. I've built some successful, active wikis and if an admin would behave like this on my wikis I would start a discussion with them. There's no such thing as this on Wikimedia projects. It's very much about policies and bureaucracy.
Greeters could be a good idea. I recently posted on the pywikipedia list with some code that is likely to be useful for other users of pywikipedia, but it's more than 1 month later and I haven't heard back from anyone. Meanwhile I simply published my code elsewhere. If someone would have greeted me and ideally given a bit of guidance I might have started doing other work on pywikipediabot by now.
In any case, I have seen Greeters initiatives in other open source projects and they really work well. Both giving newcomers a warmer welcome AND getting a new type of contributors involved as greeters, since you don't need to be a PHP wizard or a busy maintainers to become a successful greeter.
Who wants to start? See http://wiki.maemo.org/Greeters for a reference that was successful while it lasted.
(re-posted from Research_talk:Teahouse): Hi Quim! Technical implementation of the Teahouse isn't too hard, and I could help out. Maintaining it doesn't take much work either, since a lot of the critical functionality (such as inviting new users to participate, featuring and archiving content, etc) is automated. The most important 'soft' requirement is a critical mass of dedicated volunteers to staff the Q&A board, answer questions and in general be helpful & welcoming presence on wiki. Will post this to the thread on Mediawiki as well. Cheers, Jonathan
Thank you for the idea and congratulations! Now we have an own page to start developing Greeters.
Sorry to keep spamming your thread :) Quim asked me to provide a bit more information about how many greeters you might need to get started. In my experience, the number of greeter's you need depends on the number of newcomers you expect and what you want your greeters to do. We started the Teahouse with around 15 hosts. We get an average of about 30 who participate each week, a subset of whom are highly active, plus quite a few drop-ins who answer questions and take part in conversations in the Host Lounge. We currently get about 10 questions and 2-3 new profiles at the Teahouse.
What will be the role of greeters, do you think? At the Teahouse, we initially had a few hosts (mostly Sarah and RosieStep) delivering LOTS of manual invitation templates to new users they found on the New Contributors filter, AfC, a bot-generated daily report, and elsewhere. But that wasn't sustainable for us: we were dealing with the firehose of new enwiki editors, and only about 5% of the people we invited actually stuck around long enough to visit us, so to get critical mass at the Teahouse we needed to invite 50-100 newcomers per day. Since July 2012, most invitations have been sent out by bot although some Wikipedians do still invite new editors manually.
The other major role of Teahouse hosts is to answer questions on the central Q&A board. Some hosts also 'welcome' users who create a profile using the 'welcome this user' link which is baked in to each profile. Hosts do connect with new users one-on-one as well, but this is mostly ad-hoc. The Teahouse space itself is more geared towards lightweight peer support than direct mentorship.
Anyway... not sure which of these activities will apply to your greeters, but I hope that helps!
Cheers,
The good news is that we don't expect to have as many newcomers as English Wikipedia. The other kind of news is that our newcomers might be looking for a much more diverse collection of questions. Wikipedia is mostly about editing, while here editing is only one of many potential activities, and not even the primary one.
While MediaWiki bots or categories might offer to newcomers a choice of new tasks, at the moment this is not so straightforward for development, testing, product development and other activities, many of them not happening on top of MediaWiki. I think the primary role of Greeters is to connect newcomers with a first task until completion. Once you are there porobably you can go alone for a second one, or you have met the people that will help you further in your area.