Wikipedia talk:Welcoming committee/Welcome templates

message: The Wikipedia:Education program manages a platform which organizes thousands of university students who contribute to Wikipedia as part of their regularly assigned university coursework. (Sample Wiki Ed course page here.)  These Wiki Ed student editors typically contribute for several weeks during the second half of their semester course, and then disappear, no doubt busy with college courses, graduation, and real life. I've made a proposal at how Wikipedia might attempt to regain some of these former student editors at a later time, perhaps after graduation. Your feedback would be welcome at WP:ENB#Student editor retention, or re-welcoming. Thanks, Mathglot (talk) 23:01, 30 March 2023 (UTC)
thread_title:  Feedback requested on Wiki Ed student editor retention or re-welcoming 

message: As a side issue: it seems like there are a lot of passionate opinions about this on all sides, but unless I miss my guess, there is little passion about the narrow proposal topic of Welcome template content, which in isolation is a pretty dry and technical niche of the encyclopedia. I think the passion exhibited here about the Welcome template is in reality a proxy for the passion that people feel about how best to support new users at Wikipedia, and I think what unites every commenter so far no matter where they come down on their !vote, is a desire to encourage new editors; we're just not sure how best to do that. I hope if this Rfc and discussion achieve anything (even if there's a no-consensus outcome here), it is that it demonstrates the breadth and depth of interest in the topic of supporting new users, and creating new content. And I hope there will be a cross-pollination from this discussion to other projects and teams that are concerned primarily or secondarily with that issue, and to the extent that that occurs, I think that will be a worthy outcome. Mathglot (talk) 21:04, 1 July 2023 (UTC)
replies: text: @Mathglot I think your proposal has actually managed to annoy quite a lot of users who had to invest a fair bit of time and effort to stop a rather daft proposal of yours being globally implemented across a suite of not very often-used templates. TBH: I did not find that at all helpful, and you have gone down in my estimation for putting such a proposal  forward. But, yes, I do agree with you that there are a lot of passionate people who dearly want to make the newcomer experience of editing Wikipedia more effective in whatever way the can. So it's good we can agree on that. Nick Moyes (talk) 22:45, 19 July 2023 (UTC)
replies: text:  The proposal is well-meant, and I brought it here in good faith to get a sense of community opinion, which seems exactly the kind of think talk pages (and Rfc's) are about. But I get it: you find the proposal "annoy[ing]", "daft", and "not... helpful". Is that equivalent to saying you "oppose it"? What about the other 21 supporters (to 28 oppose), have they all gone down in your estimation, too? As far as what counts as "rarely used", I'm not really sure, but  has 17,000 uses,  = 7,000,  = 10,000,  = 15,000, and  has 31,000. Perhaps I should have worked out these numbers beforehand and included them at the top of section to provide an idea of the scope of the issue, so that users could've made a more informed decision about whether it was worth their time to respond or not, but I didn't think it was needed at the time. And I value and very much appreciate all the responses and suggestions, regardless whether they agree with my position or not; I'm not here to "win", but to do the right thing by the encyclopedia, and I think we are achieving that, so that is still a "win" in my book. Mathglot (talk) 03:33, 20 July 2023 (UTC)
thread_title:  side-benefits of this discussion 

message: Members of the Welcoming Committee may be interested in this discussion about the interaction of the Welcoming committee with the plans for the Wikipedia Growth Team, in particular the "Newcomer homepage". Mathglot (talk) 02:54, 15 November 2023 (UTC)
thread_title:  Newcomer homepage discussion at Growth Team talk 

message: I am really fond of Template:W-shout as a welcome template. However, it directs new editors to Wikipedia:Help desk and I think a link to Wikipedia:Teahouse would be more appropriate. (It looks like the template itself was written long before the Teahouse existed.) I'd like to propose that the link in the welcome message be changed. Thoughts? Who is able to make this kind of change? ~ L 🌸 (talk) 20:05, 27 April 2024 (UTC)
thread_title:  Change link in [[Template:W-shout]] to go to Teahouse?