Jonathan, I didn't realize that there was another use for NEWT. (: It's a little old though, and it appears to be specific to English Wikipedia, and my personal feeling is that a need to disambiguate the editing interface from an old research project is the lesser evil as compared to an acronym that can't be easily pronounced.
Kerry, I think that until and unless WMF enables VE for talk pages (which I hope that they will agree to experiment with doing), teaching new users to edit talk pages with NWTE/NEWT is the best option available on wikis that don't use Flow. I'm sensitive to folks telling volunteers that we should be doing more unpaid work, hence my admittedly strong reaction to your proposal about mentoring. In an ideal world it would be nice to have more mentors, and I think that adding paid staff to do some mentoring work would be a good use of funds; the Wiki Ed Foundation seems to be successful with this approach, and some affiliates also have a variety of training programs that they do for Wikipedia editors and/or for others such as school teachers who will then train others. I should also mention that WMF is developing training for functionaries, and WMF has provided some grant or contract funding projects where training is a focus such as the English Wikipedia Teahouse, the Wikipedia Adventure, and the video series for which I'm largely responsible. So it seems that WMF is sometimes willing to provide funding for training, and I would encourage them to continue to do so. Pine _______________________________________________ Wiki-research-l mailing list Wiki-research-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wiki-research-l
