(Spun off the Advertising changes to MediaWiki messages in core.) 2012/12/4 S Page <sp...@wikimedia.org>: > I wrote a little script last night to check for the existence of the > old and new messages, and it seems there are 205 wikis that did > override welcomecreation (!!?), so ideally someone should find the > [[Wikipedia:MediaWiki messages]] or [[Village pump (technical)]] page > for those 205 wikis, or otherwise contact their admins. The list of > wiki messages is at > <https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/User:S_Page_%28WMF%29/welcomecreation_messages>
This made me feel very \o/. Research about current customizations of messages on projects is probably the number one thing that I'd like to see happen in the Wikimedia dev community. These customizations didn't go through the thorough user testing process of the kind that your team does, but they are nevertheless a wonderful source for ideas for improvements that can be useful for any language, and for identifying things that communities need and the software doesn't provide out of the box. > I'm curious if any of those 205 wikis are doing inventive "Welcome > aboard, now read a tutorial/say hi/fix a page/play in the sandbox" > things. It's an area our team (Editor Engagement Experiments) cares > about. In the languages that I know (Hebrew, Russian, Catalan) - yes, mostly. The most inventive is probably the Hebrew Wikipedia ( https://he.wikipedia.org/wiki/MediaWiki:Welcomecreation ), which has a lot of graphics. It has three big buttons: 1."writing style tutorial for beginners" (equivalent of Wikipedia:Tutorial) 2. "adopt-a-user" (equiv. of Wikipedia:Adopt-a-user or Teahouse) / "Help Desk" (equiv. of Wikipedia:Help desk) 3. Special:Preferences Most customized welcome pages say a few words that are specific to the project, such as "Welcome to the Russian Wikiversity. Sign up to your school." One message was just a punctuation correction that was made to its primitive 2005 version. Things like this happen a lot, too. -- Amir Elisha Aharoni · אָמִיר אֱלִישָׁע אַהֲרוֹנִי http://aharoni.wordpress.com “We're living in pieces, I want to live in peace.” – T. Moore _______________________________________________ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
