Wikipedia talk:Welcoming committee/Welcome templates

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Autosigning again

Is there a technical reason that some templates require signing and some don't? I'm still fairly new to to wikipedia, and I like the idea of welcoming people that I noticed did something good. But the fact that some templates need signing and some don't seems completely arbitrary. I saw in the archives this message [1] but there was no follow-up discussion. Am I missing something? (EDIT: and to top it off I forgot to sign this) Closhund /talk/ 03:44, 11 September 2023 (UTC)[reply]

@Closhund, are you talking about welcome templates instructing new editors about signing (which is what the prior conversation was alluding to) or about the templates themselves needing to be signed or not? On the latter, it's just natural variation as the templates were built. It'd probably make it easier for automated welcoming tools like Twinkle if everything was standardized to either autosign or not, but also it's probably not worth the effort it'd take to try to make that standardization happen. I know that user warnings are supposed to not autosign, and welcome templates are perhaps similar. {{u|Sdkb}} ^talk 03:49, 11 September 2023 (UTC)[reply]

The latter. I was not aware the the prior conversation was not about that (it's frustrating finding links in archives, my bad). Just whether the ~~~~ needs to be applied after the the template. If it's not the worth the effort, then okay. But I feel like it's a weird source of variation, and I don't *think* it would be hard to make them align. It's definitely something that I've found annoying even using these templates by hand. Closhund /talk/ 04:44, 11 September 2023 (UTC)[reply]

There are a lot of things on Wikipedia that are fairly arbitrary/non-standardized, just because wikis grow so organically. Putting things in order is also a very Wikipedian impulse, though. The challenge that I can imagine is that I could see some editors wanting all templates to autosign because it allows signatures within the box/other formatting things (see, for instance, {{Welcoming}}, one of my favorite welcome templates) whereas others not wanting autosign to align with user warnings. That could lead to a lack of consensus. And then if consensus is achieved, various tools would need to be modified to adjust to the new state so that they don't end up signing twice/not at all, and some tools have more maintainers than others.

Taking the longest-term view, we do want to eventually synchronize things like this as much as possible, so I don't want to totally discourage you from taking it on. But it seems likely to be a fairly difficult task in relation to how much good it'd achieve. As a lesser step, improving welcome template documentation to make it clearer which autosign and which don't might be an area that could use improvement. {{u|Sdkb}} ^talk 05:11, 11 September 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Newcomer homepage discussion at Growth Team talk

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)[reply]

Change link in Template:W-shout to go to Teahouse?

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)[reply]

Welcome templates

Most welcoming templates seem to have the wording "Thank you for your contributions to this free encyclopedia." (or something similar) either as the very first sentence or somewhere in that vicinity, but I've only ones I've come across two that seem geared to users who have made basically zero contributions: {{Welcome0}} and {{Welcome-informal}}. Are there other templates, for example, that can be used for those user's whose very first post is a WP:HD/WP:THQ post or perhaps a talk page post? It always feels a bit odd (at least it does to me) when I add a template like {{welcome-graphical}} to someone's user talk page when they have made essentially zero edits. If there are no such templates, maybe a few existing ones could be tweaked to add a parameter that gives the option of deleting the boilerplate "contributions" sentence. Marchjuly (talk) 21:06, 4 November 2024 (UTC)[reply]