Talk:Welcoming policy

Creation of proposed policy

Help pages at the English Wikipedia often get posts from users who are confused and sometimes worried by mystic mails in unreadable languages and scripts. I have created this proposed policy to stop unwanted notifications from wikis a user may have no interest in or knowledge of. I have personally received many of them. Some affected users ask if they were hacked. They may also be concerned that the Wikimedia Foundation has leaked their email address to a spammer. PrimeHunter (talk) 20:47, 16 May 2020 (UTC)

• Support A surprise notification from the Hindi wiki took up perhaps two hours of my time today, thinking I'd been hacked or impersonated. It turns out a template edit at the en.wiki many years ago set the stage for my contrib to be imported to that wiki which then sent me a bizarrely out of the blue and alarming note about my Hindi talk page!!!! I now know that there's nothing to worry about. Talk about DISRUPT. NewsAndEventsGuy (talk) 02:02, 19 June 2022 (UTC)
•  Support It's always slightly freaky to receive brightly-coloured cross-wiki alerts in languages you don't understand, and even once you figure out what it is, it's disruptive. 🌺 Cremastra (talk) 22:30, 25 January 2024 (UTC)

Global SUL

If you want to see for yourself how widespread this is, install and run User:Krinkle/Tools/Global_SUL. This will create an account for you on most the 760-ish wikis. IIRC, I got about 50 "welcomes" in the first week or so, then maybe a dozen more over the next few months. Suffusion of Yellow (talk) 21:05, 16 May 2020 (UTC)

@PrimeHunter and Suffusion of Yellow: I strongly support this. Firstly, User:Meta-Wiki Welcome was shut down because it welcomed vandals and other bad-faith editors, which made suppression of usernames more difficult. Secondly, it makes no sense to welcome someone who has no intent to contribute (positively or at all). We need to have a system where only editors who have made a certain number of edits are automatically welcomed. Maybe 10-50 edits. I'd rather have that than just a bot aimlessly welcoming everyone because it would prevent most spammers from being welcomed. Let's see if we can make an RfC in Wikimedia Forum. Aasim 11:21, 17 May 2020 (UTC)

@Awesome Aasim: The proposed policy says: "Wikis are free to make stricter local rules". Are you suggesting that the common policy for all wikis should be stricter? Most decisions are usually left to the individual wikis. My main concern was getting rid of notifications which annoy users of other wikis. PrimeHunter (talk) 12:33, 17 May 2020 (UTC)

I am not against welcome bots in general (I know wikiHow, another wiki community I am part of, has a WelcomeBot), I am against it when there is a huge hassle with dealing with vandals and spambots, &c. Because almost all Wikimedia pages are public, unlike wikiHow where only article content pages and some user pages are public, our WelcomeBot would need to meet so specific criteria to operate. Not saying I am against WelcomeBots, but they would need to be more suited for the job. Aasim 14:09, 17 May 2020 (UTC)

 Support. @PrimeHunter: RE: "A wiki is only allowed to post welcome messages to users if their account was originally created at the wiki, or the user has at least one non-imported edit there." Maybe it could be done even more restrictive by adding "and it can be reasonably assumed that the user speaks the language of that wiki". Taylor 49 (talk) 02:19, 13 November 2021 (UTC)

@Taylor 49: I think it's too difficult to determine that, especially for welcome bots. I and other active editors sometimes make a small edit somewhere without knowing the language but most users don't. I can live with welcome messages for that. The proposal includes "Wikis are free to make stricter local rules". PrimeHunter (talk) 02:58, 13 November 2021 (UTC)

 Support I have no big problem with receiving welcome messages in unknown language, if that happens soon after I edited wiki in that language. What is very confusing is however when one suddenly starts getting several welcome messages in several languages one doesn't speak for wikis on which they made no edits whatsoever (and have no recollection of even intentionally visiting!); e.g. here --Mnalis (talk) 01:30, 11 December 2023 (UTC)