Template talk:Welcome2

I'm not a huge fan of the GWW:How to help page, and I was bored at work - I've been trying to somewhat adapt the Wikipedia WP:WELCOME page to work for us, because I don't think we really have any one page that does a very good job of a general introduction. Anyway, take a look: User:MisterPepe/Sandbox. If everyone thinks that it's unneeded, I'll stop working on it - but I personally think it's the one page this wiki is really missing =P (Props to User:Barek. He's better with wiki tabling than I am, so I ripped off his section header template XD I'll learn that junk eventually...) As always, feel free to edit/prettify to your heart's content. I'm not overly posessive about my sandbox. At the moment, it's mostly ripped off from the WP version (which is, I suppose, okay - they're GFDL too), but I'll be fixing that once I decide what I want it to look like, assuming this is a good idea at all. MisterPepe talk 22:48, 21 April 2007 (EDT)

Takes up to much space, not alot of people want a huge message like that when they register.--Eloc 00:43, 22 April 2007 (EDT)

They don't have to - you would put a link to it in a greeting text (GWW:WELCOME), perhaps instead of using the original "Welcome" template, which is too big and which "Welcome2" is trying in some way to alleviate. --Snograt 00:57, 22 April 2007 (EDT)

Exactly. It's to have a page with a good set of links and information that would help out newer users, and still let us keep those canned welcome messages to a reasonable "Hello, welcome!" I think we need something a little more, well, helpful to new users - we don't really have anything on the wiki yet that does a good job of that. MisterPepe talk 01:18, 22 April 2007 (EDT)

Questions

I'm still working on that welcome page (once again, User:MisterPepe/Sandbox), but I had a couple thoughts and was wondering what people thought about having these pages:

• Regarding a list of people willing to help newer users - Wikipedia has a page with a listing of more experienced Wikipedians willing to answer questions. Is this something that our userbase could support (in terms of size), and is it even something we would want at all? If so (on both), any volunteers? =P
• Would an organized "Help me, I don't get wikicode" page be a good idea/useful? Similar to the formatting of Guild Wars Wiki:Reporting wiki bugs, just a simple place to ask questions and get answers.

Still looking for comments/questions/concerns/formatting help on the page itself. Thanks! MisterPepe talk 20:35, 22 April 2007 (EDT)

1 - Yes, even though we're a much smaller concern than WP, I'm sure that the people providing the very helpful comments I've seen so far would be glad to be listed. I'd love to volunteer myself but, er, I don't fall under the category of experienced XD

2 - A resounding yes - wikicode is a daunting prospect for those unused to it. Heck, I'm only just starting to get to grips with it!

More power to your elbow ;) --Snograt 20:46, 22 April 2007 (EDT)

Further thoughts to part one: should it be set up by a category/template on your userpage, or be an actual page that you add your name to manually? Wiki does it via {{User wikipedia/Welcoming Committee}}, and it adds members to a category, which then updates the members page. Personally, that seems like a lot of work to me, so, unless someone else wants to make that (I'm horrible with templates), I'll probably just make a sign-up list like we have for the Projects pages. Any other ideas are, of course, welcome (pun totally intended). MisterPepe talk 22:07, 22 April 2007 (EDT)

GWW:WELCOME

I've updated this template to include a link to the GWW:WELCOME page - I've tried to create a series of pages (highly based on Wikipedia's system =P) to help out newer users. I'll be working on updating and adding pages to the Help: namespace over the next couple of days, so it should get even better =) I'd like to ask that anyone who likes to welcome newer users use this template rather than the somewhat obnoxious {{[[Template:Welcome|Welcome]]}}, or perhaps we should move this to overlap that template. Thoughts? MisterPepe talk 12:29, 23 April 2007 (EDT)

Move this over {{tl|Welcome}}, in my opinion. --Dirigible 13:06, 23 April 2007 (EDT)

Yeah. I think I'll move it over, just to cut off usage of that one - this one has been used in a few places, so I'll probably keep it up, at least for now. MisterPepe talk 13:35, 23 April 2007 (EDT)