Infosphere:Welcoming Committee

Welcome to the Welcoming Committee of the Infosphere.

Who We Are
The welcoming committee is a group of people who kindly greet new users and help them get started (if needed). If you want to help out, the most obvious thing you can do is post welcome messages and be friendly and helpful with new users you meet. The easiest way to identify new users is from the recent changes list. The new user's username or talk page will be red because they haven't been created, yet. Once you're on the user page, you can click "User contributions" on the sidebar to see how many edits they've done. Also be sure to check the history of the talk page to verify that no one has already welcomed them (they may have deleted the first welcome message).

Note that joining the committee confers neither responsibilities nor privileges, but members are expected to do some welcoming &mdash; we don't want to simply clutter up this page with member names.

You should also have a basic technical understanding of the wiki so that you can answer any questions an inexperienced user might have.

Don't Bite
Don't get frustrated if a newcomer or some IP makes a mistake&mdash;let it slide and give him a friendly note telling them what they did.

Standards for Welcoming
A good welcome message should be around the lines of this template:

To use the template, type " ", which will automatically include your signature and a timestamp. (Typing subst before the name of the template tells the system to copy a static version of the template to the page.)

This can also be used when first getting in touch with anonymous editors, just use " " instead, however they are generally only welcomed when they seem to be sticking around without registering. Hints that an IP might be here for a while include page creation, in-depth changes, detailed comments on edits or performing more than a handful of edits. Be aware that there may actually be multiple persons at a given IP and that the user you think you are welcoming may have changed IPs already after having turned off their computer.

If a new user or an IP adds joke or test content that needs to be cleaned up, use

Be as kind and welcoming as possible and answer any questions they might have.

When creating your own personal template, you don't have to follow the original layout exactly. You can rearrange it and reword it, but please include the MediaWiki User's Guide, Help:Standards, Help:FAQ and Help:Editing pages within the text. Like the general welcome template, be sure to use the  command to substitute, rather than link, your template on a user's talk page.

Members
(Please remember only to join if you plan to do some Welcoming)


 * 1) Buddy13
 * 2) Quolnok