Forum:New features on Wednesday, March 18th

Hi everyone! We have three new features that we're excited to be releasing tomorrow, and I just wanted to give you a quick heads-up with some information about them all. Tomorrow morning, we will be releasing the Wikia Welcome Tool, Category Select, and more Edit Page Enhancements.

Wikia Welcome Tool
Welcoming new contributors is a really important task on a wiki. When a new person shows up to help, we want to make sure that they feel appreciated, and connected to the community. Some wiki communities work really hard to make sure that every new contributor gets a welcome. Unfortunately, it's also a big chore, and there are a lot of communities where it doesn't happen.

Wikia has developed a new feature that will make the welcoming process a lot easier -- the Welcome tool! It's an automatic process that will welcome every new contributor, leaving a welcome message that the community can customize.

When a contributor makes their first edit, the Wikia Welcome tool leaves a talk page message for them, and creates a user page.

Hi, welcome to (Wiki Name)! Thanks for your edit to the Article title page.

Please leave a message on my talk page if I can help with anything! -- (signature)

The talk page message is signed by the admin (or Wikia staff member) who's edited the wiki most recently, to help the contributor find someone who's available to talk to them if they need it. The message is left one minute after the contributor's edit, so they'll get the message while they're still on the wiki.

We've been testing this on a dozen wikis over the last week, and the results have been really positive. On the test wikis, new contributors have been responding to the messages, reaching out to admins with questions. It's helping to create connections between contributors and admins, opening up the opportunity for conversations and collaborations.

There seems to be a real advantage to this method, even for communities that currently do their own welcomes. A welcome message left by a person can happen hours later, when the contributor isn't there anymore. Automating the welcomes accomplishes the same goal, but it's a lot faster, and active contributors don't have to spend time on a routine task.

Each wiki can still have its own specialized welcomes. The whole system is completely customizable by the admins, by editing the following pages:


 * MediaWiki:Welcome-message-user is the welcome message that's left for logged-in contributors.
 * MediaWiki:Welcome-message-anon is the welcome message that's left for anonymous contributors.
 * MediaWiki:Welcome-user-page is the user page that's created for logged-in contributors.
 * MediaWiki:Welcome-user -- You can use this page to change the signature that's left in the welcome message, or to turn the feature off. There are three settings for this page:
 * @latest -- This is the default setting. This means that the message will be signed by the latest admin to make an edit on the wiki.
 * Username -- If you replace @latest with a contributor's username, then all of the messages will be signed by that contributor.
 * @disabled -- This turns the feature off, so nobody gets a welcome message. If you turn it off, you can turn it back on again by replacing this with @latest or a username.

If you have any questions about the Wikia Welcome tool, please contact a staff member for help.

Category Select
On Wednesday, we're also releasing a new Category Select tool site-wide. Using this tool, you'll be able to add categories to pages in two new ways:


 * 1) From the article itself: At the bottom of each article there is a new "Add Category " button, this allows users to add categories to any article without going into full edit mode.
 * 2) From a new category section in edit mode: While in edit mode there is now a separate box for categories which allows you to add categories by simply typing their name and clicking enter without wikitext.

You can still access the raw category wikitext by clicking on the code view link in the left side of the category section. If you would prefer to disable Category Select all-together, you can do so within the Editing tab of your personal preferences and checking the "Disable Category tagging" option. For more detail about this feature, please see the help page.

Edit Page Enhancements
After taking in some of the feedback that you provided, we're also releasing a modified version of the edit page enhancements that went out last week. Here is how the edit page on Monaco will change for wikis that do not have the Rich Text editor enabled: These changes will not affect Monobook. If you would like to tweak how these changes display on your wiki, you can find out more information about doing so here.
 * In order to make more room for the edit window, the site notice, wiki tagline, and talk page message notification are not displayed on the edit page. Additionally, the size of the page title has been reduced (rather than eliminated, as it was before).
 * The preview window now displays with a bright red background to make it clear that the edit has not yet been saved.

More Information
If you have questions or comments or need help with any of these features, please contact a Wikia staff member. Thanks! --KyleH (talk) 22:21, 17 March 2009 (UTC)