User talk:Rfsmit/The Saga of the Unwelcome Welcome

Welcome!

Hello Rfsmit, and welcome to Wikipedia! Thank you for your contributions. I hope you like the place and decide to stay. Here are some pages that you might find helpful:

I hope you enjoy editing here and being a Wikipedian! Please sign your name on talk pages using four tildes (~~~~); this will automatically produce your name and the date. If you need help, check out Wikipedia:Questions, ask me on my talk page, or place {{helpme}} on your talk page and ask your question there. Again, welcome! Dolphin51 (talk) 22:55, 14 July 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Interesting. I've been making contributions for a while now. Let's see -- 65 contributions over three years isn't a great deal, but it's more than I've made to my local newspapers, or to A Competitor™. Maybe the sixty-fifth contribution triggers an automated welcome message? I don't know. Help me out here… Maybe it's just that this was the first useful contribution I've made? That's awesome. Oh man I'm so pumped I've been welcomed to Wikipedia.

No, it's just that there are some people out there who take it upon themselves to issue a 'welcome' whenever they come across a user page without one. Personally I find it condescending Rojomoke (talk) 14:17, 18 July 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks for the clarification, Rojomoke. It's not only condescending, it's redundant! That's why I found it so funny. But where are my manners? I should have welcomed you to my Talk page!

Something else occurs to me. Shouldn't it be "Manual of style", rather than "Manual of Style", "MaNuAl Of StYlE", or other l33t variants?

- Hi Rfsmit. Thanks for your note on my User talk page. The background to my Welcome! notice on this page is as follows. On 14 July you made a very useful addition to Avro Vulcan. I have an interest in the Avro Vulcan and it is one of the articles on my watchlist so I saw a reference to your addition shortly after you made it. It was immediately apparent that you did not have an active User talk page because the word talk appeared in red rather than blue. Clearly you had not been welcomed to Wikipedia in the usual way. I have welcomed many people to Wikipedia by starting a Talk page for them, and depositing the standard message on the new page. I don't precisely recall your case but I'm sure I followed my usual routine and checked your contributions which showed that you had made a number. I then clicked on your red talk to activate your User talk page, and deposited the standard welcoming message. It was not intended to be condescending. If the standard Welcome message offends you, you are at liberty to delete it.

Within the Wikipedia community there is a large number of people who have formed a welcoming committee. They have volunteered to welcome new users and others. You can see their names on WP:Welcoming committee. My username is not on the list, but I understand and support the objectives of the welcoming committee. Happy editing. Dolphin51 (talk) 23:36, 30 July 2008 (UTC)[reply]

As has been noted, it's not my own welcome, it's a template ({{welcomeh}}) from the Welcoming Committee. I'm sorry you find obtrusive, you can remove it as you wish. Many very new users find it useful and friendly to be welcomed - as I said, there is no reason why anyone can't remove the welcome from their own page. If a user has been around for a while and not made many edits (but has started editing again recently) or if their editing style shows they're a rookie, I tend to give them the template as a quick but friendly reminder to read up on policy and guidelines. —Vanderdecken∴ ∫ξ φ 08:58, 31 July 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks for the response, guys.

And there you go. Two welcomers; one "official", read self-appointed, another merely self-appointed. How quaint. How inappropriate. Mediawiki already provides a mechanism for user orientation. It would be more appropriate to list this information in the space below the "Save page" buttons (and, in the case of the silly "official" welcome template, with fewer pretty colors). Let's just recap for the welcoming committee the reasons why I should not have had this childish edit made to my talk page:

I'm not a new user
I'm not a very new user
I haven't started editing again after a hiatus
I'm not a rookie

I don't fit any of the groups of users who are targetted for this mindless welcoming. Yes, there is some useful information in there. There's useful information all over Wikipedia; all over the Web, for that matter. But to come over to someone's talk page and dump a template is just rude, because the implication is that a) the target is not familiar with the subjects listed, and b) the poster is more familiar with those subjects. I'll let this stand as an example to others for a while, and then I'll archive it. Sheesh.

HOW IS ANYONE SUPPOSED KNOW YOU DON'T FIT ANY GROUPS? YOUR USER PAGE SHOULD SAY I AM GRUMPY OLD MAN.

HEY RFSMIT, I HAVE GOOD NEWS FOR YOU TO MAKE YOU HAPPY. YOU NOT WELCOME HERE! HA HA —Preceding unsigned comment added by 203.110.136.172 (talk) 00:29, 20 August 2008 (UTC)[reply]

How? By looking at the date I joined; by looking at the list of articles I've edited; by looking at the quality of my edits. Not too difficult, eh? Almost as easy as switching off Caps Lock...