Marjan Tomki SI

Welcome

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Getting welcome

Welcome template seems to be intended to introduce a novice user to what's Wiktionary about, and how (s)he can contribute. But I didn't have any idea it exists fo months, and was stumbling around and searching after info I needed as a novice much of that time, and I have also tried here, and am now giving it to myself.

I searched for some of information here (program search mechanisms work only, if you already know the term used for the concept you are looking for) for some months, IMO in a far less than optimal way, because I was researching how Wkt works instead of learning to and contributing contents.

Problem may also be that senior editors (non-novice) implicitly expect the novice to follow the guidelines that welcome template is intended to provide, but I as a novice hadn't seen it before being accidentally lead by a discussion to a discussion page of another user in WP space, where that template was provided.

I also think that that problem is probably not limited only to me, and so worthy of discussion.

Maybe what is userpage for, what is user discussion page for - and how to get Welcome template into it - should also be covered in tutorial, and/or somewhere else where a novice would most probably see, which is even more so where a senior editor is less likely to help with initialization of user's talk page (or user initiation ;-). I'll see what I can do about it when I know more. --Marjan Tomki SI (talk) 07:37, 15 April 2021 (UTC)

Problem, technical

I reviewed categories this was added to, and Babel seem to have unexpected results:

Categories: User en-3User enUser sl-NUser slUser la-2User laUser sh-4User shUser bs-4User bsUser mk-1User mkUser cs-1User csUser pl-1User plUser ru-1User ruUser it-1User itUser fr-2User frUser de-1User de

I don't recall saving this page with Babel "User en", "User de", "User sh" and so on, which in Babel usually means Native proficiency. I must check if this - e.g. User de - really means "Native like" or "any" proficiency in German (if it is "any" I shall only remove this).
If not so I shall seek help to troubleshoot this.

It seems that in Babel User en means native, in cathegories User en N means native, and User en without level in cathegories here seem to mean any ability with English. It is confusing for a novice (maybe should be mentioned in babel/languages cathegories documentation).

It seems the problem is not just technical. When you use the same character string (lexeme?) for two different meanings that are not intended to be assigned to an item or entity simultainously, you need context to differentiate what is really meant (that is relevant both to humans and programs). That context could be recieved by welcome template and links on it; but when creating babel (and several months later) I got no such context info (even when I did some search for it), and was for a while just guessing (which is both also original research, of course).

This section was moved from main user page (declutter and intended to archive), and a little amended at the same time. --Marjan Tomki SI (talk) 07:37, 15 April 2021 (UTC)