[Wikipedia-l] a way to contact IP users

Mon Nov 25 14:43:56 UTC 2002

How about giving admins the ability to throw up a "Please read this" message.

Something like this:
* User submits an edit
* Wikipedia accepts the edit, and...
* Sends user to a "You have an urgent administrative message" page.

User can then:
* Click on the "Read message" button, or
* Just ignore it

We can think of variations, like, send the user directly to the message page, rather than the "you have a message waiting". Another, for egregious cases, would send the user to the "message waiting" or 'please acknowledge this' page after EVERY edit, until the click an OKAY button.

Ed poor

-----Original Message-----
From: tarquin [mailto:tarquin at planetunreal.com]
Sent: Monday, November 25, 2002 6:43 AM
To: wikipedia-l at wikipedia.org
Subject: [Wikipedia-l] a way to contact IP users

(this is a general feature suggestion, BTW, though it's a case on En 
that's reminded me of it)

Someone on En: is adding pages on actors with just dates of birth. it's 
not vandalism, but admins have deleted many of these, because they're 
such tiny stubs they're basically worthless.
it's not the first time that we get users who make many well-meaning 
edits, but make mistakes that leave us a lot to clean up.

This reminds me of something I suggested ages ago -- we need a way to 
contact unregistered users to politely point of where they're putting a 
foot wrong.
My suggestion was this:
* on the IP contributions page, add a "alert this user" dialog box, or a 
link to one
* that user will then see the message text above above every edit box

This could save us a lot of cleaning up work. I also worry that these 
people may get discouraged and leave when they find we've deleted their 
additions -- we may be losing potentially valuable contributors.

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