Template:Welcome needed/sandbox

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This is a utility template to further the goal of § Editor retention. It creates a Cirrus Advanced search link to search for users who have warning(s) on their page, but who do not yet have a Welcome message. Users with archives are excluded, as they are presumed to have had a Welcome earlier. Users with level 2 warnings (or higher) are excluded. Various options are available to narrow the search results.

Usage

{{welcome needed}}
{{welcome needed |warning_template_name |x1=excluded template |user=type |year=YYYY |month=Monthname |count=number |sort=type |disp=link string}}

Parameters

There is one positional parameter, and twelve named parameters; all are optional:

|1= – name of a user-warning template, less the uw- prefix; e.g., pov1. (alias: |warn=; default value: none, but there must be at least one template starting uw-).

|user= – type of user: one of reg (registered), anon, IPv4, or IPv6. See § Details

|year= – if present, the page must contain a message from the given year. (default:2025); see § Details.

|month= – if present, the page must contain a message from the given month. (default: April); see § Details.

|day= – if present, the page must contain a message from the given day. (recommended; suggested value: 29); see § Details.

|sort= – modify the sort order of the results; values: last_edit, create_timestamp, relevance (the default). Additional sort order values are available in Cirrus (but rarely useful here). See § Details.

|dir= – sort order direction; values: asc (aliases: up, oldest first); everything else is considered descending. See § Details.

|first= – first search result; 0-origin, so for results 101-150 use |first=100 |count=50. (alias: |offset=; default: 0). See § Details.

|count= – number of results to return (alias: |limit=; default: 50).

|disp= – display text for the link (default: 'search link').

Details

Although all parameters are optional, the generated search link will not operate efficiently with no parameters, and will likely time out attempting to return millions of results. Choosing values for |warn=, and some or all of the date params will narrow the results.

Date fields: note that year, month, and day currently are independent of each other; it is possible to specify year and day without month, but this doesn't do what is expected, because they are just string searches, so |day=18 may find a value '18' in some part of the user page that has nothing to do with a date. Specifying just year, or year and month together, or all three will usually do what you expect it to. Note that the date field applies to *any* message on the page, not just the warning template. There is currently no way to specify the date of the warning template message itself.

User type: this template is capable of surfacing only registered users, or only anon users, if you request it. For anons, you can specify all anons, or just IPv4 or IPv6. All of these searches are based on regular expressions that take some shortcuts for the sake of efficient search. It is possible that a (misleadingly named) registered account that looks like an IPv6 for the first dozen characters or so, and then goes alphabetic could be identified as an IPv6 user. The regex code could be made more robust if needed; this may be done in the future if there are too many false identifications, but at a cost to performance, and seems unnecessary at this point. Please add details of false positives returned in results to the Talk page.

Constraining results: Your first page of search results normally has results 1 to 50; you can use params |first= and |count= to alter this. To do the equivalent of getting to the "second" page of results, just set |first=50. You can use other increments, such as 20: requesting |first=60|count=20 gets you the fourth page of search results, taken 20 at a time. Note that the value of param |first= is zero-basedd. The standard values for |count= are: 20, 50 (default), 100, 250, 500 (maximum), but you are not limited to that and may use any value less than the max for these two params.

Sorting: there are various sort algorithms, most of which don't make sense for the purposes of this template (such as random). The most useful are last_edit and create_timestamp, and both of these also have a directional aspect, settable separately in param |dir=. Param value last_edit detects the last edit (of any kind) on the page, so it is more about how active the page has been recently, and not connected with how long ago the warning template was placed. Value create_timestamp is about the time the user's talk page was created, and so a descending sort based on that will get pages that are newly created; use |sort=create_timestamp|dir=desc to get the newest User talk pages satisfying the other conditions.

Examples

The generic search (no params) searches for the most recently created not blocked user talk pages in April 2025 lacking archives, or any higher level user warning template (levels 2 and higher) and that contain at least one level-1 user warning, such as {{uw-unsourced1}}, but no welcome template; it returns up to 50 results initially. Almost all of the described conditions are configurable in template; see § Parameters.

1. {{Welcome needed}} → search link
2. {{Welcome needed|unsourced1}} → search link
3. {{Welcome needed|unsourced1|user=IPv4}} → search link
4. {{Welcome needed|unsourced1|user=reg|year=2025|month=April|day=29|sort=last_edit|dir=desc}} → search link
5. {{Welcome needed|error1|user=IPv6|sort=create_timestamp|dir=desc}} → search link
6. {{Welcome needed|coi|user=reg|count=1|disp=latest COI registered user}} → latest COI registered user

Editor retention

The goal of this template is to assist us in improving editor retention by finding deserving users that have not yet been welcomed, and welcome them.

In particular, this template lists those users who have received a minor (level-1) user warning template on their talk page, but have no evidence of having received a welcome from anyone (but see § Technical notes about possible false positives). The idea is that having warnings can be off-putting or scary to a new user, and that seeing a friendly welcome message on their page from another volunteer can go a long way to mitigating that effect, and encouraging the editor to stay, as well as providing needed links.

Here is a possible procedure, if you would like to find such users and welcome them:

1. Place the template in your sandbox, or at Special:ExpandTemplates, and experiment with the parameters until you get the set of search results you want. This will display a set of User talk pages lacking a welcome message.
2. From the search result page, right-click/context-click a result to open the User talk page of a user in a new browser tab.
3. From the user talk page, right-click/context-click the View History tab at the top of the page and the User contributions link in the Tools section of the sidebar or dropdown to open two new browser tabs.
4. On the 'User contributions for Username' page, click '500' (if it appears, or the highest number available, or 'Oldest'), to show as many contributions as possible, or the oldest ones. Same thing at 'User talk:Username: Revision history' page.
5. Should this user be welcomed? This is the main question to ask yourself. This is a user already warned for something, and we want to distinguish between bad actors on the one hand for whom a Welcome would be just a waste of time, and on the other, good-faith editors trying their best to improve articles and who could become good editors, and just need some encouragement. Look at their Talk page to see if there is a pattern of warnings, and of what type. Check the Talk page history to see if there are a lot of deleted past warnings; such warnings are likely to have section headings of Monthname Year, and you can search-on-page for them that way. Deleted warnings don't necessarily mean anything bad is going on, some users just like a clean Talk page. On balance, is this user trying to improve articles, but has gotten one or a few warnings of the types newbies always get at the outset due to the myriad rules they have to learn, or are the warnings more serious such that a Welcome message is not appropriate? Even presence of {{uw-coi}}, {{vandalism1}}, or {{disruptive1}} doesn't necessarily mean they are a bad actor; the person placing the template may have been over-zealous.
6. How belated is this welcome? If you have decided they deserve a welcome, then briefly assess their contribution pattern by examining the number of their contributions, and the date range. Some users have been around for a decade, but have few total edits, others got started yesterday, and managed to garner a warning already. The Welcoming committee has Welcome templates you can choose from]], including two specifically for belated Welcomes. A personal welcome you compose yourself, or a few words of encouragement added to a templated message is even better, especially if it acknowledges their particular circumstances ("I see you have been around for three years already, and it looks like nobody has welcomed you in all that time, so let me be the first!")

Did this work for you? Please add your feedback, comments, and suggested enhancements at the Talk page!

Technical notes

This template uses regular expression search, which can be slow (many seconds). Specifying more refined searches may speed it up. Slow searches may also time out, and return only partial results; if that is the case, a warning message is displayed on the search results page.

You can refine by searching for one specific warning template, but not two or more templates, due to the limitations of Cirrus regular expression search, which notably lacks alternation ('OR' expressions). For any refinement parameter, you get to pick one string value. The same applies to date refinements: you can pick a day, month, and year, but not two months.

The search condition of "not having a welcome message" is implemented with an exclusion term of 'Template:Welcome' for now; the most common welcome messages start that way, but not all do, meaning that there may be false positives with users who have already been welcomed by an alternative welcome message with a different kind of title. This may be improved in the future by beefing up this term or adding new terms.

This template is rated alpha, and is working well enough to be used in projects and talk pages in a limited fashion, but is open for feedback and enhancements which may result in breaking changes, including changes to the parameter set. Please use it, and provide feedback at the Talk page.

The above documentation is transcluded from Template:Welcome needed/doc. (edit | history)
Editors can experiment in this template's sandbox (edit | diff) and testcases (create) pages.
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