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Wikipedia talk:Welcoming committee

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Recent and planned improvements

I've made some § changes to the header, split the § 'Specialized' section into two, dropped the § Greetings page, introduced § consistent naming among templates in one section of the Templates page, § revamped the gallery page, § spun off the user-hosted templates into a new subpage, § improved access to template usage numbers, and added doc page links to help § find welcome templates substed onto User talk pages. And I have a § proposal for standardizing Talk page and archiving usage. Mathglot (talk) 23:57, 31 August 2025 (UTC)

Greetings page

The Greetings page at Wikipedia:Welcoming committee/Standard user greeting has been obsolete for a long time. I have removed it from the nav header that appears at the top of every Welcome subpage, so there are no Welcome Committee links to it anymore, and tagged it {{Historical}}. In my opinion, we should tag it for deletion, possibly under WP:T5, otherwise WP:Tfd. There are 39 inlinks, mostly from user space, so as an alternative, we could redirect it to WP:WT. Mathglot (talk) 21:09, 31 August 2025 (UTC)

Split 'Specialized' section into two

The § Specialized section of the /Templates page was previously a grab-bag of templates which pretty much all fit into one of two categories:, namely:

I have split out the ones in the second category into new top-level section § Welcome, along with advice or warning. Given that everything on that page is a welcome template of some sort, that could probably be shortened to just, 'Along with advice or warning', or similar. Mathglot (talk) 22:02, 31 August 2025 (UTC)

The Nav header has been updated to include this Talk page, and drops the obsolete Greetings page. THe header is now horizontally centered, and there are some other minor adjustments. The style is moved out of the header and into Wikipedia:Welcoming committee/Navigation/styles.css. Mathglot (talk) 22:53, 31 August 2025 (UTC)

In addition, the header now uses the tabbed heading seen in many WikiProjects for navigation to the main topics or subpages. Mathglot (talk) 00:08, 12 September 2025 (UTC)
A corollary of using tabbed headdings, the smiley faces previously seen extreme left and right on the Nav header are no longer there. I played around for a while trying to find clever ways to include them, but nothing looked quite right. Do we really want to keep the smiley faces? If so, I will try some other methods, or feel free to jump in with your own solution. Mathglot (talk) 05:25, 14 September 2025 (UTC)

Naming standardization

After splitting the § Specialization section, I moved a few pages in the new, § With advice or warning section to add hyphens between words, to bring them in line with the majority of welcome templates in that section. I haven't looked at the other sections, but they should all be brought in line with some standard as well. I don't much care whether they all end up with blanks between words, underscores, hyphens, or nothing, but they should follow one standard so users don't have to constantly guess what this one is called. Mathglot (talk) 22:59, 31 August 2025 (UTC)

There is a whole lot left to do with the other ones, which also includes questions about whether we want to standardize names that don't start with Welcome, like {{Mentor welcome}}, and the ones that start W-, like {{W-short}} or {{W-FAQ}}. Mathglot (talk) 02:57, 1 September 2025 (UTC)

Talk page and archive standardization

I propose that we standardize all subpages to use a common Talk page, as is the practice in numerous WikiProjects. Currently, we have a mixed bag, with at least two active talk pages. With one exception (two, earlier), they mostly point to this page ('Wikipedia talk:Welcoming committee'), but there is an exception with the Templates page. (There were two exceptions, before the § Greetings page was obsoleted). Here is what we have now:

There are currently five conversations at the Templates talk page (none in 2025), and three Template talk archive pages (*/Archive_1, Archive_2, Archive_3; most recent Archive_3 comment dates to 2023). Tere are six archive pages for the remaining subpages: Wikipedia talk:Welcoming committee/Archive 1, 2, ...6, with the most recent Archive_6 comment dating to December 2021.

Proposal: move the three Template archives into subpages of this page as new archives 7, 8, and 9. Then, archive the five conversations at the Templates talk page into Archive_9if they fit, otherwise Archive_10. That will empty page Wikipedia talk:Welcoming committee/Welcome templates, which should then be redirected to this page, completing the merge. Mathglot (talk) 23:32, 31 August 2025 (UTC)

Revamp the gallery page

The Template gallery page was hopelessly out of date. If kept current, it can be a really useful resource to help pick out what the best template is. Fortunately, there is a fairly easy way to do that, so I have redone the page entirely, and all table rows show a live template, so the page only needs to be updated when a new welcome templated is added to the main page. The old page had only one section, and was already too long (as far as scrolling), so I think it benefits from having each section collapsed, and that way you can just view the ones in the section you are interested in. Mathglot (talk) 02:52, 1 September 2025 (UTC)

The new design is based on a table-builder template and a set of config files, each of which configures the template to build a table displaying the configured list of templates. Mathglot (talk) 20:13, 1 September 2025 (UTC)

But this suggests another approach that would solve both issues at once: a division of the page into six subpages, one each for the six groups of templates currently all on the one page: General, Graphical, Specialized, Unregistered, Problem users, and Topic-specific. If they were split off, they would no longer need to be collapsed, each page would just bring up the gallery of templates in that section, they would load faster, and PEIS would be negligible on each page. Mathglot (talk) 07:26, 4 September 2025 (UTC)

Spin off the User-hosted templates

I have created new subpage Wikipedia:Welcoming committee/Welcome templates/User-hosted as a container for the 80 or so user-hosted templates that appear on the Welcome templates page. Currently, there is no change to the appearance of the Welcome templates page as it now transcludes the new subpage, but should it?

The user-hosted templates occupy over one-third of the vertical space on the templates page, and I don't know that it deserves that level of prominence on a Wikipedia project page. We could still host the list here without giving it so much prominence, either by collapsing it by default, or by removing the full display of 80 templates from the templates page, while still keeping the 'User-hosted' section on the page, containing an explanatory intro paragraph, and a link to the User-hosted page. I think I favor the latter approach, but wanted to get feedback about this. Mathglot (talk) 18:47, 1 September 2025 (UTC)

I replaced the transclusion of the User-hosted page, with a brief intro and a link to it, topped by a {{Further}} link. Mathglot (talk) 21:51, 11 September 2025 (UTC)

Improve access to template usage

Up till now, it has been rather difficult to know how often any of the Welcome templates are being placed on User talk pages, as transclusion counts don't work for substed templates. For those templates which carry a unique token, such as a template id substed onto the page in hidden text, e.g., <!-- Template:Welcome -->, they can be found with an appropriate advanced search link. Most of the Welcome templates I checked do indeed carry a unique tag like this, but some do not. (There are a few where the tag doesn't match the template name, perhaps as a result of a move; those pose a problem, although not an insurmountable one.)

I took a guess about which templates might have the most substed placements, and added the {{find substed templates notice}} to the /doc pages of those templates, which makes it easy to find the usage of those templates now. From those, I constructed a usage table, which is now transcluded onto the Welcome templates page adjacent to the Table of Contents. This is very much a work in progress; please fix/alter/modify/move/re-sort the table as needed. Adding more rows to the table to add statistics for more Welcome templates would be a good idea, too. Ultimately, the data values captured in the dated column should be moved to a data table in Commons and captured weekly or so, and then a line graph chart built from it once we have three or four weeks worth of data using the new Chart extension. Mathglot (talk) 10:25, 3 September 2025 (UTC)

Finding newbies page

I just noticed that Wikipedia:Welcoming committee/Finding newbies is a stand-alone page linked from the header, like all the other top-level pages of the project, but it is a fairly short page (one section heading, eight bullet items), and it is transcluded in full onto the main page as section § Where to find new users. Do we really want it in both places like that, or just in one or the other? Mathglot (talk) 07:31, 4 September 2025 (UTC)

I've redone the § Finding newbies section on the main page, replacing the transclusion of subpage Wikipedia:Welcoming committee/Finding newbies with a link to the subpage and a short paragraph topped by a {{Main}} link instead. Mathglot (talk) 17:47, 11 September 2025 (UTC)
Great job....... thank you for informing the community as you go. Moxy🍁 00:23, 12 September 2025 (UTC)

Find welcome templates substed onto User talk pages

Typically, one uses the 'What links here' tool to find in-links and transclusions, but that does not work for templates that are substed onto the page, like welcome templates are. A subset of welcome templates that follow a particular coding convention can be located, using {{find substed templates notice}}, and those templates have an advanced search link on the doc page so you can find the substed templates. So far, only a handful of the welcome template doc pages currently have this search link (nine, at this writing; see here). The substed template search links are the same as the links underlying the tallies in the table on the list of templates page. (edit conflict) Mathglot (talk) 00:33, 12 September 2025 (UTC)

Template:W-graphical and double signatures

I just noticed something about {{W-graphical}} that probably wasn't an issue prior to the new setup for talk pages that was introduced a few years back. The template seems to automatically add the signature for the user using it to the end of the message that appears above the various links; however, the new talk page setup also automatically adds the signature of the user adding a post (this seems to have been done to mitigate the problem of users forgetting to sign their talk page posts) unless they do so themselves. Since most users of the "W-graphical" template don't sign because the template does it for them, this results in a double signature for the post: one in the template's message and one at the bottom of the post below the template. I guess this isn't really a major issue per se, but perhaps someone familiar with templates could take a look at it and see if there's something that needs tweaking. -- Marchjuly (talk) 12:49, 15 September 2025 (UTC)

Update language on anonymous templates?

After the introduction of temporary accounts, the language in templates like Template:Welcome-unregistered needs to be updated; there is no point in including information about IP addresses anymore and may cause confusion for newer users. 🌀Hurricane Wind and Fire (talk) (contribs)🔥 00:03, 8 November 2025 (UTC)

Hurricane Wind and Fire, it looks like this was done at Template:Welcome-unregistered a couple of days before your message, or did you mean that more updates are needed beyond those edits? Updates were also made to {{Welcome-anon-t}}, {{W-graphical-anon}}, {{Welcome-anon-retro}}, {{Welcome-t-anon}} for the same reason, but these all now use the terminology "temporary account" whereas Welcome-unregistered does not. Mathglot (talk) 22:36, 9 November 2025 (UTC)
I was unaware there was still a higher risk for editors with temporary accounts to have their IPs discovered by other users. I believed there was an error in the template and did not read thoroughly enough. Thank you, 🌀Hurricane Wind and Fire (talk) (contribs)🔥 22:48, 9 November 2025 (UTC)

Viewing usage of welcome templates over time

Recent improvements in template {{find substed}} have provided the ability to analyze the usage of substed templates by year. A tabular example of an application of this new feature can be seen in the context of User warning templates at this discussion. The same sort of treatment could easily be provided for welcome templates, to provide a comparative table of template usage year over year, or to plot them on a chart. Mathglot (talk) 09:56, 27 November 2025 (UTC)

Should the Welcome Committee be a WikiProject?

Please see discussion at Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Council#Should the Welcome Committee be a WikiProject?. Depending on the outcome, we might want to rename the page to Wikipedia:WikiProject Welcoming committee or something else with 'WikiProject' in the name. Mathglot (talk) 06:40, 4 December 2025 (UTC)

Seems like de facto, we are one. I added a project banner, and linked it in the header section. Mathglot (talk) 10:09, 7 December 2025 (UTC)

Template discussion

There is a template naming discussion that may be of interest to this committee. - UtherSRG (talk) 19:39, 13 December 2025 (UTC)

All the anon/unregistered templates should become wrappers

All of the unregistered or anon templates should become wrappers. The welcome templates mostly come in pairs (although there are a lot of exceptions): a registered and unregistered variant. In theory, they should differ only by one paragraph about how to register and the benefits of registering, such as in the third paragraph of {{Welcome-unregistered-unsourced}}. What happens in practice, is that as soon as you have two different templates, they start to diverge (example: Welcome-[anon-]npov: diff). Not only that, but not all of the main set have an unregistered twin at all. Sometimes, it's the reverse: we have {{Welcome-anon-summary}}, but no {{Welcome-summary}} (search). Or else the unregistered one simply redirects to the registered one (as in Template:Welcome-anon-belatedTemplate:Welcome-anon-belated) so the whole system is kind of chaotic and unpredictable, which leads to a lot of wasted editor time.

What should happen, is that each template in the "registered" set should conditionally emit an extra paragraph about account registration under control either of new param |temp=yes (or, |registered=no) or BASEPAGE detection, and all of the "unregistered" templates should become wrappers to their registered twin. That will cut down the number of templates significantly, as well as keep both variants identical, except for the extra paragraph, which should itself be a template instead of explaining registration differently in every anon template, as it is now. (Note that {{Welcome-belated}} does this now.) Mathglot (talk) 02:42, 15 December 2025 (UTC) OP by Mathglot (talk) at 06:43, 8 December 2025 (UTC)

Support: I agree the templates are a bit of a mess. Uniformity would be appreciated. I believe temp accounts should be treated similar to registered users in most cases, so having the templates only differ by a small registration mention would be nice. I'll also echo a point in that merge discussion regarding uniformity of names: the templates are still mixed between saying unregistered and temporary; cleaning this up would also be ideal, but that's beyond the proposal at hand. Kodning 🌸 (talk) 00:32, 18 May 2026 (UTC)

See Template talk:Welcome-retro#Added a mentor link for details. Mathglot (talk) 03:23, 21 December 2025 (UTC)

Requested move at Template talk:Welcome-unregistered-unconstructive § Requested move 3 February 2026

An editor has requested that Template:Welcome-unregistered-unconstructive be moved to another page, which may be of interest to this WikiProject. You are invited to participate in the move discussion. Qwerty123M (talk) 23:26, 3 February 2026 (UTC)

Discussion at Template talk:W-graphical § Proposed "newuser" parameter

 You are invited to join the discussion at Template talk:W-graphical § Proposed "newuser" parameter. -- Marchjuly (talk) 04:16, 10 February 2026 (UTC)

Joining the WC

Do you need to go through requests in order to be a member of the WC? Thanks.   ~ The Hamster Of Poland  23:15, 11 February 2026 (UTC)

Hi, PolishHamster. No, the only requirement is a desire to welcome new users. That can take many forms, but placing one of the many Welcome templates on the User talk page of a new user is perhaps the main activity and a good way to get started. Mathglot (talk) 11:52, 16 February 2026 (UTC)
Thanks for the info, I have at least welcomed 25 or more users to the site.   ~ DatPolishHamster  22:20, 16 February 2026 (UTC)
To add on: if you want a more explicit indication of participation, you can add your name to the member list and use one of the project's userboxes. This is optional, of course; it's just for self-identification. Kodning 🌸 (talk) 22:10, 17 May 2026 (UTC)

Add LLM caveat to many Welcome template

Note I have copied this here from the subpage Welcome Templates as this seems to have additional eyes on it. Looking for more opinions, although those at Wikipedia talk:Welcoming committee/Welcome templates are in favor (2 yes, one abstain).

I would like to suggest that we add a caveat about the use of LLM to most of the Wellcome templates. I am posting here for comments with a cross-post to WT:NPP. It is not going to stop the use, but could be a small step. N.B., I realize that this may need to also be discussed at the different templates with some specific wordage; that can come later if I see some consensus developing. Ldm1954 (talk) 17:04, 7 April 2026 (UTC)

Yah, probably a good idea. Mathglot (talk) 00:57, 18 May 2026 (UTC)

User Page icons and tags not working

I have noticed that the templates for the top icons and tags that are to go on your user page if you are a member are not working. They do not show up on the template lists, top icon wikiprojects list or on your user page other than the inside of the {}. Please fix this issue as soon as you can.De wiki encyclopediaUSER (talk) 14:39, 4 May 2026 (UTC)

meta:Welcoming policy

meta:Welcoming policy (authored by me) became global policy yesterday after meta:Requests for comment/Welcoming policy:

A wiki is only allowed to post welcome messages to users if their account was originally created at the wiki, or the user has at least one non-imported edit there.

I think our editors already satisfy it but should we mention it on Wikipedia:Welcoming committee? PrimeHunter (talk) 15:54, 14 May 2026 (UTC)

I support adding a mention or the above quote. It would be good to have a link to the global policy; I wouldn't have been aware of it if you hadn't linked it here. Kodning 🌸 (talk) 22:20, 17 May 2026 (UTC)
Let's just make sure any mention is clear enough for those who are unaware of global issues, other Wikipedias, or other sister projects. In any case, I think we are already grandfathered in, as the opening sentence of the project page says it's destined for "new users who have already made good-faith edits", by which I understand, edits "edits at en-wiki", as all of our WP:P&G intend without having to state it. Mathglot (talk) 00:56, 18 May 2026 (UTC)
I added something to WP:WC, but now that I look at it, I'm thinking we should just combine the two notices into one. Thoughts? Mathglot (talk) 06:57, 18 May 2026 (UTC)
Yeah, I see what you mean. I think the notices can be combined to reduce redundancy. Maybe the notice could use the small parameter as well, that way it'll show to the right of the prose; the project introduction is a little overshadowed. Kodning 🌸 (talk) 00:57, 19 May 2026 (UTC)
Also, the existing (long-standing) notice makes a lot of assertions, and it isn't clear if that comes from consensus here, or was just one editor's idea of what to put there. I suspect it can be cut way back to the essentials, and then combined with the other, or even just link to the meta page. Mathglot (talk) 18:24, 19 May 2026 (UTC)
The long-standing notice was added in 2014 and had slightly different wording; the surrounding edits are unrelated, and I don't see any relevant discussion in the talk page archives. This seems like a bold edit that others silently agreed to and later refined.
Looking at the page again, I think the original notice can just be removed. The new notice, together with the page's lead, cover all the same details, so there probably isn't much to combine anyhow. Kodning 🌸 (talk) 03:28, 21 May 2026 (UTC)
I went ahead and made a bold edit that removes the redundant notice and makes the global policy notice small. Feel free to revert or modify. Kodning 🌸 (talk) 06:32, 27 May 2026 (UTC)