This is a draft proposal to be kicked around in my userspace before submission as a bot request or otherwise. If you have concerns about the proposal please raise them on the talkpage. If you like the idea but can see ways of doing it better then please pile in, don't be restrained because it has started in userspace
This proposal has been worked up as a result of a discussion on Jimbo's talkpage (link here to the relevant archive once it has been archived).
Edit summaries are useful, both to tell other editors what you've done, and blank ones are a useful signal that you are probably either a vandal or a newbie. The problem is how do we encourage editors to start using edit summaries once they've stuck around for long enough that they are no longer newbies.
Option One - Bot edit
A Bot would run daily looking for accounts that meet the following criteria:
- Over 100 edits
- Less than one thousand edits
- 5 of the last 10 edits had a blank edit summary
- An edit with a blank edit summary in the last 24 hours
- Not previously messaged by this Bot
It would then template their talkpage with the following Message:
<no wiki>==100 edits congrats!==</no wiki> <No Wiki>Hello {{basePageName}} and congratulations on contributing your first 100 edits! now that you've had a bit of experience here you might want to check out some of the areas of the community. This is a fairly large list of wikiprojects, there are bound to be some that fit in with your own interests. One thing you might consider is setting your preferences to prompt you to add an edit summary on future edits.
I'm conscious of the need to mitigate a potentially negative message by combining it with a larger number of positives, and also that a message to many newish users at this stage of their wikicareers is a great way to do something positive, as well as a risk of becoming some sort of stodgy wall of text warnings like the worst of our welcome templates.
Option two as above by with manual messages edit
I'm assuming that we wouldn't have sufficient volunteers to do this, but it might be worth finding out how many people would come up in a typical daily list and whether there were people willing to take on the job of contacting them. If it could be done manually with a more tailored message from a living active Wikipedian then I believe it would be far more effective than if automated.
Option three Automated option change edit
Negative messages are much better delivered privately and spun positively. An individual system message congratulating an editor on completing their 100th edit and telling them that unless they object their options will now be changed to prompt them for an edit summary. Perhaps "blank edit summaries are a great way for the community to identify edits by new editors, but now that you've contributed a hundred edits your contributions won't need that extra scrutiny".