Please read through the policy below to familiarize yourself with our common practices and rules.
If you have any questions, suggestions, or complaints, please post them on the talk page.
Memory Alpha, like any wiki, relies not just on its dedicated members to expand its content base, but also on new members who are thinking about joining the project. Newcomers are the community's most valuable "resource," because they help us to expand and spread the work around.
Therefore, it's important that we kindly welcome new members to our community. Newcomers are, by definition, generally unfamiliar with the policies and customs that the rest of us mostly take for granted. Once they're acclimated to our practices, they'll probably become productive members and a part of our community.
Here are a few general tips that can help welcome new members:
- Remember their value. New members are potential assets to our community. Consider them an opportunity rather than a nuisance.
- Politely point out mistakes. Make sure you look like you're providing helpful hints rather than aggressively criticizing their work. Hostility will drive newcomers away!
- Encourage boldness. Help newcomers realize that it's okay to be bold when updating pages! Memory Alpha is a continuous work-in-progress, so it's okay if there are little mistakes.
- Always give the benefit of the doubt. Assume that a newcomer is interested in helping out, and is simply unfamiliar with our guidelines rather than flaunting the rules. Give them a chance to learn – not everyone has the patience to RTFM ahead of time!
- Remember, everyone was a newcomer once! (Well, unless you're Harry or Dan. ;-))
Standard user greeting
The following is a standard greeting used to welcome new members and can be added using the following template: {{welcome}}.
Welcome!
Welcome to Memory Alpha, Be considerate to new members! We've noticed that you've already made some contributions – thank you! We all hope that you'll enjoy our database and decide to join our community.
Since you're new to Memory Alpha, we have a few links that you should check out:
- Our policies and guidelines are the best place to start. Particular items of note are the content and resource policies, the editing guidelines, our point of view, copyrights, and guidelines for proper etiquette.
- We strongly encourage you to use the "source editor" in your editing preferences so that you can use our standard formatting templates. Click here to learn more.
- The Manual of Style and how to write a great article can help you put together an article that might end up on our featured articles list someday.
- Want to help build the category tree? Check out the category suggestions.
- You can look up your past changes in the contributions log and keep track of your favorite articles through your very own watchlist.
- Create your user page and be contacted here, on your talk page. Please make sure to sign any comments on talk pages with four tildes (~~~~) to add your user name and the date and time.
If you have any questions, please feel free to post them in one of our forums. Thanks, and once again, welcome to Memory Alpha!
- The above message was automatically added.
Standard anonymous user greeting
The following is a standard greeting used to welcome anonymous (IP) users: {{welcome-anon}}.
Template:Welcome-anon