Proposal: Make the WikiLove tab visible only after a user has made 10 edits
There is a general view amongst Wikipedia admins that excessive templating/boiler plate text on user pages is poor practice. I frequently use an initial (customized) welcome template for new users and do use standard user warning templates for vandalism, though not for "regulars". However these standard boilerplates are not available to brand new users as tools such as Twinkle will only be discovered after an editor has had a chance to learn the basics.
Wikilove has been implemented differently as a user sees the tab as another early toy to play with and we now see a lot of new users trying it out on their own talk pages as their first edit. At the moment Wikilove works on an opt-out basis rather than an opt-in basis.
PROPOSAL: Let's change the Wikilove tab to only be visible to users after their first 10 edits. Before this point, it is unlikely that new users will be able to use these tools in a meaningful way and this would also help to keep the interface simple for the first few edits made and targeted on article content rather than user page decoration and social fluff.
I don't think that adding this restriction would be of much value. I actually think it would operate antithetically to the entire philosophy behind the tool. Requiring "autoconfirmed" statues (which your suggestion effectively does) to anything is normally a bad idea if one is trying to increase the overall atmosphere of inclusion.
I agree that excessive boilerplating is bad practice. We know this to be true from various studies. However, we also know that early expressions of gratitude work well towards promoting new editor retention. This is not the same thing: a WikiLove message is, indeed, a template. However, these are nearly always personalized templates. And the research we have shows that the problem is not "templates" but rather "impersonal templates."
I am not sure that your point entirely makes sense in this context. There would be nothing stopping the user receiving Wikilove messages which may well help with editor retention. The issue is whether it is helpful in the long term for users with less than 10 total edits to be sending out Wikilove messages, often before they have made any contribution to article space. I do not believe there has been any analysis of the behaviour of new contributors that demonstrates any clear benefit in this use case scenario.
If part of the problem is that new editors can't figure out talk pages and are using WikiLove as a GUI to leave messages, this problem might be solved by enabling QuickComments and putting a note about that in the WikiLove interface (e.g. "You can also just leave a quick comment.")
