People who have been editing for a long time often have highly personalised interfaces, and also have access to a variety of tools/rights that aren't available to new users. These are both important things, but it does make it difficult for existing users to understand the issues facing new users. A practical example of this is, when giving presentations to new users at outreach events, many Wikimedians create a 'fake' user account specifically to be able to show the 'default' user interface on the screen to the newbies. Importantly, the presenter never actually presses 'save' when showing how to edit, because then this user account would get the auto-confirmed userright.

I propose the creation of a user preferece 'mode' that makes both the user-interface and user-rights the "default" for a newly signed-up user. Call it "new user mode", or "default mode". Crucially, editing in this mode would mean that the user WOULD NOT become 'auto confirmed' when they save their edits but WOULD still count the change in their editcount. It could be marked in the history with a #defaultMode tag or something.

Wittylama (talk) 10:27, 21 November 2015 (UTC)

This card tracks a proposal from the 2015 Community Wishlist Survey: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/2015_Community_Wishlist_Survey

This proposal received 7 support votes, and was ranked #75 out of 107 proposals. https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/2015_Community_Wishlist_Survey/Editing#Default_user_interface_mode