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A mentor for each newcomer: where are we at?

As the question has been raised in the previous section, I'd like to give you an update about mentoring.

At the moment, only 10% of new accounts on English Wikipedia see the "Your mentor" module on their homepage. Each month, about 100,000 new accounts are created at English Wikipedia.

In order to have a mentor for 100% of new account, based on observations of newcomers activity at other wikis, the Growth team advises to have one mentor for each group of 500 new accounts/month. So English Wikipedia should have a minimum of 200 active mentors to achieve this 100% goal.

As I write this message, 86 mentors signed up (but I don't know if they are all active). It means that we have (roughly) 4 times the number of mentors needed for the 10%. It is also the right number of mentors for 40% of new accounts.

Based on this, the question for your community is: should we move from 10% of new accounts receiving a mentors to 40%? It would give a better chance for some newcomers to start editing and staying active.

I anticipate the question of only giving a mentor to new active accounts. The Growth team observed the case of some newcomers' first edits being a question to their mentor. I can testify of it as a volunteer mentor at French Wikipedia, where one of my mentees' first dit is a question to me; this person is now an active, appreciated editor. Only giving a mentors to people who have been bold enough to click "edit" would not be fair for shy but promising editors.

Trizek (WMF) (talk) 15:48, 5 September 2022 (UTC)

@Trizek (WMF) I strongly suspect we would lose a high number of mentors if the question level quadrupled, then requiring a backtrack or an overwhelming. But certainly we need a shift up - perhaps 25% or 30%? Could we also get a stat update? Especially as between the two categories? Nosebagbear (talk) 18:46, 5 September 2022 (UTC)
@Nosebagbear, of course we can go with a smaller percentage. It is up to your community. But let's not forget about the ultimate goal. :)
In proportion, the proportion of activated new accounts compared to the total number of active accounts is quite the same at all big wikis. All big Wikipedias have 100% of newcomers getting a mentor (except German Wikipedia). We haven't seen many complaints regarding the number of questions mentors have at wikis where 100% of new accounts have access to a mentor. Mentors have the possibility to work on the number of mentees assigned to them directly on their dashboard.
It actually depends on how the current mentors see their participation and how they perceive their current workload. Maybe we should survey them? Also, how can we increase the number of mentors?
Trizek (WMF) (talk) 14:48, 6 September 2022 (UTC)
@Trizek (WMF) As far as increasing, we would need to advertise. I suggest a simple landing page (not the mouthful of a title that Wikipedia:Growth Team features is), something like Wikipedia:New editor mentors that describes: What this is, What is expected of you, What to expect from others, How to sign up (that page can certainly link to WP:GTF for more info). Once this is ready, some advertising - perhaps a watchlist notice, post to WP:VP, an write up in the next WP:SIGNPOST, we could link to it from WP:PERM, and make people a shiny WP:USERBOX and topicon. Be sure to differentiate GTF Mentors from WP:MENTORs — xaosflux Talk 15:02, 6 September 2022 (UTC)
One thing that has been discussed but, as far as I can tell, hasn't achieved consensus agreement is the criteria for mentors on English Wikipedia (or if any criteria or approval process is needed: the handful of editors who have supported having criteria on this talk page might not be representative of general consensus). I think the community should work this out before making a big push to recruit more mentors. isaacl (talk) 15:17, 6 September 2022 (UTC)
@Isaacl today the requirement (which has not had a lot of community discussion) is: (a) Be extended-confirmed, (b) Opt-yourself-in. — xaosflux Talk 15:25, 6 September 2022 (UTC)
For reference, here are some of the previous discussions: Wikipedia talk:Growth Team features/Archive 3 § Need for pseudo-Permission is about to skyrocket and Wikipedia talk:Growth Team features/Archive 1 § Workshopping Mentor Userright. isaacl (talk) 15:34, 6 September 2022 (UTC)
We will soon deploy a new system for the mentors list. The list will be a special page, and the sign-up process would be done by visiting the Mentor dashboard. We will test it very soon at our pilot wikis, and then release it to other wikis. I think it would be available at en.wp in October. When deployed, the FAQ at the top of the existing mentors list will have to be moved to another page, so it is good that you consider to create one.
Regarding defining criteria to be a mentor, it is up to you community to decide to keep the current, very opened criteria or to change it. One thing that will come with the new system is the possibility to assign a mentor role. This role will be automatically assigned to anyone who volunteers if you keep the current criteria you have. Or, if you decide to move to a process where people have to request the role, then the role would be given by admins. It is literally up to you, as everything will be configurable using Special:EditGrowthConfig.
A personal comment: both systems have their pros and cons. A very opened system will attract more people, as the door is more opened than when you have to request the role, while a request-based system might increase the quality of applicants but will discourage experienced people who are shyer, and attract more hat-collectors.
Trizek (WMF) (talk) 19:33, 6 September 2022 (UTC)
@Trizek (WMF) assuming this is using a mediawiki group an additional options would be to use an autopromoteonce level, or possibly include the rights with additional existing other groups. — xaosflux Talk 19:46, 6 September 2022 (UTC)
@Xaosflux, yes, it is do-able this way. The default will be "you get the role if you click on a button" after reading a recommendation page but anything that uses a mediawiki role will work too. We let communities decide on what is best. Trizek (WMF) (talk) 13:41, 7 September 2022 (UTC)
I'm in favour of anything up to 50%. I've got my mentor settings to be at double the average mentees and I don't find it a problem, even though I've not had a huge amount of time to dedicate to Wikipedia as of late. I think mentors should be mass messaged with a notification saying "We've raised the threshold from x% to y%. If you'd like to double or halve your number of mentees from the normal amount then this can be done at Special:MentorDashboard. If you are not presently able to act as a mentor then you can also change your mentor status at that page."
We have 100 Teahouse hosts and if we need more mentors then I'd recommend a mass message to them. Wider notification like a listing at WP:CENT or talk pages for things like NPP and AFC could get a surge of new mentors. I think the volunteers will be there when the demand is raised. But we're way beyond the point in rollout now where it should be at 10%: it's now an established part of newcomer onboarding with most kinks ironed out. — Bilorv (talk) 20:15, 11 September 2022 (UTC)
Has anyone already informed Teahouse hosts that they can volunteer to become mentors? Trizek (WMF) (talk) 13:18, 12 September 2022 (UTC)
It has been discussed a couple times in March and September 2021, and most recently this February. Perfect4th (talk) 13:48, 12 September 2022 (UTC)

Growth team newsletter #22

Welcome to the twenty-second newsletter from the Growth team!

Newcomers tasks reach the 500,000 edits milestone — more data publicly available

As of the last week of June 2022, the newcomers of the world have completed over 500,000 newcomer tasks. In other words, newcomers have made over half a million Wikipedia edits via Growth’s “Suggested Edits” module.

  • About 30% of those edits were completed on mobile devices.
  • Usage continues to increase; in June 2022 almost 50,000 newcomer tasks were completed.

We have added some new data to Grafana. You can now check the number of edits and reverts by task types, or the number of questions asked to mentors. You can filter the data by wiki.

If you have any questions, or there is more data you want access to, please let us know.

Ongoing projects and explorations

The new impact module is part of the Positive Reinforcement project. The image displays the mockup for mobile we used for user testing.

We are continuing our work on our new project, Positive Reinforcement. User testing of initial Positive Reinforcement designs was just completed. Interviews were conducted in Arabic, English, and Spanish. The outcome has been published on the Positive Reinforcement page. We are now utilizing user testing feedback along with prior community feedback to iterate and improve designs.

We are exploring the idea of a Copy Edit structured task. We have tested copy edits in Wikipedia articles for arwiki, bnwiki, cswiki, eswiki (Growth pilot-wikis) and enwiki with two different methods: LanguageTool and Hunspell. We will share more details here and on the associated Copy Edit page once the evaluation is complete.

Add an image was utilized at GLAM events in Argentina, Mexico, and Chile. For an overview of what was learned from these events, read: #1Pic1Article I: how Latin American heritage experts added images to Wikipedia (in English).

Experiments analysis

Add a Link Experiment Analysis has been published. The most important points are:

  • Newcomers who get the Add a Link structured task are more likely to be activated (i.e. make a constructive first article edit).
  • They are also more likely to be retained (i.e. come back and make another constructive article edit on a different day).
  • The feature also increases edit volume (i.e. the number of constructive edits made across the first couple weeks), while at the same time improving edit quality (i.e. the likelihood that the newcomer's edits aren't reverted).

Newcomer task edit type analysis has been published.

  • Communities had expressed concern that newcomers whose initial edits were structured tasks wouldn’t go on to learn how to complete more difficult tasks. The Growth team data scientist conducted a Newcomer task edit type analysis to see if this was indeed the case.
  • Results from analysis indicate that this likely isn’t a significant concern. More than 70% of users who start with the easy task "Add a link" also make another task type. Read the full analysis and methodology here.

News for mentors

A new system for the mentors list

The configuration of the mentors list will change over the next weeks. In the future, mentors will sign up, edit their mentor description and quit using Special:MentorDashboard. This new system will make the development of new features for mentors much easier.

At the moment, the mentor list is a simple page anyone can edit, unless it’s protected. With the new page, mentors will be able to edit only their own description, while administrators will be able to edit the entire mentors' list if needed.

The deployment will happen first at the pilot wikis, then at all wikis. Existing lists of mentors will be automatically converted, no action will be needed from the mentors. [1][2]

Mentors will be informed about the next steps soon, by a message posted on the talk page of existing Mentor lists.

Learn more about this new structured page on mediawiki.org.

A tip for mentors

Did you know that mentors can filter their mentees' changes at Special:MentorDashboard (and star the ones that require attention)? This feature helps to keep an eye on newcomers' edits, helping mentors to fix minor details, and encourage them if necessary.

And did you know that mentors have special filters to highlight their mentees' edits at Special:RecentChanges? Look for the following filters in RecentChanges: Your starred mentees, Your unstarred mentees.

Other improvements

Some improvements will be made to the mentor dashboard in the coming weeks:

  • While we now offer some options for mentors to take a break, the option to quit mentoring was not easy to find. This will be improved. [3]
  • Mentors at wikis using FlaggedRevisions will have a way to discover their mentees' pending edits. [4]
  • Dashboard discovery for new mentors will be improved. [5]

Recent changes and fixed bugs

  • We moved to a new Image Suggestions API. This new API will allow us to deploy Add an Image to more wikis. [6]
  • Starting September 19, a few more wikis now offer Add an image to newcomers. These wikis are Greek Wikipedia, Polish Wikipedia, Chinese Wikipedia, Indonesian Wikipedia, Romanian Wikipedia. [7]
  • Add an image has been disabled for a few days due to technical issue. "Add an image" added a blank line instead of an image. This has been fixed. [8]
  • In order to know if Special:EditGrowthConfig is used by communities, we now instrument page loads and saves of configuration. [9]

Have a question? A suggestion?

Please let us know! You can also read our FAQ page.

Growth team's newsletter prepared by the Growth team and posted by bot • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.

17:18, 21 September 2022 (UTC)

Newcomer tasks

How are the articles for newcomer tasks selected? Does the new user pick the article, or is there a list that selects which ones they go to? Because if its the latter, this seems like a really bad article to be sending newcomer tasks to. Hog Farm Talk 01:59, 21 October 2022 (UTC)

It uses templates to identify tasks. You can see which templates it uses at Special:NewcomerTasksInfo. Best, Barkeep49 (talk) 02:03, 21 October 2022 (UTC)
That makes sense. I remember being pointed to an obscure video game when I first started editing. Still a bit unfortunate to be sending new users into that minefield to start out with, but the selection process does make sense. Hog Farm Talk 02:24, 21 October 2022 (UTC)

If your talk page is protected, set yourself as away

People who watch this page may be interested in this talk page thread [10]. Clovermoss🍀 (talk) 17:09, 25 October 2022 (UTC)

Discussion at Wikipedia:Help desk § Mentorship question

 You are invited to join the discussion at Wikipedia:Help desk § Mentorship question. * Pppery * it has begun... 02:38, 15 November 2022 (UTC)

Request a mentor to be marked as inactive

Tracked in Phabricator
Task T321509

I dunno where to ask this but could someone mark SkyWolf369 as away? They haven't edited in a month and have been receiving questions from newcomers that they have not been answering. ― Blaze WolfTalkBlaze Wolf#6545 14:17, 21 November 2022 (UTC)

I've answered all the unarchived questions on their talk page, but didn't try answering already-archived questions. I'm willing to give it a shot if it might be of benefit, but I don't know how likely it is that the mentees will see any answers (or how un-archiving should be handled) and I don't have any more time to devote to it just now. Perfect4th (talk) 08:02, 22 November 2022 (UTC)

Make new users more aware of english variations

I think new users should be made more aware of the different varieties of English. Just now, I encountered a new user changing British English to American English in an obviously British related article meaning they most likely didn't even know that British English existed. And I know for sure this isn't just some one-off thing as I've seen this multiple times and I'm sure other editors have as well. This kind of stuff is considered disruptive and new users should not have to be warned for doing this in the first place. ― Blaze WolfTalkBlaze Wolf#6545 22:26, 3 November 2022 (UTC)

A possibility is to change the links displayed in the Help Panel, to highlight the recommendation page regarding languages. But let's not forget that Growth features can't cover all cases; human-to-human messages and explanations are very often the most efficient way. Trizek (WMF) (talk) 12:49, 4 November 2022 (UTC)
Yes I agree, however new users should be more aware of smaller things such as differences in English variations. ― Blaze WolfTalkBlaze Wolf#6545 12:55, 4 November 2022 (UTC)
@Trizek (WMF), I think it would be very helpful to add one more panel to the quick start tips for "copy edit" that mentions this issue. That's not going to be obnoxious or overwhelming for new users. It won't stop this from happening entirely, but it might help, and it's a much kinder experience for a newbie than being templated over it. -- asilvering (talk) 16:18, 4 November 2022 (UTC)
It is possible to edit the step-by-step messages locally.
Step 2 says "To make a difference, you only need to make one or two small corrections. You do not need to work on the entire article. You also don't need to have any special knowledge about the topic.". We can add a paragraph that would say "English Wikipedia uses different varieties of English. Please use the same variant as in the article." Of course, any suggestion is welcomed, as fat at it remains short and easy to understand. Trizek (WMF) (talk) 17:37, 7 November 2022 (UTC)
I like that, and maybe possibly a link to the guideline for different English Varieties, since users might not understand what it means by different varieties of English. ― Blaze WolfTalkBlaze Wolf#6545 18:02, 7 November 2022 (UTC)
In theory it could be possible to add a link. However, it might break the workflow, as newcomers would stop editing to check on this link; no idea of how the step-by-step would behave, I'll test it at testwiki tomorrow.
Another possibility would be to add an example ("color" vs "colour"). Trizek (WMF) (talk) 18:28, 7 November 2022 (UTC)
The only issue I can see with an example would be users assuming that's the only time English varieties would apply. (yes I know this is assuming new editors are stupid and don't have common sense, but sometimes this seems to be true, so you never know) ― Blaze WolfTalkBlaze Wolf#6545 18:34, 7 November 2022 (UTC)
Given that we have extremely limited real estate in the help panel to communicate tons of essential concepts as a launch ramp for newcomers (things like "please use references"), I think it would be a mistake to devote space to something as comparatively trivial as MOS:ENGVAR. Style issues can always be easily cleaned up by others, and have minimal impact on readers; content issues are both more impactful and harder to fix.
Ideally, this is another instance where phab T265163 will eventually allow us to highlight misspellings (like the red underline in Word/Google Docs) when someone uses "colour" in an article tagged with {{use American English}} and explain ENGVAR to them before they'd even publish a bad conversion. {{u|Sdkb}} talk 18:38, 7 November 2022 (UTC)
Is the "help panel" the same thing as "quick start tips"? Or is that something else? -- asilvering (talk) 22:03, 8 November 2022 (UTC)
Quick start tips are part of the help panel, in the context of a suggested edit. They are only visible if the user starts a suggested edit at their homepage. Otherwise, the user sees generic help. Trizek (WMF) (talk) 14:38, 14 November 2022 (UTC)
I tell new editors specifically not to focus on the minutiae of policy and guidelines, with this as an example. I encourage them to be bold and they will (in principle) either learn a new rule when they are reverted or have made a positive change to the article. There is no way that a newcomer can know all our style guidelines before editing. You should not be warning editors for this, nor wrongly referring to these edits as disruptive; however, the notice (not warning) {{uw-lang}} can be placed on user talk pages to politely explain EngVar. — Bilorv (talk) 09:36, 27 November 2022 (UTC)

Growth team newsletter #23

Welcome to the twenty-third newsletter from the Growth team!

Highlights

Screenshot of the positive reinforcement module improvements.

Positive reinforcement: an improved impact module to test

The goal of the Growth team is to encourage newcomers to try editing for the first time, and encourage them to keep editing. We want to increase newcomers' motivation by showing them how impactful their edits are.

Newcomers have access to an impact module; you can find yours at Special:Impact. The revised impact module provides new editors with more context about their impact. It will display the number of edits, the number of thanks received, the last time they edited, the number of consecutive days they edited, and the number of views for the articles they edited.

This module will soon be available at our pilot wikis starting December 1. You can already test this new module at Beta Wikipedia. For safety reasons, do not use your regular account and password at Beta wiki. Create a new, specific account for this wiki, with a different password.

Structured tasks: improvements based on patroller feedback

After the deployment of Structured tasks, we received feedback from various communities regarding how patrollers of recent changes were feeling overwhelmed by an increase in edits to check, and how some edits were poor quality or of poor relevance.

We made several improvements based on the feedback we received. Several points of improvement have already been addressed:

  • Patroller fatigue:
    • By default, newcomers can complete up to 25 "add a link" tasks and 25 "add an image" tasks per day. If patrollers are overburdened, each community can use Special:EditGrowthConfig to lower that limit.
  • Quality of edits: what constitutes a "quality edit" is not a well defined concept. We initiated a discussion and summarized our findings. We also worked on the following improvements:
    • Add a Link
      • Underlinked articles are now prioritized, so it's less likely that newcomers are adding links to articles that are already have a lot of links.
      • The confidence score was increased, so suggestions are more likely to be accurate.
      • The default number of suggested links per article has been lowered to 3. This can be changed at Special:EditGrowthConfig. Communities can also exclude articles containing certain templates or categories from being suggested.
    • Add an Image
      • Lists will no longer receive "add an image" suggestions.
      • Disambiguation pages will no longer receive "add an image" suggestions.
      • We have many further improvements we plan to make to "add an image" in early 2023. [11]

The Positive Reinforcement project will also address some of the concerns around encouraging newcomers to progress to higher value edits. The Growth team will soon work on strategies geared at "Leveling up" newcomers so they progress from easy to more difficult tasks.

Recent changes

  • All Wikipedias now have the same onboarding experience. Previously, at a few wikis, 20% of new accounts didn't get the Growth features when they created their account. These 20% of new accounts were used as a control group, in order to know if the Growth features were changing newcomers' behavior. Experiments have shown that Growth features improve activation and retention, and as we want to provide the same onboarding experience at all Wikipedias, we have decided to remove the control groups. We will utilize control groups when testing new features, and German Wikipedia keeps a control group at their request. [12]
  • The quality score for "add a link" suggestions will change. We will suggest less links for each article, but they will be more accurate. We will first deploy it at our pilot wikis, and then to all other wikis where this feature is available. [13][14]
  • Growth's features FAQ has been updated and expanded. This page centralizes all the information about Growth features. We invite you to read it, and, if you can, to translate it.

News for mentors

  • All Wikipedias can now setup and manage a mentorship program in an easier way.
    • We changed the process to make it more reliable, easier to improve and easier to use.
    • Wikipedias where mentorship hasn't been enabled yet can turn mentorship on following a new process. When done, mentors can sign-up by visiting Special:MentorDashboard.
    • Wikipedias where the list of mentors already existed have been converted to the new system.
    • A new special page — Special:ManageMentors — now displays the list of mentors. This page can be transcluded on any other page. There are also new processes to signup as a mentor or to quit mentorship, and we improved community mentorship management.
  • The Mentor dashboard's "Your mentees" module will have a new footer, called "Recent changes by your mentees". This footer will include a link to Recent changes, where mentors can see only edits made by their own mentees. [15]

Deployments

Improving this newsletter

We plan to have a more regular newsletter, every two months. We also want to know if the current format suits you! Let us know what you like, what you like less and your suggestions of improvements: leave us a comment, in your preferred language.

Growth team's newsletter prepared by the Growth team and posted by bot • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.

20:57, 29 November 2022 (UTC)

Why I quit as a mentor

I've been a mentor from the very start of this feature and have decided to remove myself from the list even though I've long believed in the initiative and think onboarding new users is one of the things we as a community need to improve the most on.

The reason is a lot to do with personal circumstances (I'm more busy and less interested in Wikipedia than I used to) but also that it's incredibly rare to see any users that are both productive and want to stay. I know I've stopped some users from doing counter productive things (informing about COI policies or explaining why their edits get rejected leading them to stop) that would have been more annoying to deal with if they didn't stop saving both their and our time, but that really doesn't bring the same satisfaction as actually helping someone here for the right reasons. I doubt this really is a problem solvable with changes to the system and it may very well just be me that is unlucky (or incompetent), but I thought you guys may want my thoughts anyhow. Even though I can't say the mentor part looks like a great success from my perspective I'm very happy that the WMF is doing something about getting new editors and that the team has been actually listening to the community. --Trialpears (talk) 22:36, 20 November 2022 (UTC)

Hi Trialpears. I've had a mostly similar experience for the most part, with the one outlier being my conversations with Mariah Harned. I was the one who reached out to her first there though and maybe I was just really exceptionally lucky to get that kind of response.
I just wanted to let you know that maybe you'd find it more furfilling to participate in WP:AAU? It stands for Adopt-A-User. From what I can tell it hasn't really been truly active in like a decade, but I had a good experience with Nick Moyes there a few years ago. Clovermoss🍀 (talk) 02:19, 21 November 2022 (UTC)
@Trialpears, thanks for the honest feedback. When you say that it's incredibly rare to see any new users who are both productive and want to stay, do you mean of all of your mentees or of just the mentees that ask questions?
As part of the Growth's Positive Reinforcement project, we hope to start surfacing productive newcomers to mentors, hopefully as a way to improve retention among new contributors who are showing promise. Of course the overall goal is to help improve newcomer retention, but I wonder if it might make being a Mentor more rewarding too. As perhaps engaging with newcomers who are showing success might be more fulfilling than having to re-explain basics like COI, etc. Do you think this might help? Or can you think of other ways to make mentorship more effective or enjoyable? KStoller-WMF (talk) 01:01, 1 December 2022 (UTC)
Having had a similar experience to Trialpears' (and having reduced the number of mentees I take because of it), I think a system that surfaces newcomers doing productive things could have a lot of potential. {{u|Sdkb}} talk 07:13, 4 December 2022 (UTC)
KStoller-WMF I was just referring to people who contacted me on my talk page and I haven't really looked at any other mentees. Seeing the productive work from other newcomers could be much more rewarding and I may very well return then. --Trialpears (talk) 18:23, 8 December 2022 (UTC)
Nice, thanks for the feedback @Trialpears and @Sdkb! We hope to get started on this work soon: T317817
And hopefully we'll have an initial version out to our pilot wikis in a few months. If the experiment goes well, we'll scale it out to all wikis (but of course communicate more in advance of that!) KStoller-WMF (talk) 22:47, 8 December 2022 (UTC)

Mentees Reassigned

Tracked in Phabricator
Task T323031

A former mentor, Celestina007, hasn't edited since May of this year yet they are still receiving questions from mentees. Is there a way for their mentees to be reassigned? I've watchlsted their talk page and will try to keep up with questions there if nothing else can be done. --ARoseWolf 15:20, 1 November 2022 (UTC)

Hello @ARoseWolf -- An admin can go to Special:ManageMentors and remove Celestina007 from the list. Their mentees will be reassigned to other mentors. Trizek (WMF) (talk) 18:06, 2 November 2022 (UTC)
Trizek (WMF), thank you for responding. They are not on that list any more, having been removed do to inactivity, however, it clearly states if you are removed as a mentor or remove yourself you will no longer get new mentees but the ones you have will remain. I know because I took a break from the mentorship program for a couple of months and I kept whatever mentees I had at the time but were not assigned new mentees. I was just wondering if there was a way to reassign the current mentees Celestina had? --ARoseWolf 18:14, 2 November 2022 (UTC)
@ARoseWolf, in this case, we will take care of the reassignment. Can I consider this discussion as an official request to reassign Celestina's mentors? Trizek (WMF) (talk) 12:46, 4 November 2022 (UTC)
Trizek (WMF), I would officially request it, yes, on the grounds that Celestina hasn't edited Wikipedia since May, during which time they were removed from being a mentor due to inactivity, yet they have had mentees asking questions between then and now. --ARoseWolf 12:55, 4 November 2022 (UTC)
We will soon conduct a global reassignment of ex-mentors. Trizek (WMF) (talk) 14:45, 14 November 2022 (UTC)

Newcomer experience + new article creation

Hello @Kudpung, @Novem Linguae, @MB, @BusterD, @Sage (Wiki Ed), and anyone else interested in joining this discussion.  Thank you for spending the time to offer your perspective on newcomer onboarding! My name is Kirsten Stoller, and I’m the Growth team’s Product Manager.  @MMiller (WMF) asked that I follow up from the discussion related to the 2022 WMF letter regarding New pages patrol.

Clearly better newcomer onboarding is tied to the NPP work: newcomers who create articles without understanding the complexity of Wikipedia or even the fundamental principles of Wikipedia end up making considerable work for patrollers. My understanding is that you have ideas regarding how we onboard users who are set on creating new articles.    

I always try to make product decisions backed by data, so I was curious to know more about how many new articles are created by new editors. Obviously that answer depends on how you define “new editor,” but here’s at least some initial data I looked at:

On English Wikipedia, over the previous three months (August 1, 2022 - October 31, 2022):

  • 4,616 new articles were created by accounts that are less than 30 days old. 
  • About 2.78% of articles created during that time frame were from accounts less than 30 days old.
  • About 50 new articles are created each day from accounts that are less than 30 days old.

Are those numbers about what you expected?

Another interesting data point to consider, is that on English Wikipedia: about 25% of newcomers (who complete the welcome survey), say they created an account specifically to create a new Wikipedia article. In other words, about a quarter of newcomers are creating accounts with the immediate intention of creating an article.

As you likely already know, the Growth team has so far been focused on encouraging newcomers to try small edits rather than immediately create articles. All newcomers are encouraged to visit their homepage after creating an account. Currently, on the homepage, we try to funnel newcomers into learning some core skills about how the wikis work before they move on to larger tasks like article creation. In fact, we discourage newcomers from creating articles initially but also try to redirect them as needed if they are still focused on creating a new article. Part of the onboarding flow includes the following language:

To successfully create a new article, you'll need to use many of the skills you can learn through completing some easier tasks. To learn more about how to create a new article, click here.

From my perspective, I would like to see Growth team features continue to evolve and better meet users where they are.  So if a newcomer comes to Wikipedia determined to make an article, I think it would be ideal if we are providing them with the information and guidance they need, perhaps even provide a structured task for creating an article.

I’m excited to hear your input!  Keep in mind that the Growth team is in the middle of several projects that we need to wrap up before we consider starting a new project, so I can’t promise any immediate action on your ideas, but I can promise to listen and start to integrate these ideas into our long-term roadmap.

  • What newcomer onboarding or newcomer tools would best serve new users who are looking to create a new article? How might the newcomer homepage better handle these users?
  • What tools or processes would best serve new users who create a new article?
  • Are there any “quick win” ideas that you think we should consider immediately?

Thank you in advance for any ideas or guidance you share! KStoller-WMF (talk) 18:47, 17 November 2022 (UTC)

Hi Kirsten. Thanks for giving this some thought. It looks as if we're basically on the same page. The statics you provided paint even a more sombre picture than we thought although our anecdotal experience came fairly close. I have been closely following the development of your home page feature and mentoring project for a long time already. I have doubts that it would have a positive impact on the work of NPP by improving the quality of new articles from completely new users and reducing the submissions by them of inappropriate ones. Another interesting data point to consider, is that on English Wikipedia: about 25% of newcomers (who complete the welcome survey), say they created an account specifically to create a new Wikipedia article. In other words, about a quarter of newcomers are creating accounts with the immediate intention of creating an article - this is precisely the problem and it's exacerbated by the fact that probably as much as 50% or more of new articles nowadays are submitted by non-native speakers - something that data mining won't reveal but which the reviewers who spend hours at the new pages feed are critically aware of.
We have already done some preparatory work on this in anticipation of the bugs and new features being addressed for PageTriage that are overdue by many years. We have a 'quick win' solution that absolutely does not need any special programming. It's mainly basic html. php. and .js . Once I have a consensus from the NPP coords on the UI, it could be inserted into the newcomer UX flow quite soon before the NPP backlog grows again. I will be trying to find some time over the weekend to put together what you want to know and how we can integrate your work in our plans. I'll get back to you on Monday. Kudpung กุดผึ้ง (talk) 09:44, 18 November 2022 (UTC)
Thanks for the response, @Kudpung.
That's interesting regarding how many new articles on enwiki are submitted by non-native English speakers. It's good to have a variety of perspectives contributing to English Wikipedia, but I totally see how that creates additional work and complexity to review.
Thanks again for being willing to share your ideas! I look forward to hearing more about the newcomer flow you are envisioning. KStoller-WMF (talk) 00:33, 22 November 2022 (UTC)

Thoughts from BusterD. Echoing Kudpung's hearty thanks. We are happy to have your attention, Kirsten. We don't plan on going away. We have reasons to expect a spending increase for the next budgetary year. We hope through discussion we can demonstrate to the community WMF has addressing the flagship's valid and ongoing concerns as a high priority. We're not merely about building tools here. We're about building the connection with the Foundation and staff which leads and compliments the ongoing relationships with each of the pedias and associated projects. Early successes for this team are important. I'm sure our friend Kudpung will bring some needed detail.

I've been playing a bit with the newcomer experience tools. I had an observation (in the weeds a bit, I'll concede): If I was to choose the "create new article" option, I would (as a new user) need to know how essential it is to begin with reliable sources. I shouldn't be able to "publish" unless 1) I've first previewed and 2) in re-reading provided two or more autofilled citations (possibly created from bare links). Known sources might be flagged directly by quality from WP:RSNP red, yellow, green (maybe black for blacklisted). It should be possible to create a new page from the newcomer interface, but doing so should require accomplishments and the interface should educate as it gently impedes. BusterD (talk) 19:24, 20 November 2022 (UTC)

@BusterD - not in the weeds at all, thanks for bringing this up! This actually sounds very similar to something I've discussed with the Editing team recently. There has been a discussion about providing new editors with more "in the moment" direction, especially for core content guidelines like citing sources. I am definitely supportive of this line of thinking: ideally we are educating newcomers as they progress rather than retroactively reprimanding and reverting their edits (or deleting their articles) once they have made mistakes. Hopefully we can start to better meet newcomers where they are. There is a lot to do, but I see an approach like this being in the long term interest of onboarding newcomers while also hopefully lightening patroller burdens as well. Thanks for the feedback! KStoller-WMF (talk) 00:46, 22 November 2022 (UTC)
I would (as a new user) need to know how essential it is to begin with reliable sources. I shouldn't be able to "publish" unless 1) I've first previewed and 2) in re-reading provided two or more autofilled citations (possibly created from bare links). Known sources might be flagged directly by quality from WP:RSNP red, yellow, green (maybe black for blacklisted). It should be possible to create a new page from the newcomer interface, but doing so should require accomplishments and the interface should educate as it gently impedes.
hi @BusterD: this is a quick drop-by comment to express a hearty +1 to – what I understand to be – at the core of what you're expressing above: a way to provide people who are new with feedback that helps them to see/understand that the volunteers who will be reviewing the new content they're adding (be it via expanding an existing article or creating a new one) be accompanied by a reliable source.
Assuming the above matches up with what you were expressing above, then I wonder: would you be open to reading through the new project the mw:Editing Team is working on and letting me know whether you think it could help address the issues you're raising here?
Also, hi! I'm Peter. I work as the Product Manager for the Editing Team 👋🏼
And thank you to @KStoller-WMF for making me aware of the conversation y'all are having here ^ _ ^ PPelberg (WMF) (talk) 19:36, 1 December 2022 (UTC)
Give me a bit to process the link you've provided. A heads up: I noticed this tool yesterday and it looked like a move in the right direction. BusterD (talk) 20:27, 1 December 2022 (UTC)
I see I'm behind a bit, not noticing CiteHighlighter by good Novem Linguae. So long as we have a system for "greenlighting" sources by reliability, this may tend to provide encouragement to new contributors trying to do the right thing. My initial take is that this project work looks in line with my hopes, and is targeting an important and obvious new user target population. We might develop a (somewhat linear, or option limited, perhaps like a checklist) way of writing what is essentially a secondary school term paper, my outcome expectation of a successful first page creation: has RS, has a Wikipeda-like structure (lead, body sections, citation, supplemental media, categories), and passes self-acceptance tests (Does is look like a Wikipedia article? Is the attempt a basic satisfactory coverage of the subject? Does it conflict with other similar articles?). If the new page satisfies the new contributor's desire to create a page and looks likely to weather an initial NPP, the new contributor may succeed on the first try. Initial success (or at least strong positive feedback) is crucial to building new connection, no matter the language or region served. BusterD (talk) 21:12, 1 December 2022 (UTC)
User:Headbomb/unreliable: neat! This is the first time I'm seeing the script @Headbomb wrote. Thank you for sharing it, @BusterD. I've documented it on the project page.
My initial take is that this project work looks in line with my hopes, and is targeting an important and obvious new user target population.
I'm encouraged to hear the project initially reads to you as such.
We might develop a (somewhat linear, or option limited, perhaps like a checklist) way of writing what is essentially a secondary school term paper...
While we're still exploring options for the feature's user experience, the Editing Team share's what [I think] is at the core of what you're describing above: for this experience to be integrated within the editing workflow itself, rather than some set of instructions that sit outside of it that are susceptible to people ignoring them.
...my outcome expectation of a successful first page creation: has RS, has a Wikipeda-like structure (lead, body sections, citation, supplemental media, categories), and passes self-acceptance tests (Does is look like a Wikipedia article? Is the attempt a basic satisfactory coverage of the subject? Does it conflict with other similar articles?).
Knowing the kinds of questions you ask yourself when reviewing new articles is helpful considering the project will be for naught if the experience isn't causing people to make contributions that align with the expectations you, and other patrollers, have in mind when reviewing them.
A question related to this last point...
Let's say you were reviewing a new article a newcomer had written or an existing article that they had contributed some amount of new content to (e.g. a new section), but they neglected to accompany with references. Can you imagine any pieces of information that might help you evaluate this newcomers' intent? I ask this question with the following thought in my mind: "Might more experienced volunteers invest a bit more energy/effort into helping out someone who is attempting to add new content to the wiki if they could say, with some certainty, that this newcomer was attempting to do so in good faith?" PPelberg (WMF) (talk) 00:44, 3 December 2022 (UTC)
Your question is essential for each of us to ponder, so we can experience our own reaction to it. As it turns out, I had an experience along these lines: last year I noticed a relatively new contributor creating new team season pages, like the ones I sometimes create to support NCAA women's basketball teams. Such new pages are often rather involved; when I build one it might take me more than an hour of steady work. My objection to the new contributor's efforts was that the pages lacked at least one RS, though they may otherwise be fully formed. After consulting with other editors, I came to the conclusion that the effort the contributor was making was totally worth my effort in adding a few RSs. If that's all I have to do to save the page, I thought, I'm not going to object unduly to these incomplete efforts. In these cases, I could count myself fortunate that I didn't spend 50 or so hours, if all I needed to do was watch the user's contribs. BusterD (talk) 01:10, 3 December 2022 (UTC)
It occurred to me that the assistance we want to give might be conveyed as helping the new user ascend a mountain. Creating a new page should be difficult, or at least demanding, or everyone would do it. Many have tried and some have succeeded. "Will you climb this mountain?" The wizard/sherpa must make clear the new user's mere willingness to make the climb does not guarantee success (without willingness to take certain enumerated steps). While the flow chart our Kudpung improves is a useful guide, what I'm envisioning is more like a pyramid, with most minimum required coverage for publication as the foundation: multiple cites from rs, categories, structure, incoming links. The creation pyramid seems counter-intuitive but in creating a new page, we've got to start with foundation, anchored in reality and connection. We're striving to keep the chaos out so to speak, and each step in creation has to be more elevated than the last. The sherpa does not climb the mountain for us; it merely puts us close to our objective, points out risks and foibles, and appears interested in our success. The steps are ours to take. "Will you climb this mountain?" When at last we've summarized the article we've written and thus created our introduction, we're ready to publish. BusterD (talk) 04:39, 4 December 2022 (UTC)
@BusterD: I appreciate you sharing this story with me and I'm sorry you haven't heard a response from me sooner!
A follow up question related to it...
It sounds the decision you made to save the page and invest some of your own time into improving it was – to some extent – a result of you being knowledgable about/interested in the content of the article you were reviewing.
Assuming the above to be accurate, let's assume you encounter a new article about a topic you are learning about for the first time in that moment who is written by someone you have not yet seen/interacted with before on-wiki...
What questions might you ask yourself when deciding whether to delete the article or keep it?
RE the pyramid metaphor you shared, I agree with you in thinking that it's important that the workflow(s) for creating a new article equip newcomers with the information they need to know what will be expected of them/the content they're writing in order for the volunteers who will be reviewing that article to find it worthy of being published in the main namespace PPelberg (WMF) (talk) 22:46, 22 December 2022 (UTC)
Page process flow chart
  • Hi Kirsten and @Trialpears, Clovermoss, BusterD, Blaze Wolf, Pppery, MB, and Novem Linguae: (inadevertently place this post in the wrong section) the editor who was probably mostly concerned with adopting users is Worm That Turned but who later shifted the focus of his work to address other Wikipedia issues. He has an exceptional skill in mentorships and conduct problems and there's probably a lot of tips he could offer based on his experience.
While I believe the Growth team's director(s) correctly identified the need for improved onboarding of new users and obtained significant funds for it, their strengths might not necessarily be in UX and the best GUI design for it and they didn't think at the time to tap in to the wealth of experience with new users by admins such as WTT (adoptions), and Nick Moyes at the Teahouse, and the veteran and/or prolific members of the NPP team like Onel5969, some of whom who, like myself, have been patrolling new pages since long before the special tools were created for it 11 years ago.
I'm a bit behind with my work at the moment because the weekend had to be dedicated to issues in RL, but I'll get back to you asap with our suggestions for a special landing page for those who are determined to submit an article as their first participation plus a truly inter-active Article Wizard that we're working on. These pages which are based on our solid anecdotal experience together with Growth's statistics, will complement the work of Growth's current project, enhance user retention in addition to onboarding, and address the concerns brought up by others here. Kudpung กุดผึ้ง (talk) 02:12, 22 November 2022 (UTC)
Thanks, @Kudpung, I look forward to hearing more about your suggestions for a special landing page for newcomers intent on submitting a new article. I certainly agree there is a lot more we could and should do to improve newcomer onboarding! KStoller-WMF (talk) 01:01, 1 December 2022 (UTC)
Hi Kirsten (and @MB, BusterD, MB, and Novem Linguae: ), we've all been tied up recently with other aspects of our volunteer work on Wikiedia but of course the onboarding of new users who want to create articles is a top priority. We will get back to you in the next day or two with a suggestion for a date and time for a video chat with the four of us from NPP and anyone whom you would like to bring along from your team. For this first meeting we would like to outline our suggestions and get from you a scope and time frame for possible development as soon as you're able to find banddwidth for it. Kudpung กุดผึ้ง (talk) 01:39, 1 December 2022 (UTC)
I like this flowchart. Can you perhaps create an annotated version with durations of each step, because I think a lot of ppl don't really understand how long some of these various steps (can) take. It would be good educational material for UX designers etc as well. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 15:55, 1 December 2022 (UTC)
HI TheDJ and Kirsten, I don't think that's easily done or would be useful - there are too many variables, and the flow chart only really depicts what has supposed to be being done for years. It's not meant for a lot of people, only those who will be on the conception and realisation for the improvement or rebuilding of the features needed for those steps to perform correctly. I made it some months ago in anticipation of obtaining the WMF's cooperation on these isse, which we now have, and to depict the processes on on en.Wiki with which they are not familiar. It's a talking plan. You know yourself how long those steps take and your input would be most welcome.
I don't think it's our task to educate the UX designers. A good project for the elements of an interactive website (or a video-based instruction manual for using a machine or a process, for example) has a team of people each with their established skill. They start with a story, then a storyboard (in this case, the flow chart). The people include concept designers, an art director, graphic designers, experts in human communication, and finally for websites, the FE and BE coders who make it all work. It's rare for coders to embody all those skills, some of which are talents, and the WMF teams don't appear to have staff for those specific specialisations and that's why working together with the volunteers is essential - some of those skills are our daytime jobs in RL.
What the readers of Wikipedia see is one thing; one of the features that's glaringly missing from Wikipedia is a set of colourful, visually appealing ('in the moment' = interactive) instructions that encourage editors to read them and use them. People click rapidly away from grey walls of text. And that's what's fundamentally wrong with pages like Help:Your first article and what makes for hard and boring work for NPP and AfC. Kudpung กุดผึ้ง (talk) 03:52, 2 December 2022 (UTC)

Meeting details

PS: Kirsten, would you like to suggest a date and time very soon for a video meeting between our lead NPP coordinators and BusterD and me with you and your team? But please no more conferences in the middle of the night ;) Kudpung กุดผึ้ง (talk) 03:59, 2 December 2022 (UTC)

@Kudpung: Is there any way I could join? I'm curious even if I'm not sure I'd have more revelant thoughts than people who are more invested in NPP than I am. Feel free to email me details if it's not something that's been discussed on-wiki. I don't mind being a part of something like a video call, though. :) It's okay if I'm not able to be a part of it, either. I'd understand. Clovermoss🍀 (talk) 08:53, 2 December 2022 (UTC)
@Kudpung I’m available to meet and looking forward to hearing the NPP ideas around this topic. I’ll include @MMiller (WMF) and at least one Growth team engineer in the discussion. Perhaps @Sage (Wiki Ed), @TheDJ, @Nick Moyes, and @Clovermoss can attend if they are interested and available so we hear more perspectives.
Just so we all have clear expectations going into the meeting: I won’t be able to commit to anything during our meeting. The Growth team currently has plans for the coming months based on input from many different wikis and commitments to improve several of the things we’ve already rolled out. But we are all agreed that new article creation is an important part of the newcomer experience, and so I am committed to listening and learning so that we can figure out how the Growth team might address that aspect in the future.
Would next Thursday, December 8th or Friday, December 9th work for a meeting? I imagine we have quite a few time zones and schedules to accommodate. I'm Pacific Time Zone based, but happy to meet outside normal business hours if that helps. KStoller-WMF (talk) 00:20, 3 December 2022 (UTC)
@KStoller-WMF: For what it's worth, my real life schedule is kind of chaotic (I work nights sometimes) and I'm way more open to something in the middle of the night than others might otherwise be. I can sleep during the day just fine :) What I'm saying is that I'm more willing to compromise if that makes it easier. I'm definitely interested if I'm able to be a part of this. Clovermoss🍀 (talk) 00:46, 3 December 2022 (UTC)
@KStoller-WMF, MB, BusterD, MB, Novem Linguae, and Clovermoss: this website has an excellent free planner for setting up cross-timezone meetings. I am in Southeast Asia 'Bangkok' zone which covers most of Indochina, Malaysia & Singapore at UTC+7 when I'm available during my daytime and early evening. Kudpung กุดผึ้ง (talk) 01:00, 3 December 2022 (UTC)
I'm UTC-5, but again, more flexible in regards to when. Just need to know a little bit ahead of time. Clovermoss🍀 (talk) 01:07, 3 December 2022 (UTC)
I'm UTC-6, living in Northern Illinois. I'm available afternoons and early evenings, working late evenings, but might also be available in the pre-dawn morning before I sack out. BusterD (talk) 01:17, 3 December 2022 (UTC)
@Kudpung @Clovermoss @BusterD, @MB, @BusterD, @Novem Linguae I'll still need to check to ensure a Growth engineer can attend, but I'm thinking that Friday, December 9, 2022 at 01:00:00 UTC might be a decent compromise for most of us (that's Thursday evening for those of us in the US).
I'll re-read the NPP letter and talk page and watch the previous meeting recording, so I have more background context and we can focus entirely on the newcomer experience discussion. Like I said, I won't be able to make any commitments during the meeting, but I am excited to listen and learn from you all and start to figure out how the Growth team can improve the experience of newcomers who come to the wikis interested primarily in article creation.
For attendees, I plan to invite Marshall and a Growth Engineer, and leave this meeting open to whoever else you all want to invite.
As for an agenda, I'm really open to whatever works for you all, but I was thinking we could do some quick intros and then leave the rest of the meeting for you all to share your ideas. However, I'm certainly happy to do a quick demo of current Growth features to start us off if that's helpful. KStoller-WMF (talk) 19:23, 3 December 2022 (UTC)
This sounds very good to me. I'm very likely to participate at the suggested date and time. We appreciate your facilitation, Kirsten. BusterD (talk) 19:37, 3 December 2022 (UTC)
I'm also good with that time. Thanks Kirsten! Clovermoss🍀 (talk) 23:33, 3 December 2022 (UTC)
Works for me. Kudpung กุดผึ้ง (talk) 01:16, 4 December 2022 (UTC)
@Kudpung @BusterD, @MB, @Novem Linguae, @Clovermoss, @Sdkb,
Here are the meeting details, I'm looking forward to meeting you all and hearing your ideas!
Growth + NPP: Newcomer experience meeting:
Meeting purpose:
A conversation with WMF Growth team representatives and English Wikimedians (mainly NPP representatives) regarding the newcomer experience for users who come to the wikis primarily to create an article.
Background information to review prior to meeting:
Meeting agenda:
  • Introductions
  • Growth team representative briefly demos the current newcomer experience. (We can keep this very brief, but I think it’s important to ensure we all know what the current newcomer experience is before we discuss improvements).
  • NPP representatives to share their ideas for improving the newcomer experience for users set on article creation.
  • Questions & answers
Setting expectations:
  • I will record this meeting and post on Commons after the meeting, for those of you who are interested but unavailable at this time.
  • I won’t be able to commit the Growth team to any feature work or projects during our meeting. But we are all agreed that new article creation is an important part of the newcomer experience, and so I am committed to listening and learning so that we can figure out how the Growth team might address that aspect in the future.
  • I want to be sure we cover everything the NPP team wants to review, but this meeting might also be of interest for others who think extensively on helping newcomers, so @Sage (Wiki Ed), @TheDJ, @Nick Moyes please feel free to join us if you are interested.
KStoller-WMF (talk) 19:41, 6 December 2022 (UTC)
Thanks! I'm planning to attend. Sage (Wiki Ed) (talk) 20:33, 6 December 2022 (UTC)

File:En.Wiki growth of pages.png

Thanks for the reminder about it being a Thursday for me. I should be there and I'll be sure to review all the background information beforehand. My own participation will likely be limited but I'm interested in observing and thinking about the potential impacts to newcomers. Nick Moyes, if you're able to attend, this would be a great opportunity to connect a face to the username :) Clovermoss🍀 (talk) 20:58, 6 December 2022 (UTC)
  • (I've only briefly skimmed the discussion above beyond the opening post, so apologies if my thoughts are redundant) @KStoller-WMF: Thanks for asking about this! To break down your question, there are two groups of users who might arrive here determined to create an article: those who want to create one on a suitable/notable topic and those who do not.
    The latter group makes up a sizable portion — AfC likely has some stats on how many submissions there are ultimately declined, and some portion of the 50 articles created each day by autoconfirmed-but-not-extended-confirmed get flagged for deletion by NPP. For people in that group, we could try to divert them to other tasks, but that's unlikely to work often, given that the rejection is likely to create sour feelings. So realistically, the best thing to do for that group is to offer a friendly push out the door as quickly as possible, freeing up experienced editor resources elsewhere. People are less likely to get angry if the decline is made early rather than after they've put a ton of effort into the draft/article, so one practical takeaway is that notability ought to be introduced early on — if they can't pass it, then there's no point going further.
    For the group of newcomers who are writing about a notable topic, the problem then becomes that writing a brand new article is one of the hardest tasks on Wikipedia, and our current massively long guidance is woefully ill-equipped to help them through it. I've thought a fair amount about what a structured task for creating an article would look like, and my thoughts are compiled at User:Sdkb/sandbox/Vision for a better Article Wizard. Please feel free to look it over and let me know what you think! It describes a pretty advanced system, which would take a lot of effort to design, but I think if the Growth team really wants to make article creation a feasible task for newcomers it'll need to provide something like this.
    I'd be happy to join the call being discussed above if it ends up being at a time I'm free; please keep me in the loop! Cheers, {{u|Sdkb}} talk 01:02, 4 December 2022 (UTC)

@KStoller-WMF, MB, BusterD, MB, and Clovermoss: I think Sdkb's suggestions in their sandbox page are excellent and by coincidence they put into words in almost 90% detail of what I have envisioned. It should be read before the meeting. Their formula involves a lot more technology than I have been proposing with the NPP coordination team but would be ideal if Growth could make bandwidth for it when they apply for engineering funds. From meetings we have had with the WMF and other discussions, Novem Linguae has put together a summary at User:Novem Linguae/Drafts/New landing page proposal which I think every one should also read before the meeting.

The main features around my proposal are:

  1. the suggestion for a landing page for users who are determined to to create an article (see flowchart)
  2. A wizard that will prevent continuing to the next step if the previous step has not been correctly accomplished (with a focus of providing sources), and offering the creator a choice of thematic templates which exist already.

With the combination of Sdkb's and my suggestions and those of other veteran New Page Patrollers together with the ideas and technology from the Growth Team, I think we would achieve an enduring solution.

The focus of the upcoming meeting should be on this and not be confused with possible improvements to Growth's user home page/mentorship project which is an entirely different discussion but on which our UX experts and GUI designers would be happy to provide input.

I'm sure Sdkb would be most welcome to attend Friday's meeting. I'm looking forward to it. Kudpung กุดผึ้ง (talk) 04:01, 4 December 2022 (UTC)

@Kudpung Thank you for the links and additional context. I'll read through those ideas prior to our meeting.
I agree that the meeting should be fully focused on how to improve onboarding for newcomers determined to create an article. I was suggesting a Growth feature demo in case we want to discuss the basics of how all of these ideas fit together. My assumption is that we could use welcome survey responses to help determine how we personalize onboarding. Like I mentioned previously, on English Wikipedia: about 25% of newcomers (who complete the welcome survey), say they created an account specifically to create a new Wikipedia article.
I'm looking forward to chatting with you all synchronously! I'll send out a meeting invite tomorrow and include @Sdkb as well. Thanks all! KStoller-WMF (talk) 05:00, 6 December 2022 (UTC)

Developments discussed at Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Guild of Copy Editors#ChatGPT promise us that we're all soon obsolete if OpenAI can help us with copyediting... Could be a useful addition to our users' toolset. BusterD (talk) 23:19, 4 December 2022 (UTC)

Post meeting

  • @KStoller-WMF, MB, BusterD, MB, Clovermoss, Sage (Wiki Ed), and DannyH (WMF): and everyone else who was present, on behalf of the NPP team thank you all so much for such a productive first meeting. I just want you to be sure again that my being logged in under my company Google account was 100% unintentional - I don't have a personal Google account and I thought it would be like Zoom or Whereby. Unfortunately if you've ever used Google once it sticks everywhere. Although from different perspectives, we are certainly agreed on the general principle of inserting a secondary landing page for new users who want to create an article, and the need for an interactive wizard. Perhaps I should have said 'mockup' instead of 'wire frame', but although I am not from an engineering background I've been saying 'wireframe' in a web design UX context for nearly 25 years. For a next meeting I think it would be great to be able to pool our 'mockups' for a wizard and a landing page and screenshare them. The next phase would be to see if a such a concept would be technically realisable within the constraints of Product & Engineering's plans. To recap, my redraft of Your first article is at User:Kudpung/YFA - the possibilities are endless but it needs to be a distinct departure from Wikipedia's traditional monochrome walls of tl;dr text. If anyone wants to adapt my page process flowchart for use with this project I will gladly email a copy of the apple .pages original to save making the whole thing again or something similar. Kudpung กุดผึ้ง (talk) 03:38, 9 December 2022 (UTC)
My apologies, I forgot to include Sdkb in the pings. Kudpung กุดผึ้ง (talk) 07:50, 9 December 2022 (UTC)
  • I'm very limited in what I could say from a technical perspective but I will say I found this meeting to be informative and I look forward to engaging in future ones. It was nice to meet everyone! Clovermoss🍀 (talk) 03:42, 9 December 2022 (UTC)
    It was great to meet all of you who attended the meeting, and I truly appreciate you all taking the time to pass along your ideas! Here is the recording.
    For next steps for me:
    - I'll create a "Potential Project" page at: https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Growth
    - I'll continue to listen to ideas and chime in on discussions if I'm pinged
    - I'll set up a meeting for us to have another discussion in January
    - I'll chat more with Growth team members about ideas, and consider which other stakeholders we should consult with
    - I'll see how this work might potentially fit into current or upcoming research projects
    Once again, it was great to hear your ideas and see how much support there is for improving onboarding for newcomers! But just to make sure I'm managing expectations: I still can't guarantee this project fits into our next annual plan. There are a lot of competing great ideas, and I'll need to spend time evaluating ideas and the likely impact and effort of various projects. That all being said, I certainly see this as a project that makes sense and fits with Growth team objectives. I look forward to continuing to partner with you all to further refine the ideas and scope of this project, and I truly hope this is something the Growth team can move forward with in the future.
    Should I schedule our next discussion? Does 1:00am UTC Friday, January 20, 2023 work? KStoller-WMF (talk) 19:01, 9 December 2022 (UTC)
    The date and time you suggested would work fine for me. Thanks for driving this. BusterD (talk) 19:18, 9 December 2022 (UTC)
    It's fine for me as well. Clovermoss🍀 (talk) 19:30, 11 December 2022 (UTC)

Second meeting

@Sdkb, MB, BusterD, Clovermoss, Sage (Wiki Ed), @Kudpung,

For those of you who would like to meet again, I've set up a meeting next month:

1:00am UTC Friday, January 20, 2023 (that's the evening of Thursday, January 19 for people in the US)

Meeting link (link updated)

It's easiest for me to set these up via Google Meet, but I can host on a different platform if someone prefers Zoom or Jitsi. If you want a calendar invite via email, just send me an email and I'll send you an invite.

Here's my initial attempt to document this project idea in a newcomer-focused way that fits how our team generally approaches projects: https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Growth/Article_creation_for_new_editors

Thanks again for spending the time to share your initial thoughts! KStoller-WMF (talk) 23:36, 14 December 2022 (UTC)

Hi Kirsten, Due to commitments in RL I cannot say for sure what my plans are so far in the future, but I'll earmark the date. On another note, Jitsi appears to be the preferred conference software by your colleagues in the WMF and it works fine. For the reasons stated, I prefer not to be associated with Goggle which tracks everything you do, and I don't want to create a personal Google account for the meeting. Kudpung กุดผึ้ง (talk) 23:57, 14 December 2022 (UTC)
@KStoller-WMF: Just for the record, I'm actually Canadian. But the American timing given still applies to me. I've never used Jitsi, but I'm okay with learning new video conferencing software if other editors would prefer to use it. That's how I felt using Google Meets the last time, afterall. I am much more familar with Zoom, though. Clovermoss🍀 (talk) 01:56, 15 December 2022 (UTC)
@Kudpung OK, I've updated the link to Jitsi. Meeting link
@Clovermoss Sorry, I should have said those of us in North America. I'm also totally new to Jitsi, but I know it's preferred by many Wikimedians and WMF employees since it's open source, so let's see how it goes. KStoller-WMF (talk) 22:30, 15 December 2022 (UTC)

Growth team newsletter #24

Welcome to the twenty-fourth newsletter from the Growth team!

Newcomer experience projects

The Growth team partnered with other WMF teams to conduct several experiments around increasing account creation and new editor retention. Results from four of these experiments are now available:

Newcomer tasks

  • Several communities suggested improving "add a link", by suggesting underlinked articles first. We released this change to Growth pilot wikis. We will review the data and collect feedback before considering releasing it to more wikis. [17]
  • The deployment of the "add a link" to all Wikipedias is still in progress. Suggested links use a prediction model, which has to be trained. The deployments will resume after we finish training all models. [18]

Mentorship

  • When someone wants to signup as a mentor, they are now informed if they don't meet the defined criteria. [19]
  • Workshop hosts asked us to have workshop attendees assigned to them. They can soon use a custom URL parameter. This way, workshop hosts will continue mentoring the event's attendees after the workshop. It will be available in February. [20]
  • Have you considered to help new editors on your wiki, by signing up to be a Mentor?

Other news

  • In Special:SpecialPages, Growth experiments now have their own section. [21]
  • This newsletter will have a new publication period, 6 times a year: January, March, May, July, September, November.

Translations

  • Newsletter translation: We are looking for translators for this newsletter. If you are interested and have the needed English language proficiency to assist, then please add your name to this list. You will receive an invite on your talk page to translate the newsletter when it is ready.
  • Interface translation: You can also help by translating the interface, or reviewing translations to make them more inclusive. Interface translations are hosted at translatewiki.net.

Growth team's newsletter prepared by the Growth team and posted by bot • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.• Help with translations

14:44, 31 January 2023 (UTC)

Reminder about upcoming meeting

User:KStoller-WMF has previously set up a meeting on Jitsi for this week.

1:00am UTC Friday, January 20, 2023 (that's this Thursday, January 19 for folks here in the US)

Meeting link (link updated)

BusterD (talk) 22:20, 16 January 2023 (UTC)

Sending out a few pings: @Sage (Wiki Ed), @TheDJ, @Nick Moyes, @MB, @Clovermoss, @Sdkb, @SmokeyJoe, @Atsme, @theleekycauldron

Further reading: Wikipedia:New pages patrol/New landing page proposal

Planning to attend

It may be helpful if we had some idea how large the meeting would be so I've provided a space so we can assemble this week's posse. A smaller group moves more quickly but a larger one provides more input and transparency. Be aware: we record. BusterD (talk) 22:40, 16 January 2023 (UTC)

  1. BusterD (talk) 22:40, 16 January 2023 (UTC)
  2. –Novem Linguae (talk) 01:39, 17 January 2023 (UTC)
  3. KStoller-WMF (talk) 17:52, 17 January 2023 (UTC)
  4. I'm a probably. Barkeep49 (talk) 18:06, 17 January 2023 (UTC)
  5. Unless something unexpected comes up. Atsme 💬 📧 11:40, 18 January 2023 (UTC)
  6. I plan to be there again. I look forward to seeing the new participants :) Clovermoss🍀 (talk) 17:46, 18 January 2023 (UTC)

Not attending

  1. D'oh. Panini! • 🥪 14:29, 18 January 2023 (UTC)

Draft agenda?

Has somebody already been thinking about this so the meeting is useful to all? I've been asked to help so I'm initiating this discussion. We may be starting without much prior workproduct. Kudpung would prefer we don't wp:refund his drafts.

What might we plan to accomplish/discuss this month? (besides continuity) BusterD (talk) 22:40, 16 January 2023 (UTC)

Thanks @BusterD for the reminder and for getting us organized!
You all are welcome to use this time however you prefer. I'll be there to listen to feedback and ideas. Ideally we can maintain a focus on onboarding newcomers as it relates to article creation (upcoming PageTriage work will be handled by Moderator Tools team, not the Growth team).
If you want, I'm happy to speak to the potential project I added here: https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Growth/Article_creation_for_new_editors. KStoller-WMF (talk) 17:51, 17 January 2023 (UTC)
I second the thanks, and will add a bit more. *As it relates to NPP, and based on prior meetings with WMF, I think Novem Linguae has a good handle on the technical aspects of reviewing, and what needs to be done. It would be much appreciated if he could list what he has in mind so we are not duplicating anything. I am also of the mind that all other aspects of NPP are dependent on decisions by our community and its highly influential administrators who are the ones making final decisions about content. If we have experienced/trained NPP reviewers making decisions about new articles, after they properly conducted a BEFORE exercise, it is rather frustrating when an admin denies a speedy or PROD, and have not done BEFORE and/or are not article creators and/or want to include everything thinking a half-baked article will be magically fixed over time. The latter happens quite often, and I would imagine represents a very high percentage of the cases. NPP should be able to organize a system that allows a qualified group of NPP reviewers to make the final determination in those cases rather than leaving it in the hands of a single admin or AfD. It would save so much time and angst at AfD (and burnout at NPP), the former of which is (a) problematic because it's a hit and miss situation depending on who shows up (including socks & meat puppets), (b) AfD also suffers backlogs and can be a frustrating time sink, and (c) we are dependent on AfDs being closed by someone who may or may not be qualified to do so. To me, it makes no sense when there are much better alternatives. I have requested stats on how many speedies have been turned down by admins, and passed at AfD or were actually deleted. Maybe that is something we can ask for at this meeting. I would also like to know how many unsourced articles remain in the WP corpus of articles, and how many bad articles were kept after an AfD and eventually deleted. Just my 2¢ worth. Atsme 💬 📧 11:40, 18 January 2023 (UTC)
@Atsme It seems like your thoughts above primarily relate to the patrolling process, rather than new editor article creation guidance. I'd be interested in discussing further over at the Moderator Tools project talk page! Samwalton9 (WMF) (talk) 14:05, 18 January 2023 (UTC)
My apologies, Sam. I was not paying attention to the url, and incorrectly assumed that with mention of Kudpung, this discussion was about NPP. I won't add another project to your plate while this one is still open, so ping me later if you so desire – ideally when you have more time to focus on patrolling. Atsme 💬 📧 15:09, 18 January 2023 (UTC)
No worries @Atsme! My team does want to learn about the difficulties folks have with patrolling so happy to discuss over at the linked talk page :) Samwalton9 (WMF) (talk) 15:17, 18 January 2023 (UTC)

Meeting #2 thoughts by Novem Linguae

Before I forget, here are some notes from the meeting...

  • Attendees
    • Barkeep
    • Enterprisey
    • Novem
    • BusterD
    • Clovermoss
    • Tgr (WMF)
    • KStoller (WMF)
    • DannyH (WMF)
  • Summary
    • Sentiment that your first article and/or the article wizard are too dense/too long. Perhaps we should focus some resources on re-writing those in a more condensed manner.
    • Sentiment that 3 good sources should be the base of any article (WP:GNG), and that this should be baked into any kind of wizard or tool we provide.
    • Growth Team interested in making tools that can be used by all wikis, not just enwiki.
  • Possible action items
    • Schedule next meeting (sentiment that current 5PM USA Pacific meeting time is good)
    • Consider scheduling these meetings on a regular basis, such as every two months.
    • Sdkb's page was well-liked and well-received in the meeting. BusterD and Sdkb should chat in detail about it.
    • (this is Novem's opinion) Keeping in mind that the Growth Team's time is valuable and that one of the main things they can do for us is create wiki software, perhaps for the next meeting we should try to (in advance) have a concrete plan for what software we want to ask them to build.
    • Each meeting should have a clearly articulated goal/focus. Onwiki preparation (brainstorming, discussing ideas) should be done on wiki talk pages before the meeting, in order to arrive at more concrete proposals to present in the meeting.
    • Enterprisey's comment that sharing images of prototypes/wireframes in these kinds of meetings promotes a lot of discussion is a good one. We should try to come up with a visual prototype of some kind, so that we can focus the meetings a bit more.
    • Enterprisey mentioned that he might do an image of a prototype/wireframe for the next meeting. Perhaps him and BusterD should chat a bit about that.
    • Jitsu software wasn't great. Buster's text chat was unreadable due to some kind of Jitsu bug. Consider different video conference software.

–Novem Linguae (talk) 02:16, 20 January 2023 (UTC)

I think that's a fair summary but could I add as a possible action item to have a goal/focus for the meetings? This could also let people who maybe can';t make it give some thoughts ahead of time that those who can could discuss. Best, Barkeep49 (talk) 02:51, 20 January 2023 (UTC)
I think that would be a good idea to have a goal/focus for the meetings. Same for the thoughts ahead of time. For all the downsides of text-only communication (like tone of voice), one of the advantages is that it gives people time to consider what they're going to say. I think I tend to actually express myself better through writing a lot of the time.
I find that I feel uncomfortable staring into a camera for long periods of time and fidgety. I also think it's easy for me to get into the mentality of it's like a regular conversation and I don't want to interupt people who are trying to share their thoughts, so I think I'm going to try voice next time to give more time to others because I think that'd work better. I can focus more on what I want to say, what others are saying, and just feel more put together. Clovermoss🍀 (talk) 03:24, 20 January 2023 (UTC)
I agree. I think we should try to do brainstorming ahead of time on these talk pages, etc, and then we can arrive at these meetings with concrete proposals. I'll add a bullet. –Novem Linguae (talk) 03:24, 20 January 2023 (UTC)
Thank you for the notes, @Novem Linguae! This is especially helpful since I've discovered that only 8 minutes of our meeting was actually recorded yesterday. I'm happy to share that if people are interested, but it's certainly not a very helpful overview of the meeting. The Jitsi UI indicated the recording restarted after it was stopped, but for some reason it never saved to my computer. Sorry about that! In other words, I'm definitely in support of that last bullet point to use a different video conference software next time!
Most of my notes duplicated the notes above, but here are a few more ideas (mentioned by others) that I jotted down:
  • We shouldn’t necessarily limit ourselves to text-based solutions for onboarding newcomers.
  • The Vision for a better Article Wizard is a sizable project, is there a smaller change or MVP we could consider as a start?
  • Some sort of "Start an article" page could be a good place to link to in the new Contribution menu.
And a few things I wanted to mention:
  • I still can't make any commitments to what the Growth team will work on next fiscal year. I just want to be clear that I'm excited by the ideas and thoughts shared so far, but the Growth team will need to prioritize a lot of good ideas along with WMF annual planning priorities, so I can't yet make any promises. BUT now is a really great time to have these discussions, as we are starting to plan for the next fiscal year.
  • I think it's great to brainstorm some bigger project ideas about improving newcomer onboarding about Article creation, but ideally we can also brainstorm some smaller wins or MVPs as well. For example, here's a task @Tgr (WMF) added after our meeting yesterday: T327464. I wonder if something like that (perhaps with some sort of community configurable notability requirement around providing references up front) could be a step in the right direction. The page could then evolve to include more functionality over time. Let us know here or in the Phabricator ticket if you have thoughts on that idea.
And please let me know if I can help with setting an agenda and focus for the next meeting. Do we want to consider splitting the meeting so that the Growth team can share and ask for feedback on some ideas for ~20 minutes of the meeting, and then you all can lead the topics and discussion for ~30 minutes of the meeting? (With the assumption that we'll need ~10 minutes for intros and wrap up).
Thanks again to everyone who joined the meeting, I've really enjoyed meeting you all and hearing the excitement around these project ideas!  :) KStoller-WMF (talk) 23:56, 20 January 2023 (UTC)
One thing that should be easy enough to plan first is what video conferencing software we should use next time as we all seem to agree Jitsi didn't really work out that well. Clovermoss🍀 (talk) 21:02, 22 January 2023 (UTC)
It's easiest for me to schedule via Google Meet, but I can schedule via Zoom if that's preferred by the rest of the group.
I've also asked Growth's program manager to attend next meeting, as she's fantastically organized and can help facilitate and keep us focused on the agenda. KStoller-WMF (talk) 03:42, 24 January 2023 (UTC)
@KStoller-WMF, good question about the MVP. I think one option might be to start with just step 4, the three sources. I say that both because it's fairly isolatable and because sourcing concerns are probably the single most common reason for AfC declines. Incorporating that step into the existing article wizard would ideally result in some immediate improvements, but I'm not sure how much it'd tell us about the other steps or the holistic experience of newcomers looking to create an article, as their frustrations may then just be displaced to the other areas still unaddressed. To get a sense of that, all the steps would need to be built. For that, it would be possible to limit the scope slightly by limiting the article topics initially available.
One thing to note is that I think it's important that step 7's advice panels have community buy-in when that feature launches. TemplateData is a cautionary tale here: It launched too soon, lacking essential features like the ability to wikilink in parameter descriptions, and as a result, it failed to become the go-to central repository of its domain (template documentation). We'd want these advice panels to become the go-to place for wikiprojects to concisely record their best practices for each section, so they'd need to work well enough to be a desirable place to put that info. Cheers, {{u|Sdkb}} talk 04:48, 24 January 2023 (UTC)
Thanks @Sdkb, I agree that starting with a sources requirement could be an interesting place for an MVP.
And I totally agree that getting community buy-in early is important for any major wiki feature release! One way to get a lot of eyes and potential support for an idea like this would be the community wishlist. Another community member actually contributed a very similar idea earlier today: Community_Wishlist_Survey_2023/New_contributors/Reference_requirement_for_new_article_creation
(To be clear: I'm not saying the idea would need to be tackled by the Community Tech team, just that having clear support for an idea like this in the Community Wishlist would make it even more likely that the Growth Team could focus on this project in the future).
Pinging @BusterD, @Clovermoss, @Barkeep49, @Novem Linguae, and @Enterprisey since you might also be interested in helping shape the Reference_requirement_for_new_article_creation wishlist item. KStoller-WMF (talk) 21:57, 25 January 2023 (UTC)
Thanks for the ping. Just a quick note that some of the NPP coordinators are hesitant to use the wishlist. Hopefully if a good NPP-related software proposal emerges, the Moderator Tools team would help execute anything PageTriage related, and the Growth Team would help execute anything else. I'm also hoping that BusterD has enough time to take the lead on triaging the ideas being presented on this page and via this group of people. That is, to keep an eye on these ideas that are emerging, to promote discussion, and to collect the best ideas into concrete software proposals to present at our Growth Team meetings. Thank you to everyone that is contributing. –Novem Linguae (talk) 22:54, 25 January 2023 (UTC)
Thanks so much for writing out these notes, Novem Linguae! I wish I could've attended, but I'm glad that it seems to have been productive and I hope I'll make the next one. BusterD and anyone else, I'm happy to chat more about the vision page if you have thoughts/questions! {{u|Sdkb}} talk 06:50, 20 January 2023 (UTC)
Thanks for the notes, guys. Not sure sticking with 5pm pacific is ideal - means the same people will generally not be able to make it. 1am UTC is pretty late even for a Brit, and functionally a no-go for mainland Europeans (with workday issues even as we cycle round the world). Nosebagbear (talk) 10:06, 20 January 2023 (UTC)
Good feedback. For one of the meetings, we might want to try a 9AM USA Pacific / 5PM UTC meeting time to allow interested Europeans to attend the meetings. –Novem Linguae (talk) 17:43, 20 January 2023 (UTC)
Obviously no time is perfect as putting things at 17:00 UTC is right in the middle of the night for Asia and hits during the working/school day for the Americas. Perhaps some rotation could be helpful? Best, Barkeep49 (talk) 17:49, 20 January 2023 (UTC)
FYI 17:00 UTC is fine for me. I'm in Chicagoland but I'm home during the day. Been reading all this stuff and not exactly ignoring your pings, but I felt I dominated the meeting discussion (and yet was less than prepared) so I've been following the chat above to comprehend points of view not my own. Very interested in Sdkb's work to date. BusterD (talk) 20:31, 26 January 2023 (UTC)

@KStoller-WMF, Sdkb, Novem Linguae, and BusterD: I vaguely remember something in the last meeting about researching newcomer experiences and how they react to certain things. Do you think it would be helpful for me to list newcomer experiences that I have observed from the Teahouse relating to stuff like drafts and how it can be frustrating? As in, why isn't there anything to prevent them from wasting so much time when something isn't going to be notable no matter what they do? I'd have to look at this closely again and maybe sift to find different sorts of experiences and what they might have in common with each other but that'd take some time and I want to know it'd be considered worthwhile before I undertake something like that. Clovermoss🍀 (talk) 19:32, 31 January 2023 (UTC)

Having real-world examples of users who have been frustrated by the article creation process absolutely sounds valuable to me. If your searches don't quickly turn up good ones, though, I wouldn't spend too much time digging; just wait around a bit and it (unfortunately) won't be long before more come up. {{u|Sdkb}} talk 19:41, 31 January 2023 (UTC)
@Sdkb: Good to know. I'll take a look sometime tomorrow when I'm less tired. At the most, it should take me a few days. Clovermoss🍀 (talk) 20:19, 31 January 2023 (UTC)
@Sdkb: I'm going through some unexpected dramatic life changes right now so I might be more sporadic in the near future in regards to my edits. I was able to get a sample of some questions yesterday in my sandbox. Not quite what I was thinking of but I think it might be useful to share with KStoller-WMF? Notability is an important concept on enwiki and I think this demonstrates some of the nuances. Clovermoss🍀 (talk) 16:05, 2 February 2023 (UTC), edited 00:13, 11 February 2023 (UTC)
@Sdkb: Catching COVID-19 postponed some of the life changes so I actually have more free time than I previously would have since I'm stuck inside 24/7. Do you think it'd be useful to keep going with what I was doing or is it only tangentially useful? Clovermoss🍀 (talk) 03:30, 7 February 2023 (UTC)
Oh no; I hope you feel better soon! I think @KStoller-WMF or some of the other WMF folks might be better positioned to answer that question. Cheers, {{u|Sdkb}} talk 03:42, 7 February 2023 (UTC)
@Clovermoss Sorry for the slow response and I hope you are feeling better! I just read through the sample of newcomer questions in your sandbox. Thanks for spending the time to do that, I really appreciate it! I don't think I'm seeing anything too unexpected in those exchanges, but it's certainly helpful to read those specific examples and better empathize with how frustrating the current process can be for newcomers and experienced users.
I definitely appreciate your push to review these newcomer questions, but I don't think you need to spend more time gathering examples. I've added a reoccurring reminder for myself to review recent Teahouse conversations. Even just reviewing recent conversations I see many similar scenarios.
I'm very hopeful that the future Page Curation work (Page Curation/2023 Moderator Tools project) will ensure we can also gather more qualitative metrics to go along with the these examples to help guide future work.
We also hope to gather more information soon on Welcome survey responses and follow up newcomer activity. For example, I want to be able to answer questions like:
- Of the newcomers who indicate they want to create an article, what percentage actually go on to attempt article creation in the first month? How does that compare to the newcomers who select a different reason for creating an account?
- Of the newcomers creating accounts, what percentage are deleted? Of the deleted articles, what are the reasons for deletion?
What other metrics would you want to gather before starting a project to help address improvements for new editors related to article creation?
And just FYI, the wishlist item related to requiring references for new article creation was accepted for voting: Community_Wishlist_Survey_2023/New_contributors/Reference_requirement_for_new_article_creation
The more well scoped the idea becomes and more support it gathers, the more likely the Growth team could consider including something like this in our roadmap, so I think it would be great if more people chimed in on that discussion! KStoller-WMF (talk) 18:55, 10 February 2023 (UTC)
@KStoller-WMF: I've been doing much better lately. I still would've liked to not have COVID-19, though. If you ever want to search Teahouse questions, if you go to the archive box it's actually fairly easy to use search terms like "draft" and get some sample queries like I did. I just figured that looking at previous conversations might be useful in addition to what you're currently researching. I think it's an often underlooked benefit of all the conversations that have taken place since the start of Wikipedia. We're often not the first to identify issues and seek out solutions. Archives at other venues may be helpful, I'll try to think of ones that may be relevant if you're interested. Clovermoss🍀 (talk) 00:00, 11 February 2023 (UTC)
I got COVID in December. It kicked my butt. Get well soon! –Novem Linguae (talk) 00:02, 11 February 2023 (UTC)
@Clovermoss Great, thanks so much. And I'm glad that you're feeling better! It really has been a rough winter for germs. KStoller-WMF (talk) 23:08, 14 February 2023 (UTC)
This is the first I'm seeing of Vision for a better Article Wizard and I think it's fantastic. I'm not too sure which aspects of it would be too sizeable for the Growth Team but I think the COI and RS checking would be an enormous help. "What is your relationship to [article]?" would be such an easy win (although the question and buttons need workshopping).
I also think "Please enter URLs of three sources" would really cut down the number of unsourced drafts even if the wizard did nothing with this information and just allowed the user to pass to the next screen with any 3 URLs. The point is to force editors to engage with the idea that notability or verifiability are part of the rules for writing a Wikipedia article. Most have no clue. Of course, interaction between the wizard and RSP would be amazing. — Bilorv (talk) 22:04, 6 February 2023 (UTC)

Concerns about the Marketing Experiment

I'm a bit concerned about the Marketing Experiment. Wikipedia is meant to be a non-profit, however if we start advertising Wikipedia then what will happen on Wikipedia? Will we start including ads on Wikipedia itself? Will people start thinking we're trying to sell Wikipedia? Also, what will these ads look like? ― Blaze WolfTalkBlaze Wolf#6545 19:02, 31 January 2023 (UTC)

@Blaze Wolf I'll chime in since I think I triggered this concern by including a link to the experiment in the recent Growth newsletter. I just wanted to clarify and let you know that this was a one-time small experiment on Spanish Wikipedia. The experiment was around driving an increase in new editors in emerging communities. From my perspective, as the WMF Growth team Product Manager, the results weren't significant enough for us to continue experimenting with that approach. That being said, if you are interested in the details (including what the Spanish ads looked like) you can read about it here, but you can be assured that this experiment ended and we aren't planning to test it in any other languages. KStoller-WMF (talk) 21:13, 31 January 2023 (UTC)
I definitely noticed this, too. Overall, I don't see anything particularly concerning, especially given the small experiment scale, but there would certainly be ethical concerns about giving money to Facebook to advertise there.
The emails to new users seem to show more potential; I followed up about that here. Cheers, {{u|Sdkb}} talk 21:29, 31 January 2023 (UTC)
Agreed, thanks for the feedback! The Growth team has a lot of competing priorities, but working on welcome email improvements definitely seems to have potential and I hope we can focus on that more in future. - KStoller-WMF (talk) 21:52, 31 January 2023 (UTC)
If we start actually advertising anything, another concern would be how this could legitimize other forms of Wikipedia "ads" (like undisclosed paid editing). I also think advertising outside of Wikipedia would be a very controversial change that would generate a lot of pushback from the broader community. I think it's best to explore other ideas more thoroughly, which appears to be the case. Clovermoss🍀 (talk) 14:45, 1 February 2023 (UTC)
I'm not sure I understand the concern about how trying to recruit more volunteer editors, such as is done with edit-a-thons, for example, would legitimize paid editing. (I appreciate the report found the resulting registration rate to be very low, and thus if social media ads were to be used again for recruitment, there would have to be changes in the implementation.) Even something as small as getting more people to understand that editorial control is in the hands of the users and not WMF-paid staffers would raise awareness that Wikipedia can only thrive with a regular influx of new editors. isaacl (talk) 23:56, 6 February 2023 (UTC)
It's kind of like how banks say "we'll never contact you in this way". The way this is proposed sounds similar to the way some scams that offer "Wikipedia services" try to contact people. Ads from outside Wikipedia, namely. Google "Wikipedia services" and you'll see what I mean. WP:AFC even has a warning on the project page specifically addressing this. Anyways, my concern is that trying third-party advertising could have the unintended consquence of legitimizing this sort of thing. Clovermoss🍀 (talk) 03:38, 7 February 2023 (UTC)
I think a call for volunteers, such as a poster advertising an edit-a-thon, is significantly different than someone offering to provide a service to you. As I believe we've discussed, in the past I've suggested that the community should target groups that seem well suited to writing encyclopedia articles, such as historical societies, but maybe the right people can be more easily reached with a broader net. To take a for-instance, imagine for a moment the incredible potential of something with the reach of a Super Bowl ad. Now of course this specific example is a very bad idea: it would swamp the servers, and attract way too many editors making test edits. But I think it's a useful thought exercise to stimulate ideas of what can we do to get more people interested in contributing: if you could somehow reach everyone, what would you say to them? What does the community need to provide in order to offer an attractive value proposition to desirable editors, and to diminish the value proposition to those who aren't aligned with Wikipedia goals? isaacl (talk) 17:29, 7 February 2023 (UTC)
Regarding "we'll never contact you this way", I think sending followup emails to new users is more of a concern than advertising. However I appreciate that from a pure stats point of view, making that post-signup connection has been shown to improve continued engagement. isaacl (talk) 17:29, 7 February 2023 (UTC)
Legitimize in whose eyes? I think we need editors and the people who are going to stick around will, largely, already share the community's values and/or assimilate them as they edit in the project. I am not worried that if third party ads were suddenly to become a funnel of new editors that those people are going to be "UPE? Eh, who cares?" because the harm and frustrations of that are real to just about everyone who comes into contact with it. Best, Barkeep49 (talk) 17:33, 7 February 2023 (UTC)
My concern isn't "UPE, who cares?" but more along the lines of people confusing what is legitimately an ad from the WMF and what is an ad from a scammer that is going against our terms of use. Maybe I didn't make that clear enough? Or maybe I'm not quite getting the heart of what you're trying to say? Clovermoss🍀 (talk) 17:45, 7 February 2023 (UTC)
I'm not going to say that no one will mistake an ad from a scammer as one from the WMF because... I'm sure it has happened, many times. Nonetheless, I don't think WMF recruitment ads are going to change much in this respect, as I think the differences in their underlying goals would be apparent enough. I agree it would be important for any ad campaign to make it clear what it is not (and I don't agree with the suggestion in the report to use ads for purposes other than recruitment of editors, at least not as a blanket principle). isaacl (talk) 18:02, 7 February 2023 (UTC)
Yes, isaacl, I was trying to express what was essentially in your first sentence. Barkeep49, maybe reading WP:SCAM would be more helpful in the specifics of what I mean? Unless that page is super outdated and I'm expressing concerns that aren't really relevant anymore.
As for all of the other ideas, I don't necessarily disagree. I like isaacl's idea of making it clear what ads would and would not be for if this route is taken. I just think treading cautiously would be a good idea. Especially since the broader community would likely have strong opinions about advertising off-wiki. My instinct just tells me that quite a few people would be very against the idea for various reasons, but maybe I'm wrong. Exploring the viability of various options in retaining new editors isn't a bad thing though and I appreciate all potential ideas. Clovermoss🍀 (talk) 18:20, 7 February 2023 (UTC)
People object to things for all sorts of reasons, so I'm sure there'd be opposition. I don't like the idea, though, of guilt by association. Lots of things get used by scammers; we should be wary of thinking that any use of these things is now tainted. (Plus, email would be my first place of concern in this regard, not ads, which have much more than a subject line to create a first impression.) isaacl (talk) 18:32, 7 February 2023 (UTC)
I think you're right Clover that there would be a group of editors who would share your concern (or similar ones). And I'd work to persuade them as well. I think you and I have even discussed the way that our shortfall of editor capacity is hitting the project and so finding new ways to attract (and then retain) mission aligned editors is something where I think we need to be willing to follow the data. Best, Barkeep49 (talk) 19:22, 7 February 2023 (UTC)
Apologies for the delayed response, but thanks for the response KStoller. I was concerned seeing it in the newsletter but I"m glad to hear that it was a one-time experiment. ― Blaze WolfTalkBlaze Wolf#6545 16:09, 2 February 2023 (UTC)
@KStoller-WMF: the report concludes We should continue/expand our use of paid media to reach Wikipedia-aligned audiences, which seems at odds with what you are saying. I am concerned at the idea of Wikimedia Foundation money being spent on Facebook, and I think Clovermoss has a good point about how if Wikipedia were known to advertise on social media it may have unintended consequences in allowing UPE businesses to profit. — Bilorv (talk) 21:57, 6 February 2023 (UTC)
Hello @Bilorv, thanks for reviewing the report. The report was compiled by the Marketing team back in August of 2022, so it's been several months since I've read it. I'm not aware of any further experiments that expand that work, and I don't have knowledge of any future experiments of a similar nature. That being said, the Growth team was mainly involved in the experiment analysis, so I'm likely not the best person represent this effort. @Ed Erhart (WMF), the report's author, might have more to add regarding any followup from the Newcomer experience marketing 2022 pilot. It sounds like a useful next step for me is to add more details about what concrete next steps have been planned regarding the Newcomer_experience_projects. I'll work on a summary this week. KStoller-WMF (talk) 19:34, 7 February 2023 (UTC)
Hello everyone, I'm Ed Erhart from the WMF Comms dept. You may know me better as The ed17. As Kirsten said above, the Foundation does not have further plans to use social media ads in future experiments around bringing in new editors.
The only part of this pilot we are looking into continuing are the welcome emails, which showed enormous promise. I'm personally excited about this idea, and I'd love to hear if y'all have any thoughts on them. Ed Erhart (WMF) (talk) 04:36, 16 February 2023 (UTC) (courtesy ping Bilorv)

Question about the welcome emails

I have some questions about the Welcome Emails. First, do we know if any of these emails were sent to a user's spam folder (I don't know if that's a statistic you can see or if that's something only the user or email service provider knows)? Second, if the user said yes to receiving emails, were they then prompted to enter their email address? If so, was this part skipped if the user had added an email upon registering? Third, did any of the users reply to emails or was replying not available due to the emails being sent from a "noreply" email? Fourth, did the emails look similar to any of the current existing welcome templates? Fifth, are there any plans to start a similar experiment on enWiki? If so I wouldn't mind participating in it (as in helping create the emails, not receive them as there would be no point in me receiving them). ― Blaze WolfTalkBlaze Wolf#6545 16:20, 2 February 2023 (UTC)

@Blaze Wolf: Thanks for your interest! Here are some responses in order of your questions:
  1. We do not.
  2. On newly registered editors choosing to receive emails/any prompts that appeared during registration, users had to both enter an email address and opt-in to receiving welcome emails while registering. Only people who did both received an email. This was a requirement from our Legal team as we used MailChimp to simplify launching this experiment.
  3. These were sent from a noreply email, but that's an interesting idea! We could explore routing replies to VRT queues, assuming those folks bought into the idea.
  4. They did not. Email can be a very different medium from the web, and we were only able to test one design.
  5. We were all thrilled with the welcome email pilot's results and have proposed that the WMF devote resources towards building out a welcome email feature. However, a project like this would require a significant amount of resources and would need prioritization within the ongoing 2023–24 fiscal year WMF annual planning process, so the project members don't yet know if it will continue. I'm not sure if there's any place where you can register interest in seeing this move forward, but if that's something you'd like me to ask about inside the WMF, let me know.
Thanks again and please feel free to reach out with any additional questions! Ed Erhart (WMF) (talk) 06:59, 16 February 2023 (UTC)

Newcomer tag in page history

I had questions about the meaning of the "newcomer task" tag, which I posted at mw:Topic on Talk:Growth/Personalized first day/Newcomer tasks[perma] simply because I found that page first. I don't want to fragment a discussion or cross-post, but it actually may be more appropriate for this page (and possibly both projects should address it; or maybe just one, with a sister link to the other). Thanks, Mathglot (talk) 22:35, 16 February 2023 (UTC)

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