Flow migration test/Growth talk page

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Discussion related to the old Growth team is archived at Talk:Growth/Growth 2014. (Board description edited by Trizek (WMF) (talk), Quiddity (WMF) (talk), Jdforrester (WMF) (talk))

Tweaked formatting

Hope this edit was OK. Jdforrester (WMF) (talk) 23:08, 6 July 2018 (UTC)

That's great, thank you! MMiller (WMF) (talk) 21:51, 22 August 2018 (UTC)

A good start

@MMiller (WMF): this page in its present condition looks to me like it is a good starting point. I have two suggestions and a question.

• Could you explain the preference to start with mid-sized wikis instead of small wikis?
• I suggest that you create a sidebar or other prominent placeholder on the page to display the table of contents of your current newsletter and a link to archived newsletter issues.
• A book that I read awhile ago at the suggestion of Benjamin Mako Hill is Building Successful Online Communities. I suggest that you at least skim though the potions that seem to be the most relevant to your work.

Good luck, --Pine^✉ 02:38, 10 July 2018 (UTC) Pine (talk) 02:38, 10 July 2018 (UTC)

@Pine: thank you for the comments, and I'm sorry for not replying sooner. I didn't have my notifications set up correctly on Mediawiki.org, and didn't see your comments until now.

• We are starting with mid-size instead of small wikis because our team is a software engineering team that will make changes or additions to the Mediawiki software to attempt to increase retention. We'll need a sufficient volume of new editors coming into the wikis in order to be able to detect and learn from the changes we're making. We'll also need a sufficient volume of experience editors, since our features will likely involve mentorship from experienced editors to new editors. For those reasons, we think mid-size wikis will have enough volume, but are still small enough that new editors retention is an important priority for them. When we find changes that make an impact in the mid-size wikis, we can absolutely work with small wikis to deploy them there, also.
• Thanks for the idea about the newsletter. (Please do sign up to receive it here!) I'm also tagging our Community Engagement Specialist, Trizek (WMF), since he works on our newsletter.
• Thank you for the book suggestion. I'll check it out! It sounds really relevant. MMiller (WMF) (talk) 21:49, 22 August 2018 (UTC)

This project 'Growth Team' obviously has the makings of the very best intentions,. However: "The Growth Team's objective is to work on software changes that help retain new contributors in New Editor Experiences/Midsize Wikipedias|mid-size Wikimedia projects. We will be starting with Wikipedias, but we hope these changes will benefit every community" , ignores, or appears to ignore, the need for new and improved tools to enhance the work and experience of the volunteers who do the grunt work of keeping the content of our major projects clean and appropriate. ~~~~ Kudpung (talk) 07:05, 25 August 2018 (UTC)

@Kudpung: thanks for checking out the page. While our objective for this team will be to increase retention on mid-size Wikipedias, one of the things we're definitely planning on taking into account is what the engagement with new editors will mean for the experienced editors. We'll need to keep in mind that when new editors ask questions and make edits, that will fall to experienced editors to receive and respond to. MMiller (WMF) (talk) 23:21, 27 August 2018 (UTC)

That is correct, but the main place where new editors get lost or retained is at New Page Review. Although only Reviewer rights holders can actually mark new pages as accepted, ''any'' editor can tag new pages for deletion and/or other issues whether experienced or not. Maintenance tasks are a magnet to new and inexperienced users. This is an issue that needs to be addressed. Also, right now, reviewing of new pages by authorised reviewers has almost come to a standstill. Somehow, the use of the New Pages Feed and its Curation tool need to be made more attractive. Kudpung (talk) 01:12, 28 August 2018 (UTC) Kudpung (talk) 01:12, 28 August 2018 (UTC)

@Kudpung: for what it's worth, the project for which I am currently requesting funding has English Wikipedia as its first (but definitely not exclusive; I am hoping for translations!) audience, and I hope that the videos and other materials that I create and/or organize in the scope of my project will be helpful for new editors who are creating their first articles. I'm also hoping that the materials will be helpful for new article reviewers and for the Teahouse hosts in the sense that I hope that the reviewers and helpers can refer to the videos and materials for explanations that they won't need to repeat and are more understandable to newbies than walls of text would be. :) Pine (talk) 06:56, 29 August 2018 (UTC)

@I have mentoned you on another thread on Wikipedia that you may be interested in recasting a video for NPP if the WMF is not in a position to do so. ~~~~ Kudpung (talk) 02:19, 13 December 2018 (UTC)

Thanks Kudpung. I will take a look. Pine (talk) 03:33, 16 December 2018 (UTC)

Notification of request for incremental grant funding

Hello Growth Team, I would like to notify you of the creation of my request at:meta:Grants:Project/Rapid/Pine/Continuation of educational video and website project for incremental grant funding . I would appreciate hearing any questions or comments from you on the talk page of that grant request. Thank you, --Pine^✉ 00:43, 14 August 2018 (UTC) Pine (talk) 00:43, 14 August 2018 (UTC)

Thanks for letting us know, Pine. I will check it out and get back to you! MMiller (WMF) (talk) 21:50, 22 August 2018 (UTC)

@Pine: I read your proposal; thank you for letting me know about it. I've definitely heard from multiple communities that videos can be useful, and I remember at Wikimania hearing that videos had had particular success in the Arabic community. Why do you think there have not yet been successful videos in English? Are there particular approaches that you're going to take in your videos that you think will make yours strong? Our team is interested in figuring out how best to communicate the difficult-to-understand concepts behind the wiki. MMiller (WMF) (talk) 16:50, 29 August 2018 (UTC)

Hi @MMiller (WMF):, I have been somewhat surprised that no one else (that I know of) has produced videos for English Wikipedia or Commons in recent years. I can make a few guesses about why others have not done so. Generally, English Wikimedians in particular seem not to spend a lot of time writing help documentation (although the Teahouse and IRC get plenty of use for live help) and my guess is that whatever factors result in so few English Wikipedians working on documentation are closely related to the factors that result in lack of volunteer time spent developing help videos. One factor could be that because ENWP and Commons have extensively developed policies and procedures, therefore significant thoughtful effort is required to write and present information about them in an organized, coherent, and accurate manner. Developing high quality videos from start to finish is an activity that requires a lot of time for both planning and execution, and my guess is that many Wikimedians prefer to spend their time on objectives that are achievable with much less time spent on planning. Another factor is that videos are often linear while the nature of workflows often involves tree-like decision structures, so significant thought is required to decide which workflows to depict in videos and how to address the decision points in the workflows.

Two of my hopes for the videos that I produce are that (1) videos will be easier and faster for new contributors to understand than text explanations, especially when those text explanations are spread across multiple pages or require detailed examination of documentation, and (2) that experienced Wikimedians who volunteer their time with helping newbies and doing quality control will find that the videos save time because the experienced Wikimedians can refer newbies to my videos instead of writing text explanations, or can write shorter text explanations if those explanations are accompanied by my videos. Pine (talk) 19:00, 29 August 2018 (UTC)

Categories for images

(Topic title edited by Trizek (WMF) (talk), 2001:8003:451D:EA00:71F3:965B:94D1:3D64)

Out of scope question, should be posted on Wikimedia Commons' Help desk. Trizek (WMF) (talk) 08:12, 3 September 2018 (UTC)

I have uploaded several hundred images, including dozens of original designs (e.g. flowcharts, concept diagrams, etc). Many of my original designs have been rejected on the basis that they are not original which after labouring for hours to produce them, I find extraordinary! But my most perplexing issue relates to a series of artwork images that I uploaded recently - the majority were by Iraqi artists. I searched Commons to ascertain whether the image already existed with an Arabic caption. If so, I provided English information about the work and categorised it by artist, geographic location and other relevant information such as subject matter. Next, I searched for important artworks that might be useful to the collection and uploaded them, with details and where necessary, a rationale for limited use. These were also categorised by artist, geographic location (for sculptures and monuments) and other relevant information such as subject matter. Within 24-48 hours, the majority of the categories had been deleted by an editor, who then created new superordinate categories and assigned them to that. Apparently this editor would only allow ONE category per artwork. Now, this is problematic for several monuments which were started by one sculptor who died before the work was compeleted, requiring a different sulptor to finalise the work. In other cases, the work may have had both and architect or engineer as well as a sculptor working on the project. I had categorised the work according to all principal persons associated with its execution - but apparently this editor would not allow that. The editor in question deleted all the work that had engaged me for almost a week on a full-time basis. It's very easy to press the delete button - but much harder to go through a serious process of researching a work, learning about its history and locating suitable images. At that point, I decided to more or less give up on adding images to Wiki Commons. ~~~~ 2001:8003:451D:EA00:71F3:965B:94D1:3D64 01:48, 29 August 2018 (UTC)

To upload works of art, the work has to be in the public domain in the United States (either 75 years from the death of the creator for unpublished works, or 95 years for published works). Or if the creator has given permission for their work to be freely distributed. Essentially, this means that you won't be able to upload any work that was created after 1922. Kosboot (talk) 13:02, 29 August 2018 (UTC)

You will have more details if you post that question on Wikimedia Commons' Help desk. Trizek (WMF) (talk) 08:11, 3 September 2018 (UTC)

Community Wishlist Survey

Yesterday I posted a Community Wishlist Survey proposal that had to be archived because (1) I went over the maximum of three proposals per user and (2) the proposal wasn't really suited to what Community Tech was doing.

I was, of course, told that "we have a whole team - Growth - that work on this [editor retention?] full time". I knew that this WMF team existed but I wasn't aware that their/your work would encompass all the things I was suggesting, which are, broadly speaking,

• targeted advertising outside the Wikimedia projects to recruit new editors, and analysis to improve that process
• allowing users to post and reply to tweets with the WMF-owned Twitter accounts through a consensus mechanism (or doing something else with the Twitter accounts to increase engagement)
• notifications for new users, asking them to come back and make more edits (if they're inactive), and suggesting new ways to edit

Are these things within the purview of the Growth team? I hope they're useful suggestions, if anything. Jc86035 (talk) 18:02, 30 October 2018 (UTC)

Hi @Jc86035 -- thanks for posting here and for caring about new editor retention. The Audiences department here at the foundation has thought a lot about this topic over the last year, and we actually have several things ongoing that address it. You're right that the engagement of new editors has been decreasing or being stagnant since about 2007. This paper discusses exactly how and why.

One of the things we noticed, however, is that a lot of people attempt editing, but very few stick around and keep editing. Therefore, we have thought less about recruiting new editors, and more about retaining the ones who do show up. For instance, about 2,000 new users create accounts in Korean Wikipedia every month, but only about 160 of those will come back to edit more than once. That's what our team is focused on: new editor retention (specifically in mid-size Wikipedias, who have challenges with "getting over the hump" of having enough content to be reliable sources of knowledge in their societies). You referenced that concept of a "funnel" in your proposal (e.g. maybe people don't know they can edit), and this paper talks about that specifically. And the foundation's research on new editors also digs into retention.

There are also a couple other teams working on retention of editors, such as the three teams working on mobile editing. That became a priority because we learned that newer generations and cultures coming online would much prefer to edit on mobile than desktop, and therefore having that option available would help retain new editors.

So with respect to the ideas you listed, I think the first two are "higher up in the funnel" than we are focused, because they are about informing people that editing is possible. (The New Readers team, however, did advertising last year in a couple countries to inform people that Wikipedia even exists). But the third idea is actually one that our team is thinking of prioritizing. When we discussed potential retention ideas with the broader community a few months ago, the idea of contacting new users to bring them back is one that we discussed positively. We ultimately decided not to work on it first, but it is on our short list for the future. I encourage you to go ahead and add things to that discussion page if you have thoughts on that (or any other idea).

You can also sign up for our team's newsletter or watch our updates page to follow along with our work. MMiller (WMF) (talk) 19:19, 1 November 2018 (UTC)

Conflict and editor retention

I'd like to post an interesting article about Wikipedia interactions (preprint):

Shi, Feng; Teplitskiy, Misha; Duede, Eamon; Evans, James (29 November 2017). "The Wisdom of Polarized Crowds". arXiv:1712.06414 [cs, stat].

In summary, it says that conflict is unpleasant and drives editors away, but it makes article content better. The authors welcome feedback.

I'm wondering if telling editors that conflict is productive might make it less unpleasant, especially as "I'm wasting my time here" is a frequent reaction to conflict. It would be interesting to do some experiments with different messages and see if they affect retention or productivity. HLHJ (talk) 22:32, 20 January 2019 (UTC) HLHJ (talk) 22:32, 20 January 2019 (UTC)

I don't think "conflict" by itself makes the article better. Rather, conflict as an accessory to shared goals ''can'' (but not always) make an article better. Kosboot (talk) 23:42, 20 January 2019 (UTC)

Perhaps I should have said "conflicting views"; obviously calling someone a numbskull will not improve content. HLHJ (talk) 00:35, 21 January 2019 (UTC)

Well, consider conflict as the default path to improve articles is not really the best one. We should avoid conflicts. Trizek (WMF) (talk) 14:13, 21 January 2019 (UTC)

Thanks for the link, @HLHJ. I'll check the article out. One question I would have right off the bat is what percent of newcomers actually are around long enough to experience what this article would call "conflict". MMiller (WMF) (talk) 01:38, 24 January 2019 (UTC)

Depends on what the first article you edit is, I guess. "Donald Trump" will probably run you straight into conflict, even if you are a really competent editor, while (hitting the random article button) "Alastair Macdonald" would probably not. HLHJ (talk) 04:01, 23 February 2019 (UTC) HLHJ (talk) 04:01, 23 February 2019 (UTC)

Hungarian Wikipedia

Hi, we've just started a new project on the Hungarian Wikipedia for editor retention. The Hungarian Wikipedia fits perfectly to your target wikis, and I was wondering whether we could join to the Growth program? Samat (talk) 21:10, 9 April 2019 (UTC)

Hello Samat, and thank you for your interest on Growth projects.

We are going to discuss it within the team and keep you informed. Trizek (WMF) (talk) 13:02, 10 April 2019 (UTC)

Thank you, I am looking forward to the result :) Samat (talk) 19:12, 10 April 2019 (UTC)

Hello Samat

We have discussed a bit about involving your community and we think it is a good community. We need to work on some details before we start the process.

In the meantime, can you confirm that someone will be able to do the following: translate messages, translate newsletters, provide links, motivate people to reply to newcomers questions, and to have meetings sometimes (maybe every two weeks)? Trizek (WMF) (talk) 17:11, 17 April 2019 (UTC)

Dear Trizek, thank you for reply. I don't know exactly, what are the needs of the project (for example how long are these newsletters :)), but I am glad to participate and help. It would be useful if you could inform me about the details of the planned activities, necessary tasks etc. Since beginning of April I am the project manager of our retention program, and the Growth program fits very well what we would like to try and achieve, and I would like to use the synergy between the two programs. Samat (talk) 21:52, 17 April 2019 (UTC)

We can separate the work to do in two parts:

First, setting-up the tools.

Growth tools require configuration and translations. Setting them up would require your community to provide a lot of things (like links to some help contents, explain the context of your community dynamics, translate the interfaces and some help contents...). We are working on setting up a document to recap all of that.

Then, when the tools are deployed, the community needs to make a great effort to reply to newcomers on the help desk. Your retention program will very likely cover those needs.

So it is a question of how much time your community can spend on preparing the tools for deployment, and then to maintain an effort around newcomers. That effort is important: some communities are surprised by the number of requests they have to face.

Newsletters are posted once a month .You can find exemples on Growth/Newsletters. We recently changed our format and now the newsletter is translatable.

We also have some community ressources Growth/Communities that are translatable and, of course, open for discussion to be improved.

As I said, we have some work to do on our side. I'll keep you posted about the next steps. :) Trizek (WMF) (talk) 16:28, 18 April 2019 (UTC)

Dear Trizek, I would go forward. Let me know what is the best way setting-up the tools, what is the priority order for the tasks? I've talked in the community, and we would try to join the program. I will do my best to make it smooth, and there will surely be a few editors who will help. Samat (talk) 15:57, 27 April 2019 (UTC)

Hello Samat

As you know, at the moment, we have a short list of wikis we work with and monitor. Adding yours requires a bit of work. since you've the first wiki to ask for those tools.

We definitely want to deploy the help panel for you (that require no monitoring), but we're deciding about the other components.

You can start translating the Growth pages on mediawiki.org, so as our community ressource for help desk, and figure out if community members are ready to reply to newcomers following those best practices. You can also ask from volunteers to translate the interfaces.

I'll keep you posted with updates soon. Trizek (WMF) (talk) 17:10, 29 April 2019 (UTC)

Hi @Samat -- our team is now ready to bring Growth features to Hungarian Wikipedia. We've published a checklist here of what communities need to do in order to be ready. Please take a look and let us know if you have any questions, or if you want to discuss! We are excited to be working with your community. MMiller (WMF) (talk) 21:05, 13 June 2019 (UTC)

Dear Marshall, thank you for your and for your team's help. We will go through the checklist to prepare the Growth features for the Hungarian Wikipedia. I will let you know if we have any question. Samat (talk) 21:24, 16 June 2019 (UTC)

Encourage the newcomers feedback

I've been heavily editing Wikipedia:Wikipedia:Encourage the newcomers, trying to give fairly concrete and evidence-based advice, and it occurs to me that there are some experts here, too. I'd appreciate any criticism, commentary, or contributions. HLHJ (talk) 03:00, 7 October 2019 (UTC) HLHJ (talk) 03:00, 7 October 2019 (UTC)

Thank you for sharing this! I've read it and I think it is a good approach to introduce the work with newcomers.

Here are some ressources you can use to enrich your page, as examples or as inspirations:

• New Editor Experiences - a research program about new users (typologies, what are their motivations...)
• How to interact with newcomers - an help page created by Growth to help mentors interacting with newcomers
• Editing Wikipedia with my parents may be a good reading, to see how newcomers make their first steps
• An analysis of two reports made by French Wikipedia and Hungarian Wikipedia about welcoming new users (in German), published on the Kurier. FYI, the French part was done by volunteer-me. Trizek (WMF) (talk) 09:14, 7 October 2019 (UTC)

Hi @HLHJ -- I think it's really cool that you're working on that page. How will other editors find it and read it? One thing that I definitely recommend including is advice on how experienced editors can recommend tasks to newcomers. Many newcomers arrive with something specific and challenging they want to do, such as write a new article. They don't realize that writing a new article is one of the most difficult things to do on Wikipedia, and so they try, fail, and leave. It can be good for an experienced editor to say something like, "It's good that you want to write a new article about a band. That's one of the most challenging things to do on Wikipedia. I bet you'll end up succeeding with your article if you practice some easier edits. Here are some existing articles about bands that could use some copyediting." MMiller (WMF) (talk) 23:41, 7 October 2019 (UTC)

Sorry for the slow reply, I have some problems with my use of the notifications system, as you know :).

• An analysis of two reports made by French Wikipedia and Hungarian Wikipedia about welcoming new users (in German), published on the Kurier.] (archived version, as link above now broken)
  • I think this is a bit out-of-scope for the essay, which is more about individual actions than community ones (though I'd agree that the latter are important changed my mind, added draft content). I'll add in "How to interact with newcomers", though, it's an excellent collection of traditional knowledge, if I can use that for a community of ca. 1 generation age. It would be really great if that page had citations to empirical evidence, maybe an observational study... I assume you've seen this on de's checked version system?

"Editing Wikipedia with my parents" is fascinating; I tend to see it as confirmation of my preconception that the main good/bad experience determinant is the interactions with other editors. I barely interacted with other editors at all for the first decade or so on en; IP editing, not even revert notifications. I guess that put me in the "Knowledge sharer" profile. On fr and de, though, I've generally had edits reverted for inadequate language skills; the implication that the editors there do not consider my edits worth ten seconds of their translation-polishing time is rather demotivating. I polish translations on en, and while sometimes the English is hard to understand ("velvet municipality"? oh, Samtgemeinde) I find that amusing.

"Encourage the newcomers" gets about 50 views a day these days.[1] I did link it from WP:BITE, which is fairly trafficked, so hopefully anyone interested will find it. I've added some material on recommending tasks and new editors' goals, though it's still pretty rough and poorly-integrated; I'll come back to it when I've thought it over. HLHJ (talk) 05:04, 10 November 2019 (UTC) HLHJ (talk) 05:04, 10 November 2019 (UTC)

Interesting discussion involving two new editors at en:User talk:Clovermoss#Editor retention, typo trivia. HLHJ (talk) 06:33, 5 February 2020 (UTC) HLHJ (talk) 06:33, 5 February 2020 (UTC)

@HLHJ -- thanks for pointing it out! I put some thoughts there. MMiller (WMF) (talk) 20:01, 6 February 2020 (UTC)

Growth/Navbar

Would it be possible that the links in the Template:Growth/Navbar point to the localized pages? If somebody reads a localized page with the navbar, and would like to use it to navigate between the projects, arrives always to the English pages instead of the localized ones. This can be confusing even for experienced editors. Samat (talk) 18:02, 2 November 2019 (UTC)

I realized, that it works as I wanted, as soon I change the surface language from English to X (Hungarian in this case). Sorry. Samat (talk) 10:16, 3 November 2019 (UTC)

I havent found a nice way to add a direct link for translations. If you have an idea, I'm interested! :) Trizek (WMF) (talk) 10:28, 5 November 2019 (UTC)

NavWiki project space is in development on the Outreach wiki

Participants on this talk page, particularly @MMiller (WMF) and @Kudpung, may remember this video project. I am creating a project space for the videos and associated information on the Outreach wiki at https://outreach.wikimedia.org/wiki/NavWiki. Please post on the project talk page on Outreach if you have questions or comments. I plan to send a newsletter with project status information to all tutorial newsletter subscribers during the next few weeks. Regards. Pine (talk) 07:54, 6 November 2019 (UTC)

Hi @Pine -- thanks for letting us know. I'll post a couple questions for you on Outreach. MMiller (WMF) (talk) 19:45, 7 November 2019 (UTC)

Tools

I would propose a few tools to support and give feedback to both newcomers and oldtimers. (Just me trying to write down some ideas, aka ranting… )

Random award

People tend to continue doing things where they get a slightly random award. People tend to keep trying to get such rewards, even if the likelihood are pretty small. Compare to casino-like games.

It is rather well-documented how and why this work, and some people use it as an argument for free contributions vs paid contributions. That is probably wrong, but the argument is made anyhow. Its origin could be hunter-gatherers, and a continued quest for food even if they often failed.

That makes me believe there should be a page where new contributions are highlighted. A kind of special page “in the work”. That page can pick pages with larger contributions after they are patrolled or some time after the contributions are uploaded. Because the list should be limited it would be slightly random which page (contributions on that page) reach the special page. It is a feature that only some reach that page, but it could be possible to include more on the page if the reader choose to do so. Imagine the page as a “recent changes” with a lead paragraph with a list of the last contributions, and notify the user when his/her contributions reach the special page.

A practical implementation would pick pages that are above a certain threshold in size, and likewise a threshold on contribution. Above that threshold it would be included with a probability that scale with the accumulated size of the contributions.

Activity feedback

Users at Wikipedia are very eager on measuring their impact and reach, which makes me wonder if it is possible to create some kind of simple indexes or badges. It could be a kind of “six degrees of wikiholicks” with some funny comment popping up in the notification centre when you reach a higher level. As activity changes, it could be measured over some timespan, with some feedback (badges) early on that is pretty simple to get. Later on it could be logarithmically harder to get badges. Now our only feedback to newcomers seems to be a notification that their edits are rolled back, which gives a negative feedback.

Comparable systems are Khan Academy, Duolingo, and several other.

Ongoing work

I've been wondering if it would be a good idea to have a note on user pages about what page the user is editing. It would be like an implicit Kanban queue. If a page is open for edit in a tab, we could use a ping to the server and keep track of it in the session, and the user has several recent changes to the page, then it gets posted as “current work” or “work in progress” on the user page. If the user hasn't any contributions to the page, or if the contributions are too old, then it will not be listed. Likewise if the edits are not patrolled. A similar note can be posted on the content page itself, thus giving a positive feedback to the editing user. By limiting the number of listed pages it will give the contributor a sense of what s/he should focus on, ie. finish the current work, yet it allows the user to do random edits on other pages.

Note that “current work” should follow the page, and when another user moves the page to another title the note should keep pointing to the correct page. Jeblad (talk) 20:25, 7 November 2019 (UTC)

Hi @Jeblad -- thank you for thinking about our work and for writing out these ideas. I'm sorry that it has taken a little while to get back to you. I have some notes and questions about each of your points:

• Random award: our team has talked many times about how to use awards to help motivate newcomers. Some of our notes are here. There is definitely evidence that awards can work, such as this paper about an experiment in German Wikipedia. In that experiment, a random set of newcomers was given an award for completing their first edit. They were then listed in public as one of the recipients of the award. This increased their retention by 10%. It's notable that in the experiment, the award came from a group of people (a WikiProject), as opposed to from "the system". Our team wants to extend the impact module on the newcomer homepage to give users awards that make sense for them, and we know we'll have a lot of thinking to do with our communities to make sure the awards are appropriate and incentivize healthy behavior.
• Activity feedback: I see this as related to the "awards" concept, because it's all about recognizing people for the work they have done. If you take a look at the homepage's impact module (shown in these designs), how good of a job do you think we're doing here? What should be different?
• Ongoing work: this reminds me of conversations our team has around a concept we call "neighborhoods". We think that it would help newcomers for them to be able to clearly say that there is activity happening in the wiki, so that they can join in (we have some notes on that here). Right now, it's hard to see activity unless you go to Recent Changes. So we think newcomers could have some kind of "activity feed" on their homepage, that could be tailored to topics that they care about, e.g. "Music", "History", etc. But it sounds like you're also saying that recent edits could be clearly listed on a user page. That would fit in well with some of our ideas around a potential structured user profile (some notes on that here, and I've added your idea to the bottom).

How does this sound? What do you think? MMiller (WMF) (talk) 22:19, 19 November 2019 (UTC)

Random award is a bit weird. You tend to be more enthusiastic over a random award when you expect none, compared to a situation where you expect the award and get none. Even if the overall level of awards are the same. If people are giving the award, and you are expecting an award, then it quickly turn into a grudge toward the users that did not give you the expected award. Either the award should be really unexpected, that is statistically random, or it should be deterministic. A deterministic award is an activity feedback. It should also be given by a non-human, so to avoid disgruntled users. In the mean two different users at the same level should be given the same amount of random award, even if they have been given different awards at any given moment.

Activity feedback is a deterministic awards. You should be able to expect an activity feedback, but a random award should be unexpected. All users doing the same amount of work should be given the same activity feedback. Call it “activity award” and “random award” if it is easier to understand.

Ongoing work is the users “own work”, and limited to the users present major work. It makes him focus on his own work, possibly triggering a higher completenessrate. You could create interest groups, by collecting over a group of users from the categories where the user are editing. Note the difference between the users own activity, users interests, and articles where there are activity. Some user editing a random article does not imply he has a profound interest in neither the article nor the category. Only after accumulating edits over some time you know the users actual interest. The users interest could be modelled as the categories from the articles where (s)he contributes, weighted by the amount of work invested in each article. The categories should probably be simplified somewhat. You can make a metric for group activity both from users contributions and from recent changes. It depends on the level of granularity you want.

I'm not sure about the present standing on paid editing (Gneezy U; Rustichini A; (2000) Pay enough or don’t pay at all. Quart.J. Econom. 115(3):791–810.) I tend to believe the communities have made up their mind on a fairly weak (or even non-factual) basis. That could have implications for what kind of awards that can be used, and it makes it virtually impossible to use the most effective means for content production – payment. It seems like Wikipedia has at the same standing on corporate contributions as Linux in in the late 90s.

Note that awards in a system like Wikipedia relates more to cultural capital than social capital. Facebook and Twitter are more about social capital. LinkedIn tend to be social capital, but with a twist on educational and commercial capital. This has impact on what kind of awards will be regarded as important, and what kind is simply fun. Jeblad (talk) 14:10, 20 November 2019 (UTC)

مشاركة

مرحباً اريد المشاركة في فريق النمو 156.213.191.123 06:04, 16 December 2019 (UTC)

أهلا وسهلا ومرحبا، هل يمكننا أن نتعرف على اسم حسابك على ويكيبيديا؟ شكرا. Dyolf77 (WMF) (talk) 09:12, 16 December 2019 (UTC)

New Feature

Choosing a mentor: It may make sense to make it possible for a newcomer to select a mentor from the list of suggested mentors himself. I started enabling experiments on sr.wiki, and one user suggested this idea to me, so here's it. Aca (talk) 09:54, 13 January 2020 (UTC)

Hi, I'm a Growth ambassador at Czech Wikipedia. Thanks for suggesting this feature! I'm currently working on a new feature that allows mentors to claim a newbie, if they know them off-wiki, for instance. See (draft) help page at Growth/Personalized first day/Newcomer homepage/How to claim a mentee. Maybe that's something you would like? Feel free to give comments on that!

I'm honestly not sure if displaying a list of usernames to the newbie is worth it? How would be a newbie supposed to thoughtfully choose their mentor? It would be nice if you could explain how would you like the newbies to use the proposed feature, so we can make a better image of it. Martin Urbanec (WMF) (talk) 11:15, 13 January 2020 (UTC)

Hi, and thank you for this message, Acamicamacaraca!

I think that a newcomer can claim a mentor only after a few interactions with Wikipedia. When I work with newcomers as a volunteer on French Wikipedia, I very rarely have someone who asks for a specialist about a particular topic. Newcomers very often need help about basic things, like adding a source or an image, or understanding some rules. So I don't think that they need to pick a mentor from a list.

If they want to change their mentir, than can do so by simply agreeing with the new mentor who could claim the newcomer. :) Trizek (WMF) (talk) 11:33, 13 January 2020 (UTC)

The idea was that e.g. the newcomer can choose the mentor himself based on his description. For example, if a newcomer wants to deal with football topics, he would prefer to choose a mentor who also deals with football topics instead of historical ones. Aca (talk) 11:57, 18 January 2020 (UTC)

Newcomer homepage on fr_wikipedia

Tracked in Phabricator
Task T252420

Trizek (WMF) (talk) 15:47, 18 May 2020 (UTC)

Hi !

As you can see: https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikip%C3%A9dia:Le_Bistro#Outils_pour_accompagner_les_personnes_d%C3%A9butantes, the community of Wikipedia in French would like to benefit from the new homepage for newcomers

Thank you very much,

Cordially. Athozus (talk) 17:15, 22 January 2020 (UTC)

Thank you for this message, and happy to see you motivated.

I just replied on the Bistro about it. :) If you community is okay, please create the Phabricator task.

(Today, I learnt that "cordially" is an English word, thank you! 👍) Trizek (WMF) (talk) 17:25, 22 January 2020 (UTC)

@AirSThib C'est pas compliqué de se faire un compte Phabricator, il suffit d'aller sur ce lien, et tu peux te créer ton compte grâce à ton compte Wikimedia existant ! Si tu veux, je peux t'aider mais mon anglais à l'air moins bon que toi ! Nemo Le Poisson (talk) 10:25, 26 January 2020 (UTC)

Oui je sais mais j'ai 13 ans donc je souhaite pas pour l'instant en créer un à cause de l'adresse mail. On ne serait pas obligé d'indiquer notre e-mail je l'aurais fait depuis longtemps ! Athozus (talk) 10:29, 26 January 2020 (UTC)

Dans ce cas, il faut demander à quelqu'un du projet Aide et accueil de s'en charger : @Binabik peut-être ou @Jules78120... Nemo Le Poisson (talk) 10:37, 26 January 2020 (UTC)

Oui. Athozus (talk) 10:39, 26 January 2020 (UTC)

Si cela n'a pas été fait, je peux ouvrir le ticket, ou en êtes-vous @AirSThib? AB Louis (talk) 15:06, 18 May 2020 (UTC)

Le ticket existe et le déploiement a lieu demain, normalement. :) Trizek (WMF) (talk) 15:46, 18 May 2020 (UTC)

Parfait ! 77.205.153.224 08:32, 19 May 2020 (UTC)

Resources

(Topic title edited by Samat (talk), Jdforrester (WMF) (talk))

The anchor template can solve the multi-language section linking. Samat (talk) 15:53, 29 January 2020 (UTC)

In the general navbox of the Growth project, there is a bold link: Resources for communities

Should it be linked to Special:MyLanguage/Growth/Communities#Resources for better collaboration with newcomers ? Samat (talk) 22:31, 27 January 2020 (UTC)

Thank you for noticing it. I've changed it. Trizek (WMF) (talk) 15:45, 28 January 2020 (UTC)

Sorry, I reopen the topic for one more, related question.

Is there a way, that this link will work with non-English surfaces? For example, if I click on it (using Hungarian surface), I am linked to Growth/Communities/hu#Resources for better collaboration with newcomers which obviously does not exist. Samat (talk) 21:31, 28 January 2020 (UTC)

There is an i18n-ed anchor, #Resources, but apparently it is not working with Special:MyLanguage?

Can you check? Special:MyLanguage/Growth/Communities#Resources Trizek (WMF) (talk) 11:41, 29 January 2020 (UTC)

Your link works, but the link in the navbar didn't.

I believe that these two changes will solve the problem: https://www.mediawiki.org/w/index.php?title=Growth/Communities&type=revision&diff=3640829&oldid=3568575 and https://www.mediawiki.org/w/index.php?title=Template:Growth/Navbar&diff=prev&oldid=3641119 . (As soon as the change in the transcluded template will take effect. Reloading or action=purge haven't helped yet.) Samat (talk) 13:46, 29 January 2020 (UTC)

It may take a couple of dummy edits to have everything being fixed. Thank you for your help! Trizek (WMF) (talk) 14:17, 29 January 2020 (UTC)

Wikiext and Visual editors

I am looking for information on how the team plans to deal with the fact that we have dual editors. This includes, but is not limited to, things such as Newcomer tasks.

Does the team intend to design in an editor-agnostic fashion? Do you intend to funnel users into the Primary editor? The community may reject or disable a product if it attempts to funnel new users into the Secondary editor. Alsee (talk) 03:17, 5 February 2020 (UTC)

Hi @Alsee -- thanks for looking in detail at our projects and thinking ahead. You're asking an important question that the team is actually starting to discuss. So far, the features that we've built have been editor-agnostic. Specifically, the help panel opens no matter what editor the user chooses; and newcomer tasks lets the user use whichever editor they choose (for wikis that have two edit buttons), or whichever editor is the wiki's default (for wikis that have one edit button). And so the features fall back on the user's or community's choices around editors.

The reason your question is relevant now is because one of the things we're thinking about for newcomer tasks is guidance -- using the help panel to explain to newcomers how to complete the task. The guidance in the panel has to be pursuant to the editor the user is in, of course. So we're looking at what the default editor is on the Wikipedias we're working with (Arabic, Czech, Korean, and Vietnamese), and talking about what preferences those communities have for the editor that newcomers use (in those languages, we have dedicated community contact points that we call "ambassadors"). Interestingly, the different communities that we're working with think about the editors in different ways, which we're learning about.

I'd like to get back to you in the next couple weeks with some more details as we get farther along in design guidance. How does that sound? MMiller (WMF) (talk) 19:48, 6 February 2020 (UTC)

Thanks. The definition of which editor is primary/default has been a recurring point of conflict, so I was a little jumpy when mention of guidance for how to add links appeared to imply or assume the minority editor. Alsee (talk) 00:29, 7 February 2020 (UTC)

Hi @Alsee -- I’m getting back to you with some more information and next steps around guidance.  We have talked to our community contacts in the four Wikipedias to which we have deployed newcomers tasks (Arabic, Korean, Czech, Vietnamese).  Their recommendation for their own wikis has been to encourage newcomers to use visual editor when doing suggested edits through this feature’s workflow.  Specifically, what this will mean in those four wikis is:

• In wikis that only have one edit tab, and on mobile devices, users in the newcomers tasks workflow who click edit will see the visual editor.  This is already the default behavior in some wikis. The users will be able to switch to the source editor afterward if they choose.
• In wikis that have two edit tabs (one for the visual editor and one for the source editor), there will be a blue dot on the visual editor tab that nudges the user to choose the visual editor.  They will still be able to choose the source editor instead, if they wish.
• Given the two points above, the written guidance that the newcomer sees will explain how to complete the editing tasks via the visual editor.

You made a good point that other communities may have different preferences around which editor the newcomers should be using.  Our plan for that is to build the software so that communities we work with in the future can opt to prefer the source editor for newcomers -- by including guidance around wikitext instead of VE, and by nudging users toward the source editor instead of toward VE.

I’m hoping that this plan respects the interests of communities, and that we can keep an eye on results to make sure that good edits are being made.  Please leave any thoughts you might have. MMiller (WMF) (talk) 23:04, 4 March 2020 (UTC)

@MMiller (WMF) thanks for getting back to me.

Single Edit Tab: I am painfully aware of the situation. I had to escalate this exact issue to the Executive Director.[2] She had to summon the Product Manger to answer me on it.

Six months before the product was even announced, I asked the manager how he was going to handle the question of default editor. He gave me explicit assurance that he would not deploy the product with a VisualEditor default without asking the community first. Six months later it was deployed to several wikis. It was set to VE default. That nearly provoked another Superprotect-level crisis. The largest of affected communities wrote hacks for the sitewide javascript to overrule/override the deployment. The manager eventually relented and reversed it on three wikis. The other affected wikis were smaller. They were likely unaware of the problem, and if they were aware they likely felt unable to battle the Foundation about it. I let the Single Edit Tab issue slide, as the conflict effectively terminated the project. It looks like I'm going to have to return to the issue and get the Single Edit Tab default fixed globally.

It's generally not acknowledged within the WMF, but the data collected by the MWF shows that VE has a negative impact.

Could you provide me with links to the ArabicWiki, KoreanWiki, CzechWiki, and VietnameseWiki discussions deciding to go with VE? I can use machine translation. I'd like to see whether it was a unilateral decision by your contacts, or whether there was a community consensus. If it was a community consensus, I might try to reach out and provide those communities with the data that the Foundation has gathered on VE. Alsee (talk) 00:51, 5 March 2020 (UTC)

Hi @Alsee — I first want to make sure the scope of what we’re working on is clear. The Growth team is talking just about the newcomer tasks workflow, which won’t affect the editor seen by newcomers who are not participating in the workflow. This work also won’t alter the experience of non-newcomers.

With respect to your question, we did not go through a community discussion process around the decision to nudge newcomers in the suggested edits workflow toward VE — rather, we relied on our ambassadors in those wikis to represent what they think would work best for their communities. Working this way helps us both iterate quickly while also taking community thoughts into account. In this case, our ambassadors have experience mentoring and teaching newcomers to edit, and think that the visual editor will help those users make their first edits and stick around the wiki, so that one day they can move on to more advanced edits. I think they have built up good trust and judgment with their communities by communicating about Growth team work through newsletters and on-wiki conversations in their native languages, and then taking community concerns to our team so that we can adjust.

In that vein, I think it’s a good idea to make sure that communities are aware of these specific plans around VE, and so we’ll make sure to include this aspect of the newcomer tasks workflow in our team’s next newsletter, so that communities can think about and react to it. MMiller (WMF) (talk) 19:56, 6 March 2020 (UTC)

@MMiller (WMF) yes, I understand.

The tension is the pattern of the Foundation pushing the secondary editor as the default. Wikitext is de facto the primary editor, used by the large majority of editors for the large majority of edits. Within the Foundation there is a sincere and widespread belief that VE is beneficial. However out in actual use on wikis the adoption rate for VE have been dismal, there is broad experience that VE is a poor tool for the job, and there is a strong view by many that it's harmful to push new users into VE by default.

Ideally we need a global answer to avoid rehashing the issue on a wiki-by-wiki and product-by-product basis. However I do not anticipate reaching to that point soon enough to apply here.

I think it’s a good idea to make sure that communities are aware of these specific plans around VE, and so we’ll make sure to include this aspect of the newcomer tasks workflow in our team’s next newsletter, so that communities can think about and react to it.

While that would be an improvement, it is difficult enough for large communities to oppose WMF announcements. Smaller wikis rarely speak up because of the language barrier, and because they may feel powerless to challenge the WMF.

My view on software deployment is that the Foundation should either:

• make a good faith assumption that silent wikis probably agree with the larger wikis that have spoken up; or
• ask them.

Would you be willing to post the question on their central management page? (Village Pump or equivalent.) It's also good practice to make a good faith effort to help people make an informed decision. I could dig up the link for the VE-favorable usertesting the Foundation did with non-editor lab test subjects. There's this graph showing VE has half the interface retention rate as the wikitext editor - for the VE interface users quickly either quit editing completely or they switch to the wikitext interface. There's also a new A/B test on the effect a mobile VE default. The team hasn't made the results public yet but a sub-task makes it clear the results were bad for VE. Alsee (talk) 23:57, 6 March 2020 (UTC)

Hi @Alsee -- I agree that the story of where and how VE is valuable for users is certainly nuanced, and I don't have the expertise to be able to dig into the data here. I do know that our ambassadors, who are very active in their communities, recommend that we use VE for this workflow and believe that decision aligns with their communities' preferences. We’ve been working with these ambassadors on Growth projects for over a year, and we’re going to continue to trust them to represent their communities as we do our work, and keep communities informed so that they can speak up when they have concerns.  We're not going to post specifically about this issue on those wikis, because our ambassadors don't believe it will be a contentious issue.

As we continue to expand to more wikis, we will likewise make sure that those communities are informed about the feature set before we deploy, including this part about encouraging newcomers to use VE in newcomer tasks.  Our current plan is to inform about this decision in our upcoming newsletter, which goes to many community members and management pages on our target wikis. MMiller (WMF) (talk) 23:45, 10 March 2020 (UTC)

For a moment there I thought things were going well. Not only did you decline the simple request to ask those communities, you escalated declaring you've decided you're going to try to shove out a VE-default on this globally.

If you are unwilling to ask the community, I'll do it. I'll start with English Wikipedia - it represents nearly half of our global community. If necessary I'll organize additional wikis into an effective Global Community Consensus.

I find it painful and baffling that the Foundation keep insisting on making this into a battle. It just contributes to the already-substantial community distrust or even hostility against the Foundation. Alsee (talk) 09:33, 25 March 2020 (UTC)

Keeping in touch with projects

I see this:

• We keep in close communication with the communities our team affects, so that our work remains grounded in reality.

and am just curious how one can be in touch with, say, Korean wikipedia community

Ottawahitech (talk) 15:34, 24 March 2020 (UTC)

Hi @Ottawahitech -- thank you for your question. There are several ways that we keep in close communication with communities:

• We have four "target" wikis, which are the wikis to which we first deploy features to try them out. In each of those target wikis, we have a part-time ambassador drawn from the experienced editor community. We meet weekly with the ambassadors, and they are able to communicate to their communities about our work in the local language, and tell our team about the opinions and preferences of their communities.
• We distribute a regular newsletter that gets posted to the talk pages of anyone who is interested. Those newsletters are translated into many languages. You can view past newsletters and sign up to receive them here.
• We post weekly short updates on this page.
• Community members can also follow along on our work in Phabricator. For instance, on this Phabricator task where we are working on "guidance" for newcomer tasks, our current project.

Does this answer your question? MMiller (WMF) (talk) 15:42, 24 March 2020 (UTC)

Sure is nice to get a reply so quickly!

i guess what i am mostly curious about is how to communicate with people who speak a different language such as Korean. I know one can use google translate, but i find it very time consuming. Thanks Ottawahitech (talk) 15:50, 24 March 2020 (UTC)

@Ottawahitech -- our approach is to work with people who are multilingual. Our ambassadors, for instance, speak English and their native language (and others!), and so they are able to talk with the Growth team in English and with their communities in the local language. They also use these skills to translate newsletters and other communications. You may be able to find people who speak multiple languages by using categories. For instance, this page lists users on mediawiki.org who speak certain languages. Working with multilingual people solves most of our issues, but we also do use Google Translate from time to time, which helps us get a sense of a local conversation. MMiller (WMF) (talk) 16:00, 24 March 2020 (UTC)

<grin>Wow a second response in a few minutes is a first for me, i think. </grin>

i guess i am kind of wasting everyones time by posting here without organizing my thoughts. What i was getting at was the general difficulty of communicating with others who dont use our language. The reason i mentioned Korean was because i recently participated in a discussion proposing the deletion of a Korean wmf project . The discussion is in english.

Ottawahitech (talk) 16:13, 24 March 2020 (UTC)

Oops forgot tomention, i must logoff now Ottawahitech (talk) 16:14, 24 March 2020 (UTC)

Unfortunately, not all projects have an ambassador to do the translation work. And English is the common language over the Wikimedia movement.

We are always looking for people who speak multiple languages to facilitate conversations. Trizek (WMF) (talk) 11:38, 25 March 2020 (UTC)

Thanks Trizek (WMF) (tfor replying.. and sigh..

I got the impression from looking around (for example here: https://en.wikivoyage.org/wiki/Wikivoyage:Travellers%27_pub#Babel_templates) that wikipedia had some magic software tool that could help in translation? I guess not and we are dependent on having thousands of volunteers running around translating vast amounts of text. Ottawahitech (talk) 19:45, 25 March 2020 (UTC)

Other compagnies provide translation engines. That's a first tool to use when you are facing a text you don't understand. Have a magic button that roughly translate a text directly when you are reading the wikis would be a nice technical wish.

Until then, we will have to rely on volunteer translators. Trizek (WMF) (talk) 15:40, 26 March 2020 (UTC)

Thanks again Trizek (WMF) ,

Is there a list somewhere of translation engines provided by other (free/ ad supprted) companies? I find google translate very cumbersome.

Thanks in advance, Ottawahitech (talk) 00:32, 28 March 2020 (UTC)

I would say "on Wikipedia". :)

I use google Translate, because of the number of languages covered. I'm more and more moving to https://www.deepl.com/translator; still proprietary, but less Google, fastest and more precise (at least on the EN <-> FR translations I use). Trizek (WMF) (talk) 13:12, 30 March 2020 (UTC)

thanks for the link I will try it out when I get a chance. I just hope it does not collapse when the wiki-herds discover it :-) Ottawahitech (talk) 21:44, 31 March 2020 (UTC)

virtual classes in editing Wikipedia and otherwise supporting Wikimedia Foundation projects

What if anything has been done to offer classes in "Editing Wikipedia and other Wikimedia Foundation projects"?

I just posted a brief outline of a proposal on this to w:talk:Encourage_the_newcomers#virtual classes in editing Wikipedia and otherwise supporting Wikimedia Foundation projects. Your comments would be welcomed here or there.

Thanks, DavidMCEddy (talk) 06:23, 25 June 2020 (UTC) DavidMCEddy (talk) 06:23, 25 June 2020 (UTC)

I think that link (to en en-wiki essay page) should have been [3] Nick Moyes (talk) 10:10, 25 June 2020 (UTC)

Hi @DavidMCEddy -- thanks for bringing up this question. i have heard stories here and there about editing events, like edit-a-thons, being run online during the time of the pandemic, but I can't point to a specific example. I wonder if the Wiki Education Foundation has been thinking about this explicitly. One thing that I do know that has been successful in the past is WikiMOOC on French Wikipedia ("MOOC" standing for "massive open online course"). I think that @Trizek (WMF) might be able to fill you in or point you to more information about it. MMiller (WMF) (talk) 00:00, 1 July 2020 (UTC)

Hello

There is actually some efforts to have Wikipedia and other Wikimedia projects classes online! I'm not sure if I can list all of them, since there are numerous initiatives.

I can cite you a few examples, a lot in French since it i my primary language.

you can find massive open online courses (WikiMOOCs). Arabic and French Wikipedia have theirs. Wikimedia Chile has its own online campus for this purpose (project Wikipuentes). There is a WikiData-MOOC project ongoing.

Live editing sessions, where people are editing and explaining what they do to their audience are also common: French Wikipedia has them on Twitch, so as some Wikidataians, I know a Wiktionarist who hosts them on Youtube.

Commons hosts a lot of videos about editing. Unfortunately, a lot of ressources are dispersed.

As you noticed, all these resources are based on videos. Text-based classes are not really successful.

Some wiki-clubs are also on-line. There are less classes, but it is also a good way to learn how to edit.

Hope this helps! Trizek (WMF) (talk) 14:41, 1 July 2020 (UTC)

Lest it's of interest, in English, I've found the Wikipedia Weekly Network videos (live and also available afterwards) to be of some interest. (See here and here).

WikiProject remote event participation seems to be an attempt to coordinate good practice, and the Wikimedia DC chapter have recently run quite a few online events (mostly someone talking over a live Powerpoint presentation about the basics of Wikipedia).

But the real failure of all of us is to effectively find a way to gather together and make available information on current events, meetups and live online classes and to promote that calendar effectively. Without somebody creating a good platform to find out what's going on, and where, and then getting it publicised and used correctly, we are wasting so many wonderful opportunities.

I think this question and answer sums the situation up quite succinctly. Nick Moyes (talk) 15:39, 1 July 2020 (UTC)

Team name in other languages

Do I need to translate the name of the team to other language? And if so, what is the exact meaning of the word "growth"? :) Iniquity (talk) 12:43, 4 July 2020 (UTC)

Hi @Iniquity -- thanks for that question. @Trizek (WMF) will probably have some good advice about this. MMiller (WMF) (talk) 04:32, 6 July 2020 (UTC)

Thank you for this question!

You can translate the name in Russian if you think it should be translated. It really depends on your community's best practices, and also on how the features are perceived. If your translation focuses on the project of growing up communities, maybe a translation would be better. If your translation focuses on the team's name, maybe it shouldn't be translated since it is a proper noun, defined in English language. Honestly, it is up to you! :)

Concerning the meaning, they are defined by the team's goals and objective, in short increase retention of new contributors. We are trying to see wikis growing up, by reducing the difficulties they may face during their first steps.

I hope this helps you to better understanding the meaning of Growth!

Are you considering to have these features deployed on your wiki? Trizek (WMF) (talk) 10:48, 6 July 2020 (UTC)

@Trizek (WMF), thanks for the detailed answer! :) I will think about it.

> Are you considering to have these features deployed on your wiki?

Yes, I would like to launch these projects on my wiki. We talked about this with @MMiller (WMF) here. Iniquity (talk) 13:18, 6 July 2020 (UTC)

request for deployment of growth prototype on clinicianwiki.com

Hi I am the founder of clinicianwiki.com. This is a really exciting project and I am happy to help with testing of the prototype on clinicianwiki.com Timingliu (talk) 15:16, 11 July 2020 (UTC)

Hi @Timingliu -- thank you for getting in touch and congratulations on founding a new wiki! We agree that the Growth features have the potential to help non-Wikimedia wikis, and you are welcome to install them on your wiki. Our team is able to answer questions, but we won't be able to manage the process or alter the software to better fit non-Wikimedia wikis. Does that sound okay? MMiller (WMF) (talk) 17:55, 16 July 2020 (UTC)

Hi @MMiller (WMF) thanks for replying! How can I install the growth features on my wiki? Timingliu (talk) 17:56, 16 July 2020 (UTC)

Hi @Timingliu -- this is the page that explains about the GrowthExperiments extension and how to install it: Extension:GrowthExperiments. If you have questions, the fastest place to ask is at the support desk: Project:Support desk. Or if the questions are specific to Growth functionality, you can also ask here. MMiller (WMF) (talk) 18:22, 16 July 2020 (UTC)

Language screenshots

Hi, I found such a cool thing, maybe we can use it for project documentation? mw:Language_screenshots. Iniquity (talk) 20:10, 19 July 2020 (UTC)

This is indeed a cool thing. When it works. :/ Trizek (WMF) (talk) 10:08, 22 July 2020 (UTC)

xD I hope someday there is someone who will support it :) Iniquity (talk) 10:21, 22 July 2020 (UTC)

Logo font

Hi, I asked @RHo (WMF), but she isn't answer me:) What font do you use for your logo? Iniquity (talk) 12:15, 26 July 2020 (UTC)

Hi @Iniquity, in answer to your question the Growth team logo uses Montserrat , the same font used for the Wikimeddia Foundation wordmark and titles (see more info on meta here), hope that helps! RHo (WMF) (talk) 10:00, 27 July 2020 (UTC)

Thanks! :) Iniquity (talk) 14:12, 27 July 2020 (UTC)

Translation from translatewiki.net

@Trizek (WMF), hi:) How often is the translation from the translatewiki.net updated? Iniquity (talk) 22:00, 8 September 2020 (UTC)

Hello!

Once a week, with the deployment train as announced on Tech News (on Thursdays for your wiki).

In the meantime, you can override some messages locally, but don't forget to remove them when the translation is available! Trizek (WMF) (talk) 14:00, 9 September 2020 (UTC)

Yes, I know that, but I haven't received translations for the second week. Iniquity (talk) 20:20, 9 September 2020 (UTC)

Newcomer's Features- Issues and Suggestions

(Topic title edited by Clump (talk), 2001:FB1:11F:B263:E07B:901E:72FB:D63A, המקיסט (talk))

Hello. I'm from the Hebrew Wikipedia and I helped in deploying the Growth's newcomer features to the Hebrew Wikipedia, which have been recently deployed to our wiki. I just wanted to point out several suggestions and issues that were raised from our Wikipedia, in hope they will be solved, and therefore it will be easier for us to promote the features for frequent usage (and hopefully to set them as default in the future):

-It was suggested that the features should also suggest to new users to write new articles that don't currently exist (the ideas for such articles can be taken from lists we have in our various wikipedia's portals). I suggest that such edits can be suggested to users who choose the "hard" difficulty level of edits in the newcomers' suggested edits.

-It was asked that the blue button on the left side will not have a question mark on it. Although I personally don't think it's problematic, I would like to hear what is your opinion in this manner. Maybe it is better using something else instead?

-If the features are applied as default, will the homepage for newcomers be applied as default to every user (including the experienced ones), or only to these who register since then? The problem is that if it's applied to anyone, many users who don't really need mentors will have to manually remove the random mentor which was assigned to them (because they don't need one), which is quite an inconvenience to say the least.

Thanks המקיסט (talk) 19:20, 24 September 2020 (UTC)

Hello @המקיסט -- thank you so much for helping deploy these features to your wiki and for communicating about them with your community. So far, there have been 298 suggested edits from 39 users! There have also been 106 mentor questions and 33 help panel questions.

I also heard about some community thoughts from @Aaharoni-WMF, so I'm tagging him here in case he wants to weigh in.

"It was suggested that the features should also suggest to new users to write new articles that don't currently exist (the ideas for such articles can be taken from lists we have in our various wikipedia's portals). I suggest that such edits can be suggested to users who choose the "hard" difficulty level of edits in the newcomers' suggested edits."

• It's interesting to hear you say this, because we have always thought about it the other way around. Usually, it seems like many newcomers want to create new articles, but they fail either because they don't understand the technology or don't understand policies. And so our features try to encourage newcomers to try easier edits first before they create new articles. How are you thinking about this? Is your wiki comfortable with newcomers creating new articles? Or maybe only after they've accomplished some easier edits?

"It was asked that the blue button on the left side will not have a question mark on it. Although I personally don't think it's problematic, I would like to hear what is your opinion in this manner. Maybe it is better using something else instead?"

• In general, when we design a feature, we actually try to design it in similar ways that other kinds of software do it. The reason is that people on the internet get used to certain symbols meaning certain things. Then when they see those symbols in our products, they automatically know what they mean instead of having to learn a new symbol. A common example is using an "X" to close a window. That's why we use the question mark -- we think people already know that the question mark means "help". Does that make sense?

"If the features are applied as default, will the homepage for newcomers be applied as default to every user (including the experienced ones), or only to these who register since then? The problem is that if it's applied to anyone, many users who don't really need mentors will have to manually remove the random mentor which was assigned to them (because they don't need one), which is quite an inconvenience to say the least."

• The way the features work right now is that all new accounts created on Hebrew Wikipedia since the deployment date have an 80% to receive the features. The other 20% are in our "control group", meaning that we compare the work of the 80% to the 20% to see if the Growth features have impact. So as time goes on, more and more users will have the features available, and will hopefully be used to them. Many experienced editors have asked us to adapt the homepage to be more useful for their work. That's certainly something that's possible in the future, but it's just that the Growth team's goal is to focus on newcomers for now. Regarding the mentors -- why do you say that experienced users would have to remove the mentor? If the user doesn't intend to ask any mentor questions, they can just leave the mentorship module alone, and choose not to ask any questions.

Let me now what you think! MMiller (WMF) (talk) 23:20, 29 September 2020 (UTC)

About lists of articles in portals:

There are a couple of issues here:

1. To begin with, it's not necessary about article creation. Portals at the Hebrew Wikipedia also include lists of articles to improve, sometimes manually curated, and sometimes as a link to a category of stubs on the topic. The bigger issue is how can they be connected to the product you are developing. Or, to generalize it even more: How can wiki editors —in any wiki, not just in Hebrew— directly influence the topics and the suggested articles in them. If I understand correctly, they are currently built by analyzing WikiProject templates in the English Wikipedia, processing it with some algorithms, and applying the results to other languages. While this produces reasonable results from what I've seen, it's quite different from the usual way in which wiki editors work: They are used to influencing things directly by editing wiki pages and seeing the results applied immediately in lists or categories. The current technology has several layers that remove the topics from the editors' control. So it's not specifically about portals, but more about having a way to control things directly.
2. Talking about article creation, the Hebrew Wikipedia is not substantially different from English in this regard. Some articles created by new editors are good, and some are not so good. The English Wikipedia is simply much larger, and has much more new article creation, and primarily because of that it has stricter rules and technical limitations about that. Amire80 (talk) 07:53, 30 September 2020 (UTC)

About the question mark icon:

Indeed, one user said this, and indeed, there are many other sites that do this. We are just passing the message. That user said that he doesn't like this icon because it is used on other websites, and on other websites it's often ineffective. I don't know if there are many other people who think like he does, but he may have a point: by itself, the fact that it's used on many other sites and apps doesn't mean that it's good and effective. Other than saying that, I trust the Growth designers and the design researchers to make good choices here. Amire80 (talk) 07:53, 30 September 2020 (UTC)

@MMiller (WMF), @Amire80 Thanks for your comments. It's great to hear that the features are used more and more in our wiki.

As for the adaptation of the homepage, I'm happy to hear that it applies to more and more users by default. Indeed, there are experienced users who want to use the homepage also in our wiki. However, many experienced users preferred to remove the mentor and just try the experience of the homepage. המקיסט (talk) 14:00, 30 September 2020 (UTC)

Survey Results Regarding the Newcomers' Features in the Hebrew Wikipedia

Hello. I had recently made a Survey among Hebrew Wikipedia's users regarding the Newcomers' Features, which was active for about a month (October 14th-November 7th). I would like to share here important results, notes and suggestions from this survey, which will hopefully help in the future development of the features for all of the relevant Wikipedias in general, and the Hebrew Wikipedia in particular. 22 people responded, most of them (except for 5-6) were experienced users, so this should also be considered when seeing the results.

(most of the questions were in a scale from 1-5. 1= not at all, 5=very much)

*When being asked about how much the users are satisfied from the features, most of the users chose 4 and 5 (out of 22, 6 users chose 5 and 7 users chose 4). Therefore, the users are overall satisfied with the features.

*When being asked how much they would like the features to stay in the Hebrew Wikipedia for the future, most of the users chose 5- 11 users out of 22 (so they indeed want the features to stay).

*When being asked how much they would like the features to be available as default for both new and experienced users, most of the users chose 4 and 5 (7 users chose 4, 5 users chose 5 while 4 users chose 3, 2 users chose 2, and 4 users chose 1). Therefore, there is a will among the users to see the features for both new and experienced users as default in the future (however, I also explained later that it's just an option that may be available for the future, and not something to be done soon).

*When asking users who were/are mentors regarding their satisfaction from the mentorship, most of the users chose 3 (5 out of 14), while 4 users chose 4 and 4 users chose 1 (and another user chose 2), so there isn't enough satisfaction from the mentorship.

I got a few more encouraging results about liking the newcomers' homepage (out of 8 users, 7 users chose answers 4 and 5), users being satisfied with the module of suggested edits (out of 5 users, 4 chose answers 4 and 5), or users being satisfied with the help panel (out of 4 users, 4 chose answers 4 and 5), but sadly only few users answered there, so I don't think it can represent enough users to use as a collective answer from our community.

In addition, I would also like to mention a few notes and suggestions that were raised in said survey:

*Users didn't like the random matching of mentees (I explained the reason for such thing, however, and that helping users with basic questions is not as same as a mandatory mentorship and thus personal matching of mentors is not critical for this kind of mentorship. I also offered to tag specific people if they are needed, and to use templates we have to tag experts in various subjects).

*Mentors are unable to know who their mentees are and their contributions (was mentioned quite a lot, before the survey and in it. I mentioned that such thing is in the Phabricator and in development, but this emphasises the need and the importance of such tools).

*It was reported that new users don't answer after they questions were answered (and it even seemed many didn't continue in Wikipedia after that). I wrote about the importance of tagging users, but it's not necessarily the factor here and probably also happened with tagged users.

*Users asked for more subjects in the suggested edits module (and to separate subjects: to separate "Philosophy and Religion" to two separate subjects, and separate the different religions into different subjects instead of putting them all into one). My personal recommendation in this case would be using our portals (hubs, "main pages" for specific subjects) for listing subjects in this module.

*Users suggested to use flow pages (or even mail) for the discussions with the mentees that should be in experienced users' talk pages in order not to overload talk pages, helping the mentees to find the page to talk with their mentors, and to help them not to struggle with WikiCode.

Thanks and sorry for the long message. Hope this will be helpful, and will improve the experience of the features. המקיסט (talk) 21:38, 8 November 2020 (UTC)

Thank you for your message. This survey is a great initiative, and we are happy that you shared the results with us. :)

the results are indeed helpful. First, it shows that people seem to be overall happy about the features.

Concerning notes and suggestions, I have some replies for you that may help mentors.

If a mentor wants to collaborate with a given newcomer, it is possible to claim a mentee. This is useful if you find someone who like editing on the same topic as yours, or if you host a workshop IRL and want to follow up on wikis the people you met.

Mentors wanting to know who are their mentees is covered by a few tickets on Phabricator. I invite you to look at these tickets, since you may find things about having a mentor dashboard, or a filter in recent changes and watchlist just showing your mentees' edits. Your survey gives some wright to these ideas. Please leave comments there with the feedback you received in your survey.

New users not responding is not a surprise to me. As a volunteer, I'm a mentor since 10 years on French Wikipedia, and some newcomers come back after a while. I recently had the case of a user responding after 3 months of absence! It seems to be a lot of time for people like us, active every day on the wikis, but for people who aren't wikiholdics like we are, it is a normal span of time.

For talk pages, maybe you should ask to have the reply tool being deployed to everyone by default on your wiki? It would ease replies from newcomers.

I let @MMiller (WMF) comment as well. :)

thank you again for sharing! Trizek (WMF) (talk) 19:03, 10 November 2020 (UTC)

Thanks! :) I will indeed comment in the phabricator regarding showing mentees and their activity to their mentors.

I was a bit surprised to hear that newcomers come back after such a long time and respond, but it definitely sounds right. Hopefully more and more newcomers will return in the future in this manner.

As for deploying the flow tool as default for the Hebrew Wikipedia- I guess I can raise this topic there and see what the community thinks about it, although I personally prefer the regular talk pages over it. המקיסט (talk) 10:53, 11 November 2020 (UTC)

My personal experience on fr.wp is a response time from newcomers of 2-3 days OR around 15 days. This is also something to consider if one has an archiving system on their talk page: don't archive too early!

Structured Discussions (Flow) will not be deployed by default on any wiki. This tool will be abandoned when the new talk pages system will be ready. Trizek (WMF) (talk) 13:45, 16 November 2020 (UTC)

Thanks, I will point this out to the mentors in our wiki.

I'm really sorry for confusing between flow and the reply tool (didn't know there was such tool and accidentally thought it's flow). I hope the discussion there will continue now considering said reply tool. By the way, there was another tool that was suggested previously in this discussion, which is quite similar to the reply tool ,but has more options and is a bit better I think. AFAIK it's called "Convenient Discussions" ("דיונים נוחים"), and it's not avaliable in our wiki through beta, but by adding this line to common.js:

mw.loader.load('https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=User:Jack_who_built_the_house/convenientDiscussions.js&action=raw&ctype=text/javascript');

I tried it and it's not perfect but overall fine. Many editors who responded previously favoured it over the reply tool and flow. Therefore, I think it may be another good alternative, and suggested it as an option too. המקיסט (talk) 14:31, 16 November 2020 (UTC)

No problem on the confusion. Like I wrote, it happen quite often.

Concerning Convenient Discussions, it is a script. If I remember correctly, this script is loaded for each talk page you visit. But the new reply tool (כלי שיחה) works when asked to. It is lighter and the interface is similar to other tools. the reply tool would be a much better experience for newcomers.

However, I'm not currently working on discussion tools. I informed my colleague WhatamIgoing about the conversation you have on your wiki. Trizek (WMF) (talk) 15:01, 16 November 2020 (UTC)

Stats and trends of ukwiki

Hi, @Trizek (WMF), @MMiller (WMF), I'm working on a presentation for the Ukrainian WikiConference about the Growth initiatives, particularly, Newcomer homepage. Can you please guide me to where I can find the numbers and findings about it that exist for ukwiki? Thanks a lot. Ата (talk) 16:58, 25 November 2020 (UTC)

Hi @Ата -- I'm glad to hear that you will be presenting about the Growth features! We think the Growth features are going well, and there is a lot of good news to talk about. We also would be eager to hear what your community members think about them so far. I can generate some numbers and graphs about Ukrainian Wikipedia next week. Is that okay? Here are some questions we have for you:

• The graphs that I want to make are like this one and this one, showing numbers of edits over time and numbers of editors over time. There are a lot of wikis on those graphs, and perhaps it would be easier to show them if we only have a small number of wikis to compare with Ukrainian. Are there some wikis on the list that you think would make the most interesting comparisons?
• Do you need any other help with your presentation? @Trizek (WMF) and I have many slides and pictures. We could also help you learn about our team's future plans, specifically around "structured tasks".

Let us know! MMiller (WMF) (talk) 19:25, 25 November 2020 (UTC)

@MMiller (WMF), If you can generate some numbers and graphs about Ukrainian Wikipedia next week, it will be awesome! I assume that cswiki, huwiki, plwiki, and possibly svwiki might be interesting for comparison. I also asked some users what that would like to hear in the presentation, and here are some points:

• Are mentors being monitored by someone? Is the mentor—mentee conversation being moderated by someone else, and if not, should it be? (My answer: no, they aren't and it isn't; but I saw mentors supplementing additional details when the already given answer from another mentor doesn't seem well. I assume that the question derives from fear of some self-proclaimed mentors not being experienced and humble enough, which says something about the community and not the Growth features themselves.)
• What are the best cases of mentoring? (My answer: I have noticed some imho very nice instances and would like to talk to some mentors next week.)
• How do mentors like the process? (I guess, one would have to ask the all for that.)
• How do mentees like the suggested edits, was there any survey?
• What are the quality of their edits, are they any good?

I am currently looking through the subpages here and presentations on Commons (like this one) and I will gladly receive any suggestions about what findings and future plans you would like me to underline during the 45 minutes that I will have next Sunday :) My email is vira.motorko at gmail.com in case you need it. Ата (talk) 10:43, 27 November 2020 (UTC)

I can reply to some of the questions :

• About mentoring mentors: the list of mentors is public and talk pages are public as well. It is up to anyone to monitor their activity, as other people monitor what's going on on talk pages. Lists of mentors are usually protected so that not everyone can add their name there. And of course, it is frequent to see other people adding extra information to a mentor reply.
• About best cases of mentoring, I would be curious to have examples since this is not something we particularly monitor.
• About mentors liking the process, it is important to keep in mind that we (as the whole WMF) mostly receive messages about things that don't work. :) I never had the chance to have a direct feedback from a mentor telling me that they like very much the process. I got a few pieces of feedback related to people disliking the process, mostly about the quality of questions received by mentors. However, this is subjective: some people we complaining because they didn't get actual questions but just greetings. Also some rare mentors were complaining about the quality of questions. An evaluation about the quality of messages has been conduced on French Wikipedia and Portuguese Wikipedia. And it appears that the majority of questions received are aligned with Wikipedia's scope, and even if they are not questions, they provide actionable feedback.
• About knowing if mentees like the suggested edits, we haven't surveyed them. But data seems to prove that they appreciate them since the number of edits they make during their first couple of weeks on the wiki significantly increases (+85,6%). Regarding quality, we mesure it by the number of reverts, and the quality of edits made using our tools is comparable to that of a control group. However, our tools haven't measured the overall quality, that would need humans to compare edits.

As Marshall mentioned, our next big step is Structured tasks. Our first tool is about adding links to the articles, and we will test it on our pilot wikis as a prototype. The slides at the end of this presentation would give you a good overview of our project (even if they are just mockups). The tool would be based on a yes/no/not sure system, to guide newcomers understanding what is a good link, and to help improving connexions between different concepts. The yes/no/not sure system would allow them to focus on understanding concepts first without the obligation to understand how to edit (even if they still can edit if they wish to).

Let us know if you need more information! Trizek (WMF) (talk) 10:15, 30 November 2020 (UTC)

@Ата -- I've made some graphs that may be useful to you. The first two show the number of distinct users completing suggested edits each work during 2020, and the second two show the number of edits completed.

• https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Suggested_edits_users_by_week_for_ukwiki_2020-11-30.png
• https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Suggested_edits_users_by_week_for_five_wikis_2020-11-30.png
• https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Suggested_edits_by_week_for_ukwiki_2020-11-30.png
• https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Suggested_edits_by_week_for_five_wikis_2020-11-30.png

Two additional numbers that may be interesting are:

• 476 mentorship questions have been asked by 379 users in Ukrainian Wikipedia
• 275 help panel questions have been asked by 208 users in Ukrainian Wikipedia

Regarding whether mentees like the suggested edits, we asked newcomers on Arabic, Czech, Korean, and Vietnamese about their experiences by posting questions on their talk pages. These questions went to newcomers who have been doing a lot of suggested edits, so we would expect their responses to be positive (otherwise they would have not done so many suggested edits). Many of them say that suggested edits helps them find interesting things to work on, that they like to choose topics of interest to narrow the articles down to certain areas, and that the feature has helped them learn editing policies and rules. We've also seen that some users do a few suggested edits and then move on to other kinds of edits, like translating articles. Other users just continue to do hundreds of suggested edits day after day.

In terms of a best case of mentoring, one story comes to mind from Vietnamese Wikipedia in which a mentee has since grown their involvement and is now a mentor.

Like @Trizek (WMF) said, we are especially interested to know what your community members think of structured tasks. You're welcome to show and demo the prototypes that are in this section.

I hope this information is helpful, and please stay in touch with any other needs. We want to hear how the session goes! MMiller (WMF) (talk) 23:31, 30 November 2020 (UTC)

Thank you both, Marshall and Benoît, you are extremely helpful, as always Hopefully I will have some thoughts about the structured tasks from the conference attendees right away; and of course it can be discussed onwiki later. Ата (talk) 11:22, 1 December 2020 (UTC)

Thank you Ата. We thank you as well, since you continuously take care of the experiments on Ukrainian Wikipedia! :)

This brand new page may also interest you as well: Growth/Results. Trizek (WMF) (talk) 13:32, 1 December 2020 (UTC)

A late update from me: I used the suggested media, and the session went ok Here are my findings and questions:

• The mentors have a need to know better what newcomers see and to share best practices of having conversations with them – it will be good to have an extended talk about this separately.
• How do newcomers know that their question on the help desk or on the mentors talk page got answered? I stressed the importance of pinging users – and also people suggest that these notifications were more prominent, maybe even in a form of another block on the homepage, or as an additional bell icon next to the mentor's name (look! they answered you!).
• In the suggested edit module, – in Ready? Click "Edit" to get started. – the word Edit might be a link to the action=edit, or be in some other way more suggestive about where to actually click. (As far as I remember there is this blue dot that suggests clicking? does it work here? I wasn't sure.)
• Is it possible to switch Extension:GrowthExperiments on a non-Wikimedia wiki?
• Can a mentor mark themselves as away yet? will a newbie be automatically switched from a mentor who haven't logged in for a while to another mentor?
• One experienced mentor reminded us that newcomers' questions may be sorted out in recent edits, and by looking for recent versions mentors can find questions, unanswered by others.

There was no particular feedback on structured edits. Ата (talk) 18:31, 14 December 2020 (UTC)

Thank you for your report! It is really appreciated.

• Mentors can discover a newcomer typical experience by creating a new account. Concerning mentors, I don't know if you know that we have a training for them.
• Newcomers know that their question has been answered when (and if) they are pinged. Like you said, pinging is a must-have on a reply. This idea of having a notification on the homepage is something that should be considered. Thank you for passing this along!
• There is always a blinking blue spot highlighting the "edit" button.
• It is possible to deploy the extension to any Mediawiki wiki that has the right configuration. But we won't support any suggestions coming from third party wikis.
• It is not yet possible for a mentor to say they are away. Please add any context concerning this question to T227876 if you can.
• Great reminder. Has it lead to people suggesting to take care about questions left by other mentors? Are mentors cooperating on your wiki?

Let me know if you need more details about anything! :) Trizek (WMF) (talk) 17:49, 15 December 2020 (UTC)

@Ата -- thank you for the notes about your meeting. It is always good to hear these sorts of thoughts and ideas. I have a couple more notes to add:

• I suspect that newcomers who don't find out that their question has been answered is one of the biggest problems with the mentorship workflow. I think that many newcomers may expect an answer in seconds or minutes, instead of hours or days, and so once they don't receive an answer, they close the window and don't come back. Many of them also don't register with an email address, and so unless they go back to the wiki to look for their notifications, they may not find out that they have received a response even if they have been pinged. I think some ideas to address this include (a) introducing some sort of live chat so that newcomers don't have to wait for a response, (b) encouraging more newcomers to register with an email address when they create their account, (c) maybe one day integrating with a chat app so that newcomers could get pinged to their phone.
• About making the word Edit into a link to action=edit: this is actually something we discussed when building the feature. The reason we didn't want a link there is because part of the point of suggested edits is to teach newcomers to edit on their own. Therefore, we want them to know that they have to click "Edit" at the top, so we don't want to give them a confusing shortcut when they're being guided. So instead, we apply the blue dot. MMiller (WMF) (talk) 19:45, 15 January 2021 (UTC)

Handle newcomers mentor assignment when a mentor quits

(Topic title edited by Trizek (WMF) (talk), Ainali (talk))

Tracked in Phabricator
Task T272376

Trizek (WMF) (talk) 14:23, 15 March 2021 (UTC)

What happens if a mentor removes themselves from the list (if they for some reasons don't want to continue being a mentor)? Will the newcomer get a new mentor automatically (and if so, will they be notified)? Ainali (talk) 16:42, 8 January 2021 (UTC)

Once a user has been assigned a mentor, they keep that mentor even if the mentor removes themselves from the active mentor list.

The workaround is to use Special:ClaimMentee. It can be used by any other mentor who monitors the retired mentor's talk page so that they can empty the list of active newcomers for this retired mentor.

We are working on plans about scaling and improving tools for mentors. In your opinion, what would be the ideal solution for this situation? :) Trizek (WMF) (talk) 14:38, 12 January 2021 (UTC)

I guess the tricky part is to know which newcomers were assigned to this mentor. Or is this information public somewhere? Ainali (talk) 13:59, 6 March 2021 (UTC)

See Help:Growth/Mentorship/Integrating mentorship#Magic word. NGC 54 (talk) 14:01, 6 March 2021 (UTC)

The magic word is not a solution to this. It's just one user and it is actually the other way around. It shows a mentor for specific mentee. It would help if it would show all mentees for a specific mentor. Nux (talk) 09:48, 13 March 2021 (UTC)

A tool that reassign mentees en masse would help there? You put a mentor's name in it and all mentees are reassigned. This is covered by T272376, as you know. :) Trizek (WMF) (talk) 14:22, 15 March 2021 (UTC)

Yes. That would be great 🙂. I'm sometimes curios how many mentees I have, but I don't really need that info. Nux (talk) 16:51, 15 March 2021 (UTC)

We have a project to have a mentor dashboard which could potentially include an overview of your mentees :) Trizek (WMF) (talk) 16:54, 15 March 2021 (UTC)

Thanks for the answer.

One simple idea that we got was just to randomly assign a new mentor and then give a notification to the newcomer what has happened. Ainali (talk) 07:06, 17 January 2021 (UTC)

I support this idea. NGC 54 (talk) 13:47, 6 March 2021 (UTC)

The idea of automatically reassign activated mentees to new mentors when their mentor quits or is blocked is tracked as T272376, where I'm going to add your feedback. Trizek (WMF) (talk) 13:34, 8 March 2021 (UTC)

Who is the newcomers's mentor?

There is a problem that the is not synchronized with the mentor list in any way. And I, with a cursory glance, could not find how to do it. Is there an API that allows you to see who the mentor of a particular newcomers is? Iniquity (talk) 20:32, 9 January 2021 (UTC)

I think a word is missing in the first part of your message. :)

> Is there an API that allows you to see who the mentor of a particular newcomers is?

No. Could you describe what would be the outcome of it? What is the need for mentors? Trizek (WMF) (talk) 15:35, 11 January 2021 (UTC)

Hello :)) Yes, “Hello template” is missing :) I want to synchronise this template with mentors list. Iniquity (talk) 16:46, 11 January 2021 (UTC)

It seems that it is a popular request. See https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T233250 for details! :) Trizek (WMF) (talk) 14:12, 12 January 2021 (UTC)

Wikidata

Linking to Wikidata could be another "medium" task. NGC 54 (talk) 13:55, 16 February 2021 (UTC)

Thank you for this suggestion. However, we prefer to keep things on Wikipedia for now, to avoid confusion by editing across the wikis. Trizek (WMF) (talk) 14:04, 16 February 2021 (UTC)

@NGC 54 -- thanks for the idea! Could you explain more about what this task would include? What would the newcomers link to Wikidata? MMiller (WMF) (talk) 00:29, 20 February 2021 (UTC)

@MMiller (WMF): Articles. NGC 54 (talk) 10:55, 20 February 2021 (UTC)

So it would be about including newly created articles to Wikidata? Trizek (WMF) (talk) 15:15, 22 February 2021 (UTC)

@Trizek (WMF): Not only "newly". For example, on Romanian Wikipedia ( ro:Categorie:Articole care necesită legături interlingve ) there are some articles unconnected to Wikidata. However, I see that this task would be suitable only for some wikis, where there are articles that have this issue. NGC 54 (talk) 17:39, 22 February 2021 (UTC)

Thank you. As you say, we are trying to create tools with an universal use. But this issue is real and should be kept in mind. Trizek (WMF) (talk) 18:49, 22 February 2021 (UTC)

Homepage

I see that there is an empty space between "Suggested edits", "Your impact", "Your mentor" and "Get help with editing" modules. Is there any proposed module for that empty space?

I do not see a "Ask the Help Desk" button in Homepage; a similar button would be useful (to choose ask the mentor or ask the Help Desk).

Why the "Create a new article" task cannot be checked? If it is not a real task, it could be integrated somewhere else, but the users still need a tutorial about how to create an article (where the notability is also described). "Create a new article" could be another module, but in this case it should be recommended to edit before that (with "Suggested edits").

Also, a tutorial about translating pages would be good (with ContentTranslation and with a draft/subpage in "User page"). NGC 54 (talk) 14:19, 16 February 2021 (UTC)

Hi @NGC 54 -- you bring up an interesting point about having the "ask the help desk" button on the homepage. In the first version of the homepage we actually did include both buttons. Here is a screenshot. But we found that the "mentor" button got about 15 times more questions than the "help desk" button. Based on how obvious it was that users preferred to ask mentors, we removed the "help desk" option in order to simplify the page.

Regarding content translation, we are planning an integration! The Language team is starting to roll out the "section translation" capability, which we think will be easier for newcomers than translating full articles (and it works on mobile). The idea would be that users could select "section translation" as a task, and then the feed would list articles that need sections translated. When the newcomer selects an article, it would take them to the Content Translation tool. How does that sound? Do you think that would work well? MMiller (WMF) (talk) 00:35, 20 February 2021 (UTC)

Ok. NGC 54 (talk) 11:40, 21 February 2021 (UTC)

Current state of the Homepage

I think you don't see the Impact module. But this module is default. Can you compare with the screenshot?

The "ask the help desk" button is supposed to be displayed on the help panel, not on the Homepage. Maybe you found an out-of-date information on a project page. Do you have a link to it?

Create a new article is a very often requested task. As a volunteer mentor on French Wikipedia, I got this question every 3 questions. The goal with this greyed box is to encourage newcomers to do the other tasks beforehand. We kept this box as a placeholder, and as an encouragement to do the other tasks. Plus, on wikis where the tools are active, there is a link that goes to the local article wizard.

At the moment, we have no plans regarding the development of things around this box, but we are considering to have something around translations. For now, we are exploring this possibility by asking people who create a new account if they can work on translations. We use the Welcome Survey for this. Trizek (WMF) (talk) 14:57, 16 February 2021 (UTC)

I see the "Your impact" module. NGC 54 (talk) 15:05, 16 February 2021 (UTC)

Where is your empty space then? Trizek (WMF) (talk) 15:42, 16 February 2021 (UTC)

@Trizek (WMF):

Red - empty space

NGC 54 (talk) 16:17, 16 February 2021 (UTC)

Ha, yes. So we have the same thing. :)

It is normal. We may have some new modules coming there at some point. Trizek (WMF) (talk) 17:20, 16 February 2021 (UTC)

Another possible task:

• Adding an image
• Uploading an image
• Adding a category
• Creating a category
• Creating a redirection NGC 54 (talk) 11:17, 17 February 2021 (UTC)

Thank you for your suggestions.

We are currently working on adding an image.

We have discarded uploading an image, due to the complexity of copyright. Also, we focus on Wikipedia, and uploading images is more a Wikimedia Commons thing.

Concerning the other suggestions, how do you think newcomers will appreciate them? Trizek (WMF) (talk) 13:08, 17 February 2021 (UTC)

Change request in the Post welcome survey path

@Trizek (WMF)

This is about tewiki.

Post survey submission, the newcomer is taken to a page where it is asking to choose a destination from

1. where the newcomer came form (lets call it "referring page") and 2. newcomer Homepage.

If the newcomer chooses the referring page, there is a chance that the newcomer may not remember to go to his Homepage after that. The very purpose of the project is defeated at this point.

Please see if it can be changed as -

The newcomer will be taken to the Homepage after the survey. There, they will be asked if they want to go the trigger page. This way, they will not miss the friendly homepage, and the mentor.

Thank you Chaduvari (talk) 04:53, 26 March 2021 (UTC)

Hello @Chaduvari

The newcomer is supposed to get a pop-up that shows the user page link, and sans something like "there is your homepage, don't forget to visit it".

We had to make a choice between forwarding users who create an account to immediately edit a page, compared to the ones who just create an account. We choose to give a choice to the user. :) Trizek (WMF) (talk) 13:02, 26 March 2021 (UTC)

Initial Editor settings for the New user

Tracked in Phabricator
Task T279029

Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 03:04, 1 April 2021 (UTC)

@Trizek (WMF), this is about my observation on tewiki.

New user has their editor preferences set as 2010 Wikitext editor. I think it should be Visual editor which makes editing easy and user-friendly for them. Can you please think it over.. thank you. Chaduvari (talk) 07:56, 30 March 2021 (UTC)

Thank you for your feedback. I'm curious to know how you tested it. Here is what I did:

1. I picked a random task from my Homepage,
2. I click "Edit",
3. I have the visual editor.

I did it using my work account and also a brand new test account.

At the moment, your wiki has one single "edit" tab. By default, clicking on it loads the visual editor for new users. If they switch to the 2010 wikitext editor when the edit and save from this editor, then the Edit tab will open the wikitext editor until the user switches back to the visual editor.

The help panel, shown when people work on suggested edits, encourage users to switch back to the visual editor. Trizek (WMF) (talk) 12:33, 30 March 2021 (UTC)

I created a new user and tested it. To recheck, I created another user today. After completing the survey, I went to my Homepage. From there, I went to edit a page. There I saw "Edit source" tab only. When I clicked it, it showed me 2010 Wikitext editor.

In the "edits" tab of the "preferences", the settings are like this:

• "Template:Int": Checked
• "Template:Int": Unchecked
• In the "Template:Int" drop-down list, "Template:Int" is selected Chaduvari (talk) 06:35, 31 March 2021 (UTC)

Thank you. The visual editor is the default editor on your wiki.

@Whatamidoing (WMF), did I miss something on this issue? Why some new users get the wikitext editor on te.wp? Trizek (WMF) (talk) 13:41, 31 March 2021 (UTC)

I'm not sure what's going on, but I've filed a bug report, and the devs will look into it. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 03:04, 1 April 2021 (UTC)

Mentor and mentees

@Trizek (WMF), hi :) Help me please. Do all newcomers get a mentor? Or only 80%? Iniquity (talk) 09:10, 9 April 2021 (UTC)

Hello!

At the moment, the features are only given to 80% of newcomers. We plan to move to 100% soon, after our second look at the data. It is a work in progress, we expect the results to be published soon! Trizek (WMF) (talk) 10:08, 9 April 2021 (UTC)

Hello @Iniquity and @Trizek (WMF), I'd like to clarify this a bit. While the features are enabled only to 80 % of newcomers, a mentor is assigned to everyone, including users who do not get the features. The assigned mentor is not used by MediaWiki itself, but it can be retreived through the magic keyword (#mentor) and used by on-wiki templates. That was decided in T275514. Best, Martin Urbanec (WMF) (talk) 10:37, 9 April 2021 (UTC)

Thank you very much for your reply! @Martin Urbanec (WMF), and for old users, those who were registered before Growth functions were deployed on wiki, a mentor is assigned? Iniquity (talk) 11:21, 9 April 2021 (UTC)

No, and it also isn't assigned for people who did not get Growth features before T275514 was implemented. Martin Urbanec (WMF) (talk) 18:42, 9 April 2021 (UTC)

Ok, thanks :) Iniquity (talk) 18:51, 9 April 2021 (UTC)

Statistics for ro.wp

Does it would be possible to see data for Romanian Wikipedia like those from Growth/Analytics updates/EditorJourney initial report and Growth/Analytics updates/Welcome survey initial report? NGC 54 (talk) 18:38, 10 April 2021 (UTC)

EditorJourney is not available for your wiki. We are limiting the number of wikis where this tool is used, since it is collecting data. It is a lot of work to have it on more wikis, so we have decided not to deploy it anymore. But the report you link to is a good reflection of what people do when they create an account on Wikipedia, whatever the language.

Regarding the Welcome survey, I'm asking of some data could be available soon. Trizek (WMF) (talk) 13:10, 13 April 2021 (UTC)

Links suggestion

When suggesting links, Special:DeadendPages could also be used. NGC 54 (talk) 11:39, 24 April 2021 (UTC)

Thanks for that note, @NGC 54. I think the idea behind that special page is similar to what our algorithm will be doing. The link recommendation algorithm is going to be finding articles that need lots of links added. They won't necessarily have zero links, but they will have fewer than other articles. MMiller (WMF) (talk) 23:13, 27 April 2021 (UTC)

Notice about the medium and hard tasks

After completing some linking and/or copyediting tasks, and if no medium/hard tasks are selected, users could be noticed again on Special:Homepage about updating, references adding and expanding. On Romanian Wikipedia, I do not see users updating, adding references or expanding (expanding I see, but seldom) when using Suggested Edits, only copyediting, adding links and vandalizing (see https://ro.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Schimb%C4%83ri_recente?hidebots=1&hidecategorization=1&hideWikibase=1&tagfilter=newcomer+task%7Chelp+panel+question&limit=1000&days=30&urlversion=2). NGC 54 (talk) 18:05, 3 May 2021 (UTC)

@NGC 54 -- that's right, we definitely want to work on this in the future. We think that if we see newcomers who are successfully accomplishing easy tasks, we could nudge them to try harder and more valuable ones. This is part of what we're thinking about in the upcoming "positive reinforcement" project. MMiller (WMF) (talk) 21:32, 14 May 2021 (UTC)

Unable to add template on bn:মিডিয়াউইকি:NewcomerTasks.json using Special:EditGrowthConfig

(Topic title edited by Martin Urbanec (WMF) (talk), আফতাবুজ্জামান (talk))

Tracked in Phabricator
Task T285748

Tracked in Phabricator
Task T285750

Tacsipacsi (talk) 13:01, 29 June 2021 (UTC)

I'm trying to add a template (bn:টেমপ্লেট:পরিষ্করণ) on bn:Mediawiki:NewcomerTasks.json using Special:EditGrowthConfig but it's not working. It's says "টেমপ্লেট:টেমপ্লেট:পরিষ্করণ-এর অস্তিত্ব নেই।" (Template:Template:পরিষ্করণ does not exist).

I tried adding "পরিষ্করণ" without prefix "টেমপ্লেট:" (template) but that is also not working.

1. I need guideline how to add template using Special:EditGrowthConfig (note: i successfully edited that on test wiki but for some reason not on bnwiki)

2. while doing that, when i submitted the edit, this happened. id changed to wikidata item id. Is it ok or should i revert the edit? আফতাবুজ্জামান (talk) 01:46, 29 June 2021 (UTC)

Thank you for getting in touch about this! @Martin Urbanec (WMF) can help you with your question. MMiller (WMF) (talk) 02:05, 29 June 2021 (UTC)

@আফতাবুজ্জামান Hello, thank you for reporting this bug! The special pag wants you to use no-prefix names. However, it looks there's a bug in the autocomplete mechanism, looking to the main namespace instead to the template one. As the form checks for existance of the template, it doesn't let you to add a page that's not suggested by the autocomplete, and as the suggestions are wrong, you're not allowed to add this template there.

I filled this autocomplete bug as T285748 to Phabricator. Since I'm not able to fix the cause, I also figured out a workaround, which you can see in T285750 in Phabricator.

Ad 1) Unfortunately, that's not possible via the form because of a bug. If you feel like it, you can try editing bn:MediaWiki:NewcomerTasks.json manually, or also I can do it for you. Alternatively, you can wait until the bug is fixed, and use the form then.

Ad 2) That's expected. We decided to start using Wikidata items as link IDs. It does not impact what the user sees, the link IDs only change what we the Growth team see as what link the newcomers click. This data helps us to understand newcomers better. That's also why it's not possible to change IDs in the form itself. Feel free to keep the edit in :).

I hope this helps. Do let me know if you have any other questions. Best, Martin Urbanec (WMF) (talk) 10:51, 29 June 2021 (UTC)

Thanks for answer. আফতাবুজ্জামান (talk) 12:16, 29 June 2021 (UTC)

@আফতাবুজ্জামান I just deployed a workaround for this bug. I tried to add the template through my staff account, and it worked (I self-reverted, as I'm not sure where that template is supposed to be). Could you try it again, please? Martin Urbanec (WMF) (talk) 00:06, 30 June 2021 (UTC)

Yes, it is working now. Thank you. আফতাবুজ্জামান (talk) 15:07, 30 June 2021 (UTC)

I'm glad to hear it! Closing this thread then :). Martin Urbanec (WMF) (talk) 22:40, 1 July 2021 (UTC)

Consider Wikisource

Tracked in Phabricator
Task T290441

Trizek (WMF) (talk) 17:22, 6 September 2021 (UTC)

Today I learned about the work of your team, and seeing only the mock-ups, I think it's the way to go.

That been said, I write to you to ask you to consider Wikisource. I think the tools you have developed are suited for us, and here's my reasons:

1) we are mainly small communities with dire need for growth 2) our work is very fun, you get to read a lot about that you like, and there is room for everyone. (There's always more and more texts, and no subject is "taken") 3) we have a huuuge backlog, lots of stuff that need maintenance 4) our workflow has a very steeped learning curve, which usually deter newcomers. Once you get the basics, it's as easy as reading a book.

Let me know what you think about this. If there's any chance, some of the community's members are really tech-savvy and surely will be happy to work with you. Ignacio Rodríguez (talk) 23:36, 5 September 2021 (UTC)

Hello Ignacio, and thank you for your message !

As written on the get-the-features page, we keep the door open to any community wishing to deploy the feature at their wiki. For non-Wikipedia wikis, they get the features as they are, and the team will not have time to prioritize improvements specific to those wikis. However, it doesn't mean that it is impossible for you to get the features, nor get improvements being made. :)

I don't know if you already tried the features, for instance at Spanish Wikipedia. I think they could fit Wikisources as they are:

• the Homepage is the key feature. There, we can eaisly deploy the following modules:
  • the mentorship module would be very helpful for any newcomer. You get an experienced user assigned to you when you create your account, so that you can get some advice when it is time to edit.
  • Suggested edits are a bit more tricky to change, but maybe some of the existing maintenance tasks could be used on Wikisource. Or you could "hack" some of these tasks, by over-writing all messages locally. The feature offers 2 placeholders for easy tasks, 2 for medium tasks and 1 for hard ones. We need to figure out how to triage them by topic.
  • Other modules available at the homepage would remain unchanged.

• the Help panel can be customized with helpful links so that newcomers can have them on hand. We can also add either a link to the mentor talk page, or to the local help desk.

I'd say it is something we should try! I will share your idea with the rest of the team, to check about this possibility. The most important point then would be to find a Wikisource to volunteer. Any thoughts? ;) Trizek (WMF) (talk) 12:44, 6 September 2021 (UTC)

I'm an admin at Spanish Wikisource. Tomorrow after my shift ends I will look into those pages and see what I can do.

If I need help with the setup, can I contact you by email? Ignacio Rodríguez (talk) 15:39, 6 September 2021 (UTC)

We will have to work together in order to check if the deployment is possible and how to customize it.

Keep me posted at: bevellin@wikimedia.org :) Trizek (WMF) (talk) 16:19, 6 September 2021 (UTC)

Ignacio Rodríguez, I believe the procedure is to open a query at the wiki where it needs to be deployed, and seek community consensus in a vote and discussion. Once that's done then deployment and customization may proceed.

Trizek, MMiller, MFlorence, I would suggest that you put a message out in TechNews for all sister wikis (Wikibooks, Wikisource, et al) and invite them to deploy any of the Growth Team projects there, if you haven't done so already. (It is in my opinion better to do it early as software engineering may be influenced by custom needs of these wikis and their early implementation could perhaps help to improve the software design with little overheads.)

Thanks. Gryllida (talk) 21:27, 14 September 2021 (UTC)

@Gryllida, thank you for your encouragement to see more wiki getting our features!

Our current focus is on Wikipedias. As a consequence, our features aren't designed to work properly at other wikis. French Wiktionary already enabled some of the features, but not all of them, because they aren't relevant: what's the point to add links between definitions, or to work on copyediting?

We have decided to provide a good Growth experience to sister projects instead of just taking the features "as they are", with more limited functionalities. As a consequence, we are not encouraging the deployment of Growth features at sister projects for now. Here is our plan: at the moment, I'm working on collecting information from sister projects, to know the kind of tasks they usually provide to newcomers. This way, we can improve Growth features to for the specific needs of Wikisource, Wiktionary, etc.

It seems that our first group of wikis would be Wikisource, since I received several requests from different groups. Trizek (WMF) (talk) 14:38, 15 September 2021 (UTC)

Hello!

A first meeting happen with some users of Wikisouces from India, about adopting Growth features to Wikisource (notes here).

Now, I'm looking for more feedback to have a better overview of the needs of Wikisource.

@Ignacio Rodríguez, do you think it would interest some people from Spanish Wikisource to have a virtual meeting to discuss about welcoming newcomers at Wikisource, and how Growth tools could help?

Thank you! Trizek (WMF) (talk) 15:54, 29 September 2021 (UTC)

@Trizek (WMF) Nobody answered at Spanish WS. If you want to have a virtual meeting with me, please email me for coordination. Ignacio Rodríguez (talk) 14:55, 17 October 2021 (UTC)

I'm going to ask the broader community and tell you what they think. Ignacio Rodríguez (talk) 16:56, 29 September 2021 (UTC)

The Ukrainian section of Wikisource is also not against this expansion in Wikisource. In the near future, I will start a discussion on the project. Best regards, admin of the Ukrainian section Arxivist (talk) 08:51, 17 October 2021 (UTC)

Hello

I just created a project page to have everything regarding Growth features and Wikisource at the same place. Please let me know, on this new page's talk page what you think about it.

I will soon schedule a discussion time about Wikisource and Growth. Trizek (WMF) (talk) 15:36, 19 October 2021 (UTC)

Sister wikis

Hello MMiller, MFlorence, I would suggest to call the other contributors 'peers' rather than 'mentors'. In my view this would be a more balanced semantics in some wikis. Would you agree? Can this be made configurable on a per-wiki basis? Gryllida (talk) 21:24, 14 September 2021 (UTC)

Aren't all users peers on wiki? Ата (talk) 07:23, 15 September 2021 (UTC)

In the context of the Growth features, "Mentors" is a role. Like "Admins, "bureaucrats", "Patrollers"... are role at the different wikis.

Mentors are experienced wikimedians who volunteer to reply to newcomers' questions.

The term "Mentor" is translatable wiki per wiki. Trizek (WMF) (talk) 14:47, 15 September 2021 (UTC)

Comment

Hello! I wanted to give a general comment on the whole Growth initiative, how I found out about it and what are my opinions on it, hoping they can be helpful on the long term. Given that the answer may be large, I'll try to break it down in replies.

I'm an admin at SqWiki and while patrolling the latest changes, I noticed that some users were posting templated questions in an old page of ours which had years without getting any input. The subject of the questions was always the same, differing on details. When the new questions rate (unanswered by anyone) changed from 1 in 3 months to 2 per month, I decided to investigate and found out that they were coming from "the blue-question mark sphere" that "appeared randomly in some pages", which I had ignored in the past. I spent 3 days trying different articles and namespaces until today I stumbled on it and started "reverse-engineering" it with trial and error. Eventually I learned about this initiative and after around 30 minutes reading around the subpages I found what I was searching for: Speciale:EditGrowthConfig

This opened up a page which I had no idea it existed until now and I was able to finally customize the behavior of the "mysterious blue-question mark sphere", where it should appear (everywhere) and where it should lead the users for their questions (another page we use now for that purpose which I modified to fully cooperate with the added feature). Klein Muçi (talk) 13:21, 19 October 2021 (UTC)

I'm the most active admin in the actual SqWiki community and given that I had no idea about the whole initiative I can almost say with 100% certainty that no one from our community knows about it. I found out about MediaWiki:NewcomerTasks.json and MediaWiki:GrowthExperimentsConfig.json pages which, if you see their history, you'll see that they were created from a steward with an edit summary that just pointed to a phab request with no other contributions on them other than my actual contribution now, attesting of the lack of information that I'm describing.

I do believe this overall lack of information may provide problems for small wikis, where the main interest is on article number growth, help and wikipedia namespaces are almost ghost towns and the small number of active contributors doesn't venture out of the mainspace to care about questions being answered. This may provide a lot of disappointment from new users that finally find somewhere where to ask a question only to find out a bit later it would be forever unanswered.

Therefore I think we should try and inform communities more massively about this so they can prepare beforehand by creating and then guarding the said pages for new questions by putting on duty at least one of their active users to care for the new questions. Klein Muçi (talk) 13:32, 19 October 2021 (UTC)

Having said all that, I can't stress enough how much I do think this whole initiative was needed on Wikimedia for years now. I do organize a lot of edit-a-thons and given that I have interface admin privileges I tend to take note how new users react on the software/interface part and their overall experience. And all the users coming from a young age are strongly alienated by the Wikipedia's interface and the way things work overall. Those coming from an older age will say that they can operate it because they remember how forums used to work back on the day but the new generation has no idea of that internet era. All the new webpages and social medias (which make for around 75% of daily internet use these days) now share some common features like commenting/replying, having specialized pages for specific functions which differ in appearance and in no way have computer code in them, react buttons and counters, profile pages, help panels, instant messaging and online/offline status, which have become a natural way of the way the younger generation navigates the web. On every edit-a-thon that we make, a large portion of time is spent on teaching users about the whole forum-like interface and on concepts like "userpage ≠ profile", "messages ≠ private messages", etc. which tend to alarm them because of privacy worries like "Everyone can see everything?!".

My whole work on my community is dedicated to creating small facilities that try to close the gap in this aspect and make SqWiki navigation more instinctual for new users. I read about the whole initiatives on the Growth project and I'm really happy to see that actual steps are being taken on this direction. My only general suggestions would be to work organically with small wikis and their most active users to set up the infrastructure so you can make sure they know what they're doing and can look after it. Also make it easier in the documentation here to point out towards Special:EditGrowthConfig, which is the key point of everything. Keep up the good work and let me know if there are any questions you might have. I'd be more than happy to answer them. :) Klein Muçi (talk) 13:53, 19 October 2021 (UTC)

Hello Klein Muçi, and thank you for your message and observations.

I'm happy to know that the Growth features are useful for you and newcomers at your wiki. Let's see how can we work together in order to help small wikis to benefit from these tools!

Communication to small wikis (and even big ones) is a complicated matter. We try to do our best to inform every community about any new change. This can be done through Tech/News, or with direct messages.

I messaged your community last March regarding the deployment. Maybe it was on the wrong page? Maybe my message hasn't been seen in RecentChanges? Let me know how can we improve our processes to communicate with your wiki, so as with all our wikis.

Now that you fortunately found the right page to post your message, I note that we should improve how the communities could contact us as well. The process we designed may not be the best one. Thank you for reporting this!

It is nice that you found the configuration page. Let me know if you have any questions regarding the configuration of our tools, and how can I assist you there. Trizek (WMF) (talk) 14:55, 19 October 2021 (UTC)

Yes, that is the correct page. But unfortunately technical notices there are usually ignored by most users. What I suggest would have been a better way (and could be better for the future notices of this kind) is to end the notice with a specific request. For example, your notice before a year could be closed with a request that an admin should modify the Special:EditGrowthConfig page according to the community needs and report back. And then you can check back on all the wikis that haven't gotten an answer of any kind and tag all the most active admins around until you get an answer. Most small wikis have 1 tech-savvy guy who will come and handle the request. Once communication has been established with the said user, it can be tagged on future requests to guarantee faster communication and better tools deployment, using the same method described above. (I do understand this would make it harder to program mass messages though. :/ )

This method is based on our experience on Content Translation Tool. The notices about it were largely ignored until we started having organic conversations with user Amire80. I must disclose that this didn't happen as part of a mass notice though. We specifically mentioned him after one of the messages because one user had seem them and notified some of us on Telegram. Unfortunately in small wikis most of the communication is individual in nature and it tends to happen off-wiki. Klein Muçi (talk) 15:07, 19 October 2021 (UTC)

I have a question: If we want the homepage and help panel features auto-enabled for all users, assuming we have a community discussion about it, where do we ask for such a thing and post the results of that discussion? Klein Muçi (talk) 15:27, 19 October 2021 (UTC)

Thank you for your ideas regarding the communication, they are very important o us so that we can improve our processes.

I should have informed communities more about Special:EditGrowthConfig, not just by relying on Tech/News (I hope you are a subscriber...). I will also reach at Amir about his experience.

Regarding enabling the homepage and the help panel to all users, I need to confirm that you literally mean all users, and not just all new users. If it is really all users, it is not something we have considered to do. We have thought about deploying the features to auto-created accounts (people coming from other wikis) or to returning accounts (accounts created locally, who have edited a few time ago and who resume editing).

It is a nice idea! But we need to think about this new case. What is your idea behind deploying to all users? Is your idea to have a similar experience for everyone? Or to provide some more useful tools to any user? Trizek (WMF) (talk) 16:40, 19 October 2021 (UTC)

I will subscribe now that I learned out about the project.

No, I didn't know you could make that distinction. The aim was for that functionality to be activated to all new users because it would kind of defeat the purpose if we were to expect new users to have to modify their preferences to be able to get help. From my experience, most users have no idea about the preferences link until much later in their wiki-experience. (Another thing that could be added to the homepage maybe?) That's why I said to have it active for all users. But if you can make that distinction technically, I would just vote for having it auto-active for every new account being created. Existing accounts can make the change themselves from the preferences. In my opinion, even anonymous editors should be able to benefit from the help panel (not the homepage). Having the ability to ask for help should be everywhere, in the most obvious cases, for everyone. Then editors, as they gain experience with time, and maybe, subsequently, start to get annoyed by the help offering, will also have learned how to disable it most likely and will do so if they want. But everyone's first contact with The Wiki World should be accompanied with the help offering, even IP editors - at least in my opinion. Klein Muçi (talk) 23:42, 19 October 2021 (UTC)

Regarding your wiki, 100% of new accounts get the Growth features.

Of course, these users, when they get more experience can opt-out the features in their preferences. Or they can become mentors!

Regarding IPs, we have thought about offering them some tools, but it appears that there are too many possible complications to make it happen. But just displaying the help panel to IPs would be a first step. However, we are not going in this direction. So I'm afraid that this kind of change would not be done in the coming times. Trizek (WMF) (talk) 13:43, 20 October 2021 (UTC)

Thanks for confirming that! I wasn't sure of that point and I didn't want to test it out with a new account myself. Okay then, sounds good.

I do understand what you mean because interaction with IPs is generally harder than with normal users. Everything else put aside, just by having dynamic IPs in existence becomes harder knowing who you're talking with. Having said that though I still believe help should be freely accessible by anyone in the easiest way. Even if they never see the answer to their question, it's still a good thing to have questions and to give answers to those questions because other people may see them and learn meanwhile. The more, the merrier. But I'm sure you're aware of more possible technical complications than I'm aware of so...

Thanks a lot for the information provided and the support in answering. :) Klein Muçi (talk) 15:25, 20 October 2021 (UTC)

How to go from A/B testing to "done"

I see that now Newcomer homepage is at A/B testing in ukwiki. During events we have the situation when most people have it in their experience while others don't, and it's a bit uncomfortable.

What's the plan for the future? We are working on some instructional materials and it's good to know whether to include Growth features there as something that every user is to experience.

(Sorry if I missed the answer somewhere on the page.) Ата (talk) 08:57, 21 October 2021 (UTC)

Hello!

It is possible to force account creation to provide Growth features to everyone.

Regarding A/B testing, it is still something we are discussing about. It is really important for us to have ways to compare the experience with Growth tools and without it to be sure that we are not impacting the wikis in a negative way. However, some of the features have been tested for a while now; we are waiting for the final report about the impact to deploy to 100% of newcomers.

Not related, I'm taking the opportunity of this discussion: next week we will deploy the mentor dashboard to a few more wikis, and uk.wp is in the list. I'll announce it on Monday. Trizek (WMF) (talk) 12:07, 22 October 2021 (UTC)

It's 0.5%, not 0.05%

The slide set uploaded here - https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:%E2%80%9CNewcomer_Experience%E2%80%9D_pilot_project_-_Inviting_donors_to_edit_via_email,_LATAM,_July_2021.pdf , for which the Growth Team is listed as a co-author, has a significant error on page 7. The constructive activation "percent of emails" figure is wrong by a factor of ten. John Broughton (talk) 18:51, 26 October 2021 (UTC)

@John Broughton -- thank you for reading closely and noticing that error! We will fix it and re-upload. What other thoughts did you have as you looked through the slides? Did any of the findings surprise you or give you any ideas about how we might proceed? MMiller (WMF) (talk) 05:33, 27 October 2021 (UTC)

Hi @John Broughton - the file has now been updated with the error in slide 7 fixed. A visually-small, but statistically-significant difference! LWyatt (WMF) (talk) 08:34, 27 October 2021 (UTC)

Use of Growth on wikipedia occitan

HI, I tried to use Growth on the occitan Wikipedia but text is in catalan. How can I do to translate the text ? Guilhelma (talk) 18:26, 21 November 2021 (UTC)

@Guilhelma: See https://translatewiki.net/w/i.php?title=Special:Translate&group=ext-growthexperiments&language=oc&filter=&action=page. First you need to create a new account, make some test translations in a certain sandbox, and then see if you become a translator at https://translatewiki.net/wiki/Special:Log?type=translatorsandbox&user=&page=&wpdate=&tagfilter=&wpfilters%5B%5D=newusers. NGC 54 (talk) 19:14, 21 November 2021 (UTC)

Thank you for your response, I have an account on TranslateWiki, so I can begin immediatly Guilhelma (talk) 19:26, 21 November 2021 (UTC)

Find out the mentor of a given user

A question that came up with us, in the Hebrew Wikipedia:

How do I find out who is the mentor of a given user?

Thank you!

מקף־‽‏ (Hyphen) מקף (talk) 16:56, 7 December 2021 (UTC)

@מקף Hey, thanks for bringing that up here! This should be covered at this help page, which covers how to integrate mentorship with existing on-wiki tools via templates. To summarize, there's a magic word, #mentor, that can be used to determine the mentor for a particular user. For example, you would get my mentor by using {{#mentor:Martin Urbanec (WMF)}}.

Let me know if you have any other questions about this feature. Martin Urbanec (WMF) (talk) 18:01, 7 December 2021 (UTC)

Thank you!🙂 מקף (talk) 20:21, 7 December 2021 (UTC)

Another question about mentors (he:wiki)

Hey there.

Is there any way to show only newbies who have not been blocked for vandalism?

Thanks Niles Anderssøn (talk) 19:35, 7 December 2021 (UTC) אנדרסן (talk) 19:35, 7 December 2021 (UTC)

Hello, and thank you for your question.

You mean showing people blocked for other reasons than vandalism, or people who aren't blocked? Trizek (WMF) (talk) 20:01, 7 December 2021 (UTC)

Hey, no.

I mean, when someone (a newbie) has registered, I (or every other volunteer) automatically appointed as his/her "mentor". If, sadly though it surely happens, he/she turns out to be a "troll", and blocked, its username remains as one of my "apprentices" (there must be a better word for it, mustn't it?).

So I just wondered, if is there any way to sort-of "delete" such a person from the list?

Thanks again אנדרסן (talk) 21:08, 7 December 2021 (UTC)

Hello @אנדרסן, thanks for bringing that up. The dashboard should not show any users who are indefinitely blocked. In my opinion, that should filter the trolls out correctly. Do you want to delete other users, that are not indefinitely blocked, too? Note the dashboard updates every three hours, so you might see some blocked users before the next update runs.

Does this make sense? Let me know if you have any other questions.

PS: The newcomers are usually called "mentees" when talking about the mentorship-related features. Martin Urbanec (WMF) (talk) 20:25, 11 December 2021 (UTC)

Assessment of deployment at tewiki

Hi,

Project growth is deployed at tewiki in March 2021. But there has been no update on the use and benefits of the project. Can you publish a detailed report at the earliest, as it will be useful for the community to consider next steps. Arjunaraoc (talk) 05:12, 10 January 2022 (UTC)

Hello

Thank you for your interest. We already have published one report, where we found that newcomers edit more wen they use Growth features. A new report will soon be published soon, which confirmes this trend.

Let me know if you need more specific details. Trizek (WMF) (talk) 16:30, 10 January 2022 (UTC)

@Trizek (WMF), Thanks for your response. The report you quoted was published in Nov 2020. So it did not cover Telugu Wikipedia deployment which began in March 2021. Based on my observation of edits related to growth project, I feel that the impact is not much, compared to our other method of greeting new editors and responding to their help requests by other editors. I think that enrolling all new editors, who create accounts themselves without their choice also may make it difficult to assess the impact of the project. Arjunaraoc (talk) 00:32, 11 January 2022 (UTC)

The reports are based on data collected at multiple wikis. The global trend is that the tools are working. We can't provide specific data for Telugu Wikipedia as your wiki is too small to provide relevant data.

Providing the tools to all new editors is something we believe to be efficient. It is actually an identified need. Turning on some features will be done by anyone who has confidence. But this is not everyone's profile. As a consequence, we encourage newcomers to make edits by offering some articles they can work on, we reassure them y providing guidance and immediate access to help pages, and, at some wikis, we give them someone they can contact. For the latter, as a volunteer mentor at French Wikipedia, I really think it is important: I often receive messages from users who are not confident and ho seek for advice. Their message is often the first edit they mage on Wikipedia.

How do you currently greed newcomers?

Could you provide me some examples of your observations and feelings?

Let me know if you need anything else, I'm happy to help! Trizek (WMF) (talk) 14:24, 11 January 2022 (UTC)

@Trizek (WMF), We had in place from the beginning of our wiki, a way of greeting new users, by welcoming them with a welcome message on their talk page. We have improvised the welcome message, by adding a help request link, which by clicking enables them to post a help request comment on their talk page. Though an embedded template, the help request is made visible on Village pump and Community portal through a floating table. As experienced Wikipedians visit these pages on daily pages, the help request is answered at the earliest. The request status is changed or the page is moved into unaddressed help requests through a change to the template in the help request section in due course. The status is always reflected on Village pump and Community Portal pages. New users also quickly learn that they can get help on any other page, by adding the help request template to their request. You can see the template which is based on the English Wikipedia template:help me. The advantage of this method is that there is no dependence on a specific assigned mentor to service the request and promotes collaboration with the larger Wikipedia community.

I understand from your reply that the availability of tools is universal, whereas assigning mentors is optional, which is news to me. I feel that forcibly assigning mentors is contrary to philosophy behind Wikipedia and would like to work towards making it optional. Let me know how it is done on other Wikipedias, to help me push for it on Tewiki.

Based on my observation of help requests associated with Project growth, I find most messages are general greetings or expression of wishes to contribute to Wikipedia. Even if the usage is small on Tewiki, it will help to know how much percentage of new users made use of the tool, for how long and for what featuresl.

Apart from that, based on whatever little understanding I have from the project pages, I think that some information about the demographics and/or the intention behind creating account is collected to help the project suggest tasks. If you can share a report on that it will help us understand our new users better and work on ways to make their initial experience better. Arjunaraoc (talk) 09:26, 12 January 2022 (UTC)

Thank you for sharing this workflow with me. It is really inspiring.

What you describe is something you can also do with the Growth features. When newcomers use Growth features, such as the Homepage and the Help panel, they can ask a question from them.

Do you know that communities have the ability to change the configuration of Growth features? At Special:EditGrowthFeatures, in the "Help panel settings" section, you can select at which place newcomers can post their messages. We offer two options in the form: Mentor talk pages, and Help desk. If you select "Help desk", you can actually put any page title there. It can be the Village pump, so that you can have all questions at the same place.

Regarding having a central help desk (or the like) or a personal mentor, both solutions have their pros and cons. Central places have a lower response time, but specific mentors are better for long-term collaboration, with a better knowledge of how the newcomer progresses. It is literally up to the community to have one option or the other. At my home wiki, we went for mentoring, with a possible backup to the help desk for urgent requests. As a volunteer, I had the pleasure to help newcomers to become experienced editors. It is really rewarding.

Regarding greetings and such, we see newcomers testing the process. Wikipedia procedures aren't familiar to most people, some newcomers believe that they will face robots! By the way, this is where mentoring has a benefit.

I will gather some data for you soon. I'm currently learning how to gather it, so your request arrives just on time for me to practice!

I also want to thank you for your questions, as they are a way for us to improve our documentation and our communication regarding the features. Trizek (WMF) (talk) 15:24, 12 January 2022 (UTC)

@Trizek (WMF) Thanks for your appreciaton and additional info. I read through the configuration and found it useful. My preference for help requests is at the user's talk page for general problems or the article discussion pages for article specific problem. I understand that project does not allow help requests at article talk pages.

Regarding the mentors identification, at least in Tewiki, currently anyone who has been editing for some time can sign up as a mentor. Sometimes, they may not have good knowledge to help newbies. Their availability may also change based on their other commitments. I think a better approach would be to start the newbie with basic home page and suggested tasks panel. If they desire to get mentored, they can request mentorship and the mentors on the roster can sign up to be a mentor for specific period of 1-3 months. The mentor or mentee can also opt out of mentoring when they decide that mentoring is no longer needed.

Let me know whether Project growth supports the scenario above.

I am happy to know that my interactions are helpful and that you will be working on assessing the deployment at Tewiki. Arjunaraoc (talk) 05:07, 13 January 2022 (UTC)

From what I see at the wikis I visit, a mentorship program newcomers have to contact doesn't work. This has been proven by research: "inspiring, trusted, and well-connected intermediaries are a critical asset in recruiting and supporting new editors." Showing that someone is ready to help is a way to retain newcomers.

At te.wp, only only autoconfirmed users can add their names to the mentor list.

Through Growth tools, it is already possible to opt-out mentoring. Mentors just have to remove their name from the list (we are working on improving this process); newcomers juste have to ignore their mentor (we are working on this as well), or opt-out Growth features. It is also possible to create a list of mentors that don't get newcomers assigned to them, but who can choose which mentees to work with.

Regarding mentorship, it is up to the community to decide on what to do on who can be a mentor, or how mentorship works. I suggest you to discuss about all this with the currently listed mentors.

Speaking of mentors, I will provide some data on the mentors' talk page at the beginning of next week. Trizek (WMF) (talk) 12:46, 13 January 2022 (UTC)

User research for talk page notices

Hi Growth Team and happy New Year! I had an idea that I wanted to plant in case you have interest or downtime. Aside from the new user dashboard features, there are many existing practices Wikipedians follow to welcome and onboard new users. If you haven't already, it would be supremely beneficial to order a round of user research on how those practices are working. I could see, for example, us finding out that blasting newcomers with a bunch of talk page templates is ultimately a waste of time for us and them if it (1) doesn't actually impart information, and (2) doesn't convert them into longer-term editors. Even something as simple as seeing how users respond to different talk page templates could give our volunteer community better insight into how our own time could be spent more effectively. (And of course there are all kinds of ways to improve our automated tools if we know the best ways to reach out to individuals.) User testing is a big blind spot for volunteers—we can template other users all day but to know what works best, we depend on pooling resources so a group like the WMF/your team can run a study for us. Happy to chat more, if useful. Czar (talk) 04:35, 17 January 2022 (UTC)

A very good point. Nick Moyes (talk) 07:57, 17 January 2022 (UTC)

Hello Czar and Nick. Happy new year to you too! Thank you for stating this discussion.

While I'm not working on talk pages, I have a few things in mind, where talk pages and messages left there are studied.

Testing welcome messages at French Wikipedia, where no interaction was found regarding the messages. We actually have no idea if newcomers visit their talk page. And if they understand that they have a proper message to read there.

Only half editors read their messages (study conducted in 2012). Overall, messages are important and, when they are constructive, they can lead to more edits from newcomers.

The New Editor Experiences report has some clear findings:

• "Many new editors could not find or use talk pages to communicate with other editors on-wiki". (page 18)
• "New editors don’t know how to communicate with others on Wikipedia, because communications on Wikipedia are perceived to be foreign and hidden" (page 25)

During the Talk pages consultation 2019, we found that newcomers often have no idea of how to use talk pages. Which leads the Editing team to work on talk pages improvements. One of their ideas is to offer an environment where people would identify that they are on a talk page, not on a random Wikipedia content page.

I'm still unsure if newcomers understand that messages are posted at the bottom of the talk page...

Some easy improvements are at reach though (personal thinking below):

In my volunteer capacity, I also observe that a lot of volunteers (including me) unconsciously use jargon or technical terms when they interact with newcomers. Templated messages reflect this. Which could be a push back for some people who managed to find the message but don't understand what it means. Rewriting messages is a first possible step.

Also, I frequently find messages where there is no way to contact a human. At fr.wp, a small group I belong to as a volunteer decided to have some best practices regarding messages. One of them is to add a "please contact me link" to templates, to increase chances for newcomers to find a real human, and also to force users who overuse templates to take their responsibilities, by being forced to explain why they left this message. I sometimes have a few messages asking for follow up explanation now that this has been implemented; previously, I had zero follow-ups.

This being said, within WMF teams, we work to offer a cohesive user experience. So Editing and Growth work together on helping newcomers both editing and interacting with others. I let @MMiller (WMF) respond there, as he has a more cross-team vision than I have. :) Trizek (WMF) (talk) 12:13, 17 January 2022 (UTC)

The situation that really matters is:

1. I edit
2. I don't notice/read the message on my User_talk: page
3. I edit again

The situation that doesn't matter so much is:

1. I edit
2. I never see any messages because I never edit again.

This should be possible to study. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 18:17, 2 February 2022 (UTC)

Help for Catalan Wikipedia

Hi! Congrats for this tool. I have already been translating most of its interface into Catalan. To keep improving it in Catalan, may I ask you to give me permission or special access to edit Special:EditGrowthConfig in ca.wikipedia?

As you can see here, I've been managing several wikiprojects and mentorizing newcomers since years ago, so happy to test it and play with it in my language until it's a bit more mature and I can train some other wikipedians to start using it. Thank you in advance! Best regards. Xavier Dengra (talk) 23:26, 22 January 2022 (UTC)

Anyone who can edit pages in the MediaWiki namespace can use Special:EditGrowthConfig—on Catalan Wikipedia, this currently means administrators and interface administrators. So you should apply for one of these rights in the way they’re handled on Catalan Wikipedia. (Or you can propose creating an interface editor group—it exists on a few wikis—, which could include only the specific right to edit the MediaWiki namespace, and not editing gadgets or blocking users.) Tacsipacsi (talk) 02:17, 23 January 2022 (UTC)

Inactive mentor

See ro:Discuție Wikipedia:Listă mentori#Mentori inactivi. NicolaS961, a mentor at Romanian Wikipedia, was last active on 18 October 2021, and a newcomer even observed this inactivity (see this question). What are the steps that should be follow in order to remove an inactive mentor from the list? NGC 54 (talk) 12:40, 29 January 2022 (UTC)

Hello @NGC 54, thanks for the question! If you remove a mentor from the list of mentors, they will no longer be assigned newcomers. They will, however, retain their old mentees. While the majority of questions is asked within their first few days on the wiki, it is still possible some question will appear on the former mentor's talk page.

If you want to avoid that, we can reassign their mentees to the other mentors. To request that, just let me know here (you can also create a task in Phabricator similar to :phab:T292958).

Happy mentoring, Martin Urbanec (WMF) (talk) 14:27, 29 January 2022 (UTC)

Encourage mentors to check mentees contribution + More Feedback

This is my opinion about the Growth feature, I've just checked contribution of the last user that asked a question. I've seen that he has some newcomers tasks done, (added wiki links to some pages). And I've seen that often metees ask how long it will take for their edit to be approved (on Polish Wikipedia edits need to be approved to be visible).

The problem I see is that there are not much connection between mentor and mentees. When I sign up for being a mentor (in Polish Wikipedia) they said that I will answer questions maybe once or twice a week. There is MentorDashboard but I don't think that is really useful. I don't check it that often.

But if there was a page that list all my mentees recent edits that, maybe with some filters not sure what they should be, it would be much better if mentor can look at new edits and approve them faster. Maybe it would be even better of the edits are inline with button to approve, so it will be fast and easy for mentor to just check and approve the edits and hide edits that he checked.

Also one more feature that this page should have is thank you link on each edit.

And all this because if someone add his first edit and get it approved and visible faster, and mentor will give him personal thanks. It will increase the number of people that will keep using Wikipedia as editors. It would probably also be good idea to send notification when newcomer edit is approved, this will "force" them to open Wikipedia and see his/her edits. Those can be Preferences set by default, even on Wikipedia that don't require approval for a change to be visible (like in English Wikipedia). Notification for the newcomers that his or her edits was approved, would probably be boost of dopamine for the newcomers and he or she would like to edit more.

Another idea is that it would probably be fun to add some Gamification to newcomers, not sure how. Gamification is the topic that I'm interested and need to give more focus in 2022. Jcubic (talk) 19:45, 7 February 2022 (UTC)

For the FlaggedRevs notifications about accepting edits see phab:T54510. Tacsipacsi (talk) 01:11, 8 February 2022 (UTC)

Thank you for sharing your thoughts with us, @Jcubic!

In recent changes, you can filter down your mentees' edits: https://pl.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?mentorship=all&limit=100&days=7&title=Special:RecentChanges&urlversion=2. Then you have access yo the usual tools to validate pending edits.

Implementing Thanks in Recent changes is a Community Wishlist proposal you can vote for (if not already done).

I agree on the fact that quick validation would probably help newcomers to edit more. About thanking users, it has been proven that it helps on retention.

I'm keeping your suggestions in mind for our upcoming thinking regarding how to help mentors. Given the feedback we already received, we will focus on the Mentor dashboard first.

Regarding Gamification, it is something we have considered. We try to pursue with Add a link (available at pl.wp, have you tried it?) and with Add an image. Trizek (WMF) (talk) 15:40, 8 February 2022 (UTC)

@Trizek (WMF) something is really off that special page shows https://pl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedysta:XaxeLoled on the list, and he is an admin, how can he be my mentee? Also in Metor dashboard shows person that joined in 2016-01-03 that have 4225 edits.

Should I report this as a bug? If so where? Jcubic (talk) 16:21, 8 February 2022 (UTC)

It is not a bug: we have assigned a mentor to everyone for practical reasons. I understand it is confusing; you are not the first person to mention it.

We plan to work on a feature to opt-out mentoring so that experienced users won't have a mentor, I hope we can work on it soon. Edit: It is also possible to filter down your mentees on the mentor dashboard: you can set a maximum number of edits there. Trizek (WMF) (talk) 16:33, 8 February 2022 (UTC)

Can you explore the experience of newcomers on Wikipedia?

Just a question. I have no idea how the feature work from newcomers perspective. Is there a way to see it for yourself?

Maybe some live demo or video. It would be nice to see how the experience look like to know how to improve.

Are there was any UX research done, with actual users, that was recorded? Jcubic (talk) 19:49, 7 February 2022 (UTC)

The best way to test the features to create a new test account.

We have a demo video, but some details may be a but outdated.

We do UX research on all our new features. Our usual process is the following: we create a first prototype that is tested by people who aren't Wikipedia editors. When done, we refine the prototype to fix the most important points we discovered. Then we test once again with different people. The recordings are kept private per user agreement from usertesting.com, the service we use.

At this prototype stage, we usually ask experienced users at our pilot wikis to check on this prototype. We also announce prototype testings into our newsletter, so that anyone can comment on the idea. Some of Growth team members are also experienced editors in our volunteer capacity, who work with newcomers (I include myself there).

Let me know if you have any other question. :) Trizek (WMF) (talk) 15:57, 8 February 2022 (UTC)

Remove banned accounts from the mentor panel

Is it possible to remove or (permanently) hide banned accounts from the mentor panel, since they are absolutely useless there and only add to the clutter? DarwIn (talk) 23:51, 16 February 2022 (UTC)

Hello Darwin

In theory, in Special:MentorDashboard, indefinitely blocked users shouldn't be visible. Which account do you see there so that we can investigate a possible bug?

Thank you! Trizek (WMF) (talk) 12:16, 17 February 2022 (UTC)

Without mentors

If I want to use suggestions and analytical data from the homepage, is there a way to opt out of the mentor function? Mentors can take participants who did not have a mentor before and intercept a participant by rewriting to themselves. (for example, you can take any account and start stalking it just because of the technical possibility https://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D0%92%D0%B8%D0%BA%D0%B8%D0%BF%D0%B5%D0%B4%D0%B8%D1%8F:%D0%A4%D0%BE%D1%80%D1%83%D0%BC/%D0%92%D0%BE%D0%BF%D1%80%D0%BE%D1%81%D1%8B#GrowthExperiments_%D0%B8_%D0%B0%D0%B4%D0%BC%D0%B8%D0%BD%D0%B8%D1%81%D1%82%D1%80%D0%B0%D1%82%D0%BE%D1%80%D1%8B-%D0%BF%D0%BE%D0%B4%D0%BE%D0%BF%D0%B5%D1%87%D0%BD%D1%8B%D0%B5 ) The participant can't do anything about it. The mentor can observe the contribution statistics and activity time for an unprecedented long time (even logged actions that are usually not observed by others) that the extension makes to him. Or let's make a trusted WMF account, to which the participants of each wiki could switch when you don't need your statistics to be collected for another and you don't need a chat. Sunpriat (talk) 13:52, 1 March 2022 (UTC)

We are working on a way for users to opt-out mentoring, so that they won't have any mentor assigned to them. Trizek (WMF) (talk) 14:26, 1 March 2022 (UTC)

重新分配學員

(Topic title edited by ChhTJ096 (talk), Trizek (WMF) (talk), Stang (talk))

Duplicated with phab:T261417

已完成。

w:zh:Special:QuitMentorship Stang (talk) 19:40, 21 March 2022 (UTC) (Edited by ChhTJ096 (talk))

我是中文維基的導師，但現在有事長期不能指導，可否麻煩將我的學員重新分配？ ChhTJ096 (talk) 16:03, 18 March 2022 (UTC)

Can someone answer my question about A/B test?

Hi, I posted a question on here 3 months ago, but have not taken a reply.

Does restoring the default settings restore settings set by EnablePercentage?
Topic on Extension talk:GrowthExperiments

Can someone respond? Lens0021 (talk) 14:45, 14 April 2022 (UTC)

What the newbie see

Is there a video about what the newbie see? Recently I figured out that newbies ask questions on something we dont know how it looks like. I.e. newbies receive dialogs we dont know about. Juandev (talk) 07:02, 22 April 2022 (UTC)

Ahoj @Juandev! Děkujeme za zájem o funkce týmu Growth i Tvou otázku. Ano, nějaká videa existují. Na české Wikipedii jsem například před nějakou dobou vyvěsil videa ukazující, jak registrace funguje dnes a jak fungovala dříve. Díky tomu je možné změnu v uživatelském zážitku snadno a rychle porovnat. Jsou sice, pravda, trošku staršího data, ale myslím, že pro ukázku jsou vcelku dostačující (ale stejně je zkusím v nejbližší době aktualizovat).

Je také možné vyzkoušet si funkce týmu Growth vlastnoručně. Buď registrací nového uživatelského účtu (čímž získáš přehled o tom, jak cesta nováčka probíhá od A do Z), anebo zaškrtnutím možností „Zobrazit Domovskou stránku nováčka“, „Odkaz na uživatelské jméno vede na Domovskou stránku nováčka“ a „Povolit panel Potřebuji pomoc“ ve svém nastavení. První dvě zaškrtávací políčka jsou na kartě Údaje o uživateli, to poslední na kartě Editace. Podrobnější instrukce najdeš na Help:Growth/Tools/Enable_the_Homepage/cs.

Kdyby tě o funkcích týmu Growth zajímalo cokoli více, dej vědět – rád otázky zodpovím.

S přáním hezkého zbytku dne, Martin Urbanec (WMF) (talk) 14:23, 22 April 2022 (UTC)

Translation strings

Hello! :) Where can I find out about new strings that need to be translated? I haven't found any news that a new feature pack has arrived (opt out mentorship). And I have some lines either not translated or with poor translation.

@Trizek (WMF), can you help me with it? :) Iniquity (talk) 14:30, 26 May 2022 (UTC)

https://watch-translations.toolforge.org/ might help you? Jdforrester (WMF) (talk) 16:45, 26 May 2022 (UTC)

Thanks, I also found out about this link a couple of hours ago :)

Personally, it will help me, but if I suddenly leave (busfactor), how will others know that an update has arrived? Iniquity (talk) 16:54, 26 May 2022 (UTC)

I really hope that you won't get hit by a bus, Iniquity! ;)

All strings are located at this address. Only a regular check can help someone who doesn't use watch-translations, I'm afraid. Trizek (WMF) (talk) 20:29, 26 May 2022 (UTC)

> I really hope that you won't get hit by a bus, Iniquity!;)

I hope so too xD

> All strings are located at this address. Only a regular check can help someone who doesn't use watch-translations, I'm afraid.

Just given that this interface is being shown to newbies and is under active development (i.e. there are new lines) it is very important that it be translated, in my opinion. This affects the engagement and understanding of the interface :( Can we come up with a scheme where new lines would be published? Iniquity (talk) 20:34, 26 May 2022 (UTC)

We plan to have much more regular updates of our newsletter, to inform communities about new releases.

I usually post messages to the mentors' talk pages at the wikis when something big is scheduled, as these users are more likely to help. Would it help if I also inform mentors of important changes that needs to translate a few new strings? Trizek (WMF) (talk) 20:39, 26 May 2022 (UTC)

Of course! This will be the best solution :) Iniquity (talk) 21:08, 26 May 2022 (UTC)

Noted. :) Trizek (WMF) (talk) 12:37, 27 May 2022 (UTC)

Add a link: Feature idea - „Target article name ambiguous“

Hi and thanks for a great feature! Having been using it for a couple of days on Swedish Wikipedia, I have run into the following situation a few times:

1. The algorithm marks a word and suggests a corresponding article.
2. Reviewing the suggested article shows that the title is correct, but it still is the wrong target, since it has an ambiguous name without for example a qualifier between parenthesis. A (maybe farfetched) example could be one article „Naples“ as opposed to two articles „Naples (FL)“ and „Naples (Italy)“.
3. Since this function/ algorithm keeps „finding“ this kind of articles would I like to suggest implementing a means of capturing the valuable insights they give. As it is now, one can only say „No“ to the link suggestion and then tick „Other“ as the reason (unfortunately also without being able to add a comment), and thus the insight is lost.
4. If, above the checkbox „Other“ on the „Reason“ screen after clicking „No“, there would be a checkbox „Target article name ambiguous“ or similar, followed by two fields suggesting the two new article names, then this information could, for example, be posted as a template entry in the target article, thereby inviting more advanced users to possibly rename the identified article to clear the ambiguity and also maybe create the second one, i.e. the one that „Add a link“ revealed „to be missing“.
5. In this way the feature would be useful in identifying these ambiguous article names, letting the newbies contribute in a way they now how to (delivering the article names they believe should be there), and then leaving enough bread crumbs for more experienced users to fix the issue.

~~~~ Gunboz (talk) 21:39, 31 May 2022 (UTC)

Hi Gunboz, and thank you for your feedback!

We are collecting the reasons given by users when they click "no", but we aren't collecting "suggested link is too ambiguous" as a reason for rejection. It is a idea we should consider, thank you for suggesting it.

The example you give about Naples is precisely where a human is needed and valued.

It is not possible to make comments for a simple reason: read all of them requires a workforce we don't have. :)

Regarding posting it on the article talk page, I'm not sure to get your point. Do you suggest to have newcomers adding these links no matter what, and then having experienced users to handle them, or do you suggest to have these possible links to be suggested on the talk page? Trizek (WMF) (talk) 13:47, 1 June 2022 (UTC)

Hi Trizek and thanks for your quick response, and I agree, that this is perfect human-KI-integration, I love it! Sorry if I was being unclear in my post. My suggestion would be (using a fictitious example):

1. The ”Add a link” system (in an article about ”Volcanoes in Europe”) finds the word Naples and suggests linking it to the Article ”Naples”, which however covers Naples in Florida.
2. As a user, I now mark this as a ”No”, i.e. ”do not link to the suggested article” (since that would be wrong).
3. The system now presents me with the ”Reasons” screen.
4. Now the new, added choice on that screen is ”Target article name ambiguous“
5. Ticking this box provides me with two string fields, where I can enter my article suggestions: ”Naples (FL)” and ”Naples (Italy)”. The first one would be my new suggested name for the already existing ”Naples” article (whereto I think it should me moved/ renamed). The second one the name for a possible new article (the one that I would have needed for my ”Volcanoes…”-article).
6. The system could then put a template/ tag at the beginning of the original ”Naples” article (not the talk page) like: {New suggested disambiguation | Disambiguation page = Naples | Current article name suggestion = ”Naples (FL)” | Suggested additional article = ”Naples (Italy)”}.

The template/ tag under 6. could then entice an experienced user to get his/ her hands dirty and implement the necessary disambiguation. This could not be automated. Neither could there be a link entered in the ”Volcanoes…” article at this time, since there simply is no article about ”Naples (Italy)” (yet). However, imho here the ”missing link” is the minor issue, compared to the unresolved ambiguity, which the tool ”just happened” to stumble upon. Through this addition to the ”Add a link” tool, it would start helping find and point out those ambiguities. Gunboz (talk) 16:52, 1 June 2022 (UTC)

Add a link: word exclusion list (per language)?

Hi! I wonder if there is an easily accessible ”exclusion” list, which tells the system not to use certain words as ”link targets”?

As an example, in Swedish, my main language, the words ”Lika” and ”Ingå” often appear as suggested links. While Lika is a province in Croatia (=suitable link target), in swedish it also means ”same as” (like in ”like for like”). Needless to say, that this creates quite a few ”false positives”. The same with ”Ingå” (a smaller river =suitable link target), the word however also means ”is included in”.

If I knew where to add words to such a list (if it exists), then I’d be happy doing this myself as I run into them? Gunboz (talk) 22:01, 7 June 2022 (UTC)

Thanks @Gunboz for the feedback!

We are evaluating this and several other ideas for improving "add a link" accuracy, while also investigating ways to make these edits easier to review.

What's your experience like with "add a link" tasks? Besides occasional incorrect suggestions, do you feel like this task is working well on Swedish Wikipedia? Do you have any experience patrolling these tasks, and if so: do you have any recommendations for making these edits easier to review? KStoller-WMF (talk) 20:56, 8 June 2022 (UTC)

Hi and thanks for reaching out!

1. I think the task/ feature is excellent: it’s like ”low threshold” editing when I’m too tired or similar to write or proofread outright. It brings me to surprising new subjects, and quite often I also end up fixing some other small stuff after posting the links to an article. And it helps finding quite a few ambiguous articles (pls see my other suggestion on that subject on this page).
2. Re. patrolling: I have roll-back authority (and have used it on occasion when seeing stupid stuff happening to articles on my watch list), but I have not yet performed any ”systematic patrolling”. I will now check with some more experienced users on svwp, how I could go about doing that (unless you have some ideas or hints), and then get back to yourself in a week or so, reporting on my experience on patrolling these add a link edits, if that would be useful to you and your team? Gunboz (talk) 22:10, 8 June 2022 (UTC)

Thanks so much for the feedback, @Gunboz !

1. That's great to hear!
2. That would be so helpful, thank you! Since "add a link" makes these small edits so easy to complete, we've had some patrollers mention that it's a burden to review them all. I'm curious to know if this has been an issue on svwp, or if svwp has any other feedback or recommendations for improving "add a link". Thank you! KStoller-WMF (talk) 17:13, 9 June 2022 (UTC)

Hi again @KStoller-WMF! I’ve had a look at this. First of all, I don’t know if this has been an issue on svwp (yet), one reason being that the feature was just released there very recently. However, I noticed a couple of (possible) issues with how patrolling these links does work today:

1. One gets to see ”the whole article” on the left side of the screen, just like with any other edits that have been performed on an article, and then a comment on the right side, saying like ”article xxx has been linked”.
2. This setup is imho not really helpful: a) one does not need to see the ”whole article” (left side) in this case, as when reviewing an edit of content. Maybe just the sentence with the new link would suffice, possibly the sentende before and/ or after could be helpful in addition, but absolutely not more. This would save a lot of unnecessary scrolling in the linking article. b) On the other hand, on the right side, where today only the link target article name is shown, this is definitely to lean. There is no way to determine if a link to Swan is to the animal or the sailing boat by just seeing that one word ”Swan”. If here instead the first one or two sentences of the target article would be displayed, it would be immediately clear if the new link is suitable or not (in this way I can immediately see the context around the new link on the left side and then the subject where it links to on the right, right next to each other, helping me take a split-second decision re. suitable or not).
3. The result of such a change/ suggestion would be, that the patroller would be presented a table of linking snippets on the left (text around where the link was inserted) and a clear description of the link target on the right, where each table row represents one new link. This would mean, that the table has two main columns. One could also add a third column on the left side of the table with a hyperlink to the ”linking article”, in case the patroller would like to access it for further overview or editing, although I doubt that this would be used very much in this context. And on the right side there should definitely be a hyperlink to a ”remove link” function, where the insert of the new link could be easily reverted by the patroller, if deemed unsuitable. In all a table with 4 columns.
4. With such a setup I believe, that the patrolling of these links would cost 1-5 seconds per new link, and I think that I would prefer to get a chunk of 20 to 100 such new links to verify in one go, as opposed to one by one, as with normal content edits. And I think that this would be feasible, since newly added links (especially as in this case, based upon the recommendation of the system) can create considerably less harm, than destructive editing can, so that this patrolling is much less time critical, i.e. one could wait and collect a batch of these added link edits and then let a ”link patroller” sink his/ her teeth into one such batch.
5. The way the patrolling of this has to be done today, it is imho definitely neither easy nor fun. I believe that this would be completely turned around if based on the suggested table- and batch method.
6. Needless to say, that I would be happy to take a look at or beta-test such a function, if you were to go ahead and give it a try. Gunboz (talk) 00:09, 10 June 2022 (UTC)

Thank you @Gunboz for the extensive feedback! We are still in the early stages of determining how we can improve the patroller experience for these edits, so this is super helpful. I will likely have further questions once we can focus on this more, and I'll be sure to reach out if I have further questions or we have some designs ideas ready for feedback. Thank you! KStoller-WMF (talk) 23:08, 10 June 2022 (UTC)

There may also be a next step to this: The other day I had a chat with another user on svwp, @Plumbum208, who actually brought me to you guys in the first place. His analysis, using Petscan was, that the Add a link tool "finds easy links", i.e. links to certain relatively well known subjects, which then end up with a lot of incoming links, possibly leaving other subjects "by the wayside" which might be rarely used and less commongly known, but still (and possibly therefore) would deserve to be more noticed. One use of this insight, after the patrolling issue is handled (btw. svwp does not enforce patrolling, like for example dewp, which might make this issue less severe on svwp), may be to present more than three link suggestion for an article, maybe also in a table with text snippets, then sort these based on the number of incoming links to put the less used on top, or some variant of this idea. Gunboz (talk) 05:38, 11 June 2022 (UTC)

Thanks for this idea @Gunboz, I've filed it as Template:Phabricator KHarlan (WMF) (talk) 09:12, 8 June 2022 (UTC)

Comment encourager les novices à modifier davantage ?

Voici quelques réponses publiées sur Wikipédia en français :

https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sujet:Ww312tmfxaabb3ou Nemo Le Poisson (talk) 14:14, 15 June 2022 (UTC)

Merci Nemo ! Les conclusions de cette conversation globale ont été résumées ici et il me semble que tes commentaires rejoignent ceux d'autres personnes. Trizek (WMF) (talk) 15:55, 15 June 2022 (UTC)

Optimising your statistics …

I see that the new growth features put an emphasis on some statistics.

Has it been thought how to measure the perverse effects that some of this could have ?

For example :

• It can occur that optimising the statistics become the prime motivator of contributors.
  • This could entail that the quality become secondary in their eyes,
  • or that they get upset because someone opposed to them because they do to much of whatever they do as an attempt to make a number become bigger. This in turn could entail more conflict between contributors with different motivation and way of contributing, which may in turn entail some people to leave the project if they don’t like conflict

Is there a plan to detect such adverse effects ? TomT0m (talk) 13:20, 5 July 2022 (UTC)

Merci for your question, @TomT0m!

In the design that was attached to the lastest newsletter shows the number of edits made, but also the number of thanks received. We are still in the exploration phase, so we still gather more feedback about it.

We know that some users will user whatever method to "earn points". This is why we are working on promoting qualitative edits. We want new users to consider the quality of their work as being rewarding, instead of increasing their usercount. We can't only consider the number of edits made, as it has already been proven to be rejected by communities: we both know that some users making multiple small edits to artificially increase the number of edits they've made.

So, instead of detecting users who artificially increase their editcount, we currently consider to decrease the importance of the number of edits by adding some other parameters to the equation. The idea is that newcomers will have to keep all their parameters in good balance. The contract would be clearly given when they start.

Our question ar the moment is to know what are the tools and data used by communities to detect the quality of an edit. This way we will decide which leads we can follow to increase the quality of the edits. we will very soon ask some communities about how they consider the quality of edits for individual users. French Wikipedia will be part of this feedback loop, I hope to see you there! Trizek (WMF) (talk) 13:39, 6 July 2022 (UTC)

I contacted French WIkipedia at these places about quality of edits:

• patrol noticeboard
• mentors noticeboard
• help and welcome coordination project Trizek (WMF) (talk) 10:30, 7 July 2022 (UTC)

Placeholder when submitting a question in mentorship module

It was a reminder to always ask mentors questions on time xD Iniquity (talk) 21:54, 8 July 2022 (UTC)

@Trizek (WMF), hi, can you help me, please :)

When trying to ask a mentor a question from the home page, the form is pre-filled with the following text: "Здравствуйте! Как создать". Can you tell me where it is configured and why it exists in general? Iniquity (talk) 16:59, 6 July 2022 (UTC)

Hello

Happy to help! :)

Could you tell me precisely where you find this message?

When I go to my homepage and click on "ask your mentor a question" (Задать вопрос вашему наставнику) a pop-up opens. In this pop-up, I read the placeholder "Поздоровайтесь и задайте ваш вопрос." I don't see the message you mention. Trizek (WMF) (talk) 18:08, 6 July 2022 (UTC)

I took a screenshot :) https://prnt.sc/NnxC-z5bQyoV Iniquity (talk) 18:38, 6 July 2022 (UTC)

Oh, sorry, we found out where it came from. It seems that I haven't asked a question for a very long time (more than a year ago). And I still have it in localStorage: homepage-questionposter-question-text-mentorship. Iniquity (talk) 20:06, 6 July 2022 (UTC)

No worries!

So the text you have is one you typed, right? Trizek (WMF) (talk) 10:26, 7 July 2022 (UTC)

Yes, a very long time ago :) Iniquity (talk) 13:43, 7 July 2022 (UTC)

Gotcha. Maybe it is time to send it now? :p Trizek (WMF) (talk) 11:22, 8 July 2022 (UTC)

Yes, I think it's time too xD Iniquity (talk) 21:53, 8 July 2022 (UTC)

PageTriage code reviews

Hello Trizek (WMF) and growth team. Nice to meet you guys. You're listed as the stewards of PageTriage. Would you guys be willing to help with code reviews for PageTriage patches? Who are the best software engineers from your team to tag in Gerrit code reviews? Thanks! Here's the patch I wrote: https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/c/mediawiki/extensions/PageTriage/+/814350 Novem Linguae (talk) 23:11, 18 July 2022 (UTC)

Hi @Novem Linguae, per our project page, PageTriage is in "passive maintenance" by our team, meaning we will help fix "unbreak now" level issues and do code review, when there is time. In the short term, there have been a few contributors to PageTriage among the developer community recently, who could perhaps review and test your patch? In the longer term, if you would like more direct support from WMF for this extension, I would suggest filing a code stewardship request to start a process for getting improved support/maintenance for the extension. KHarlan (WMF) (talk) 08:24, 19 July 2022 (UTC)

Ability to skip a suggested article before and during editing

Our newcomers began to make strange edits to skip the proposed article: [4], [5]. It seems to me that this is not very good :(

@Trizek (WMF), what do you think? :) Iniquity (talk) 02:49, 17 August 2022 (UTC)

Thanks, @Iniquity, for escalating this and linking to two examples. I know @Sunpriat also mentioned this issue on the Newcomer tasks talk page too. @Trizek (WMF) is out for a few weeks, so I'll try to help and follow up here.

I don't believe this has been reported as an issue on other wikis, but let me check with our Growth Ambassadors to see if they have ever received similar reports. I'll also see if our QA Engineer, who is fluent in Russian, can test this flow on Russian Wikipedia. Based on her feedback and our UX designer's feedback, I'll see if we should look into what you are suggesting: adding an easier way to skip a suggested edit after starting an edit.

Are there just these two examples strange edits from newcomers, or are there more of these types of edits I should be aware of? Thanks!

Thanks again for always providing the Growth team with valuable feedback! KStoller-WMF (talk) 16:59, 17 August 2022 (UTC)

Oh, I didn't know about the topic from Sunpriat, thanks!

> I don't believe this has been reported as an issue on other wikis, but let me check with our Growth Ambassadors

Yes, I'm also interested, I do not believe that only we have such a problem. That's why I did not immediately create a task on the Phabricator.

> Are there just these two examples strange edits from newcomers, or are there more of these types of edits I should be aware of?

So far, only such and very rare, maybe I was looking badly. Iniquity (talk) 17:14, 17 August 2022 (UTC)

@Iniquity I've checked with our Czech, Arabic, and Spanish Ambassadors and they report that this hasn't been an issue on their wikis.

Looking into those strange edits: [6], [7], one is by a user who made many single-character edits, most of them while not utilizing Growth tools, and the other is made by a user who made a single-character edit and then never edited in article space again.

As newcomers experiment with editing there will be some degree of confusion and mistakes, hopefully it's not very common though. But please keep me informed if it seems like these type of edits are fairly regular and I can dig into the issue further. Thanks! KStoller-WMF (talk) 23:24, 18 August 2022 (UTC)

@KStoller-WMF, Thanks for your research! I will monitor this behavior.

In any case, as part of the "feature", I think change the article after open it would be useful.

Thanks again :) Iniquity (talk) 00:25, 19 August 2022 (UTC)

Add Additional Resources to the Mentor Dashboard

Hi again! :) We discussed the mentor panel here and the mentors suggested adding links to the mentors forum so that we can jump in and discuss things quickly: ru:Обсуждение проекта:Помощь начинающим.

And I would like to add a link to the beginner help project there, since the project contains many links to resources: ru:Проект:Помощь начинающим.

Question. What is the best way to do this?

cc @VladimirPF Iniquity (talk) 17:32, 17 August 2022 (UTC)

Hello @Iniquity! :) I'm glad that mentors are discussing mentorship together, and I agree providing a quick link to navigate to that discussion makes sense.

I believe admins can edit and add Resources here: https://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/MediaWiki:GrowthExperimentsConfig.json

If that isn't what you are looking for, please just let me know and I'll can follow up. KStoller-WMF (talk) 21:40, 19 August 2022 (UTC)

@KStoller-WMF, I can't find where to add resources to mentor dashboard in this file :( Iniquity (talk) 21:48, 19 August 2022 (UTC)

Sorry, I misunderstood. Those Resource links might not be modifiable currently: https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T288879 but I believe the intention is to allow communities to customize them in the future: https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T279152. Perhaps after the rollout of the structured mentor list, that's an improvement we can consider prioritizing.

I'll chat with our team to make sure I'm not missing any other potential solutions. KStoller-WMF (talk) 23:05, 19 August 2022 (UTC)

Do I need to create a separate task for this? Iniquity (talk) 14:28, 20 August 2022 (UTC)

No, this task should cover adding the functionality you are asking for: https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T279152

I've added a note to the task about your request; feel free to follow that task or add more details in the task if you wish.

Thanks again for thinking about ways to improve Growth features, I agree that it would be great to allow customization of the References list! KStoller-WMF (talk) 16:11, 20 August 2022 (UTC)

Thanks for the explanation! :) Iniquity (talk) 17:13, 20 August 2022 (UTC)

Deployment table needs updates?

According to Growth/Deployment table the features are only enabled for 10% of users on English Wikipedia, but according to w:en:Wikipedia:Growth Team features they are enabled for 100%. Not editing it myself as maybe there are other languages which need updating too. The wub (talk) 22:49, 17 August 2022 (UTC)

Thanks, I'll double-check the full deployment table to make sure it's up-to-date. KStoller-WMF (talk) 23:21, 17 August 2022 (UTC)

trying..

..but failing...

I am trying to use in el-wiki the "Add an image" feature, as I translated @Trizek (WMF) message to :el:Βικιπαίδεια:Αγορά#Το_«Πρόσθεσε_μια_εικόνα»_είναι_διαθέσιμο_για_νέους_συντάκτες_στη_Βικιπαίδεια. I have not managed to find out where it is. Taking into account that I am an experienced user, either my mind is not operating clearly today, or the documentation is not very clear.

I am using Chrome. I activated (eventually) the homepage. I see three options (easy/medium/hard), but adding images in nowhere. I suppose that either I am doing something wrong, or ??? FocalPoint (talk) 20:38, 24 September 2022 (UTC)

@FocalPoint, the message tells that 50% of new users get this feature, but nothing is said about old accounts getting it. I suppose it cannot be voluntary switched on just yet. Ата (talk) 11:52, 25 September 2022 (UTC)

ha ha ha ... I am in the 0% of existing users who get it, apparently. Still, I am interested to try it, please let me know if and when you make a switch available. In my opinion, it might be interesting also for existing users. FocalPoint (talk) 14:21, 25 September 2022 (UTC)

Καλημέρα @FocalPoint! You can use this snippet in your browser console on Special:Homepage: ge.utils.enableImageRecommendations()

Thank you for helping with translations! KHarlan (WMF) (talk) 08:47, 26 September 2022 (UTC)

Hello @KHarlan (WMF), I managed it. It works well. It may not fit as a tool for new users in my opinion - but you are doing an experiment, which will tell more than the opinion of a user. I believe that it is an excellent tool for experienced users. FocalPoint (talk) 18:15, 26 September 2022 (UTC)

Consultation re: Echo notifications

Hello Growth team! Reaching out on behalf of the Campaigns team re Echo notifications via email: https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T316772#8257610:

Growth is still listed as the maintainer of Echo (though there's a note that it needs a new owner) - is there a specific person you would recommend that we ask? Thanks, all! LDelench (WMF) (talk) 14:25, 26 September 2022 (UTC)

Hello Lauren

I think you should ping your peer, Mariya.

But Growth has no plans regarding the improvement of email notification sent via Echo. And even if we are listed as maintainers, the ones who worked on this feature are now elsewhere. Your team is as skilled as we are to work on this, IMO. :) Trizek (WMF) (talk) 15:13, 26 September 2022 (UTC)

Apologies if I wasn't clear! We're seeking a bit of technical consultation on the approaches @Daimona Eaytoy outlined inhttps://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T316772#8257610 - not program management consultation. If that's not possible, perhaps Growth team should be removed entirely from Echo on Developers/Maintainers. LDelench (WMF) (talk) 21:42, 26 September 2022 (UTC)

Like us, a lot of teams have a responsibility in maintaining some key features used by the Movement. We can be pinged for big crashes, but we lack the history behind product choices that were made years ago.

So I still think you should ask @MShilova (WMF). She will add your request to our next technical meeting agenda. Then, you'd then get multiple brains thinking about the approach Diamona suggests. IMO, it is the best approach but I let Mariya decide. Trizek (WMF) (talk) 13:21, 27 September 2022 (UTC)

Discussion

Bonjour, je signale cette discussion sur la Wikipédia en français. Cela a été annoncé quand? J'ai pensé que ce changement pourrait venir de votre projet car il est nommé ici sur Phabricator. Cordialement, 37.103.1.0 15:28, 11 October 2022 (UTC) (Edited by Tacsipacsi (talk))

Hello, sorry for the frustration!

The Growth Team is currently the maintainer of Recent changes, so we appreciate you reporting this discussion.

Unfortunately I don't know of any Growth team work that would have caused this change. Perhaps @Trizek (WMF) or @KHarlan (WMF) can track down more information for us? KStoller-WMF (talk) 21:56, 11 October 2022 (UTC)

Bonjour

Le gras et les cercles pleins mentionnés dans cette conversation est la présentation par défaut des listes de suivi depuis au moins 4 ans. Concernant les triangles, il s'agit de la vue compacte, accessible depuis les préférences.

Beaucoup d'utilisateurs expérimentés ont modifié l'affichage de leur liste de suivi pour qu'il corresponde à leurs besoins. Sans doute est-ce là qu'il faut regarder si un gadget local n'a pas changé quelque chose, ou voir si un souci de configuration a remis à zéro les préférences de chacun.

La tâche Phabricator est une proposition, rien n'a été fait pour appliquer cela. Trizek (WMF) (talk) 12:02, 12 October 2022 (UTC)

What is the change exactly? Sorry, having a hard time reconciling the translated text with what I see in the phabricator link, which seems like a different issue... KHarlan (WMF) (talk) 13:07, 12 October 2022 (UTC)

@Trizek (WMF) @KHarlan (WMF) Merci pour les responses. Oui, les points étaient déjà là, mais le visuel (layout) a beaucoup changé: maintentant les points flottent dans l'espace blanc, ils sont bien trop en evidence, à qui dois-je le signaler ? Les dates sont apparues en plus. Je n'avais pas modifié des gadgets ou activé la "vue compacte" le Spécial:Préférences#mw-prefsection-rc, j'aimerai savoir pourquoi la "vue compacte" a été activée ou si elle s'est activée tout seul par erreur. Cordialement, 151.42.132.94 09:58, 13 October 2022 (UTC)

Pourriez-vous m'envoyer une capture d'écran par email (ou tout autre moyen) ? Ainsi, nous pourrons comparer les interfaces. Trizek (WMF) (talk) 14:56, 17 October 2022 (UTC)

@Trizek (WMF) Capture d'écrans envoyées aujourd'hui par courriel. Cordialement, 151.42.159.1 11:07, 10 December 2022 (UTC)

Bonjour et merci pour ces captures d'écran.

Tout semble fonctionner normalement, tant pour les points pleins et vides que pour les triangles ou l’espace blanc : c'est la présentation par défaut.

Entre temps, j'ai regardé si le problème avait été rapporté ailleurs, et je n'ai pas trouvé de rapport. Honnêtement, je n'ai pas d'idée. Par expérience, je pencherai pour un gadget ou script local qui a du dysfonctionner ou être réparé, amenant à ce conflit. Pour ma part, je n'ai pas eu le problème sur mon compte bénévole. Trizek (WMF) (talk) 15:18, 12 December 2022 (UTC)

API for getting a list of mentors with all the data

Hi, we use the list of mentors to form the pattern when the participant does not have a tutor (very old accounts). Now, to get the mentor's nickname, you need to make two requests: one for the GrowthMentors.json and the other for MediaWiki API.

Is it possible to get a list through the api that contains the names and other data about the mentor?

fyi @Trizek (WMF), @Martin Urbanec (WMF) Iniquity (talk) 14:52, 27 October 2022 (UTC)

List of all real unstructured mentors

(Topic title edited by Martin Urbanec (WMF) (talk), Iniquity (talk))

After updating the list to structural, I'm sure there are many mentees who are still attached to mentors who have not passed the QuitMentorship procedure.

There is a possibility to get this list for ruwiki? I want to think about what to do with them. Iniquity (talk) 16:06, 27 October 2022 (UTC)

@Martin Urbanec (WMF), any idea?

We should look at other wikis, as well, and reassign mentees to mentors who aren't in any list anymore. Trizek (WMF) (talk) 11:23, 28 October 2022 (UTC)

I thought of writing a task later to remove mentees from those who are completely inactive (like this phab:T321884). And ask those who are active, but no longer a mentor, re-enter mentoring and exit it or establish a status to 'away'. Iniquity (talk) 12:33, 28 October 2022 (UTC)

Hello @Iniquity, thanks for the question!

Fortunately, it is possible to create this list quite easily, because the Growth team decided in late 2021 to publish all mentorship data via dumps.wikimedia.org. Each Saturday, mentorship data are released at https://dumps.wikimedia.org/other/growthmentorship/. It is then possible for anyone interested to download the data and to build on top of them.

It is also possible to query the mentorship data via the API. For example, if I want to see all mentees assigned to you at Russian Wikipedia, I can do this: https://ru.wikipedia.org/w/api.php?action=query&format=xml&list=growthmentormentee&gemmmentor=Iniquity.

To create a list of users with at least one mentee, regardless of whether they are currently signed as mentors, the dumps are more convenient, as they provide access to the complete data.

To make it easier for you, I created an example PAWS notebook which generates this list.

You can find the list at the end of the notebook's page, together with the code I used to generate the list.

Let me know if the list is useful to you, or if you have any questions about how to make use of the mentorship data -- I'll be happy to help!

Best wishes, Martin Urbanec Martin Urbanec (WMF) (talk) 16:08, 28 October 2022 (UTC)

It's gorgeous. Thank you so much for all the links, they are very helpful! Iniquity (talk) 16:28, 28 October 2022 (UTC)

Glad to be of service! Martin Urbanec (WMF) (talk) 16:38, 28 October 2022 (UTC)

Prohibited from becoming a mentor. How to?

Tracked in Phabricator
Task T322047

Trizek (WMF) (talk) 17:05, 31 October 2022 (UTC)

There is a problem. I have a partially blocked mentor who I want to exclude from mentoring/change his status to away and make sure he can't come back. There is a possibility? Iniquity (talk) 02:35, 30 October 2022 (UTC)

First of all, you should exclude them from mentorship. While being away, this mentor can still have their name displayed at some newcomers. Excluding this mentor, using Special:ManageMentors, will reassign their mentees.

But this mentor can still reapply. Hence, I filled T322047 to provide an option to exclude users from mentorship.

Side note: if the user is excluded from mentorship because they are toxic, the best solution is to exclude them from the wiki. These users may "do useful things", but they also prevent more users who'd do useful things to join. :) Trizek (WMF) (talk) 17:05, 31 October 2022 (UTC)

Thanks! He's not toxic, he's just quite young and has a very strange way of communicating, which in my opinion can be very bad for newcomers: they get very bad answers. In addition to blocking NS Wikipedia, it is contraindicated to be a mentor :) Iniquity (talk) 17:22, 31 October 2022 (UTC)

Technical note: As of today, only sitewide blocks affect mentorship features (by fully excluding them from mentorship). I described several solutions how we can extend the partial blocks to mentorship features at T322047#8359548, thoughts are welcomed. Martin Urbanec (WMF) (talk) 12:16, 1 November 2022 (UTC)

Anomalous reassignment of mentors

Tracked in Phabricator
Task T322374

Martin Urbanec (WMF) (talk) 22:00, 3 November 2022 (UTC)

@Trizek (WMF), @Martin Urbanec (WMF).

Hi, I need your help. What happened here? https://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D0%A1%D0%BB%D1%83%D0%B6%D0%B5%D0%B1%D0%BD%D0%B0%D1%8F:%D0%96%D1%83%D1%80%D0%BD%D0%B0%D0%BB%D1%8B?type=growthexperiments&user=%D0%97%D0%B0%D0%B3%D1%80%D0%B5%D0%B1%D0%B8%D0%BD+%D0%98%D0%BB%D1%8C%D1%8F&page=&wpdate=&tagfilter=&subtype=&wpFormIdentifier=logeventslist

History: we kick one person from mentorship by admin and then he came back and leave by himself. When he got out he started reassigning mentors to everyone twice. Iniquity (talk) 15:20, 3 November 2022 (UTC)

I think it is related to https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T321382. Iniquity (talk) 15:22, 3 November 2022 (UTC)

There is a suspicion that the same pain can happen to this account: https://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/Участник:Sipuha_From_Ruwiki Iniquity (talk) 16:38, 3 November 2022 (UTC)

And it is possible that there is no double-click check when exiting mentoring. Iniquity (talk) 16:59, 3 November 2022 (UTC)

Thanks for the report Iniquity, as always! This is an interesting case.

> And it is possible that there is no double-click check when exiting mentoring.

At a first sight, that seems like a plausible explanation. I filled T322374 to further investigate this. Martin Urbanec (WMF) (talk) 21:22, 3 November 2022 (UTC)

Thanks! Iniquity (talk) 21:26, 3 November 2022 (UTC)

Growth team product KPIs

(Topic title edited by Martin Urbanec (WMF) (talk), Iniquity (talk))

Currently, newcomers can ask questions in three different ways:

• To their mentor, via Special:Homepage: this is measured under "Question posted via mentorship_module_question"
• To their mentor, via the Help panel: this is measured under "Question posted via mentorship_panel_question"
• To the help desk, via the Help panel: this is measured under "Question posted via help_panel_question"

Description in the KPI dashboard were updated to be more precise. Martin Urbanec (WMF) (talk) 19:03, 4 November 2022 (UTC)

@Martin Urbanec (WMF), hi, what difference between "Question posted via help_panel_question" and "Question posted via mentorship_panel_question"? :) Iniquity (talk) 09:54, 4 November 2022 (UTC)

Hi @Iniquity,

the difference is in the origin and target of the questions. There should be an explanation text under the (i) icon in top-left corner of each chart, but that can be improved if it's not sufficient.

Currently, newcomers can ask questions in three different ways:

• To their mentor, via Special:Homepage: this is measured under "Question posted via mentorship_module_question"
• To their mentor, via the Help panel: this is measured under "Question posted via mentorship_panel_question"
• To the help desk, via the Help panel: this is measured under "Question posted via help_panel_question"

The last way (asking questions to the help desk) is currently kept as a fallback, in case the Help desk is configured, but mentorship isn't.

Hope this helps! Martin Urbanec (WMF) (talk) 15:49, 4 November 2022 (UTC)

Thanks for the answer! Yes, it helped :)

> There should be an explanation text under the (i) icon in top-left corner of each chart
Oh, I didnt see this button.

> that can be improved if it's not sufficient
I looked, there is a very complex text, it seems to me that there is not enough human description, as you wrote to me here :) Iniquity (talk) 15:55, 4 November 2022 (UTC) (Edited by Martin Urbanec (WMF) (talk))

Great to hear that!

Unfortunately, I can't make the (i) button more visible, as it's put there by Grafana itself (the software that renders the charts).

We can definitely improve the description wording though. I changed the text in the dashboard to use the phrasing I used here. Is it more understandable now? Martin Urbanec (WMF) (talk) 17:40, 4 November 2022 (UTC)

> help_panel: question posted via the help panel, mentorship is not enabled mentorship_module: question posted via mentorship module on Special:Homepage mentorship_panel: Questioned posted via help panel with mentorship enabled

I have this description, and I think you can add "To the help desk, via the Help panel:" phrase :) Iniquity (talk) 17:45, 4 November 2022 (UTC)

Oh, cache! I was changed. Now thats perfect, thanks! :) Iniquity (talk) 17:46, 4 November 2022 (UTC)

Great! Martin Urbanec (WMF) (talk) 19:03, 4 November 2022 (UTC)

Thank you so much :)

I want to express my gratitude to you for your responsiveness, working with communities (you listen to us and hear us) and creating cool tools for beginners and mentors (setting up an extension through json and a special page is just gorgeous).

Keep up the good work :) I really like Growth team.

Special thanks to @Trizek (WMF) and @Martin Urbanec (WMF), you are cool! Iniquity (talk) 16:16, 7 November 2022 (UTC)

Well Iniquity, thank YOU for being so supportive, for being the good and bad news bearer for both Growth and Russian Wikipedia, and for being a great person. It is really a pleasure to work with you, and our common project grows (pun intended) because of all the great you put in it. Keep going! 😊 Trizek (WMF) (talk) 16:37, 7 November 2022 (UTC)

Thanks for the kind words 😍 Iniquity (talk) 17:41, 7 November 2022 (UTC)

Mentoring function analytics

Hi all! I want to host a small conference/meeting for Russian wikipedia mentors. What analytics do you think would be interesting/useful? Have you had any meeting experience? Iniquity (talk) 15:10, 24 November 2022 (UTC)

Hello

Community events reports might help you regarding events we attend.

I can share some resources with you, just let me know what you need! Specifically for mentors, we already have Growth/Communities/Mentors training. Trizek (WMF) (talk) 20:37, 29 November 2022 (UTC)

Hello @Iniquity, thanks for considering hosting a conference for mentors!

The Growth team recently added more mentor-related analytics to the Growth Team Product KPIs dashboard. You can narrow down and see just the ruwiki metrics here. Scroll down to learn where most mentor questions are posted/asked (from the newcomer homepage mentorship module or the help panel). You can also see graphs showing how many "automatically assigned" mentors are active, the number of newcomers registering per mentor, and the number of inactive mentors.

Notice that you can adjust the date rage at top, and that most of the Mentorship graphs have an "i" info icon you can click on to get more information about the metric.

Does that help? Let us know if you have further questions about mentorship analytics, as we are open to adding in more data based on community requests. KStoller-WMF (talk) 16:58, 30 November 2022 (UTC)

Hello everyone :) Thanks for the links, I knew about them, but looked again. From the statistics, I'd like something about the "growth" of success.

For example:

1. How many newbies asked questions via the help panel or module on the home page in two years

2. How many of them received their answers in two years

3. How many "suggested edits" were made in two years, and how many of them were rolled back.

4. It would be very interesting to know the statistics on the "welcome survey".

5. Statistics on "popular topics" for "suggested edits". What topics are usually chosen for editing.

6. Some statistics on retention due to the "work of mentors". Iniquity (talk) 21:18, 1 December 2022 (UTC)

@Iniquity Thanks for the feedback!

1. How many newbies asked questions via the help panel or module on the home page in two years

Russian Wikipedia’s Special:Tags page gives the following count for the various edit tags:

• help panel question: 441 edits
• mentorship module question: 7,649 edits
• mentorship panel question: 1,614 edits

3. How many "suggested edits" were made in two years, and how many of them were rolled back.

You can see graphs for #1 and #3 in Grafana (although not all the way back 2 years), but I assume you want to see an easy "total", not just the graph. Correct? Let me see if I can grab this data for you ASAP.

2. How many of them received their answers in two years

@Martin Urbanec (WMF) we have metrics on how many mentor questions are asked, but is there a way to also include how many questions received answers? Or perhaps just a percentage of mentee questions that are answered?

4. It would be very interesting to know the statistics on the "welcome survey".

Agreed, we've talked about making this info more publicly accessible, but it's not as straightforward as other aggregate data. We also only retain this data temporarily, so that's another consideration. @Trizek (WMF) I'm not seeing a Phab task for this, do you think we should add one?

5. Statistics on "popular topics" for "suggested edits". What topics are usually chosen for editing.

Interesting, I'll chat with our Data Scientist about this. I know we hope to switch to a language agnostic topic model in the future, so we might want to wait on this one.

6. Some statistics on retention due to the "work of mentors".

I'll chat with our Data Scientist about this one too. My guess is that this might be a challenge to add to a dashboard, but we are certainly looking at retention closely with the Positive Reinforcement project, and particularly at how encouragement from mentors (personalized praise) might help with retention, so hopefully we will at least have some data around retention and mentorship to share early next year. KStoller-WMF (talk) 19:31, 2 December 2022 (UTC)

@KStoller-WMF, thanks for detaled answer!

> Russian Wikipedia’s Special:Tags page gives the following count for the various edit tags:

I know that beginners can ask a few questions to the mentor. Are there clear statistics on users not edits? :) Iniquity (talk) 16:16, 5 December 2022 (UTC)

You mean the number of users who ask questions, instead of the number of edits tagged? Trizek (WMF) (talk) 17:46, 5 December 2022 (UTC)

Yep, I am :) Iniquity (talk) 13:58, 7 December 2022 (UTC)

@Iniquity

Sorry for the delay, I wanted our data scientist to double-check the data I pulled before I shared it:

How many "suggested edits" were made in two years, and how many of them were rolled back.

• 74,088 newcomer tasks were made on Russian wikipedia between Nov 1, 2020 - Oct 31, 2022.
• 6,138 reverts of newcomer tasks on Russian wikipedia between Nov 1, 2020 - Oct 31, 2022.
• So in the last two years, about 8% of newcomer tasks on Russian wikipedia were reverted.

Some statistics on retention due to the "work of mentors".

We should have more data to share on this after our Positive Reinforcement project. :)

It would be very interesting to know the statistics on the "welcome survey".

Last month, between Nov 1, 2022 - Nov 30, 2022, it looks like about 49% of newcomers complete the welcome survey (it's not required). Of those that complete the survey, for the first question Why did you create your account today? the responses were as follows:

~ 37% To create a new Wikipedia article

~ 19% To read Wikipedia

~ 13% To add or change information to a Wikipedia article

~ 11% To fix a typo or error in a Wikipedia article

~ 1 % To add a photo or image to a Wikipedia article

~ 3 % I'm participating in a program, class, or event

~ 16% Other or N/A

Let me know if you are interested in other welcome survey data and I can grab more info for you. KStoller-WMF (talk) 01:41, 15 December 2022 (UTC)

> Last month, between Nov 1, 2021 - Nov 30, 2022,

Last month or last year? :) Iniquity (talk) 15:47, 17 December 2022 (UTC)

Ack, sorry, typo! That should have said "Last month, between Nov 1, 2022 - Nov 30, 2022" KStoller-WMF (talk) 21:53, 18 December 2022 (UTC)

Thanks for the stats! I will use it at my next meeting :) Iniquity (talk) 11:45, 17 December 2022 (UTC)

Is there any statistics on how many newcomers register from mobile, and how many from desktop? Iniquity (talk) 18:16, 17 December 2022 (UTC)

@Iniquity We have that information, but I'm not positive I know how to combine data correctly to grab that exact data for you.

This data is easier to access, although not exactly what you are looking for:

- Newly registered users on Russian Wikipedia

- Unique devices accessing Russian Wikipedia split by Mobile and Desktop

However, you would prefer to see that first graph (Newly registered users on Russian Wikipedia) but split by Mobile and Desktop, correct? KStoller-WMF (talk) 19:58, 21 December 2022 (UTC)

Thanks! :)

> However, you would prefer to see that first graph (Newly registered users on Russian Wikipedia) but split by Mobile and Desktop, correct?

Yes, I would like to understand how to make help documentation, and whether it is necessary to focus on mobile users.. Iniquity (talk) 20:11, 21 December 2022 (UTC)

Ok, understood. I'll look into this, but I likely won't have an answer for you until January.

Thanks for thinking about documentation improvements for new editors. I'll chat with you in 2023!  :) KStoller-WMF (talk) 16:40, 22 December 2022 (UTC)

Thank you! I will wait for it :) Iniquity (talk) 21:21, 22 December 2022 (UTC)

@Iniquity I don't have data yet for all of 2022, but here's some data from 2021 for Russian Wikipedia:

About 36% of accounts created were created from a mobile device.

Mobile users were less likely to Activate as compared with Desktop users.

Mobile users were less likely to be Retained as compared with Desktop users.

Registration only counts users who self-registered on the given wiki (meaning autocreated accounts and accounts created by others are ignored).

Activation means making at least one edit within 24 hours after registration.

Retention means a user was activated and then went on to make at least one edit over the next two weeks after their first 24 hours.

Hope that helps! KStoller-WMF (talk) 22:56, 13 January 2023 (UTC)

Thanks a lot! Yes, that's what I need! :) Iniquity (talk) 23:21, 13 January 2023 (UTC)

@Iniquity I just wanted to follow up since I now have the data for all of 2022.  :)

I've included Russian, English, and Growth pilot wikis so you have some comparisons:

• Numbers shown are monthly averages over 12 months from 2022-01 through 2022-12.
• Registration only counts users who self-registered on the given wiki (meaning autocreated accounts and accounts created by others are ignored).
• Activation means making at least one edit within 24 hours after registration.
• Retention means a user was activated and then went on to make at least one edit over the next two weeks after their first 24 hours.
• There are two ways to measure retention, either as proportion of users who activated, or as the proportion of users who registered. We show both in their respective columns.

Language	N Registered	N Activated	N Retained	Activation rate	Retention rate (of activated)	Overall retention
Arabic	8,871	2,904	340	33%	12%	4%
Bengali	1,804	487	54	27%	11%	3%
Czech	1,227	518	82	42%	16%	7%
English	99,787	32,897	4,714	33%	14%	5%
Russian	9,939	3,330	433	33%	13%	4%
Spanish	14,895	5,056	626	34%	12%	4%

Language	Platform	N Registered	N Activated	N Retained	Activation rate	Retention rate (of activated)	Overall retention rate	Mobile proportion
Russian	Desktop	5,736	1,670	270	29.3%	16.2%	4.7%	42.3%
Russian	Mobile	4,204	1,660	163	39.5%	9.8%	3.9%

Also you might find this data useful: Wiki comparison, as the most recent data was just added.

I hope this is helpful! KStoller-WMF (talk) 23:02, 10 February 2023 (UTC)

{{#mentor}} load in Hello templates

Hello! We want to think and make it so that when arranging greeting templates, {{#mentor}} is inserted without substitution. How critical will the server load be if this word is used on hundreds of thousands of pages? Iniquity (talk) 16:32, 7 December 2022 (UTC)

Hello!

Not much, otherwise we wouldn't have provided it. :) Trizek (WMF) (talk) 18:39, 7 December 2022 (UTC)

Thanks! :) Iniquity (talk) 16:23, 8 December 2022 (UTC)

"Shorter version" should be put on jawp:Announcements

@Trizek (WMF):, Hi, I enjoy translating Growth Newsletter time to tome. I wish to convey you voices from jawp editors/users, mainly two points which tastes kind of sharp but the reality: There are inputs suggesting that providing News in full in foreign language is not a very wise choice, whichever WMF team initiates. If you want ppl to read and join you, please reconsider and perhaps tailor made the outreach to each local language and page you target.

The Growth Newsletter is a treasure trove, full of passionate reports and invitations, surely. But, maybe too big/too rich to publish on the present format, causing heart-burns? FYI, the Announcement page functions on jawp as a day-to-day bulletin board, very practical similar to old-fashioned, such like "lost-and-found". Could we make something as short as 200 words to introduce a new issue of Growth Newsletter?

I'll be frank to relay the murmurs of jawp editors.

• Growth Newsletter is too long and chokes other more practical announcements that needs attention for more concrete and urgent matters;
• Esp that Newsletter is not popular not inviting: why published in English on local page?
• When you do need to discuss further and in details, that is up to each reader. Do not nag in loud voice at me; If some group publish long long newsletter solely written in Japanese, are the enwp editors ready to accept such dis-manner?

We can publish shorter, Table_of_Contents type of circulars provided in local language. As much as the Newsletter is thought provoking, you need time to read. If TOC type of circular is published, and somebody finds a topic in it interesting, then they will set aside time to read the details. Don't we attract more insights in return on the talkpage, maybe? That way, at least it will be reader friendly publication. And at the most, that will open many doors across languages, I cross my fingers.

Good example is that from the Tech team (Tech News, published weekly). For the contents, we can't compare tech-related reports/announcements to what Growth team heads for, though, for readers, what is more handy?

Please take time and comprehend that each wiki needs Announcement pages for their own use, too.

Addendum: If I may translate the unspoken thoughts of jawp editors very plainly. "We are pushed into Knowledge Gap whenever we see lengthy announcement in English. Many teams of WMF tries to outreach through Announcement page. Surely, that and Village Pump is open to anybody including the Foundation, but actually the publication format unnerves ppl even to doubt the intention. Why is WMF utilizing jawp and its local hub of information as a dish to serve things in non-Japanese language? Are they sure ppl will spend time reading it with dictionary? No budget or resources for Knowledge equity? Squatting lines after lines in non-Japanese language is very rude in ja culture, because English is not a local language: it stands against the pride Wikipedia community holds in providing knowledge in native language."

IMHO, the above underlines the editors' discomfort, which we seldom tell somebody causing such situation, as taling back in English is not what ppl care. Dis-communication on the surface, but backed with cultural ethics. Let's look into how practically we convey the activities and resources the Newsletter delivers to people. I stand by the hours and researches each writer has poured into very rich content on each issue, and Newsletter should never contribute and have readers-to-be earmark "Growth-things", look away and negate. Ping me, and I'll try and find time to support TOC translation when you are ready. Omotecho (talk) 15:43, 20 December 2022 (UTC)

@Omotecho thank you for spending the time to offer such detailed feedback!

I'm the Product Manager of the Growth team and I think a lot about how we can better involve and communicate with all of the wikis and languages we build products for. It's certainly a challenge to find the right level of detail for our communication, and ensure it's translated and properly localized!

We currently post more detailed Weekly Updates (which I see you've also helped translate - thank you!) and the Newsletter is meant to be a more widely shared and succinct overview of our work. However, based on your feedback, it sounds like we should aim to make the Newsletters even more succinct in the future and ideally make sure it is fully translated before it is shared.

Once @Trizek (WMF) returns, I'll discuss your feedback further with him and make sure it is also shared more widely with Wikimedia Foundation Community Relations Specialists. Our Community Relations Specialist team has a far deeper understanding of how to prepare and deliver multilingual newsletters than I do, so I imagine they may have other ideas for how we can improve communication.

Thanks again for taking the time to provide feedback! @Trizek (WMF) is working to improve the Growth team's communication strategy, so we will certainly use your feedback when considering improvements to how we communicate. KStoller-WMF (talk) 19:10, 21 December 2022 (UTC)

@KStoller-WMF: Appreciate so much for your prompt attention. Yes, please ping me anytime, and I will link you to the latest local discussion that if Wikipedia:Announcement/ja^※ should segregate any Newsletter or message from WMF staffer into a subpage.

That motion was turned down for knowledge equity on global standard, and IMHO not sure how long we opposers could hold back if the same proposal will be made, as the WMF input looks flooding lately, even to a bilingual person. Expecting that trend will accelerate makes me worry very much as on the US calendar, we are in Q3-FY2022 now.

Could we also cast a light on different Fiscal Year systems?

FYI, past the New Year’s holiday, our social calendar in Japan moves on to the last quarter for Fiscal Year 2022, or the Q4-FY2022, on an April-March calendar: I suppose the Foundation will be in the Q3-FY2022, June-May, and activities can be in fuller swing, much more to share globally than the previous Q2 (November 2022).

Such gap of time frame based on different Fiscal Year Calendar (FY), and how practitioners plan their workflow. On June-May FY system, I suppose you have more time to move things on in January, before the dawn/Q4-2022. On the contrary, Japan (and a few other countries/regions) is toward the deep night/recounting a year in Q4.

That suggests cases in Q4 workflow: discussions starting in Q4 with a non-Wikimedia partner/a public sector rather leave over a new agenda into future FYs in Japan. Then June, not April, will be when public offices and legislatures in Japan practically start the real work for, say FY2023. Because the Diet approves the Supplementary Budget for that FY by the last week of May.

Private sectors in Japan, including ja Wikimedia community and events/program organizers, and WMF Grantees, negotiate with public sectors and may need to set aside the waiting period April-May. You will be 100% sure official decisions is final and safe to give a go to local projects.

So going full circle, news needs to be fresh thus Newsletters are valued. Degrading factors such as FY systems might least affect "call for actions" go old or expired, if we plan timing and see how we pitch the ball (news) and hit, catch, and pass among us. I hope translation is a wide receiver mid-fielder to speak, enjoyable task if given enough time ahead. (※ = prefix "Wikipedia:" is applied on jawp; "Project:" on other /jp MW wikis, and enwp.)

Cheers, Omotecho (talk) 23:46, 21 December 2022 (UTC)

Thanks again for the details!

I've asked the Senior Manager of the WMF Community Relations Specialists team to review your thoughts, since this is definitely an issue that is more global than the Growth team.

Some of our staff have already started a winter holiday break, so your concerns might not be reviewed until January 2023, but I'll be sure they are discussed with other WMF staff soon. Thank you for spending the time to pass along your feedback and concerns! KStoller-WMF (talk) 01:08, 22 December 2022 (UTC)

Hello @Omotecho, and thank you for sharing your feedback and ideas with us. Japanese Wikipedia has the reputation of being a difficult to reach community, so I'm happy that you share this feedback with us. Also, I'm sorry for the late reply, but I took some time off.

Your message reflects some feedback I already heard, regarding the length of our newsletter and its content. It is a challenge, and it is a challenge for all newsletters. Hence I will split my reply in to parts, one covering the overall newsletters' challenges, and the other covering Growth challenges.

Regarding newsletters challenges

Community Relations Specialists take care of newsletters. Since I joined, newsletters have been a challenge. Our goal is to provide newsletter in the best format, in the right length and with comfortable options for translations.

We get feedback in favor of all possible (and conflicting) options: longer or shorter newsletters, translated versus untranslated but in a simpler English contents (even if translated contents have more supporters), posting at community boards versus posting at individuals talk pages, etc. Even the most appreciated newsletter we care about, Tech News, get some conflicting opinions about its content. :)

What is the best option regarding English versus local language? Should we offer information in English, even if not everyone can get the information or is frustrated by it, or not posting at all if we don't cover the local language? I'm personally in favor of posting in English if no translation has been provided, as the important thing is to inform users.

An other question Community Engagement has is about translations. It is difficult to find translators, and communities complain about it as they get the messages in English, with no way to translate it in an easy way after posting. Also, if the newsletter has a short edition, or partially translated, or if it redirects to a page in English, will it suit all users' needs? Of course, we have received some suggestions around paying translators, but we have more than 300 languages to take care of, and prioritizing one over another may feel unfair.

We also have the question of the right place where to post. We observe community pages that are full of announcements and newsletters, and we have no clue if the contents are read. We also have some communities asking us to post at a given page, knowing that it is a dead end as nobody goes there. So I like a lot the fact that you contacted us to improve the contents!

I took good note of the quarters' cultural differences. This is something I'll carefully consider on further publications. This is typically the king of feedback we look for. WMF fiscal year starts in July. It might be different and not standardized: I asked my relatives about their businesses, and they start their fiscal year respectively in October and January (case of businesses in France). The important point is to tell when the year starts, or to offer better timeframes. Instead of saying "In fiscal year Q3..." we should write "Starting in January...".

Regarding Growth newsletter

As @KStoller-WMF mentions, we are refining our communication strategy. We look for feedback and we test new approches.

One of the changes is the Highlights section in the newsletter. The goal is to have the essential information being displayed for users who just skim the newsletter. Maybe we could only send this short version to users who'd like to get the most important news? We have to find a good balance as we also hear from people who like the level of detail we provide. Out of curiosity, how would you summarize the latest Growth newsletter in 200 words?

We are also want to know more about our target audience. We want to inform experienced editors primary. We have two kind of users we'd like to target: the ones who care about newcomers, and the ones who are curious about changes we provide to newcomers' first steps. I'm taking the opportunity here to ask you about these users (of course without putting aside the rest of the conversation): are they profiles we can find at Japanese Wikipedia? Could they be interested by a conversation about which information they look for? Also, is Wikipedia:お知らせ/ウィキメディア共通 the right place to post the Growth newsletter?

As a conclusion (for now)

I'm really curious about any other feedback or idea you might have, so as on-wiki conversations you could share with us. We look for feedback to improve our services, and this conversation is promising. Again, thank you very much for starting it. Trizek (WMF) (talk) 14:15, 3 January 2023 (UTC)

Happy New Year to you and your team! Right, I also share the many challenges Growth team has looked into, as I am saddened how ja community distances thmeselves from the Community sphere as if we are a loner, even in the 2020s. I appreciate you have come up with the Forum where any language is accepted, and wish it will live long.

The discomfort that ringers in ja community.

IMHO, one thing is that jawp is a group of writers and editors, period. Many inputs from WMF (news/newsletters/notices etc) are felt as coming _down_ to bother writership, misunderstood as the act of bureaucracy (pardon me for the sharp taste).

• There is a ja expression, "上位下達" (jōi katatsu) that somebody/something on a very high parch drops anything down out of the blue, regardless of how the downstairs' residences appreciate/dislikes;
• Obviously, free riding, or piggybacking on WMF servers does not irritate your feeling of fairness in ja culture, thus prevents you to think about your share is what you care and act for. (sigh)

How WMF has began walking with each community/Hubs, and I wish it will be appreciated how it will make our editorship/readership sustain and extend. Well, naturally, it involves much reading assignments: newsletters in en floods your inboxes, no way to catch up the volume if you are so thrilled to edit/write encyclopedia.

Wikipedia:お知らせ/ウィキメディア共通

literally, the subpage is a ja:announcement:wikimedia_subjects, to save space for jawp specific topics/action items.

• those who care about how ja community will sort out newsletters has decided to arrange the inbox into multiple layers. That is hoped to yield the negative feelings soiling how information is shared:
• Important and friendly message from WMF teams are buried and choked because of the total volume; the volume is not functioning to extend knowledge, rather ends up WMF teams competing for attention, no winner;
• on top of that, at the moment, the subpage kind of looks like a closet that things are thrown in at random; you can't dig out your favorite raincoat;
• if the newsletters are easily sorted, not by the readers, but by the posters. Icons? Color bands on its headline? Visual identity might help readers stop ignoring easily, go harvest their pick and become regular supporters.

Disorientation about how WMF and its reams are laid0out;

Does WMF has a simplified chart of teams/departments, or can we offer a navbox type of sorter? In Japanese society, we always look for charts how an institution or NPO lays out its sections;

• If you imagine the diagram laying out 10 metro lines posted above metro ticket vending machines in Tokyo. Maybe we could mend the disoriented feeling to how WMF functions day-to-day. Myself, too, loves to know the directory, not as a chart of power, but rather to save time and find the better reception desk where I will consult.
• How about categorizing newsletters to specific topic of interest? Digging into the mass of newsletters is not handy without proper cues. Esp when you are a writer/editor much more used to look at the page bottom and care about the categories. I guess it involves community discussion locally and name categories or not?

200 words' newsletter

As a translator, my analog sense of word count is bound by 200-400-600 and so forth to translation source in en: it will fit to approx. 400 characters in ja the maximum, even when I embed translator's note to terminology. 400 characters are a volume you digest and comprehend the contents as a reader with out too much pain;

• the Tech News wisely fits its word count into the range of short memory circuit I guess; like giing external or interwiki links, can't we engineer our newsletters that way? For Growth newsletter, we have TOC page separate from the full-length one, and that TOC will function well to fit short memory circuit, that the essence of each issue will reach to wider readers: novice/Junior and hardcore/passionate but searching for what you can do; to Senior and believe you know the map, rather hesitate to try newer path, but somehow confident you will lead the way if the input is translated.

What I wish to change will be: I wish to catch up before those notices arrive on ja communities in raw form, or in en; you can bring a horse to the riverbank, but can't force it to drink, you know...

• many notices are yet to be perceived as a chance to tell what you feel, even though more meetings invites you with interpreters/pre-posted list of agenda; offered in en, then instantly counted out as another thing "not mine", and unread, rot (archived).

Basic understanding of how we all support the Wikimedia is less comprehended in ja community as I see;

• some clutch their arms and very much sound as if preaching new comers that you don't go near WMF-ish things, as they came _after_ Wikipedia came into our world;
• it might have looked/sounded cool (in the 2010s), but no more, as I eyewitness more newcomers to jump over the fence and reach out to Meta or Mediawiki;
• too bad that those jumped into wider Wikimedia sphere stumbles as the common/standard language, English, is a too wide a ditch in front of you.

Even after newsletters be offered in translation, it might not change drastically how ja community members are motivated to read more input from WMF. A jawp editor/writer is too afraid to allow themselves and spend time reading things not directly contributes to the article page(s), in which you pour your free hours to comb and brush up. How can we change that superstitious thinking pattern? What can we sell better to those picky buyers of information? Omotecho (talk) 18:22, 3 January 2023 (UTC)

if the newsletters are easily sorted, not by the readers, but by the posters. Icons? Color bands on its headline? Visual identity might help readers stop ignoring easily, go harvest their pick and become regular supporters.

The problem with any visual distinction is that if a wiki doesn’t have a separate page for newsletters (most wikis don’t have, they’re just thrown on village pumps), these visually distinguished messages sent by some outsiders (from the wiki’s point of view) are much more prominent than messages sent by users of the given wiki, specifically aimed at users of that wiki. What could work is wrapping the message in MediaWiki messages that don’t do anything by default, but can be locally overridden to provide styling, like

{{MediaWiki:wikimedia-newsletter-start|growth}}
...
{{MediaWiki:wikimedia-newsletter-end|growth}}

(these two messages need to be defined as empty in the WikimediaMessages extension). Japanese Wikipedia could override them to respectively open and close a colored <div> (or add an icon in the opening one or whatever you want). Tacsipacsi (talk) 21:30, 3 January 2023 (UTC)

Hello

A quick update about these topics: as we will improve the Growth team's communication strategy, the ideas and suggestions shared here will be tested when possible. To be continued. :) Trizek (WMF) (talk) 19:14, 16 January 2023 (UTC)

A new issue is ready for translation.

We tried to keep it short.

With this newsletter, we test a solution to reach more translators. We offer a new option for translators to be informed of a new issue, by receiving a message directly on their talk page. Please signup for next issues! Trizek (WMF) (talk) 13:25, 27 January 2023 (UTC)

Finished the latest issue, and wow, very crisp to read/translate! I sense much editorship was needed to condense the important issues and topics into that length, which is scientifically very handy to read: think about how ppl will open your newsletters on the way to office, as Tokioan workers spends 45-80 minutes on train (;

And appreciate so much you showed translators-to-be that they are wanted. Kindly ping me if your analysis between how ja community readers are motivated to read on, clicking links in the digest newsletter. Arigatō.

BTW, Do we put "xyz minutes' read" kind of teaser? I bump into such strategy more often, and in WMF circle too. Very wise. Cheers, Omotecho (talk) 11:29, 29 January 2023 (UTC)

Thank you for your feedback, but you were the one who gave is the ideas we implemented. :) If you want to be pinged for the next issue when ready for translations, please signup here.

We don't gather data on how many people read, from where they are, etc. The only way we have to know if an issue is read is when we get follow-up questions, or when we observe community discussions, or community changes.

Reading the "xyz minutes' read", we never considered it as our audiences are very broad. It would be up to translators to guesstimate a reading time. And even with a guess, it would be very imperfect. For instance, I read English less faster than a native speaker. And I know some users who read the newsletter in a language that is not their first or even second language. Reading times are definitely irrelevant for them; it could actually impress them and make them feel dumb because they need three to four times the needed time -- it is not what we want to do. Trizek (WMF) (talk) 14:47, 30 January 2023 (UTC)

Please please do some market research considering newsletters and how much they are read. Or casual chat at Wikimania in Singapore? IMHO among NPOs like one for the wild birds, they put a one-minute quiz or enquette time to time: it is to get the general idea how the readership perceives/enjoysthe contents, to scale the impact versus the energy to edit and publish newsletters.

Thank you @Trizek, very interesting insight regarding the reading time.

My understanding syncs with yours as I am also not a native English speaker/reader either, and still, reading time given towards native readers just makes me judge: if the writer has considered how busy the readers are and/or it needs hook to - grasp hearts of readers. As far as it is titled a newsletter, details will be linked and all I need is headlines with good summary.

Lengthy ones are called reports, aren't they? (; As far as newsletters are a kind of love letter/job report, we need to grasp our readers at the first "blow".

Of course, not 100% of us users/editors, though if you allow me share you my personal view, I don't mind reading lengthy reports or academic theses as word count does not signal too negative contents or intention to cover up unwelcome news. But the lengthier the public post named "news"...

Actually, I now realize how my eyeglasses have been tinted with those Japanese public posts by public offices titled newsletters. If I need to scroll down too many times, that signals some thing negative has been covered up misusing the community resources they have demanded for the job.

Foundation and us:

Cultural thing. Kindly consider that in some culture including that in East Asia, anything named with a "Foundation" tends to, either horseback racing or children's book or free knowledge frontline, makes esp ja peers sense they need to be protective being in a structure of power: It's an instinct telling us we are not on the top layer but downstairs, practically necks will ache looking upstairs. I am glad that purist mindset has been changing among ja wikis. And hope less ppl will panic at posts in non-ja language on the Village Pumps/ja or Announcements/ja...

My motive to translate things from and to anything English is to expand chances to my peers and understand we are together on the bandwagon named Wikimedia Movement. And my hunch tells me I am facing the same direction with you, Trizek, using our second language. Very Movement-oriented !^o^! Have a nice day, cheers, Omotecho (talk) 06:13, 31 January 2023 (UTC)

I like the idea of making some market research about newsletters, in the context of the Wikimedia movement.

We would certainly discover that one would like to keep the newsletter short, whine an other would really prefer to have muche more details, or the case of users complaining because the language is too simplistic or too complicated. And probably many more contradictions, on which we would have to find the right balance... Without proper

I'd love to have time to work on this, but time for out of annual plans projects is a rare commodity.

This is where community members can step in and offer their help. It is another way to participate to the movement's life. And it is easier for me or my colleagues to assist a project like this than leading it from start to finish. Trizek (WMF) (talk) 13:55, 31 January 2023 (UTC)

Yes, I owe you a cup of good coffee for all your thoughtful relies. We are lucky bumping into Community Wishlist Survey, yey! I will brainstorm myself and offer my cup of coffee there. Cheers, Omotecho (talk) 14:10, 31 January 2023 (UTC)

@Omotecho @Trizek (WMF)

(Hi Trizek, I'm Junko, an MSG facilitator for the Japanese language since the very late 2022)

I have read through the interesting discussion, nodding frequently to both of your comments. And I obviously don't have any solution, I just wanted to throw in my perspective as a Japanese WMF staff who is also a newbie to the world of Wikimedia.

Survey would definitely be helpful to understand the readers and their needs for improve the contents and how they are presented. I also think that there's another challenge that perhaps many of the main target readers have not found the newsletter in the first place. Seeing that a lot of effort is made in editing and translating the newsletter, it would foremost be in the best interest that the newsletter is read by those who can appreciate the contents, and that number being as many as possible.

The biggest challenge for me so far in Wikimedia is that I feel I am always overwhelmed and lost in this vast ocean of text information. To be honest, I've found out about this newsletter thanks to Omotecho but otherwise, not sure when and how I would have found my way here. So I can easily imagine a similar scenario for many of the newcomers.

I wish there is "a world map" like thing where you can have a bird's eye view style glance and get a grasp of simply, "what is where". Making a map of the entire Wikimedia world would probably be unrealistic, but just the major projects including this newsletter which newcomers can benefit from?? (afterall, "treasure hunt maps" never show thorough information)

The Wikimedia is a world full of adventures, and I think more newcomers can venture out and enjoy the treasure hunt if there's a map to get them started (then again, maybe it already exists and I just don't know about, it which is something that happens constantly ;) JNakayama-WMF (talk) 04:01, 1 February 2023 (UTC)

New things proposed

I noticed some things that I would like to talk about some more however there's no links to discuss these things. I'm mainly referring to the Marketing Experiment and Welcome Emails. I'd like to discuss these things a bit more however these don't seem to have any way to discuss them. Blaze Wolf (talk) 14:50, 31 January 2023 (UTC)

@Blaze Wolf Thanks for your interest in these projects! You are welcome to ask any questions here, and I can loop others in as needed.

Or if you prefer, your can start those discussion separately on the Welcome emails experiment and the Newcomer experience project discussion page for the Marketing Experiment work. Thanks! KStoller-WMF (talk) 18:33, 31 January 2023 (UTC)

@KStoller-WMF: Sounds good. Would there be anywhere on enWiki I could discuss these things? I'm not really a fan of how Mediawiki's talk pages are set up and look. To me it makes the conversation feel more disjointed and harder to follow. ― Blaze Wolf^Talk_{Blaze Wolf#6545} 18:42, 31 January 2023 (UTC) Blaze Wolf (talk) 18:42, 31 January 2023 (UTC)

Hello

Growth activity at English Wikipedia can be found at en:Wikipedia:Growth Team features.

The missing link to discussion is my fault: I forgot to add it to the newsletter template. Trizek (WMF) (talk) 18:56, 31 January 2023 (UTC)

@Trizek (WMF): Ah alright. Thanks. I'll start a discussion on these things there. ― Blaze Wolf^Talk_{Blaze Wolf#6545} 19:00, 31 January 2023 (UTC) Blaze Wolf (talk) 19:00, 31 January 2023 (UTC)

Request for translators

You send the mass-message for the wikidata:Q6117605 about this. Dušan Kreheľ (talk) 17:52, 31 January 2023 (UTC)

Hello

I don't understand your message. Can you explain again ? Trizek (WMF) (talk) 18:54, 31 January 2023 (UTC)