Editor engagement experiments

Wikimedia Foundation engineering activity

Editor engagement experiments

Experimentation around increasing participation in Wikimedia projects, especially Wikipedia

Group:	Features
Start:	2012-04-16
End:
Team:	Matt Flaschen, Dario Taraborelli, Ryan Faulkner, Ori Livneh, Steven Walling, Kirsten Menger-Anderson
Management:	Terry Chay (EPM)
Status:	See updates

shortcut: E3

The purpose of the Editor engagement experiments (E3) team is to find ways to attract and retain new Wikipedia editors. Rather than spending resources building products on a large scale, we test the effectiveness of our ideas using short term experiments. The team launched on April 16, 2012 and we are hiring several new full-time engineering positions for this team.

Team

• Ori Livneh (Software Developer)
• S Page (Software Developer)
• Matt Flaschen (Superm401) (Software Developer)
• Steven Walling (Associate Product Manager)
• Dario Taraborelli (Senior Research Analyst)
• Kirsten Menger-Anderson (Technical Writer)

Status

[edit status] • [add new]

2013-05-monthly:

In May, the Editor Engagement Experiments team (E3) launched its redesigns of account creation and login forms, after numerous bug fixes and working with local communities to customize the interface as needed. The initial rollout was to 30 of the largest Wikimedia projects in English and other languages, including Wikipedia, Wikimedia Commons, Wikidata, Wikivoyage, Wikispecies, Wikiquote, Wiktionary, Wikibooks, Wikiversity and Wikisource. Complete deployment as the default for all remaining projects was enabled early in June.

Also this month, the team launched and tested a major revamp of the "Getting Started" interface for onboarding new Wikipedians (in English). This included a redesigned landing page, a refactor of the backend to increase speed and stability, a new navigation toolbar on articles that new users were given as their first editing task, and a guided tour to help them complete their first edit. The results of A/B testing of this new version showed the largest increase in click-through rates for the landing page – up to 32%, a large increase over the 10-12% click-through rate of previous versions. Overall, it also showed a small but statistically significant increase in the rate of first time edits (+1.7%) by new English Wikipedians invited to participate in Getting Started.

Last but not least, the PostEdit extension (previously enabled on most of the top Wikimedia projects by size) was migrated to MediaWiki core. With this change, the post-edit confirmation message will be available on all projects, and will be more easily integrated in to VisualEditor.

Projects

Here's what we've been working on, in rough chronological order:

1. Timestamp position modification
2. Post-edit feedback
3. Account creation user experience
4. Confirmation message via Extension:PostEdit
5. Onboarding new Wikipedians
6. Login redesign (to accompany account creation user experience work)
7. Guided tours

Infrastructure projects:

• Extension:E3Experiments (Deprecated)
• Event logging
• UserMetrics
• Extension:Campaigns
• Usertagging and revtagging

Future work: The team does not have a strict roadmap, but we do have Quarterly Planning notes. Projects in the idea stage include...

• Reactivation
• Microsurveys

See also

• Editor engagement experiments — Research-focused documentation on Meta-Wiki
• Wikipedia:Editor engagement experiments — Coordination page on the English Wikipedia
• General engineering information
• The public board on Trello for E3