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

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]

2013-04-monthly:

In April, the Editor Engagement Experiments (E3) team focused first and foremost on its account creation and login redesigns in MediaWiki core. The first phase of the launch invited editors and readers on all Wikimedia projects to test the new forms on an opt-in basis, to identify bugs and localization issues across our many wikis. We expect to release these as the default forms in May, pending any final blockers.

For the team's Onboarding new Wikipedians project, we completed quantitative analysis of the latest version of the GettingStarted landing page, and began prototyping a new landing page and navigation system for usability testing prior to further development and launch, which is expected in early May as well.

On the analytics and infrastructure front, the team handed off the product roadmap for the User Metrics API to the Analytics team and colleagues in the Grantmaking and Programs department. Ori Livneh, in support of the data analysis needs on the team, began work supporting a Foundation instance of IPython Notebook.

Last but not least, the E3 team held its second Quarterly Review session, and began work planning its next high-level goals for the April–June quarter.

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 and other projects:

• Extension:E3Experiments
• Event logging
• UserMetrics
• Usertagging and revtagging

Future work:

The team does not have a strict roadmap, but we do have a Quarterly Plan notes. Projects in the ideation stage include...

• Reactivation

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