Topic on Talk:Growth/2023

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.

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), 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.

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!

@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!

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.

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.

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.

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! :)

@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.