Growth/Newsletters/23

Planned publication date: NOV 20.

Highlights of the month

 * Mentorship: We released the new structured mentor list to all wikis. This change makes mentorship easier to setup, manage and use.
 * Positive reinforcement: An improved impact module is available for testing.



Positive reinforcement: an improved impact module to test
Growth's goal is to encourage newcomers who have visited their homepage and tried our features to keep editing. We want to increase newcomers' motivation by showing them how impactful their edits are.

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

You can test this new module at Beta Wikipedia.

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

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


 * Patrollers fatigue:  newcomers can complete up to 25 of Structured tasks per day. If patrollers are overburdened, each community can now use Special:EditGrowthConfig to change this number.


 * Quality of edits:
 * underlinked articles are now suggested in priority;
 * we increased the score on link recommendation service suggestions so that less links are suggested, but are more relevant;
 * the number of suggested links per article has been lowered to 3. This can be changed at Special:EditGrowthConfig. Communities can also exclude articles containing certain templates or categories from being suggested.
 * Quality of edits was not a well defined concept. We initiated a discussion and summarized the findings. This will be used for our next improvements.

Soon, we will improve our communication processes, improve Add an Image (starting in March 2023) and address minor improvements overtime as we work through maintenance work. Our next project is to work on leveling up users, through positive reinforcement and other improvements (to be continued in the next newsletter).

Recent changes

 * All Wikipedias have now the same onboarding experience. At few wikis, 20% of new accounts didn't get the Growth features when they create their account. These 20% of new accounts were used as a control group, in order to know if the Growth features were changing newcomers' behavior. As our observations haven't showed a negative impact of the Growth features, and as we want to provide the same onboarding experience at all Wikipedias, we have decided to remove the control groups. We will keep control groups on specific tools, and German Wikipedia keeps a control group at their request.
 * The quality score for Suggested link will change. We will suggest less links for each article, but they will be more accurate. We will first deploy it at our pilot wikis, and then to all other wikis where this feature is available.
 * Growth's features FAQ has been updated and expanded. This page centralizes all the information about Growth features. We invite you to read it, and, if you can, to translate it.

News for mentors

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

Deployments

 * Add a link has been deployed to a 5th round of wikis.

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