Growth/Positive reinforcement/Mentorship preliminary analysis, August 2023

The Growth team has been developing features related to mentorship on Wikipedia for several years. Newcomers have access to the Mentor module, enabling them to ask their mentor a question that gets posted on their mentor's talk page. In addition to findings questions from newcomers on their talk page, mentors also have access to the Mentor dashboard where they can get an overview of their mentees' activity on the wiki.

For the Positive reinforcement project, the Growth team decided to look into the effect of these features. At the time this analysis was done, there were two Wikipedia wikis where a proportion of newcomers would randomly get access to a mentor, English and Spanish. On the English Wikipedia, the proportion was 10% for a long time but was increased to 25% in July 2023, while on Spanish it has been 50% for a long time. This random assignment allows us to compare the group who has a mentor to the one that doesn't.

We gathered a dataset of registrations from English and Spanish Wikipedia spanning June 1 to July 15, 2023. Details about the dataset can be found below in the methodology section. We focused on high-level questions about mentorship as this is a preliminary analysis. Our questions were:


 * 1) What proportion of newcomers with access to a mentor asks them a question?
 * 2) Out of those who ask a question, what proportion asks more than one?
 * 3) How quickly after registration are questions asked?
 * 4) What are the activation, retention, productivity, and revert rates for newcomers with and without mentorship?