Growth/FAQ

Welcome to the Growth team FAQ. We hope you will find the information you need. However, if it is not the case, let us know.

Which features are you working on?

 * Newcomer homepage: a new special page, the best place for a newcomer to get started. It includes:
 * Newcomer tasks: a feed of task suggestions that help newcomers learn to edit. Newcomers have been making productive edits through this feed! Know more about this tool.
 * Mentorship module [optional]: each newcomers has a direct link to an experienced user. This way, they can ask questions about editing Wikipedia, less the need to find where to ask for assistance.
 * Impact module: the user sees how many pages views articles they edit received.
 * Help panel: a platform to provide resources to newcomers while they are editing. If they choose one of the suggested tasks on the newcomer homepage, they are guided step-by-step on the process of editing.
 * Welcome Survey: communities can know why newcomers create an account on Wikipedia.

You can have a look at our features summary to know more about it.

Are Growth features effective?
The Growth team found evidence of the effectiveness of these new features.

How topics and tasks are suggested?
We suggest articles that are a combination of both the selected topics and the tasks you'd like to work on.

If you only select task types, you get all articles that have the template corresponding to the task type. For instance, if you select no topic and "Copyedit" as a task, you will have up to 200 articles about copyediting, about any topic.

If you select "Europe" as a topic and "Copyedit" as a task, you will have up to 200 articles about Europe that have a template about copyediting.

If you add "Expand article" to the previous selection, you have articles that are about Europe, and either about copyediting and expanding.

If you add "Asia" to the previous selection, you will have article either about Europe or Asia, and and either about copyediting and expanding.

I don't have any task for a given combination. Is it normal?
Some topics don't have a lot of articles. As a consequence, they have less articles being tagged with maintenance templates, leading to a limited choice.

How to provide more tasks for newcomers?
Newcomers are invited to work on 5 maintenance tasks, ranked by level of difficulty: Tasks are listed based on maintenance templates. To increase the number of tasks being available, you can:


 * Add other templates that match the definition of the task to  on your wiki
 * Add maintenance templates to more articles on your wiki.

Sometimes, easy tasks are not available because experienced editors work on them. We advise experienced users to work on more difficult tasks instead, to let newcomers having a chance to make their first edits.

How to monitor which topics or which tasks need more articles?
Please use.

How is mentoring working with the Growth features?
Each new account receives a mentor taken from a list.

Have you considered to only assign a mentor to people who first make some edits?
We don't know what each individual user needs. Some new users may need a confirmation of their right to edit before making their first edit, or with would like to have more information about editing. As a consequence, we provide a mentor to each new account. It is then up to the newcomer to contact their mentor.

How many mentors does a wiki need?
Based on our observation, we advise to have one mentor for each group of 500 new users your wiki gets per month. For instance, if your wiki has 2,500 new accounts per month, your wiki should have at least 5 mentors.

We recommend to have at least 3 mentors.

How many messages does a mentor receive per week?
It is difficult to know. It depends on how motivated newcomers are, and on the number of mentors for the wiki.

On average, we observe between 0 to 6 messages per week, with important fluctuations between weeks.

What kinds of questions do newcomers ask?
From the observations we have made, questions are mostly about basic editing.

Our wiki already has a mentoring project. Is the Growth mentoring system replacing it?
We assume that your mentoring system is a list of experienced users who are available for motivated new users, who have specific questions about specific topics. Most are listed on Wikidata.

It is up to your community to find the right way to integrate the Growth mentoring feature. Some options include:

Replace your mentoring system with the new one

If your mentoring system hasn't much success, it could be replaced by the Growth team features.

Have both systems working in parallel

You can imagine to have two roles:


 * Growth mentoring takes care of the newcomers basic questions,
 * The existing mentoring can take care of newcomers who are more involved.

In this case, you might have to translate the interface for Growth features using your own terms.

Can we reassign a newcomer to a different mentor?
Yes, it is possible using.

Who can I ask if my mentor is not responding to me?
If your mentor is not available you can ask your question to the help desk.