Onboarding new Wikipedians

Work by the editor engagement experiments team to get new registered Wikipedians to quickly become productive members of the community. Getting people up to speed in an organization or community is often called "onboarding".

Background
As a follow-up to our work improving the account creation user experience, we have decided to focus on increasing the number of registered accounts that contribute and reach the 10-edit milestone. There is more on that at our prioritization notes, but the summary is that we want to avoid trying to increase the number of registrations if it is likely it won't impact the number of those who actually become active editors. We also want to avoid simply building tools to increase the productivity or retention of existing editors of any kind, since these tend to be more difficult interaction problems.

Current
Currently, there is little to no direction given to new registered users immediately after they join Wikipedia, other than a link to user preferences, other projects, and the internal referrer that brought the user to account creation. It looks like...



For the people who already know what they want to accomplish as editors, at least in the immediate future, this lack of onboarding is not necessarily an obstacle. However, we know that the majority of accounts registered never attempt or complete an edit. Not all people can or should edit Wikipedia, but those who are registering can be safely assumed to be better candidates for conversion to editing than random readers.

Future
While it is standard for other applications to encourage people to fill out things like profiles or complete a checklist of tasks before using their product, the Wikipedia way is to encourage people to focus on contributing content. The current behavior pattern of successful new Wikipedians matches this; of registered users who do complete an edit, the majority do so within an hour of registration.

Since our goal is to increase the number of editors, the question that follows is who is registering and what kind of editing task might they want to complete? To understand the kind of users signing up for accounts and making their first edits, we've crafted four personas to represent newly-registered Wikipedians.

The possible ways to onboard new Wikipedians, regardless of their experience and motivation, breaks down into the following list:


 * 1) Get them to do something right away to develop their editing skills, gain confidence, and perhaps reach 5-10 edits.
 * 2) Surface interesting and useful things to do.
 * 3) Help them make social connections and find help.
 * 4) Educate them about what an account is for and how to contribute.

Flow 1

 * Primary persona: Nora, a reader who wants to join but isn't on a mission to edit.
 * Secondary persona: Adam, a reader who wants to edit, but is new. (Adam might have a topic area in mind, so a tool to get him up to speed might just be distracting.)


 * Current
 * 1) Arrives at Wikipedia, either through one of the main portals (wikipedia.org, Main Page) or a specific article.
 * 2) Visits the account creation page.
 * 3) Successfully creates account, is redirected to the landing page including a confirmation message, and links to preferences, sister projects, and a returnto link to their internal referrer.
 * 4) Either goes back to reading, departs, or explores secondary links like preferences etc. 70% of people who create accounts never use them to edit, so it's unlikely most of these people contribute.


 * Proposed
 * 1) Arrives at Wikipedia, either through one of the main portals (wikipedia.org, Main Page) or a specific article.
 * 2) Visits account creation page.
 * 3) Successfully creates account, and is redirected to a landing page with a confirmation message, a returnto link to their internal referrer, and an invitation to make their first edit using a simplified inline editor. This could be either...
 * 4) * a request to "Fix this mistake", with a simple grammar, spelling, or other error present. We know that our current community members are the kind of perfectionists who hate to let an obvious error go by without fixing it, so fixing a handful of errors – real or fictious – may be an irresistible thing.
 * 5) * an invitation to try out the basics of markup. If they do in fact follow the instructions and test various forms of basic markup, then there is a reasonable chance they are better prepared for real editing. If they ignore the instructions and simply use the editor as a sandbox, that also meets the goal of this onboarding step. (A particularly useful feature for this tool would be live preview.)
 * 6) Followup? Could be more stuff to do, like Community Portal open tasks, or interest-dependent...
 * 7) * Article suggestions. Using something like a very simple category or title intersections, we could try to give these users a list of articles that need work. Could be either standalone or post-edit overlay.

Flow 2

 * Primary persona: Sarah, the reader who wants to accomplish a task. For this use case, she wants to edit a semi-protected article.


 * Current
 * 1) Reads article and decides to edit, but finds it is protected
 * 2) Visits account creation page, as prompted by the edit/view source notice
 * 3) Successfully creates account, is redirected to the landing page including a confirmation message, and links to preferences, sister projects, and a returnto link the article
 * 4) Either departs, wanders off into reading, or returns to the article
 * 5) Attempting to edit the article leads to the message "This page is currently semi-protected and can be edited only by established registered users." once again


 * Proposed
 * 1) Reads article and decides to edit, but finds it is protected
 * 2) Visits account creation page, as prompted by the edit/view source notice
 * 3) Successfully creates account, is redirected to the landing page including a confirmation message, and links to preferences, sister projects, and a returnto link the article
 * 4) Either departs, wanders off into reading, or returns to the article
 * 5) Attempting to edit the article leads to...
 * 6) * Seeing a "Contribute" button or the edit with a CTA to make the edits, suggest on the talk page, or see similar articles.

Flow 3

 * Primary persona: Sarah, the reader who wants to accomplish a task. For this use case, she wants to start an article.

For an overview of this flow and proposed changes to it, see Article creation workflow.

Flow 4

 * Primary persona: Max, the anonymous editor who wants to join.


 * Current


 * Proposed

Technical documentation
Much of the capability for testing these flows for onboarding new editors is contained in Extension:E3Experiments. Potential new requirements include:


 * Modification of the account creation user experience to support campaigns, previously implemented as URL parameters.
 * Use of usertagging to identify editors who engage in a particular onboarding workflow.