Onboarding new Wikipedians

Work by the editor engagement experiments team to get new registered Wikipedians to quickly become productive members of the community.

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 their fifth edit. 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.

User experience
Getting people up to speed in an organization or community is often called "onboarding". It is a term borrowed from human resources departments, but is now a very common piece of the user experience design parlance. The alternative to providing an onboarding experience is simply to dump new editors on Wikipedia and hope they find their way around the basics.

Personas
To help guide our work related account creation and any onboarding experience immediately afterward, we've created four personas for users. By mapping newly-registered Wikipedians on a spectrum of their interest and experience with editing, as well as what kind of objective they have, we were able to better understand what the primary elements of an onboarding experience should be.

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.

Proposed
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) Help people accomplish their immediate goal. Of the 30% of registrations that edit, most of them seem to have something to do in mind.
 * 2) For the 70% of registrations who currently do not ever edit, get them to do something useful and interesting right away.
 * 3) Educate people about what an account is for and the many ways to contribute.
 * 4) Help them make social connections and find help.

There are various workflows which may help us serve these purposes, described below in the order which we plan to test them. The question guiding this work is, What kind of onboarding is needed?, and specifically, how much handholding do most new editors need to get started?

Technical documentation
We will deliver this new onboarding experience through a combination of: Extension:Onboarding, which will present the tasks and other calls to action for new editors immediately after registration; Extension:E3Experiments, which already logs editing tasks from the Community Portal, and Extension:GuidedTour, which provides the guides to how to complete a task, if a user accepts one.

Experimental design and data collection

 * See: Research:Onboarding new Wikipedians