Growth/Newcomer experience projects

Several WMF teams are working together to improve newcomer experiences and new editor retention. Involved teams are Growth, Advancement, Communications, & GLAM.

Goal
In order for everyone in the world to have access to all knowledge, we need people around the world to be able to participate in building that knowledge. No matter someone’s location, language, gender, device, income, technical skills, personality, or time constraints, we want them to be able to join in and find a way to be the best Wikimedian they can be.

Problems

 * Readers of Wikipedia don’t know that they can and should participate and share knowledge on Wikipedia by becoming newcomers.
 * Newcomers to Wikipedia lack ways to start participating in building open knowledge.  They try to participate, but are blocked by our single, complicated, open-ended experience -- barriers of entry that especially affect underserved populations.
 * Even when newcomers do succeed at first, they are not nurtured into taking the next steps to becoming part of our communities.

Hypothesis
If we direct newcomers to quickly make simple contributions in an onboarding experience that makes them proud of their impact and encourages their progress, then more readers, and more diverse kinds of readers, will become contributors -- especially amongst mobile users in emerging communities.

Objectives

 * Account creation: Internet users learn that they can contribute and are prompted to create an account.
 * Activation: Newcomers have fast, easy, and mobile-friendly ways to make their first edits.
 * Retention: Newcomers are proud of their impact, leading them to come back.

Projects
Account creation Activation Retention
 * Thank you pages & banners: Encourage donors to create accounts through thank you pages and banners.
 * Marketing experiment: Run ads on-wiki and off-wiki to see how this impacts account activation.
 * "Add an image" GLAM events: Host GLAM events that focus on using the "Add an image" tool.
 * Welcome emails: Experiment sending welcome emails to newly created accounts.

Current Status

 * 2021 - 2022 fiscal year:
 * Launch "add an image"
 * Conduct several experimental projects:
 * Thank you pages & banners
 * Newcomer experience marketing experiment
 * "Add an image" GLAM events
 * Welcome emails experiment
 * 2022 - 2022 fiscal year:
 * Pursue ideas that show promise:
 * Further Thank you page work is in progress (T318975)
 * Expanding the Welcome email experiment is in discussion
 * Improvements to "add an image" are planned (T293711), scaling has continued (T304110)
 * Work on a section-level "add an image" task has started (T321754)