Growth/bn

The Wikimedia Foundation's Growth team works on a set of features to encourage newcomers to make edits. These features have been shown to increase engagement by newcomers.

বর্তমান উদ্যোগসমূহ
এই উদ্যোগসমূহ এবং সেগুলোর আওতাভুক্ত নির্দিষ্ট প্রকল্পের হালনাগাদকৃত তথ্য পেতে দেখুন গ্রোথ দলের হালনাগাদ কিংবা আমাদের দলের নিউজলেটারের জন্য নথিভুক্ত হতে পারেন তথা সাইন আপ করতে পারেন।



নিচের টেবিলের মাধ্যমে দ্রুত দেখে নেওয়া যাবে যে গ্রোথ দলের উদ্যোগসমূহ কোন উইকিতে চালু হয়েছে। বিস্তারিত জানতে নির্দিষ্ট প্রকল্পের পাতা দেখুন।

উপরের টেবিলে গাঢ় অক্ষরে যে সকল উইকির নাম (আরবি, চেক, বাংলা এবং ভিয়েতনামী উইকিপিডিয়া) দেখানো হয়েছে, সেগুলো আমাদের পাইলট উইকি, এবং সেখানে পৃথক তথ্যাবলী বিদ্যমান। বৈশিষ্ট্যসমূহ সম্পর্কে আরো জানুন।

লক্ষ্য
২০১৮ সালের জুলাই মাসে গ্রোথ দল গঠিত হয়। দলটি অডিয়েন্সেস বিভাগের "নতুন বিষয়বস্তু" প্রোগ্রাম নিয়ে কাজ করে এবং পর্যায়ক্রমে উইকিমিডিয়া ফাউন্ডেশনের দীর্ঘকালীন লক্ষ্য "জ্ঞানের সমতা" নিয়েও। এ সমস্ত কিছুর মাধ্যমে শক্তিশালী সম্প্রদায় তৈরি করা হয় যারা সারা বিশ্বের মানুষের কাছে আরো বৃহত্তর ও গভীরভাবে তথ্য পৌঁছে দিতে পারবে। এর একটি উপায় হচ্ছে উইকিমিডিয়া প্রকল্পসমূহে নবাগতদের অংশগ্রহণ করানো। দুঃখজনকভাবে যারা অবদান রাখতে শুরু করেন, তাদের মধ্যে খুব কম মানুষই কয়েক দিন বা সপ্তাহ পরও অবদান রাখা চালিয়ে যান। এর কারণ এক্ষেত্রে কিছু সাংস্কৃতিক ও প্রযুক্তিক জ্ঞান প্রয়োজন যা হয়তো শেখাটা কঠিন। গ্রোথ দলের উদ্দেশ্য হচ্ছে সফটওয়্যার পরিবর্তনের মাধ্যমে এই সমস্যার সমাধান করা, যেন মধ্যম-আকারের উইকিমিডিয়া প্রকল্পসমূহ নবাগতদের ধরে রাখতে পারে। এই কাজটি উইকিপিডিয়ার মাধ্যমে শুরু হয়েছে।

আমরা কিছু কারণে মধ্যম-আকারের উইকিপিডিয়ায় আমাদের কাজ শুরু করছি। এই সকল প্রকল্প বিস্তৃত হওয়ার অনেক সম্ভাবনা আছে, কিন্তু কিছু বাধাও আছে যা হয়তো সফটওয়্যার দিয়ে পরিবর্তন করা যাবে। এই দলের প্রেরণার একটা বড় অংশ জুড়ে রয়েছে নতুন সম্পাদকের অভিজ্ঞতা গবেষণা প্রকল্প, যা ২০১৭ সালে গ্রহণ করা হয়। এই গবেষণার মাধ্যমে উইকিমিডিয়া ফাউন্ডেশন চেক ও কোরিয় উইকিপিডিয়া সম্প্রদায়ের সাথে কাজ করে নতুন সম্পাদকদের পথে সম্মুখীন হওয়া সম্ভাব্য চ্যালেঞ্জগুলো বুঝতে চেষ্টা করে। এর ধারাবাহিকতায় আমরা অন্যান্য মধ্যম আকারের উইকিপিডিয়ায় নতুন পরিবর্তন চালুর পূর্বে [$cswiki চেক] এবং [$kowiki কোরিয়] উইকিপিডিয়ায় সফটওয়্যারজনিত পরিবর্তনগুলো পরীক্ষা করে দেখব। আমাদের সফটওয়্যারগত পরিবর্তন সাধারণত নিচের তিনটি বিষয়শ্রেণীর একটির আওতার মধ্যে পড়ে:


 * মূল-বিষয়গত সহায়তা: উইকিপিডিয়া সম্পাদনার অভিজ্ঞতা পরিবর্তন, যেন প্রযুক্তিক ও ধারণাগত বাধাসমূহ নবাগতরা সহজে অতিক্রম করতে পারে।
 * মানুষ থেকে মানুষের সহায়তা: ফোরাম ও কার্যক্রমের মাধ্যমে সম্পাদকদের সংযোগ ঘটানো, যেন নতুনদেরকে অভিজ্ঞ অবদানকারীরা সহায়তা করতে পারে।
 * কাজের সুপারিশ: পরামর্শকৃত সম্পাদনা যা নবাগতদের উইকি দক্ষতাসমূহ শিখতে সহায়তা করবে।

Past projects

 * For information about the Growth team that existed from 2013–2015, see Growth/Growth 2014.
 * For information about the predecessor to this team, see Collaboration.

Past projects by various iterations of the team and volunteer developers:
 * AfC improvements
 * Map Improvements 2018
 * Edit Review Improvements
 * Thanks
 * Structured Discussions, formerly Flow, discussion and collaboration software. Now in production as opt-in for talk pages, help pages and village pump-style discussion forums, on select wikis, but new requests are currently not applied.
 * Notifications (Echo), a redesign of the notifications system in Wikipedia. It was deployed to all Wikimedia wikis in November 2013.
 * New Page Triage, redesigning the New Page Patrol experience.
 * WikiLove, a tool designed to encourage community health and reduce "bite".
 * MoodBar, a tool designed to encourage feedback from new users, with Feedback Dashboard supporting review by experienced members.
 * Article Feedback Tool, a tool designed to encourage readers to provide feedback on articles.

Goals and metrics
As stated in the Audiences department’s 2018-2019 annual plan, the Growth team’s goal is:

Increase retention of new contributors in the target wikis, Czech and Korean Wikipedias.

To determine whether we’re meeting our goal, we have specified metrics and set targets for them: The first metric, “new contributor retention”, is the main metric we use to measure our impact. The second metric, “mentor retention”, will be relevant for interventions that involve mentorship. As we focus our work, we will consider whether that second metric is the right fit for the team at this time.

We need to create a more specific definition of “new contributor retention” in order for it to be useful. See the section below on “What does it mean to ‘retain new contributors’?” for our team’s thinking.


 * In the future, this section will contain links to the Growth team's reports that track our metrics.

What does it mean to "retain new contributors"?
For the purposes of this team, “new contributors” are people who have registered accounts on a wiki project, even if they have not made an edit. To “retain” them means that they make edits and continue to make edits over time. Though we hope that contributors are retained for months and years, we know that they will first have to make it through their first days and weeks. Those first days and weeks are more likely to be the Growth team’s focus.

There are different periods of time over which we can measure retention. One definition might be “second month retention”, meaning a contributor is "retained" if they edit during their first month and also edit during their second month. But another definition might be “second week retention”, meaning a contributor is "retained" if they edit during their first week and also edit during their second week.

As we work, the Growth team will determine which types of retention are most important to track and to increase. See this page for a formal definition of retention.

Background
Wikimedia projects need to have a constant stream of new contributors in order to become hubs for broad and deep content. New contributors replace experienced contributors who stop editing. They also increase the diversity of the editing community. This stream of new editors allows projects to grow their content while increasing the diversity of their content. But in many Wikimedia projects, the number of active contributors is decreasing or staying the same, and the retention rate of new contributors is also decreasing or staying the same. This issue was studied in the 2013 paper The Rise and Decline of an Open Collaboration System: How Wikipedia's reaction to popularity is causing its decline. The authors showed that active contributors in English Wikipedia began to shrink in 2007, with the major cause being increasing technical and cultural barriers for contributors. Since then, similar patterns have been seen in other Wikimedia projects.


 * Data showing the state of active contributors and contributor retention in Wikimedia projects is forthcoming.

Beyond the high-level numbers themselves, additional research suggests that many new contributors do not reach their full potential because contributing is both technically and culturally complicated. For instance, it is common for excited new contributors to have their first edits reverted or their first pages deleted without an informative explanation. This causes them to be confused and disappointed, and ultimately not to continue editing.

Together, the numbers, research, and stories, mean that we can do better to engage and retain new contributors. In particular, the Wikimedia Foundation decided to focus on mid-size Wikipedias because those projects need to grow their content, have challenges with contributor retention, and there is potential for software to help.

To better understand what causes new contributors to stay and to leave, the Wikimedia Foundation completed the New Editor Experiences research project in 2017. The project identified the main challenges experienced by new contributors to Wikipedia, and a set of potential solutions. See the “Challenges” and “Solutions” sections below for the details.

The Growth team formed to take action on the challenges and solutions identified by the research project. We will continue our relationship with the Czech and Korean communities by testing changes in those wikis first. When we discover changes that increase contributor retention, we will engage other communities to consider deploying those changes in more wikis.

Although much valuable research has already been done to help our team understand new editors, important open questions remain. The team records and prioritizes our open questions on this page. We will be deliberate about using research, data, surveys, and feature instrumentation to answer them.

Principles
The following is a list of healthy characteristics that we think wikis should exhibit with respect to new contributors. They are guiding principles for our team, and we hope to help make them a reality in the wikis we work with.


 * Diverse contributors lead to wikis with broad and deep content.
 * Contributors who want to make useful improvements to a wiki should all be able to find a place in the community where they fit in.
 * Contributors should be able to learn to edit on their own.
 * Contributors of any skill level should be able to ask for and receive help from other community members.
 * Contributors should be able to learn and edit in a supportive and non-confrontational environment.

Challenges
There are challenges that stand in the way of the principles above. The main challenges were identified by the New Editor Experiences research project that was completed in 2017. With the help of Czech and Korean community members, researchers interviewed 64 contributors to Czech and Korean Wikipedias to learn about why they started editing, what they found easy or difficult, and if they've stopped editing, why they stopped. The project surfaced a set of technical, conceptual, and cultural challenges, summarized below. Our team’s work will help wikis overcome these challenges so that the principles can become reality.


 * Technical: new contributors struggle with specific skills needed to contribute.
 * Editing: though Visual Editor is helpful for new contributors, it is hard for them to learn the process of building, citing, and publishing.
 * Communication: new contributors have trouble finding and using Talk pages. This is because Talk pages do not use Visual Editor, and because they work differently than other internet discussion systems.
 * Finding help: many wikis have scattered and inconsistent help materials that are difficult for new contributors to find and use.
 * Conceptual: new contributors have trouble learning core wiki policies and best practices.  The following are the concepts that are most challenging.
 * Community: many new contributors do not realize there is an active community behind each wiki project.
 * Verifiability and citations: all content must be attributed to reliable sources.
 * Notability: all content must have garnered enough broad attention to deserve an article.
 * Encyclopedic style and neutral point of view: articles should present content without bias toward one side of an argument.
 * Copyright: content should not violate the licensing of its sources.
 * Cultural: the wiki environment can be discouraging to new contributors who are trying to find where they fit in.
 * Personas: new contributors have different objectives for why they are editing, but it is hard to figure out how to accomplish them.
 * Framing: the way that contributors communicate impacts whether new contributors stay. Negative feedback can discourage further contribution.

Solutions
The Growth team will attempt multiple solutions to the above challenges, and we will learn and expand as we go along. These are the findings from the New Editor Experiences project that will guide the solutions we attempt:


 * Intermediaries: many new contributors have succeeded because a partner or mentor helped them learn to edit.  These partners are frequently found in off-wiki places like schools, libraries, or meetups.
 * Iterative learning: new contributors have more success when they learn editing skills over time in safe environments.
 * Outside help: new contributors frequently search for help outside of Wikipedia, either in off-wiki communications, or through other internet resources.

Those trends lead to two main categories of solutions to the challenges described above. The work of our team will usually fit into one of these categories:


 * Human-to-human help: forums and programs that connect contributors to each other so that experienced contributors can help newer contributors succeed.  This can include help desk forums, mentorship opportunities, or even off-wiki connections.
 * In-context help: changes to the Wikipedia editing experience to surface helpful guidance around technical and conceptual challenges.  This is guidance surfaced at the time it is needed, in the place where it is needed -- as opposed to on a separate page that may be difficult to find.

This page contains the list of ideas that the team has considered and discussed with communities.

How we work
The Growth Team follows several principles as we work toward our objective.


 * We keep in close communication with the communities our team affects, so that our work remains grounded in reality.
 * We start with small interventions, learn quickly, and adjust our approach.
 * We make decisions based on evidence from experiments, data, and user research.
 * We take the time to equip ourselves with the tools we need to be flexible and work quickly.
 * The software we build gives flexibility to the communities who use it, so they can modify and improve it on their own.
 * When we know something doesn’t work, we remove it cleanly and learn for the future.
 * We follow the Wikimedia Product Guidance for working with communities.
 * Please report bugs at Phabricator, using the  tag
 * How we triage incoming tasks and other chores, is detailed at Growth/Team/Chore list.

How to work with us
While we will be focusing on Czech and Korean Wikipedias during 2018 as our initial audiences, we are looking for information and input from various other places and demographics. Here are some ways you can help us through some useful resources on how to interact with newcomers or how to get the tools we create on your wiki.