Growth/Positive reinforcement

This page describes work on "positive reinforcement" as part of the Growth feature set. This page contains major assets, designs, open questions, and decisions.

Most incremental updates on progress will be posted on the general Growth team updates page, with some large or detailed updates posted here.

Current status

 * 2021-03-01: project page created
 * 2022-02-25: project kicked off with team discussions
 * 2022-03-01: project page expanded

Summary
The Growth team has been focused on building a “cohesive newcomer experience” that provides access newcomers need to the elements that help them join the Wikipedia community of practice. For instance, with newcomer tasks, we have given them access to opportunities to participate, and with the mentorship module, we have given them access to mentorship. Suggested edits has been able to get more newcomers to make their first edits. With that success, we want to take action to encourage newcomers to continue to make more edits. This draws our attention to an undeveloped element to which newcomers need access: evaluating performance. We’re calling this project “positive reinforcement”.

We want newcomers to understand there is progression and value to sustained contributions on Wikipedia, increasing retention for those users who took the first step in making an edit.

Our big question here is: How might we encourage newcomers who have visited our homepage and tried our features to keep editing and build on their momentum?

Background
When the newcomer homepage was deployed in 2019, it contained a basic "impact module", which listed the number of pageviews for the pages the newcomer had edited. That is the only part of the Growth features that give the newcomer any sense of their impact, and we have not improved on it since it was first deployed.

With this as a starting point, we have gathered some important learnings about positive reinforcement:


 * We have heard good feedback from community members about the module, with experienced editors saying that it is interesting and valuable to them.
 * Appreciation from other users has been shown to increase retention, such as in the case of "thanks" (here and [ https://citizensandtech.org/2020/06/effects-of-saying-thanks-on-wikipedia/ here]) and in an experiment on German Wikipedia. We believe that these reinforcements from real people would be more effective than automated ones coming from the system.
 * Community members have explained that it is a high priority for newcomers to move on to more valuable tasks after starting with easy ones, as opposed to getting stuck just doing easy tasks.
 * Other platforms, such as Google, Duolingo, and Github, all utilize numerous positive reinforcement mechanisms like badges and goals.
 * Communities are wary of incentivizing unhealthy editing. We have seen that when editing contests offer cash prizes, or just when useful roles such as "extended confirmed" rely on edit counts, it can incentivize people to make many problematic edits.

User persona


There are many parts of the newcomer journey in which we could attempt to increase retention. We could focus on newcomers who have stopped editing after just one or a few edits, or we could focus farther down the journey on newcomers who have stopped editing after weeks of activity. For this project, we have decided to focus on those newcomers who have completed their first editing session, and who we want to return for a second session. The diagram illustrates these with a yellow star.

Ideas
We have three main ideas for positive reinforcement. We may pursue multiple ideas as we work on this project.


 * Impact: overhaul of the Impact module based on incorporating stats, graphs, options, and other contribution information.
 * Leveling up: it is important to communities that newcomers progress to more valuable tasks. For those who do many easy tasks, we want to nudge them toward trying more difficult tasks.  This could happen after they complete a certain number of easy tasks, or by encouragement on their homepage.
 * Personalized praise: research shows that praise and encouragement from other users increases newcomer retention. We want to think about how to encourage experienced users to thank and award newcomers for good contributions.  Perhaps mentors could be encouraged to do this on their mentor dashboards or through notifications.

Open questions
Adding incentives to the editing experience will hopefully encourage constructive contributions, but we also know that it could cause unexpected or undesired behavior from users. Therefore, we want to discuss with communities how we could encourage newcomers while still preserving the values of the wikis.


 * What has worked well on your wiki for motivating newcomers?
 * What ideas do you think we should consider?
 * What could go wrong and what should we try to avoid?