Thread:Project talk:New contributors/Greeters?/reply (8)

Sorry to keep spamming your thread :) Quim asked me to provide a bit more information about how many greeters you might need to get started. In my experience, the number of greeter's you need depends on the number of newcomers you expect and what you want your greeters to do. We started the Teahouse with around 15 hosts. We get an average of about 30 who participate each week, a subset of whom are highly active, plus quite a few drop-ins who answer questions and take part in conversations in the Host Lounge. We currently get about 10 questions and 2-3 new profiles at the Teahouse.

What will be the role of greeters, do you think? At the Teahouse, we initially had a few hosts (mostly Sarah and RosieStep) delivering LOTS of manual invitation templates to new users they found on the New Contributors filter, AfC, a bot-generated daily report, and elsewhere. But that wasn't sustainable for us: we were dealing with the firehose of new enwiki editors, and only about 5% of the people we invited actually stuck around long enough to visit us, so to get critical mass at the Teahouse we needed to invite 50-100 newcomers per day. Since July 2012, most invitations have been sent out by bot although some Wikipedians do still invite new editors manually.

The other major role of Teahouse hosts is to answer questions on the central Q&A board. Some hosts also 'welcome' users who create a profile using the 'welcome this user' link which is baked in to each profile. Hosts do connect with new users one-on-one as well, but this is mostly ad-hoc. The Teahouse space itself is more geared towards lightweight peer support than direct mentorship.

Anyway... not sure which of these activities will apply to your greeters, but I hope that helps!

Cheers,