Growth/Growth team updates/2023

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Update 2023-03-03: Positive Reinforcement & Add a Link

 * Positive Reinforcement
 * Impact module
 * Experiment analysis for the Impact module A/B test has started (T327581), and we plan to make some improvements to the empty state of the Impact module based on initial experiment results (T330614).
 * Leveling up
 * Engineering continues on Leveling up work, and we hope to release the initial Leveling up MVP changes to Growth pilot wikis in mid-March (T317813)
 * Personalized praise
 * Since our initial community consultation about Personalized praise plans, we’ve iterated on ideas and designs, so we started a second community consultation to review the current plan. This consultation will include  discussions on Mediawiki, English Wikipedia, Arabic Wikipedia, Bengali Wikipedia, Czech Wikipedia, and Spanish Wikipedia.
 * Engineering on the new Mentor Dashboard module for “personalized praise” continues (T317817).
 * Add a Link
 * We are preparing the backend to deploy “add an link” to more Wikipedias (T304550, T304551, T308133, T308134)
 * Testing
 * Growth features are now the default experience on both test.wikipedia.org and test2.wikipedia.org. Now that Growth features are the default for all newcomers, it was a time our testing environments had the same user experience (T330748).

Update 2023-02-24: Leveling up & Add a Link

 * Leveling Up
 * We completed a community consultation in which we reviewed the most recent Leveling up designs with the Growth Pilot wikis. This consultation was completed in English on Mediawiki, and at Arabic Wikipedia, Bengali Wikipedia, Czech Wikipedia, and Spanish Wikipedia (T328356). In general, feedback was quite positive. These two tasks help address the only critical feedback mentioned by those that provided feedback:
 * Leveling up: Community configuration (T328386)
 * Leveling up: Second design iteration of "Try a new task" dialog (T330543)
 * The Growth team is wrapping up a few remaining tasks that are necessary for the initial release of Leveling Up features.  After testing is complete and translations are in place, we will release these new features in an A/B test to Arabic, Bengali, Czech, and Spanish Wikipedias.
 * Add a Link
 * We looked at edit and revert data on Growth pilot wikis before and after the release of T301096. It appears that the new prioritization formula may result in more newcomers completing "add a link" tasks and also result in a lower revert rate (although this was not a true A/B test, and revert rates are low enough that it is difficult to draw a conclusion with confidence). Given these results combined with a prior manual evaluation by Growth Ambassadors, and positive reception from Pilot communities, we plan to move forward with releasing this new prioritization formula to all wikis that currently have the "add a link" structured task (T330535).

Update 2023-02-17: Leveling up community consultation & evaluation of section-level image suggestions

 * Leveling Up community consultation
 * The Growth team is almost entirely focused on completing Leveling Up work (which is one part of the Positive Reinforcement project).  We have started a community consultation in which we are following up with community members who offered us feedback in a previous community discussion. We are also sharing our current designs and plans, and asking some questions to help guide future work. This consultation is happening in English on Mediawiki, and at Arabic Wikipedia, Bengali Wikipedia, Czech Wikipedia, and Spanish Wikipedia (T328350).
 * Add an image: section-level image suggestions
 * The current “add an image” tool only suggests images to entirely unillustrated articles. The "add an image" feature suggests article-level image suggestions; images meant to illustrate the article as a whole. The WMF Structured Data team is working on the backend needed to provide image suggestions for specific sections in an article. These section-level image suggestions will power a new Growth team structured task for section-level image suggestions. We are starting design work on this task (T321756), and Growth team Ambassadors helped with a first evaluation of these section-level image suggestions (T316151).

Update 2023-02-10: Positive reinforcement community discussions & Suggested edits topic filtering

 * Positive Reinforcement
 * Leveling Up & Personalized Praise work continues. Designs have been localized into Arabic, Bengali, Czech, French, and Spanish so we can discuss further with Growth pilot communities (T329229).
 * Suggested edits
 * A UI improvement was released to help differentiate between and/or topic filtering (T318597). This “and” topic matching feature is currently only released to Growth pilot wikis (T305399).


 * Mentorship
 * We finished some code cleanup after the release of the structured mentor list (T321501)
 * Several Mentorship bugs were fixed (T328773, T328444, T324615)

Update 2023-02-03: Positive reinforcement, Mentorship for workshop attendees, & "Try editing" prompt for donors

 * Positive Reinforcement
 * Impact Module
 * The new Impact module is released as an A/B test to Growth pilot wikis and we’ve released several minor improvements and bug fixes (T327849, T324675, T327824). Next up we will complete experiment analysis to determine how this change has affected newcomers (T327581).
 * Leveling Up
 * We are wrapping up some analysis to better understand where we should set baseline Leveling Up prompts (T322433)
 * Engineering work has started on improving the post-edit dialog when a newcomer has topics or tasks selected that result in no suggestions (T324177).
 * The main purpose of Leveling up work is to encourage newcomers to try new and more difficult types of tasks, and our initial work on that effort has started (T322386).
 * Personalized Praise
 * The backend work needed to support the new “personalized praise” module on the Mentor dashboard has been completed (T322444).
 * Mentorship
 * Workshop hosts now have an option to claim workshop attendees as mentees (T323038). Example:
 * A newcomer goes to: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:CreateAccount?forceMentor=Trizek|Martin_Urbanec
 * When the newcomer completes their account from this URL, then they will have either Trizek or Martin_Urbanec as their mentor.
 * Newcomer experience projects
 * Special account creation pages for donors are now available on SV, IT, JA, FR, and NL Wikipedias (T321370). This work expands the Thank you page experiment in which we encouraged donors in certain languages / on certain wikis to try editing Wikipedia.
 * Welcome Survey
 * Vietnamese Wikipedia now has a newcomer welcome survey (T325376).

Update 2023-01-27: Positive reinforcement, SpecialPages, PageTriage, & Mentorship

 * Positive Reinforcement
 * We added more details to the Positive Reinforcement project page about some initial experiment data (T323788).  And we’ve now gathered enough data that we can start the full experiment analysis (T327581).
 * We’ve been busy finishing Impact module work (T222310). The Growth team is now shifting to focus on Leveling Up work (T317813) and Personalized Praise work (T317817).
 * Growth SpecialPages
 * Now you can find all Growth SpecialPages together under “Growth tools” on Special:SpecialPages.
 * Check Special:NewcomerTasksInfo for an overview of which topics newcomers are editing on your wiki.
 * PageTriage
 * The Moderator Tools team is gradually taking over ownership of PageTriage and has a project planned to work on improvements to PageTriage.
 * In the meantime the Growth team added some better baseline instrumentation: PageTriage Debugging Grafana dashboard (T324747).
 * Mentorship
 * When someone wants to sign up as a mentor, they are now informed if they don't meet the defined criteria (T321500).

Update 2023-01-19: Newcomer experience projects & Positive reinforcement update

 * Newcomer experience projects
 * The Growth team has been partnering with other WMF teams to conduct several experiments aimed at increasing new editor activation and retention. An overview of the four main projects completed are available here: Newcomer experience projects
 * Positive reinforcement
 * There are three parts to the Positive reinforcement project, and we are nearly complete with the first. The work needed to complete the new Impact module is almost complete (T222310). The Growth team is now shifting to focus on Leveling Up (T317813) and Personalized Praise (T317817).
 * Welcome survey
 * On January 30th, we will deploy the welcome survey to Vietnamese Wikipedia (T325376). After this update, all language editions of Wikipedia with Growth tools enabled will receive the Welcome survey.
 * Newcomer experience + New article creation
 * A few Growth team members are meeting with New Pages Patrol representatives and other English wikipedia community members to discuss improvements for newcomers who come to the wikis primarily interested in article creation (meeting details). The Growth team hopes to learn more about current NPP challenges and consider how a project around Article Creation for Newcomers fits into the plans of the Growth team. If this project is prioritized we will spend more time gathering feedback from other wikis and especially focus on feedback from new editors.

Update 2023-01-13: Positive reinforcement updates and Mentorship improvement

 * Positive Reinforcement
 * We released several Impact module improvements including a change to the logic of how we are displaying “Total edits” (T325216).
 * The new Impact module is still being A/B tested on Pilot wikis. We will conduct a thorough analysis once the experiment has run long enough to gather retention metrics, but in the meantime the impact module leading indicators appear healthy.
 * Thanks has been added to Watchlists, Contributions, and Recent Changes (T51541, T90404). We will soon work on design ideas for improvements to the confirmation step (T315859).
 * Mentorship
 * We have worked on a few changes recently to help ensure that when a Mentor is blocked locally or globally they don’t continue to receive questions from mentees (T325087, T318819).
 * Add a Link
 * Newcomers at Growth pilot wikis will now receive “add a link” suggestions for articles that are more clearly "underlinked" (T301096). After discussing this change with Pilot communities and looking at “add a link” metrics we will decide if this change should be released to more wikis.