New Editor Experiences

New Editor Experiences is a Wikimedia Foundation project which aims to experiment with ways to better attract and retain new editors at mid-sized Wikipedias.To do this, it's crucial to learn more about their experiences, and the experiences of established editors who work with them. We started by traveling to the Czech Republic and South Korea to interview editors from the Korean and Czech Wikipedias.

In August 2017, we released the findings from the research and we're currently starting the development phase of the project by planning of a series of discussions and workshops with WMF staff members and Czech and Korean community members. These workshops will discuss the research findings in depth and how they can be addressed.

If you have questions, comments, or are interested in getting involved in the project, please use the talk page here or contact Neil Patel Quinn directly.

Research project
To conduct our research, we worked with a design research firm called Reboot.

The first part of the project, which ran from May to July 2017, was a research project that involved visiting new editors of two Wikipedia projects to interview them in person (a contextual inquiry). The topics of the interviews included other activities the users participated in (particularly ones that were voluntary, Internet-based, or related to knowledge-sharing), their technology ecosystems, their attitudes towards and awareness of Wikipedia, and their experiences while contributing. In addition, we also interviewed a number of experienced editors who frequently interacted with new editors.

Our research focused on the Korean Wikipedia (we traveled to South Korea May 17–30 and did 30 interviews) and the Czech Wikipedia (we traveled to the Czech Republic June 13–27 and did 34 interviews). For details of how these were selected, see community selection.

Team members

 * Abbey Ripstra, lead design researcher
 * Neil Patel Quinn, product analyst
 * Melody Kramer, audience development manager
 * Juliet Barbara, communications director
 * Sati Houston, grants impact strategist
 * Toby Negrin, interim chief product officer
 * Trevor Parscal, director of the Contributors team
 * Sherry Snyder, community liaison
 * Soohyun Pae, Korean participant recruiter

Solution development
A number of WMF teams will be participating in a series of workshops planned for September–November 2017 to explore issues and solutions.

The WMF Contributors team plans to build on this research with product development work in the 2017–18 fiscal year, as part of that year's annual plan. The technical tools developed may be directed at new contributors or at experienced editors who interact with them, or both.