Onboarding new Wikipedians

Work by the editor engagement experiments team to get new registered Wikipedians to quickly become productive members of the community. Getting people up to speed in an organization or community is often called "onboarding".

Background
As a follow-up to our work improving the account creation user experience, we have decided to focus on increasing the number of registered accounts that contribute and reach the 10-edit milestone. There is more on that at our prioritization notes, but the summary is that we want to avoid trying to increase the number of registrations if it is likely it won't impact the number of those who actually become active editors. We also want to avoid simply building tools to increase the productivity or retention of existing editors of any kind, since these tend to be more difficult interaction problems.

Current
Currently, there is little to no direction given to new registered users immediately after they join Wikipedia, other than a link to user preferences, other projects, and the internal referrer that brought the user to account creation. It looks like...



For the people who already know what they want to accomplish as editors, at least in the immediate future, this lack of onboarding is not necessarily an obstacle. However, we know that the majority of accounts registered never attempt or complete an edit. Not all people can or should edit Wikipedia, but those who are registering can be safely assumed to be better candidates for conversion to editing than random readers.

Future
While it is standard for other applications to encourage people to fill out things like profiles or complete a checklist of tasks before using their product, the Wikipedia way is to encourage people to focus on contributing content. The current behavior pattern of successful new Wikipedians matches this; of registered users who do complete an edit, the majority do so within an hour of registration.

Since our goal is to increase the number of editors, the question that follows is who is registering and what kind of editing task might they want to complete? To understand the kind of users signing up for accounts and making their first edits, we've crafted four personas to represent newly-registered Wikipedians.