Growth/Growth 2014/status

Last update on: 2012-08-monthly

2012-04-monthly
Karyn Gladstone, Steven Walling, Maryana Pinchuk and Ryan Faulkner conducted the Necromancy experiment, [//blog.wikimedia.org/2012/05/02/enticing-wikipedians-back/ emailing lapsed editors] to encourage them to edit Wikipedia again. Work on the Template A/B testing project is wrapping up; a full report is expected in May. The E3 team will also be publishing details on each experiment on meta and the English Wikipedia. The technical specifications for each implementation will be posted on mediawiki.org. The team also began recruiting for its open positions; the first software engineer for the team will be joining mid May.

2012-05-monthly
The team started the development of the Timestamp Position Modification experimental feature, which was deployed then disabled due to a conflict between the ClickTracking feature and the MediaWiki API. Further testing and tuning continues, as well as analysis, redesign and development of the ClickTracking extension. We are gathering requirements for the next experiment on analyzing post-edit feedback, and we continue to hire software engineers.

2012-06-monthly
The team redeployed the Timestamp Position Modification experiment and it is now wrapped and in analysis. Designs and analytics work on the next experiment, post-edit feedback, were completed in preparation for a July deployment. Debug hooks were added to the clicktracking extension with the goal of improving QA for experiments. We wrote a clicktracking dashboard that intercepts event logging calls and displays them on-screen, shows which experiments are currently active, and to which bucket (if any) the current user has been assigned. Work is ongoing on a re-write of the clicktracking extension, which is taking shape as at Extension:E3_Experiments.

2012-07-monthly
The Timestamp Position Modification experiment was completed, and initial analysis shows that adding the timestamp on articles increases clicks on the History tab. Development started to deliver post-edit feedback messages; this experiment includes a proof-of-concept dry run of a new editor bucketing strategy for delivering experimental treatments that was deployed in advance of the full experiment. The team configured a test environment on Labs, to be used for UI and functional requirements validation by the team. The Wikimania conference was an opportunity to interact with editors from the English Wikipedia, and to define a new experiment related to cleanup templates.

2012-08-monthly
We deployed and ran the first iteration of post-edit feedback, testing whether various types of positive feedback after submission of an edit increase the productivity and retention of Wikipedia editors. (The results will be publicized soon.) We are currently working on the next iteration of post-edit feedback and on a new experiment which centers around the account creation process.

We've also deployed click-tracking to the English Wikipedia community portal, account creation page, and the article edit form, and devised a tool for generating reports from the raw log data. Working with Asher, we've also architected an alternative data pipeline for event tracking, and begun its deployment. 