Growth/Newsletters/16/en

 Welcome to the sixteenth newsletter from the Growth team!

The Growth team's objective is to work on software changes that help retain new contributors in mid-size Wikimedia projects.

Growth features impact
Newcomers task experiments results

In November 2019, the Growth team added the "newcomer tasks" feature to the newcomer homepage. After six months of experiment, we collected data from Arabic, Vietnamese, Czech, and Korean Wikipedias. We analyzed the global impact of the Growth features, including newcomer tasks.

This analysis finds that the Growth feature "newcomer tasks" leads to increases in: We also find that the quality of their edits is comparable to that of a control group.
 * the probability that newcomers make their first article edit (+11.6%)
 * the probability that they are retained as editors
 * the number of edits they make during their first couple of weeks on the wiki (+85.6%)

You can find more details about this experiment on the report page.

Other data

As of November 2020, on all wikis where the features have been deployed:
 * more than 5,000 newcomers have made more than 40,000 edits using Newcomer tasks.
 * more than 14,000 questions have been sent to volunteer mentors by more than 11,000 users. These questions were posting using the mentorship module on the newcomer's homepage.
 * more than 2,000 questions have been asked on help desks by more than 1,500 users. These questions were posted using the help panel, while users were editing a page.

Know more about this.

Variant C and D
Variants C and D are two new arrangements of the newcomer homepage. We deployed it at the beginning of November. After two weeks of these variants being deployed, we can spot a difference, and the number of interactions increased.

News for mentors
A separate list for workshops hosts

During workshops organized by education programs through the communities, workshops hosts like to mentor people they train on wiki. Several wikis requested to have a way to claim their mentees without getting people they don't know randomly being assigned to them. To address this need, a separate list can be created on wiki, for mentors that wish to claim mentees, but prefer not to have random mentees being assigned to them. Know more about this feature.

Claiming multiple mentees at once

Mentors can use  to have a newcomer being assigned to them. Now, mentors can claim multiple newcomers at once.

Community news
The Help panel allows people to post a message to the local Help desk while editing. The tool posted messages at the bottom of help desks by default, like any new messages. Wikis using displaying new messages at the top of the page are now supported. T261714

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