Growth/Newcomer experience projects

Several WMF teams are working together to improve newcomer experiences and new editor retention. Involved teams are Growth, Advancement, Communications, & GLAM.

Goal
In order for everyone in the world to have access to all knowledge, we need people around the world to be able to participate in building that knowledge. No matter someone’s location, language, gender, device, income, technical skills, personality, or time constraints, we want them to be able to join in and find a way to be the best Wikimedian they can be.

Problems

 * Readers of Wikipedia don’t know that they can and should participate and share knowledge on Wikipedia by becoming editors.
 * Newcomers to Wikipedia lack ways to start participating in building open knowledge.  They try to participate, but are blocked by our single, complicated, open-ended experience -- barriers of entry that especially affect underserved populations.
 * Even when newcomers do succeed at first, they are not nurtured into taking the next steps to becoming part of our communities.

Hypothesis
If we direct newcomers to quickly make simple contributions in an onboarding experience that makes them proud of their impact and encourages their progress, then more readers, and more diverse kinds of readers, will become contributors -- especially amongst mobile users in emerging communities.

Objectives

 * Account creation: Internet users learn that they can contribute and are prompted to create an account.
 * Activation: Newcomers have fast, easy, and mobile-friendly ways to make their first edits.
 * Retention: Newcomers are proud of their impact, leading them to come back.

Projects
Account creation Activation Retention
 * Thank you pages & banners: Encourage donors to create accounts through thank you pages and banners.
 * Marketing experiment: Run ads on-wiki and off-wiki to see how this impacts account activation.
 * "Add an image" GLAM events: Host GLAM events that focus on using the "Add an image" tool.
 * Welcome emails: Experiment sending welcome emails to newly created accounts.

Current Status

 * 2021 - 2022 fiscal year:
 * Launch "add an image"
 * Conduct several experimental projects:
 * Thank you pages & banners
 * Newcomer experience marketing experiment
 * "Add an image" GLAM events
 * Welcome emails experiment
 * 2022 - 2023 fiscal year:
 * Pursue ideas that show promise:
 * Scaling the Thank you page work to Swedish, Italian, Japanese, French, and Dutch Wikipedias (T318975).
 * Expanding the Welcome email experiment is in discussion, Leveling up notifications released
 * Launch section-level "add an image" task (T321754)


 * 2023 - 2024 fiscal year:
 * The Newcomer Experience pilot is wrapping up as the Growth team is focusing on other annual plan priorities. However, we are still supporting the work needed to scale prior work to more Wikipedias:
 * Scaling the Thank you page work to communities that express interest
 * Scaling "add an image" and section-level "add an image" (T322592)

Donor Thank you page
In 2022, the Growth team and Fundraising teams completed an initial Thank you pages & banners experiment with Donors in Latin America, India, and South Africa. The Thank you page work was especially promising, and required minimal engineering effort to scale further, so in 2023 we scaled this work to Swedish, Italian, Japanese, French, and Dutch Wikipedias (T318975).

Essentially after donation, donors landed on a Thank you page with a “Try editing Wikipedia” call to action. Donors who created an account were sent to a custom account creation page, and then received the standard Growth features and onboarding.

Initial analysis shows that this flow from donation to creating an account continues to be healthy and a low-effort way to encourage new types of people to edit Wikipedia (T331495). The following is a small sample from 2023-03-07 to 2023-03-26, but you can see that the call to action to try editing resulted in over 2,600 new accounts (Registrations) and over 150 of these new accounts completed an initial edit within 24 hours of creating their account (Activations). Methodological notes:


 * Data collected spans 2023-03-07 to 2023-03-26.
 * "Unique visitors" is counted using a combination of IP address and User-Agent to get more correct counts in situations where users share IP addresses. Previous analysis only used IP addresses as a shortcut. This affects some wikis more than others (e.g. Japanese sees a 2–3% increase in unique visitors).
 * The count of registrations excludes known test accounts and Wikipedia app registrations, which is consistent with our previous analyses. "Constructive activation" means making at least one non-reverted edit within 24 hours of registration.

Scaling the new donor Thank you page to English Wikipedia
In 2023, the Wikimedia Foundation's Fundraising team started a community discussion so volunteers can learn more about fundraising and share ideas for how we can improve the 2023 English fundraising campaign: Wikipedia:Fundraising/2023 banners

One theme that emerged from volunteer feedback was around the need to recruit more editors, rather than just fundraise: "We need editors, not money." We plan to discuss this idea further with the English Wikipedia community to see if the Thank you page experiment would be a good fit for English Wikipedia. Please join the discussion about encouraging donors to edit via a revised Thank you page.