Growth/Growth 2014/Prioritization

The E3 team does not have a roadmap, but the following are some notes on our current thinking about how to prioritize the projects we may take on next.

Types of experiments
This is a rough classification of the kinds of work we might do to increase editor engagement on Wikipedia.


 * 1) Help more people to make first edits without logging in (-1 to 0 registered edits). Howie calls this “kicking the tires.” It’s unlikely that we would build rich interfaces solely for anonymous editors, but partially only because don’t have good data on how important this stage is for the lifecycle of new editors.
 * 2) Invite more people to register. (-1 to 0 registered edits) Whatever kind of Wikipedia visitor they are – anonymous editor or reader – one strategy is simply to try and increase the number of legitimate opportunities for directing people to join the project by registering. It’s just one simple step, but it’s an important part of converting more people.
 * 3) Improve the registration process. (-1 to 0 registered edits) This is currently being done, but there’s always more to improve to potentially optimize this process. It’s unlikely we’re going to spend a lot more time on this right now, unless the results of the current A/B test are dismal.
 * 4) Help newly-registered users become fully-fledged Wikipedians (0-1, 1-10, 10-100 registered edits) The goals here would be to increase the number of newly-registered accounts that edit at all, and the number of new editors who make it successfully through each editing milestone. So far there is evidence that even just making it to as little as 10 edits signficantly increases the likelihood that you will be a Wikipedian.
 * 5) Increase retention of existing editors, without explicitly trying to move people through process of registration and first edits. Basically, this means anything that isn’t focused on getting more new people to register and become Wikipedia editors. Frankly speaking, we could encounter serious problems if we onboard any significant number of new editors. The collaborative tools of the project are quite old and clunky, and have largely been optimized for rejecting low quality contributions and vandalism. We could instead focus on ways to protect new contributors, or build tools for new contributors without actively trying to convert more people.

Current work
Our current projects are…


 * Motivating Wikipedians with feedback after editing (post-edit feedback)
 * Redesigning the account creation page (ACUX).
 * Redesigning the Community Portal.

These projects focus on types 1, 3, and 4 above, roughly speaking.