Talk:Growth/Newcomer experience projects

Encouraging donors to edit (Thank you page experiment)
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."

The Fundraising team reached out the Growth team to ask if we would be able to expand the Thank you page experiment to English Wikipedia if the community is interested. The Growth team has committed to the work, and providing edit funnel analysis afterwards if there is support for trying this on English Wikipedia.

Previously we tested a revised Thank you page with a “Try editing Wikipedia” call to action with donors in Latin America, India, and South Africa. And then in early 2023, we scaled the Thank you page experiment to Swedish, Italian, Japanese, French, and Dutch Wikipedias. Donors who created an account were sent to a custom account creation page for donors, and then received the standard Growth features and onboarding.

Here’s what we learned:
 * Approximately 7% of donors in these markets showed interest in editing immediately after donating, based on the estimated click-through rate from the Thank you page.
 * The landing page achieved a 45.1% account creation rate, which is a promising result compared to other channels.
 * Only 4.6% of the accounts created right after donating started editing within 24 hours of their creation, which is significantly lower than organic registrations.

I'm starting this discussion to see if there is support for expanding this revised Thank you page and donor onboarding at English Wikipedia. What questions do you have? What concerns do you have? Do you have any suggestions for improving this experiment? - KStoller-WMF (talk) 22:11, 3 August 2023 (UTC)


 * Hello! I left a few thoughts on en:wp.  My main feedback is threefold:
 * A "Thank you!" campaign (or any messaging campaign) that was A/B tested for effective recruiting would be fantastic.
 * A/B testing of the newbie-first-edit funnel would be a good companion process; I'd strongly like to see people invited to make edits, reviews, or other engagement with content in the first minute after choosing to start contributing. (Think of a smooth Magnus tool or a vote for great photos; something that can be reduced to a quick evaluation and annotation, while also showcasing the breadth and depth of the projects)
 * Topical messages that filter for readers interested in a particular hobby or topic area might have dramatically different effects, and over time would help us build up an [opt-in and] well-categorized network of supporters and participants by area of enthusiasm, which is closer to what permanent community sustainability looks like
 * When is the last time we tried this for a banner campaign, other than "Wiki Loves X"? Which of those have targeted logged-out readers?  What sort of A/B testing have we done on them?  :)
 * Thanks for the work on the past experiments, and for starting this thread. Sj (talk) 23:34, 3 August 2023 (UTC)


 * Thanks for the feedback, User:Sj!
 * Screen shot of ORES topic modeling in newcomer tasks 2020-03-18.png that relate to a newcomer interests]]
 * I chatted more about A/B testing options with my engineering team, and although we can certainly A/B test certain aspects of a Thank you page experiment, we likely can't conduct the A/B test that I would find most insightful due to how we handle user data and limit tracking. For example, I would like to show the new page (with the “Try editing Wikipedia” call to action) to 50% of donors and compare that to the 50% of donors that don't see that call to action. However, we simply don't track logged out traffic in that way. Once a donor navigates away from the Thank you page, if they aren't navigating to create an account (via that one specific link) we aren't tracking that. Is that the A/B test you were envisioning, or is there another experiment you think we should consider?
 * Yes! This sounds similar to Growth's structured tasks. These tasks break down the editing process to a very easy, guided process for brand new account holders. They are also suggested on the Newcomer homepage, which new accounts are guided to after account creation. These tasks help more new account holders edit for the first time. We A/B tested this feature: Add a link Experiment analysis. However, these tasks aren't released on English Wikipedia yet.  We hope to release Add a link to English Wikipedia by the end of the year (communities can then disable or adjust the task via Special:EditGrowthConfig if needed). These tasks make initial editing very easy, but that of course leads to more patrolling for experienced editors. Do you think this task will work for English Wikipedia?
 * Will you tell me more about this idea? I've considered if we could eventually use newcomer interests to help surface related Wiki Projects or edit-a-thons in some way, but curious if you have any specific ideas around this.
 * Last year was the last time we tested a banner to recruit editors: In a 2022 experiment, we tested a banner that encouraged readers to edit as part of the Thank you page experiment. We concluded that this wasn't an effective means of recruiting editors. You can see the full results in the second half of this report: “Create an account” Invitations on Fundraising Thank You Pages and Thank You Banners. Despite over 50 million banner impressions, the banner only led to 492 "constructive activations" (a constructive activation is defined a new account editing within 24 hours of registration and that edit not being reverted within 48 hours). We A/B tested a few changes to the banner language to improve click-through rate, with limited impact. Ultimately we concluded the banners didn't seem like an effective way to encourage Readers to try editing and that the Growth team should utilize our time testing other methods for new editor recruitment and continue our efforts to ensure we engage and retain new editors. The Thank you page call to action lead to far more constructive activations (1,339), despite being displayed to a much smaller group of people.
 * Can you think of other English Wikipedia editors who might want to participate in this discussion and decision about whether we test a “Try editing Wikipedia” call to action on this year's Donor Thank you page? - KStoller-WMF (talk) 21:51, 7 August 2023 (UTC)