Growth/Newsletters/21

 Growth team newsletter #21 


Welcome to the twenty-first newsletter from the Growth team!

New project: Positive reinforcement

 * The Growth team started a new project: Positive reinforcement. We want newcomers to understand there is an interest in regularly editing Wikipedia, and we want to improve new editor retention.
 * We asked users from Arabic, Bangala, Czech and French Wikipedia about their feedback. Some people participated at mediawiki.org as well.
 * We summarized the initial feedback gathered from these community discussions, along with how we plan to iterate based on that feedback.
 * The first Positive Reinforcement idea (an overhaul of the impact module based on incorporating stats, graphs, and other contribution information) received the widest support and we plan to move forward with the design illustrated on right.
 * Please let us know what you think of this project, in any language.

For mentors

 * We have worked on two new features, to inform them about the mentorship:
 * In the Mentor module, we now provide more information about the public nature of the public nature of the mentors/newcomer relationship and the fact that talk pages are public.
 * We now allow newcomers to opt-in and opt-out of mentorship.

Scaling

 *  "Add a link" available at more wikis  ― Add a link feature has been deployed to more wikis: .  This is part of the progressive deployment of this tool to more Wikipedias.  The communities can configure locally how this feature works.
 *  "Add an image" available at more wikis  ― Add an image feature will be deployed to more wikis: .  These communities will be able to configure locally how this feature works.

Suggested edits

 *  Selecting topics  ― We have created an "AND" filter to the list of topics at Special:Homepage.  This way, newcomers can decide to select very specific topics ("Transportation" AND "Asia") or to have a broader selection ("Transportation" OR "Asia").  At the moment this feature is tested at pilot wikis.
 *  Changes for Add a link  ― We have built several improvements that came from community discussion and from data analysis. They will be available soon at the wikis.
 *  Algorithm improvements  The algorithm now avoids recommending links in sections that usually don't have links and for first names. Also, it now limits each article to only having three link suggestions by default (limited to the highest accuracy suggestions of all the available ones in the article).
 *  User experience improvements  We added a confirmation dialog when a user exits out of suggestion mode prior to making changes.  We also improved post-edit dialog experience and allow newcomers to browse through task suggestions from the post-edit dialog.
 *  Community configuration  We allow communities to set a maximum number of links per article via Special:EditGrowthConfig.
 *  Future change for Add a link feature  We will suggest underlinked articles in priority.
 *  Patrolling suggested edits  ― Some users at Arabic Wikipedia, Spanish Wikipedia, and Russian Wikipedia told us that "Add a link" and "Add an image" edits cans be challenging to patrol. We are now brainstorming improvements to help address this challenge.  If you have any thoughts to add about the challenges of reviewing these tasks or how we should improve these tasks further, please let us know, in any language.

Community configuration
Communities can configure how the features work, using Special:EditGrowthConfig.
 * Communities can set the maximum number of "add an image" suggested tasks a newcomer can complete daily.
 * Future change: allow communities to customize the "add a link" quality gate threshold easily, using Special:EditGrowthConfig.

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