Growth/Long-term open questions

Research undertaken over several years by many groups has helped the Growth team learn a lot about the motivations and challenges of new editors, in particular the New Editor Experiences research. Though we have learned a lot, there are still many open questions that need to be answered in order to help the team increase the retention of new editors. The team will have many opportunities to learn answers to these questions, such as research projects, surveys, and learning through our features. With the list on this page, we're recording our most important open questions so that we can make sure to learn as much as we can. This list may evolve over time as questions are answered and new ones arise.

Top four questions
Our team's top four most important open questions are:


 * Fitting in: how do we help a new editor find a role in their wiki that...
 * ...fits their interests?
 * ...fits their skillset?
 * ...fits the wiki's needs?
 * Mentorship: how can we make it so that mentorship is seen as part of what it means to be a good editor?
 * Anonymous editors: who are the anonymous editors, and how should we engage them?
 * Social media: what is the role of social media in attracting and retaining new editors?

Full list of questions
The following is a running list of all the open questions we have discussed, including even when they are redundant. The top four questions above are drawn from grouping and discussing the full list.

Making the list
During the Growth team's September 2018 offsite meeting, we took time to brainstorm and discuss the most important open questions around new editor retention. Each team member individually wrote down several open questions on sticky notes. Then we shared them with the team and grouped similar questions together on the wall. These grouping helped us see which questions came up over and over, and helped us understand what our most important open questions are. Below is a photo of the team discussing the many questions.