Editor engagement

Growing Wikipedia and its community

Editor engagement at the Wikimedia Foundation is split into two cross-functional teams: The Growth team, which takes a data-driven approach, piloting experimental features to engage new contributors to participate in Wikipedia; and the Core Features team, which focuses on building better infrastructure for new and existing users to participate in peer-to-peer collaboration, consensus, and community building.

What's new

Here are some of our most recent reports and milestones.

Notifications Launch on More Wikipedias

We’re happy to announce the release of the Notifications tool on dozens of Wikipedias in many languages! Notifications inform users about new activity that affects them on Wikipedia and other Wikimedia projects, such as talk page messages, page links, mentions, thanks or edit reverts.

GettingStarted, introducing new Wikipedians to simple editing tasks We've unveiled an experimental interface, provided to newly-registered Wikipedians immediately after they sign up. By encouraging users who otherwise don't have an idea where to get started to try simple editing tasks like fixing spelling and grammar, we hope to grow the community.

Here is the problem

We call this the "oh shit" graph.

In early 2007, the number of active editors plateaued and then started decreasing. The rate at which new editors stick around plateaued even earlier, in early 2005, and then dropped sharply. These numbers haven't improved.

We need your help

Join us! Participate in our discussions and activities, and learn about new features and experiments. You can subscribe to our mailing list, and/or sign up for our on-wiki newsletters.

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Who we are

Product managers, community organizers, developers, designers, and analysts.

 See the rest of the team

What we are doing Here's a short list of our current projects aimed at improving editor engagement. Check out each talk page for comments or questions!