Growth/ja

The Wikimedia Foundation's Growth team works on a set of features to encourage newcomers to make edits. These features have been shown to increase engagement by newcomers.

現在のイニシアチブ
これらイニシアチブならびにそれに伴う特定のプロジェクトの現状を確かめるには、Growthチームの現状ページを参照するか、このチームのニュースレターを購読してください.



Deployment table
以下の表に、Growth チームのどのイニシアチブがどのウィキで実装されたかまとめました. 詳細は個々のプロジェクトをご参照ください.

目的
Growth チームは2018年7月に業務を開始しました. 観衆部門の「New Content」プログラムにサポートを提供し、代わりにウィキメディア財団の長期目標である「公平な知識」に参加します. これらのイニシアチブは強靭なコミュニティを築き、広範で奥行きのあるコンテンツを世界中の人々に提供しようとしています. それを実現するには、ウィキメディアのプロジェクト群へ参加する新規利用者が糸口となります. 残念ながら、せっかく貢献を始めた人で、その後、何週間も何カ月も継続する人は多くありません. 原因は貢献を続けるには文化的・技術的な技量を求められ、それらはなかなか学びにくいからです. '''Growth チームの目的とはソフトウェアの変更によりこの問題に取り組み、ウィキメディアの中規模プロジェクト群で新規利用者の定着率向上につないでいこうというもので、出発点はウィキペディアとします. '''

中規模のウィキペディアを対象に取り組みを始めた根拠はいくつかあります. それらのプロジェクト群には成長の可能性が大きいこと、それでいて問題点もいくつかあり、解決にはソフトウェアを利用できそうだからです. このチームが業務に取り組むモチベーションは、2017年に実行した新人編集者の経験New Editor Experiences調査プロジェクトに根差しています. その調査では新規貢献者を妨げる問題点の理解を目指して、ウィキメディア財団がチェコ語版と朝鮮語版ウィキペディアのコミュニティと協働しました. その関係は現在も続いており、[$cswiki チェコ語版]および[$kowiki 朝鮮語版]ウィキペディアでソフトウェアの変更点をテストして、その他の中規模ウィキペディア群に実装する準備をします. ソフトウェア変更は通常、下記の分類のいずれかに属しています：


 * 文脈に沿ったヘルプ: 技術や概念の課題に関する有用なガイダンスを浮上させ、ウィキペディアの編集経験を変える.
 * 人間が対応するヘルプ: 編集者同士を結び付けるフォーラムやプログラム. 経験豊富な寄稿者から寄稿が成功するよう、初学者を助けることを目指す.
 * おすすめのタスク：編集初学者がウィキの腕前を上げるように、編集の課題を出題.

Past projects

 * For information about the Growth team that existed from 2013–2015, see Growth/Growth 2014.
 * For information about the predecessor to this team, see Collaboration.

Past projects by various iterations of the team and volunteer developers:
 * AfC improvements
 * Map Improvements 2018
 * Edit Review Improvements
 * Thanks
 * Structured Discussions, formerly Flow, discussion and collaboration software. Now in production as opt-in for talk pages, help pages and village pump-style discussion forums, on select wikis, but new requests are currently not applied.
 * Notifications (Echo), a redesign of the notifications system in Wikipedia. It was deployed to all Wikimedia wikis in November 2013.
 * New Page Triage, redesigning the New Page Patrol experience.
 * WikiLove, a tool designed to encourage community health and reduce "bite".
 * MoodBar, a tool designed to encourage feedback from new users, with Feedback Dashboard supporting review by experienced members.
 * Article Feedback Tool, a tool designed to encourage readers to provide feedback on articles.

Goals and metrics
As stated in the Audiences department’s 2018-2019 annual plan, the Growth team’s goal is:

Increase retention of new contributors in the target wikis, Czech and Korean Wikipedias.

To determine whether we’re meeting our goal, we have specified metrics and set targets for them: The first metric, “new contributor retention”, is the main metric we use to measure our impact. The second metric, “mentor retention”, will be relevant for interventions that involve mentorship. As we focus our work, we will consider whether that second metric is the right fit for the team at this time.

We need to create a more specific definition of “new contributor retention” in order for it to be useful. See the section below on “What does it mean to ‘retain new contributors’?” for our team’s thinking.


 * In the future, this section will contain links to the Growth team's reports that track our metrics.

What does it mean to "retain new contributors"?
For the purposes of this team, “new contributors” are people who have registered accounts on a wiki project, even if they have not made an edit. To “retain” them means that they make edits and continue to make edits over time. Though we hope that contributors are retained for months and years, we know that they will first have to make it through their first days and weeks. Those first days and weeks are more likely to be the Growth team’s focus.

There are different periods of time over which we can measure retention. One definition might be “second month retention”, meaning a contributor is "retained" if they edit during their first month and also edit during their second month. But another definition might be “second week retention”, meaning a contributor is "retained" if they edit during their first week and also edit during their second week.

As we work, the Growth team will determine which types of retention are most important to track and to increase. See this page for a formal definition of retention.

Background
Wikimedia projects need to have a constant stream of new contributors in order to become hubs for broad and deep content. New contributors replace experienced contributors who stop editing. They also increase the diversity of the editing community. This stream of new editors allows projects to grow their content while increasing the diversity of their content. But in many Wikimedia projects, the number of active contributors is decreasing or staying the same, and the retention rate of new contributors is also decreasing or staying the same. This issue was studied in the 2013 paper The Rise and Decline of an Open Collaboration System: How Wikipedia's reaction to popularity is causing its decline. The authors showed that active contributors in English Wikipedia began to shrink in 2007, with the major cause being increasing technical and cultural barriers for contributors. Since then, similar patterns have been seen in other Wikimedia projects.


 * Data showing the state of active contributors and contributor retention in Wikimedia projects is forthcoming.

Beyond the high-level numbers themselves, additional research suggests that many new contributors do not reach their full potential because contributing is both technically and culturally complicated. For instance, it is common for excited new contributors to have their first edits reverted or their first pages deleted without an informative explanation. This causes them to be confused and disappointed, and ultimately not to continue editing.

Together, the numbers, research, and stories, mean that we can do better to engage and retain new contributors. In particular, the Wikimedia Foundation decided to focus on mid-size Wikipedias because those projects need to grow their content, have challenges with contributor retention, and there is potential for software to help.

To better understand what causes new contributors to stay and to leave, the Wikimedia Foundation completed the New Editor Experiences research project in 2017. The project identified the main challenges experienced by new contributors to Wikipedia, and a set of potential solutions. See the “Challenges” and “Solutions” sections below for the details.

The Growth team formed to take action on the challenges and solutions identified by the research project. We will continue our relationship with the Czech and Korean communities by testing changes in those wikis first. When we discover changes that increase contributor retention, we will engage other communities to consider deploying those changes in more wikis.

Although much valuable research has already been done to help our team understand new editors, important open questions remain. The team records and prioritizes our open questions on this page. We will be deliberate about using research, data, surveys, and feature instrumentation to answer them.

Principles
The following is a list of healthy characteristics that we think wikis should exhibit with respect to new contributors. They are guiding principles for our team, and we hope to help make them a reality in the wikis we work with.


 * Diverse contributors lead to wikis with broad and deep content.
 * Contributors who want to make useful improvements to a wiki should all be able to find a place in the community where they fit in.
 * Contributors should be able to learn to edit on their own.
 * Contributors of any skill level should be able to ask for and receive help from other community members.
 * Contributors should be able to learn and edit in a supportive and non-confrontational environment.

Challenges
There are challenges that stand in the way of the principles above. The main challenges were identified by the New Editor Experiences research project that was completed in 2017. With the help of Czech and Korean community members, researchers interviewed 64 contributors to Czech and Korean Wikipedias to learn about why they started editing, what they found easy or difficult, and if they've stopped editing, why they stopped. The project surfaced a set of technical, conceptual, and cultural challenges, summarized below. Our team’s work will help wikis overcome these challenges so that the principles can become reality.


 * Technical: new contributors struggle with specific skills needed to contribute.
 * Editing: though Visual Editor is helpful for new contributors, it is hard for them to learn the process of building, citing, and publishing.
 * Communication: new contributors have trouble finding and using Talk pages. This is because Talk pages do not use Visual Editor, and because they work differently than other internet discussion systems.
 * Finding help: many wikis have scattered and inconsistent help materials that are difficult for new contributors to find and use.
 * Conceptual: new contributors have trouble learning core wiki policies and best practices.  The following are the concepts that are most challenging.
 * Community: many new contributors do not realize there is an active community behind each wiki project.
 * Verifiability and citations: all content must be attributed to reliable sources.
 * Notability: all content must have garnered enough broad attention to deserve an article.
 * Encyclopedic style and neutral point of view: articles should present content without bias toward one side of an argument.
 * Copyright: content should not violate the licensing of its sources.
 * Cultural: the wiki environment can be discouraging to new contributors who are trying to find where they fit in.
 * Personas: new contributors have different objectives for why they are editing, but it is hard to figure out how to accomplish them.
 * Framing: the way that contributors communicate impacts whether new contributors stay. Negative feedback can discourage further contribution.

Solutions
The Growth team will attempt multiple solutions to the above challenges, and we will learn and expand as we go along. These are the findings from the New Editor Experiences project that will guide the solutions we attempt:


 * Intermediaries: many new contributors have succeeded because a partner or mentor helped them learn to edit.  These partners are frequently found in off-wiki places like schools, libraries, or meetups.
 * Iterative learning: new contributors have more success when they learn editing skills over time in safe environments.
 * Outside help: new contributors frequently search for help outside of Wikipedia, either in off-wiki communications, or through other internet resources.

Those trends lead to two main categories of solutions to the challenges described above. The work of our team will usually fit into one of these categories:


 * Human-to-human help: forums and programs that connect contributors to each other so that experienced contributors can help newer contributors succeed.  This can include help desk forums, mentorship opportunities, or even off-wiki connections.
 * In-context help: changes to the Wikipedia editing experience to surface helpful guidance around technical and conceptual challenges.  This is guidance surfaced at the time it is needed, in the place where it is needed -- as opposed to on a separate page that may be difficult to find.

This page contains the list of ideas that the team has considered and discussed with communities.

How we work
The Growth Team follows several principles as we work toward our objective.


 * We keep in close communication with the communities our team affects, so that our work remains grounded in reality.
 * We start with small interventions, learn quickly, and adjust our approach.
 * We make decisions based on evidence from experiments, data, and user research.
 * We take the time to equip ourselves with the tools we need to be flexible and work quickly.
 * The software we build gives flexibility to the communities who use it, so they can modify and improve it on their own.
 * When we know something doesn’t work, we remove it cleanly and learn for the future.
 * We follow the Wikimedia Product Guidance for working with communities.
 * Please report bugs at Phabricator, using the  tag
 * How we triage incoming tasks and other chores, is detailed at Growth/Team/Chore list.

How to work with us
While we will be focusing on Czech and Korean Wikipedias during 2018 as our initial audiences, we are looking for information and input from various other places and demographics. Here are some ways you can help us through some useful resources on how to interact with newcomers or how to get the tools we create on your wiki.