Growth/Newsletters/19



Welcome to the nineteenth newsletter from the Growth team!

The Growth team's objective is to work on software changes that help retain new contributors in mid-size Wikimedia projects.

Structured tasks

 * Suggested links are tested at more than 10 wikis. Based on the feedback recived, we have decided to work on some improvements before releasing it to more wikis.
 * Prototype for our next feature, Suggested images, are available. These prototypes have been tested by newcomers, in English and Spanish.

News for mentors

 * The Mentor dashboard is available at our pilot wikis: Arabic, Czech, and Bengali Wikipedias. It will soon be available at a few more volunteering wikis, as a test.
 * At wikis where the mentor dashboard is deployed, a new filter is available for mentors. They can monitor their mentees' activity in Watchlist and RecentChanges.  For privacy reasons, this filter can't be accessed by someone else than the mentor itself. This filter only filters mentees assigned to the mentor. This filter is not visible for people who are not listed as mentors

Community configuration

 * Communities can configure how Growth features behave at their wiki, by editing special:EditGrowthConfig . This special page is editable by interface admins. At this page, community members can add a list of volunteer mentors, ready reply to newcomers' questions.

Scaling

 * The wikis that have Growth features deployed have been part of A/B testing since deployment, in which some newcomers did not receive the new features. Now, all of the newcomers on 21 of the smallest of those wikis will be receiving the features.
 * All versions of Wikipedia now have Growth features (except zh, for techniclal reasons).
 * English Wikipedia now gives the features to 25% of newcomers. This is done to test how mentorship would interfere with existing workflows.
 * Now that Growth features are available at Wikipedia, the Growth team considers to work with other projects. Some Wikisource users have expressed some interest in getting Growth features.

News for communities

 * A Deployment table has been created to track the different deployments at the wikis.
 * The Growth team has published a translatable a FAQ. You can find there the most common questions we hear from community members and our replies.
 * Interface translations are important for newcomers. Please help for your language, by translating or copyediting interface translations for the Growth features.
 * Help:GettingStarted was a feature developed in 2013, which directed newcomers to articles that needed editing. We recently removed this feature from all wikis, because it has been replaced by the Growth features.

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