Growth/Newsletters/27

Annual plan for Growth
We published our annual plan, for the period July 2023 - June 2024. In a nutshell, our projects are:


 * Community Configuration 2.0, that is confirmed (see below)
 * Providing local configuration of features would help communities to set them up fitting their needs.
 * Article creation for new editors, as a potential idea
 * Guiding more and adding guardrails to newcomers who create an article would reduce the work of patrollers, as the quality of ne articles would improve.
 * Adding module to the Homepage for readers, as a potential idea.
 * These modules would encourage readers to participate in the wikis in non-editing ways.

You can comment this plan at its talk page.

Add an image, Section-level: a new feature on test
The new Section-level “add an image” structured task has been released to Growth pilot wikis (Arabic, Bengali, Czech, and Spanish). This task was created as part of the Structured Data Across Wikipedia project. We are monitoring the edits made, and we look for community feedback as well.

Improvements regarding topic selection
Suggested Edits, sometimes known as Newcomer tasks, are now receiving topic predictions via the new Language-Agnostic Topic Classification (sometimes referred to as “Outlinks”). This update will allow newcomers to receive a greater diversity of task recommendations if they have topics selected in non-English Wikipedias. There will be about an estimated 60% increase in article coverage on non-English Wikipedias [1]. The change is gradual as incoming edits propagate the new topics, and the Research team will evaluate the impact in a few months (T328276).

Analysis of mentorship's impact
Growth provides dedicated features to setup a mentorship program for newcomers. Every newcomer gets a volunteer mentor who provides advice and helps their first steps.

Communities can setup or join this mentorship system by visiting Special:ManageMentors locally. This mentorship system is configurable by the community at Special:EditGrowthConfig.

As more communities have implemented mentorship, a WMF data scientist will be looking at the impact of Mentorship on Spanish and English Wikipedia (T341387).

Positive Reinforcement
Positive Reinforcement is a test project, where mentors get a list of newcomers that are praiseworthy. This way, mentors can encourage these newcomers to continue their efforts editing Wikipedia. At the moment, it is only available at our pilot wikis.

The initial leading indicators for the Personalized praise project have been published. Although this is still a relatively small sample, results seem healthy and show that Mentors are indeed receiving notifications and clicking through to view their praise-worthy mentees. Based on this data and feedback from Mentors at pilot wikis, the Growth team will pursue the following tasks to help improve this feature:
 * Add revert scorecard to Personalized praise module on Mentor dashboard (T337510)
 * Exclude blocked accounts from the Personalized praise suggestions (T338525)

Community Configuration 2.0

 * The Growth team designer is investigating design improvements (T334312) & conducting competitor analysis T338386.
 * We are starting to gather internal WMF team requirements and starting community discussions (T336608).

Growth contributes to IP Editing Migration
The Growth team is shifting focus to work on a project that touches many different WMF teams: IP Editing: Privacy Enhancement and Abuse Mitigation. The Growth team will focus mainly on the logged out user to temporary account holder user experience, as well as ensuring that Growth owned extensions and features work as expected with this new temporary account type (T326877).

Impact module
The version 2 of the Impact module is now deployed at 14 wikis. We plan to provide it to more wikis during the coming weeks, after we improved a few features.

Community facing events
A Growth team member will lead a session at this year’s Wikimania: Mentoring new editors on Wikipedia. Workshop attendees will help brainstorm improvements to Growth’s mentorship features.