Growth/Growth 2014/Prioritization

The E3 team does not have a roadmap, but the following are some notes on our current thinking about how to prioritize the projects we may take on next.

Areas of focus
This is a rough classification of the kinds of work we might do to increase editor engagement on Wikipedia.


 * 1) Help more people to make first contributions without logging in (-1 to 0 registered edits). Howie calls this “kicking the tires,” and it also includes things like AFT.
 * 2) Invite more people to register. (-1 to 0 registered edits) Whatever kind of Wikipedia visitor they are – anonymous editor or reader – one strategy is simply to try and increase the number of legitimate opportunities for directing people to join the project by registering. It’s just one simple step, but it’s an important part of converting more people.
 * 3) Improve the registration process. (-1 to 0 registered edits) This is underway, but there’s always more to improve to potentially optimize this process. It’s unlikely we’re going to spend a lot more time on this right now, unless the results of the current A/B test are dismal.
 * 4) Help newly-registered users become fully-fledged Wikipedians (0-1, 1-10, 10-100 registered edits) The goals here would be to increase the number of newly-registered accounts that edit at all, and the number of new editors who make it successfully through each editing milestone. So far there is evidence that even just making it to as little as 10 edits significantly increases the likelihood that you will be a Wikipedian.
 * 5) Increase retention of existing editors without explicitly trying to move people through process of registration and first edits. Basically, this means anything that is about fixing interaction problems between editors. Frankly speaking, we could encounter serious problems if we onboard any significant number of new editors.

Current work
Our current projects are…


 * Motivating Wikipedians with feedback after editing (post-edit feedback)
 * Redesigning the account creation page (ACUX).
 * Redesigning the Community Portal.

(These projects focus on types 4, 3, and 1.)

Next steps and rationale

 *  The following represent my assumptions and thinking. Please comment if you like, and apologies that it's pretty longwinded. Steven Walling (WMF) &bull; talk   23:20, 25 September 2012 (UTC)


 * What we're not doing yet and why:


 * "Type 1" projects. It’s unlikely that we would build rich interfaces solely for readers or anonymous editors, even if we could use tools like the "proto-accounts" idea to better serve people who haven't yet logged in. Our goal is to help Wikipedians, which means registered editors.
 * "Type 2" projects. While we could try to push a ton of new readers and anonymous editors to become registered members of the site, it's entirely possible that we wouldn't actually increase the number of accounts that actually become valuable contributors.
 * "Type 5" projects. We're not going to try and fix basic interaction problems between editors, whether it's that talk pages suck or that people get reverted. Frankly speaking, we could encounter serious problems if we onboard any significant number of new editors, and be forced to try and deal with the fact that new contributors have zero tools for understanding how to make an impact on Wikipedia, while power users have extremely good tools for rejecting newbies in the blink of an eye. If efforts to onboard new editors fail because of the low retention rate of editors who actually contribute something early on, then we will address this. But first, it's wiser to not try and muck with workflows used by vested contributors.
 * We're not going to build complex tools or workflows for very active editors, yet. We want to avoid tackling very difficult problems right away, when there might be more low-hanging fruit. In short, we don't yet want to take on projects like WikiProject support, or better editing/patrolling tools for everyone.


 * What we're doing next:

In addition to infrastructure work like event logging and usertagging, we'll be...


 * 1) Continuing to iterate on the account creation improvements until we feel comfortable permanently releasing it on English Wikipedia, at a minimum.
 * 2) Make post-edit feedback a permanent part of Wikipedia, as appropriate, and potentially test alternative forms of feedback.
 * 3) Work on successfully onboarding new Wikipedians. This is the new item on the list, for after account creation tests are launched and post-edit feedback tests have wrapped.