Growth/Newsletters/24

Highlights

 * This newsletter will have a new publication period, 6 times a year: January, March, May, July, September, November.

Welcome emails

 * Newcomers fill a welcome survey when they create an account. In this survey, we asked newcomers if they wanted to receive emails from us. Then, we sent a welcome email to half of users who agreed on receiving it. This group, compared to the one who hasn't received this email, returned to the wiki and made more edits. This project was a partnership with Marketing and Community Relations. Know more about this experiment (in English)

Invite to edit for donors

 * Growth features make it easier for people to join Wikipedia. People who donate to Wikipedia might be interested to become editors. A research project showed that invites in thank you emails sent to donors lead donors to edit.
 * An invite to edit using Growth features will be included in thank you emails sent to donors. This page links to specific account creation page. The first wikis to get this improvement are, , , ,.

Suggesting links task updates

 * Community members have suggested that we direct newcomers' energies toward those articles that need links the most. We changed how articles are selected, so that underlinked articles are more suggested than they were before. We are currently testing this feature at our pilot wikis. If the test is conclusive, we would deploy to all wikis that use suggested links late February.
 * The deployment of Suggested links to all Wikipedias changed. Suggested links use a prediction model. This model has to be trained. We used to train a few models, deploy them, and then move to the next group of models. Now all models are trained, and we wait for all models to be trained to deploy the feature to the wikis. If your community wishes to get Suggested links in advance, let us know.

News for mentors

 * When someone wants to signup as a mentor, they are now informed when they don't meet the defined criterias.
 * Workshop hosts asked us if they can get newcomers they meet assigned to them. A new parameter allows workshop hosts to create a custom URL when newcomers create an account so that workshop attendees are assigned to them. IT will be available in February.

Volunteer to be a mentor!

 * Your Wikipedia might looks for mentors. Please visit Special:ManageMentors to sign up.
 * If your wiki has no mentorship yet, consider to have one!
 * If you have questions about interactions with newcomers, look for our advice.

Other

 * In Special:SpecialPages, Growth experiments now have their own section.

Do you want to help?

 * We look for translators for this newsletter. If you understand English well, and you want to help, please add your name to this list. You will receive an invite on your talk page to translate the newsletter when it is ready!
 * You can also help by translating the interface, or reviewing translations to make them more inclusive. Interface translations are hosted at translatewiki.net.