Growth/Positive reinforcement/es

Esta página describe el trabajo en torno al concepto de "refuerzo positivo" como parte del conjunto de funcionalidades de Crecimiento. Esta página contiene los principales elementos, diseños, preguntas abiertas y decisiones.

La mayoría de las actualizaciones sobre el progreso se publicarán en la página general de Actualizaciones del equipo de Crecimiento, con algunas actualizaciones importantes o detalladas publicadas aquí.

Estado actual

 * 2021-03-01: página del proyecto creada
 * 2022-02-25: inicio del proyecto y discusiones con el equipo
 * 2022-03-01: página del proyecto expandida
 * 2022-05-11: discusión con la comunidad

Resumen
El equipo de crecimiento se ha centrado en construir una "experiencia coherente para los recién llegados" que les proporcione el "acceso" que necesitan a los elementos que les ayudan a unirse a la comunidad de usuarios de Wikipedia. Por ejemplo, con tareas para recién llegados, les hemos dado acceso a oportunidades de participar, y con el módulo de mentoría, les hemos dado acceso a mentoría. Las ediciones sugeridas han conseguido que un mayor número de recién llegados realicen sus primeras ediciones. Con ese éxito, queremos tomar medidas para animar a los nuevos a seguir haciendo más ediciones. Esto llama nuestra atención sobre un elemento no desarrollado al que los recién llegados necesitan acceder: la evaluación del rendimiento. Llamamos a este proyecto "refuerzo positivo".

Queremos que los recién llegados comprendan que hay una progresión y un valor en las contribuciones sostenidas en Wikipedia, aumentando la retención de aquellos usuarios que dieron el primer paso para hacer una edición.

Nuestra gran pregunta es: ¿Cómo podemos animar a los recién llegados que han visitado nuestra página de inicio y han probado nuestras funciones a seguir editando y aprovechar ese primer impulso?

Antecedentes
Cuando la página de inicio de los recién llegados se desplegó en 2019, contenía un "módulo de impacto" básico, que enumeraba el número de páginas vistas de las páginas que el recién llegado había editado. Esa es la única parte de las funcionalidades de Crecimiento que da al recién llegado una idea de su impacto, y no la hemos mejorado desde que se implementó por primera vez. Con esto como punto de partida, hemos reunido algunos aprendizajes importantes sobre el refuerzo positivo:


 * We have heard good feedback from community members about the module, with experienced editors saying that it is interesting and valuable to them.
 * Appreciation from other users has been shown to increase retention, such as in the case of "thanks" (here and here) and in an experiment on German Wikipedia. We believe that these reinforcements from real people would be more effective than automated ones coming from the system.
 * Community members have explained that it is a high priority for newcomers to move on to more valuable tasks after starting with easy ones, as opposed to getting stuck just doing easy tasks.
 * Other platforms, such as Google, Duolingo, and Github, all utilize numerous positive reinforcement mechanisms like badges and goals.
 * Communities are wary of incentivizing unhealthy editing. We have seen that when editing contests offer cash prizes, or just when useful roles such as "extended confirmed" rely on edit counts, it can incentivize people to make many problematic edits.

User persona
There are many parts of the newcomer journey in which we could attempt to increase retention. We could focus on newcomers who have stopped editing after just one or a few edits, or we could focus farther down the journey on newcomers who have stopped editing after weeks of activity. For this project, we have decided to focus on those newcomers who have completed their first editing session, and who we want to return for a second session. The diagram illustrates these with a yellow star.

We want to focus on newcomers at this stage, as that’s the next stage of the editor funnel in which we can help improve retention. It is also where we see a very significant attrition rate currently, so if we can help retain newcomers at this point, it should have a meaningful increase in editor growth overtime.

Research and design
Research was conducted on the various mechanisms that have been employed to encourage people to contribute content to both on and off-wiki products. The following are some of the key findings from the research: To see a summary of the current design ideas for Positive Reinforcement, see this Design Brief. Our designs will evolve further through community feedback and several rounds of user testing.
 * Motivations for Wikipedia editors are multifaceted, and shift over time and experience. New editors are often driven more by curiosity and social connection than ideology.
 * Internal projects focus on intrinsic incentives, appeal to altruistic motivations, and are not systematically applied.
 * Broadening the appeal beyond ideological motivations may improve diversity of retained editors on Wikipedia.
 * Positive messages from experienced users and mentors is proven effective in short-term retention.

Ideas




We have three main ideas for positive reinforcement. We may pursue multiple ideas as we work on this project.

“Thanks received” count, to highlight the ability to receive community recognition.
 * Impact: An overhaul of the Impact module based on incorporating stats, graphs, and other contribution information. The revised impact module would provide new editors more context about their impact, as well as encourages them to continue contributing. Areas of exploration include:
 * Suggested edits milestone, to nudge users to try suggested edits.
 * Statistics on how much the user has edited over time (similar to what is in X Tools).


 * Leveling up: It is important to communities that newcomers progress to more valuable tasks. For those who do many easy tasks, we want to nudge them toward trying more difficult tasks. This could happen after they complete a certain number of easy tasks, or by encouragement on their homepage. Areas of exploration include:
 * The newcomer will see success messages post-editing that motivate them to do more edits of the same or different levels of difficulty.
 * In the Suggested Edits module, provide opportunities to do more difficult edits, so that newcomers can become more skilled editors.
 * In the Impact module, include a milestone counter or award area.
 * On the Homepage, add a new module with set challenges to attain some reward (badge/certificate).
 * Add notifications to prompt newcomers to try a more difficult task.


 * Personalized praise: research shows that praise and encouragement from other users increases newcomer retention. We want to think about how to encourage experienced users to thank and award newcomers for good contributions. Perhaps mentors could be encouraged to do this on their mentor dashboards or through notifications. We can utilize existing communication mechanisms which past studies have proven to have a degree of positive effect. Areas of exploration include:
 * A personal message from the newcomer’s mentor appearing in the homepage.
 * An echo notification from the mentor or the Wikimedia Growth team.
 * “Thanks” on a specific edit.
 * A new milestone badge awarded by the mentor or the Wikimedia Growth team relating to a specific edit.

Community discussion
Adding incentives to the editing experience will hopefully encourage constructive contributions, but we also know that it could cause unexpected or undesired behavior from users. Therefore, we want to discuss with communities how we could encourage newcomers while still preserving the values of the wikis.


 * What has worked well on your wiki for motivating newcomers?
 * What ideas do you think we should consider?
 * What could go wrong and what should we try to avoid?

User testing
Along with community discussion, we want to validate and add to our initial designs and hypothesis. We will conduct Positive Reinforcement user research aimed to better understand the project's impact on newcomer contribution across several different languages. We will share these results here.

Measurement and results
Once community discussion is complete, designs are refined, development and testing are complete, our staff Data Scientist will closely monitor the impact of the Positive Reinforcement project. We will share our initial measure plan and subsequent results here.