Growth/Newsletters/17



Welcome to the seventeenth newsletter from the 1>mw:Special:MyLanguage/Growth|Growth team!

The Growth team's objective is to work on software changes that help retain new contributors in 1>mw:Special:MyLanguage/New Editor Experiences/Midsize Wikipedias|mid-size Wikimedia projects.

Moving forward: more wikis to get the tools
Last November, the Growth team published the analysis of the impact of newcomer tasks. We announced that we found that the Growth features, and particularly newcomer tasks, lead to increased editing from newcomers. Because of these results, we think all Wikipedias should implement these features.

We have started to contact more wikis to deploy the tools, both mid-sized and bigger Wikipedia. Danish Wikipedia and Thai Wikipedia will soon get the tools. Feel free to contact us if you have questions regarding this deployment.

We are looking for translators who would like to help our effort, by translating the interface. Translate Growth experiments is done on translatewiki>Special:MyLanguage/Translatewiki.net|Translatewiki.net (it requires a different account that your Wikimedia one). Access to translations

Work in progress
Add a link and Add an image – Notes around the "add an image" project have been published. Overall, participants to the conversation seem to agree that it would be valuable to use algorithms to add images to Wikipedia, but that there are many potential traps and ways this can go wrong, especially with newcomers.

Variant testing – As mentioned in previous newsletters, we were testing variant C and D for suggested edits. It appears that variant D led to more edits on desktop and variant C led to more edits on mobile. As a consequence, we will deploy each the most efficient variants to all newcomers.

News for mentors
Tools for mentors – Our effort to deploy the tools to more wikis will lead to more tools for mentors being available. Mentors from diverse wiki have been interviewed. Mentors who use or wish to use the Growth tools are welcomed to share which tools they would need.

A new magic work for mentors – It is now possible to use a magic word, , to display the name of a given newcomer's mentor. This can be used on welcome messages, userboxes, etc.

Editing questions go to mentors – At the moment, newcomers using the Help panel can ask a question on the Help desk. We made an experiment on Czech Wikipedia, where newcomers where asking their question to their mentors instead. This lead to a increase of 30% of questions about editing for mentors. This experiment is extended to Arabic, Bengali, French and Vietnamese Wikipedia.

Community news
Bengali Wikipedia now have the Growth team features. Danish Wikipedia, Thai Wikipedia, Romanian Wikipedia, and Indonesian Wikipedia will come next.

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