Growth/Growth team updates

Summary
This page documents the Growth team's first project to increase new editor retention in Czech and Korean Wikipedias. The research for this project began in June 2018, and the project will continue at least through September 2018. During July and August 2018, the team is simultaneously working on a project to improve the Articles for Creation process and New Pages Feed in English Wikipedia.

The first thing we need to do in this project is decide what to work on amongst the many potential ideas for features that could increase retention. That discussion took place here. Though we have summarized the discussion so far and are currently making planning decisions, we are still very open to receiving more comments at any time.

Goal
The following are the goals of this project:


 * By September 2018, roll out an initial proof-of-concept software change to Czech and Korean wikis to increase new editor retention.
 * Measure the impact on new editor retention using a controlled experiment.
 * Based on the experiment's results, determine whether to evolve this feature, or to begin a new feature.

How to get involved
It is important that our work is grounded in the reality of the communities we hope to help. If you have thoughts or ideas around this project or our team's work, please comment on this project's talk page.

Update 2018-09-21: summaries of community discussion and planning sessions
Over the past few weeks, we received a tremendous amount of useful thoughts and feedback on our list of eight ideas. We're grateful to the members of the many wiki communities (including several mid-size wikis) who responded on the talk page, on their own wikis, or sent us their thoughts through other channels. We were also able to get feedback on the ideas from actual new editors in Czech and Korean Wikipedias, who provided a first-hand perspective on which ideas would have helped them as they were starting out. Summaries of the feedback we received on each idea are now posted, along with some follow-up questions on the talk page.

To take action on this feedback and plan the coming months, the Growth team came together in person last week. We did two main things: short-term planning and long-term thinking.

Short-term planning To determine what our team will work on first, we spent a day processing the community feedback and reflecting on the eight ideas. We split up into groups, each of which was assigned two of the ideas. For each of their two ideas, those groups read through and discussed community comments in detail. They then summarized the comments into a poster to explain the nuanced perspectives to the rest of the team. This format helped us discuss each idea, making sure to take into account the pro's and con's from different communities. Posted here is an example of one of the posters we made, to give a sense of our process. To read summaries of what we learned from communities, see this page.

Long-term thinking

The Growth team intends to be working on new editor retention for many quarters, and we know that we will need to be continuously learning about new editors in order to be successful. Though we already know a lot about new editors from research done in the past year, there are still many open questions about how new editors work and what they need to be successful. We spent time determining which questions are most important so that our team can use upcoming opportunities to find answers. Please visit this page to see our most important open questions and read about the exercise we did to generate them.

Next steps

We are now in the process of deciding exactly which things to build and in what order, taking into consideration engineering challenges, measurement challenges, and how to work with the Czech and Korean communities. Our next update will contain our plan for the coming months.

Update 2018-09-04: final week of community discussion
Over the past two weeks, we have posted the list of ideas for discussion in many places, and we would like to gather all the feedback we can by the end of this week from as many different communities as possible. If you have planned on weighing in, please do so in the next few days!

Next week, the Growth team will be taking a substantial amount of time to process and digest all the thoughts and reactions that have been posted, and we will make a plan for which ideas make the most sense to pursue, and we'll post that here. In making that plan, we'll take into account community thoughts, technical considerations, and the burden that new development will put on existing communities.

Here are the places we have posted the list of ideas for comment:


 * In English on mediawiki.org.
 * In Korean on Korean Wikipedia.
 * In Czech on Czech Wikipedia.
 * It has been linked on Serbian Wikipedia.
 * It has been linked on Slovak Wikipedia.
 * It has been linked on many Help Desk talk pages in different wikis.
 * It has been sent to community members, newsletters, and Facebook groups in the Czech and Korean communities.

Update 2018-08-22: community discussion begins on ideas
We've now posted a list of the main ideas we're considering for the team to work on first! We hope as many people from as many communities as possible participate in the discussion on that talk page. The list of ideas is based on a lot of research and conversations the team has been taking in, but they are by no means solidified -- that's why this community discussion is really important to us. We're hoping to hear the majority of the community thoughts within the next two weeks (by 2018-09-05).

The list is also being translated in Czech and Korean and discussed on those wikis, since those are the places where the features would be deployed first. If you are interested in translating all or part of the list for your own wiki, please let us know! It would be great to have additional languages discussing.

We'll also be sending out our first team newsletter about this. Please sign up here if you are interested in receiving the newsletter.

Update 2018-08-14: narrowing down on ideas
The team is now spending an increasing amount of time planning for this first project, even as our engineers work on the Articles for Creation and New Pages Feed project for English Wikipedia. A few short updates are below, with more extensive information coming over the next week:


 * Our top priority right now is to start the conversations around which feature ideas we should pursue first. The team has been compiling many ideas for what we can build and has started to narrow to the ones that seem to have potential.  We're going to be asking the Czech and Korean communities to weigh in, and we will also post them here and in other venues so that as many communities as possible can add their thoughts.  We'll be looking for new ideas, thoughts on existing ideas, and information on when similar things have already been attempted.  Below are some examples of the types of ideas we're talking about.  More detail will be posted here in the coming weeks, as well as the reasons we think these ideas could be impactful.
 * Inviting new editors to help desks. Most wikis have a help desk, but most newbies don't know about it.
 * Making it possible for newbies to ask questions in the context where they are editing, instead of having to go to a different page.
 * Communicating a new editor's impact to them via email, perhaps by telling them about the page views on pages they've edited.
 * Gathering optional information from new editors when they create accounts about what they are trying to do and the topics in which they are interested, so we can direct them to information that serves their needs right away.
 * Instrumenting the new editor experience to learn more about what new editors do right after creating their accounts -- whether they read documentation, attempt to edit but don't succeed, or something else.
 * We have completed the staffing of our team by adding Rita Ho, our user experience designer, and Morten Warncke-Wang, our product analyst. Rita joins us from the team that built the Wikipedia Android app, and has important expertise on mobile usage that will be relevant for new editors.  Morten is a longtime researcher of Wikimedia projects and has deep experience understanding the issues newbies face and experience working with Mediawiki data.  Morten is going to be working on the "analyzing data" work mentioned in the update from 2018-07-06 below.
 * Several of our team members attended Wikimania 2018 and had great discussions with editors from many mid-size Wikipedias, including Arabic, Bengali, Serbian, Ukrainian, and others. We gathered information on the experience of new editors in those wikis, what is the same and what is different across them, and what specific tactics and features are working well to retain new editors.  We'll be assembling and posting what we learned, along with the work our Czech and Korean ambassadors have already done on that front to catalog existing help content in their wikis.

Update 2018-07-06: data, planning, and research
While the majority of the team's effort is currently going toward the Articles for Creation and New Pages Feed project for English Wikipedia, the team is laying the ground work for this initial Growth project by doing three main things:


 * Analyzing data about contributor behavior in Czech and Korean Wikipedias. We are setting up the queries and reports that will allow us to track the contributor retention rates in our target wikis, and to understand exactly where in the editing process new contributors are most likely to drop off.  We will post this data on wiki as soon as we're able.
 * Partnering with our ambassadors in the Czech and Korean communities to document the current resources that help new contributors in those wikis. We want to make sure that anything we build compliments the existing pages and tutorials that already exist, and that we are not duplicating efforts with any community members.  This is the related Phabricator task.
 * Summarizing existing ideas for features that could increase retention. Many WMF staff and community members have attempted and proposed ideas for new editor retention in the past.  We're making sure to collect those ideas and use them as a starting point.  We will post that information on wiki as soon as we're able.

We have also spent time this week establishing the processes for our new team, such as when we have meetings, how our Phabricator board works, and how we'll balance new work with maintenance on previous features built by engineers on the team. Those previous features include Notifications and the new filters on the Recent Changes and Watchlist pages.