Growth/Communities/Involve your wiki, October-December 2018

Here are the projects we are working on for the October, November, and December 2018 period. The goals of those projects are


 * to help your community to know better what newcomers expect when they create an account,
 * to redirect them to a central place on your wiki where they can be helped.

We are looking for a community who would accept to try those 3 projects:


 * Understanding first day: it will help us learn a lot about new editors. It will not change any user’s experience and will be invisible. We will monitor and see what new editors do right after creating their accounts to know where they go.  Do they just read articles? Do they read Help pages? Do they try to edit a page or leave a message? We will be careful with user privacy.  We hope to share initial results in December.
 * Personalized first day will help us learn a lot about new editors. To start, we will add some optional questions to the new editor’s registration process.  Why have you created an account? Do you want to edit? What are your favorite topics? This will help us learn what new editors are trying to do.  By using the data and your community experience, we’ll be able to make the experience better for a new user.  We want to help them to achieve what they’re trying to do.  We expect to share initial results in December.
 * Focus on help desk. Help desks work on other contexts: newcomers are happy when they can ask a question to an experienced user. We will work on two things. First a bot will leave a message to new users and invite them to visit the Help Desk. Then, we will add a new button new button in the editor to invite new editors to “Ask a question”. That button would help us to learn if another idea we have, “In-context questions or chat”, has potential.  We have created some ressources to help communities to work with newcomers on an help desk.  We hope to have an initial experiment running in December.

For those 3 projects, the Growth team will take care of the technical or design problems. The team will also help you to create better ways on how to interact with new users. The team is looking for people who can help. We rely on your motivation and your experience to have those 3 projects to be a success.