Growth/Focus on help desk

This page describes the Growth team's work on the "Focus on help desk" project, and contains major assets, designs, and decisions. Most incremental updates on progress will be posted on the general Growth team updates page, with some large or detailed updates posted here.

Summary
It is common for new editors to face technical and policy challenges when they start editing. They have specific questions, and could benefit from a human editor answering their questions. Most wikis have a help desk where new editors can ask questions, and such venues have been proven to be effective, especially the Teahouse in English Wikipedia (see this paper for an analysis of impact). The problem is that most new editors don't know about or find the help desk -- even though they frequently receive "welcome templates" on their talk pages with links. Therefore, the "Focus on help desk" project contains two parts:


 * 1) Invite new editors to the help desk by posting on their talk pages, using banners, or using email.  We have decided to invite new editors to the help desk by adding a clear and obvious link to the help desk inside their editing experience. That's for these reasons:
 * 2) * We know from the New Editor Experiences research that getting help in-context is important. This would offer a link to get help at the moment when users need it, and in a place that currently has no clear way to get help.
 * 3) * We have open questions around the "In-context questions or chat" idea, and this will help us learn whether there is demand for such a feature.
 * 4) Once we are successful at driving new editors to the help desk, undertake improvements to the help desk itself that make it a better place to ask questions.  This might include listing new questions at the top of the page or notifying new editors when their questions have been answered.

The Growth team is building Part 1 first during 2018 Q2 (October 2018 - December 2018). Our goal is to deploy an initial version of the feature at the beginning of January 2019 inside an experiment. After analyzing the results, we will decide whether and how to pursue Part 2.

Resources
While a lot of communities don't have a lot of experience concerning Help desk, Community relations have gathered on a page with some best practices that would help community to have more successful collaborations with newcomers.