This page contains updates on the Growth team's work to increase new editor activation and retention.
The planning for this work began in June 2018.
The team works on multiple projects at a time, but they will all be discussed on this page.
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.
Within 24 hours of the launch of the English banner campaign, the “Try editing Wikipedia” call to action on the donor Thank You page resulted in 409 new account creations, and 54 of these new accounts immediately went on to edit (T352116)
We are exploring designs for how we should present all available Community Configuration options (T350201). Our current designs focus on the existing Growth configuration options, but we need to ensure we focus on a more scalable design as more features utilize Community Configuration.
We’ve made some improvements to how Impact Module queries are handled (T351898). Unfortunately this work created an Impact Module bug that wasn’t caught prior to release (T352349). We will have a fix released ASAP, and also plan to improve test coverage to ensure this doesn’t happen again (T352031).
We completed a second technical check-in with MediaWiki Engineers. The discussion focused on how schemas should be stored and the pros and cons of using the existing Config namespace for Community Configuration, vs. other options.
We have completed several tasks necessary to accommodate IP Masking, including support for Recent Changes (T343322) and expiration of temporary accounts (T344695).
Starting a script to clean up Mentorship resulted in community confusion (T330071). The script was meant to ensure all mentees were assigned to an active Mentor, however the fact that the script provided Mentors for blocked users created some confusion, along with the the way the script logged the changes. We will postpone resuming the script until we can work on several improvements:
We are preparing the backend to release “add a link” to 35 more Wikipedias (T308142 & T308143). This Structured task will be released soon at the following Wikipedias:
Samoan Wikipedia - sm
Somali Wikipedia - so
Albanian Wikipedia - sq
Serbian Wikipedia - sr
Sranan Tongo Wikipedia - srn
Swati Wikipedia - ss
Southern Sotho Wikipedia - st
Saterland Frisian Wikipedia - stq
Sundanese Wikipedia - su
Silesian Wikipedia - szl
Tamil Wikipedia - ta
Tulu Wikipedia - tcy
Telugu Wikipedia - te
Tetum Wikipedia - tet
Tajik Wikipedia - tg
Thai Wikipedia - th
Turkmen Wikipedia - tk
Tagalog Wikipedia - tl
Tswana Wikipedia - tn
Tongan Wikipedia - to
Tok Pisin Wikipedia - tpi
Turkish Wikipedia - tr
Tsonga Wikipedia - ts
Tatar Wikipedia - tt
Twi Wikipedia - tw
Tahitian Wikipedia - ty
Tuvinian Wikipedia - tyv
Udmurt Wikipedia - udm
Uyghur Wikipedia - ug
Uzbek Wikipedia - uz
Venda Wikipedia - ve
Venetian Wikipedia - vec
Veps Wikipedia - vep
West Flemish Wikipedia - vls
Volapük Wikipedia - vo
Update 2023-11-03: New Impact Module released to all Wikipedias! 🎉
The Growth team has deployed the new Impact module to all Wikipedias! New editors now have access to engaging graphs and metrics showcasing their wiki impact from their personal Homepage. More experienced editors can always enable the Homepage and other Growth features by enabling “Newcomer editor features” in Preferences.
The A/B testing of the new Impact module on Growth pilot wikis revealed that while it may not singlehandedly impact new editor retention, it does contribute to significant new editor productivity gains when paired with other Positive Reinforcement features (experiment results).
Based on experiment analysis we decided to complete several follow-up improvements. Once complete improvements to the “Try suggested edits” dialog (T348205) we will scale the A/B test to more wikis (T348085).
We are finishing experiment analysis: T341387. If there are any concerning findings, we will want to resolve those, or consider further improvements. Then we will scale Personalized Praise features all Wikipedias (T350291).
Impact Module: After resolving a few tasks that blocked scaling (T344428 & T344143), we are ready to release the new Impact Module to all Wikipedias on November 1st (T336203). This new Impact module includes the same article view count data as previously, but now with more data visualizations and metrics to provide some automated “positive feedback” to new editors. This work was completed in tandem with the Personalized praise features that encourage Mentors to provide new editors with encouragement and positive reinforcement. The Leveling Up and Personalized praise features will be scaled to more Wikipedias soon!
Leveling Up: We have published Leveling up Experiment results. The Leveling Up experiment included two notifications and two post-edit dialogs that were triggered by specific user behaviors. In general, we see healthy engagement with these features, and some positive results, notably:
The "Get started" notification leads to a significant increase in newcomer activity in the week following the notifications being sent. Newcomers are more likely to return and make an edit, which also increases the average number of edits made during that week.
The "Keep going" notification, we again find a significant increase in newcomer activity in the week following notifications being sent for those who registered on the desktop platform. For users who registered on mobile web, we find that it does not increase their probability of returning to edit but does increase the average number of edits made.
The "Try new task" dialogue, which is shown to users who complete five suggested edits of a given task type, leads to a high click-through rate (81.9%) and a reasonably high rate of completed edits. Our analysis of subsequent edits shows that 33.3% of desktop users and 20.0% of mobile web users go through and complete a suggested edit of the new task type. Read further details in the Leveling up experiment results report.
This week we’ve kicked off a legal and security review for the Community Configuration 2.0 project, and asked for community feedback from technical stakeholders by posting this Wikitech-l message.
Update 2023-10-20: Community Configuration planning & Positive Reinforcement improvements
As we prepare to release the Positive Reinforcement features to all Wikipedias, we are making some minor improvements to the three associated features:
Growth team Ambassador, Dyolf77_(WMF) will be attending WikiIndaba in Morocco from the 3rd to 5th of November. Habib will host a session about Growth and Editing tools for newcomers.
Update 2023-10-13: scaling Growth features & Community Configuration progress
To make it easier to connect with readers and new editors, the Growth team’s Welcome survey can now be used to collect potential research participants (T342353). This opt-in feature will only be enabled at specific wikis when there is specific research need. The feature will limit data collection as much as possible, and has been fully reviewed and approved by the WMF legal team.
Progress was made on the Community Configuration Schema decision (T332847). Engineers tested locally and compared docs from different libraries, and summarized the pros and cons of each.
We have started to create a proof of concept version for Community Configuration 2.0 validation (T348227).
We plan to share Community Configuration 2.0 details via Wikimedia-l soon to offer technical stakeholders in the community a chance to provide feedback.
On Wednesday, Oct 11, 2023, the “add a link” task will be released to another set of wikis (T308139). The following Wikipedias will receive the task:
Swahili Wikipedia (sw)
Walloon Wikipedia (wa)
Waray Wikipedia (war)
Wolof Wikipedia (wo)
Kalmyk Wikipedia (xal)
Xhosa Wikipedia (xh)
Mingrelian Wikipedia (xmf)
Yiddish Wikipedia (yi)
Yoruba Wikipedia (yo)
Zhuang Wikipedia (za)
Zeelandic Wikipedia (zea)
Min Nan Wikipedia (zh-min-nan)
Zulu Wikipedia (zu)
Newly created accounts and accounts with Newcomer editor features enabed in their preferences will receive access to the task. This task has been shown to increase the probability that a newly created account will try editing for the first time, and also helps with newcomer retention (Add a link Experiment Analysis).
We have increased the percentage of newcomers who receive mentorship to 50% at English Wikipedia T341399.
Community volunteer, User:Func86, has helped resolve a tricky Mentorship bug that made Pages transcluding Special:ManageMentors render in the default skin. Thank you, Func86!
Update 2023-09-29: Community Configuration progress & "Add a link" scaling
The Growth team reviewed the Editing team’s Edit Check configuration code. The current Edit Check approach should be compatible with Community configuration 2.0. (T330112).
We are working to prepare proof of concept code for the Community Configuration schema provider. The initial code shows how validation would work, but it doesn't include the actual validation logic (T342575 & T332847).
Initial design prototypes are drafted for two different design styles that we will soon demo to interested admins, stewards, and experienced editors (T346109). Please let us know if you want to provide feedback on designs!
We are preparing the “add a link” task for another set of wikis (T308139).
Up Next:
IP Masking: The Growth team plans to initiate a community consultation with the goal of migrating communities from Flow to DiscussionTools. This move aims to minimize the necessity for additional engineering work to make Flow compatible with IP Masking(T346108).
Update 2023-09-22: IP Masking updates & Mentorship improvements
The Growth team is updating Recent Changes to be compatible with IP Masking (T343322). Once Temporary accounts are available on a wiki, patrollers will be able to filter Recent Changes or their Watchlist to “Unregistered” users, which will include edits made by Temporary accounts.
We have also made sure the Mentorship features are compatible with IP Masking (T341390). Temporary accounts will not be assigned to Mentors or surfaced to Mentors as part of Growth's Positive Reinforcement features.
The Growth team still needs to evaluate instrumentation around IP Masking work (T341651), and start a community conversation around Flow (T346108), but most of the other currently defined IP Masking tasks that the Growth team is responsible for have been completed.
The Growth team will start and initial community discussion (T346108) to gather feedback on:
Community interest in moving from Flow to DiscussionTools.
Community input on a limited version IP Masking support for Flow.
We gathered initial data about Flow usage to help guide the community consultation (T345484). Some initial insights:
French Wikipedia is by far the largest Flow user. It has twice as many Flow posts than Mediawiki.org (the second largest user). French Wikipedia combined with Mediawiki.org has more Flow edits than all of the other wikis together. Further data on Flow usage is available here.
NOTE: LiquidThreads is enabled only on 5 Wikimedia wikis (compared to Flow, which is enabled on 48 wikis and DiscussionTools, which is enabled everywhere)
We are finishing up the work needed to make the Thanks extension compatible with IP Masking (T345679).
Next week we will release a minor improvement to make the edit summary readable for MediaWiki:GrowthMentors.json (T322115). Thank you, Iniquity, for always providing feedback on Growth team features!
We have re-enabled the Article-level “Add an image” task (T345188). It was disabled after a failure in the image suggestions pipeline was discovered (T345141). We are adding better monitoring in an attempt to ensure this doesn’t happen again (T345204) and later this month we will set official Service-Level Agreements to ensure a certain level of uptime.
Update 2023-09-08: Section-level “add an image” analysis
We have completed initial analysis of the Section-Level Image suggestion task. The analysis showed that editors are completing the task successfully: the task completion rate for section-level image suggestions is high. The revert rate for the section-level task is higher than the article-level task, however we don't think this difference is cause for concern for two reasons. First, it might be harder to agree that an article is clearly improved by adding a section-level image compared to adding an article-level image. Secondly, articles suggested for section-level images already have a lead image, which might mean that they're also longer articles and have more contributors scrutinizing the edit.
Next week we plan to re-enabled the Article-level “Add an image” task (T345188). It was disabled after a failure in the image suggestions pipeline was discovered (T345141). We are adding better monitoring in an attempt to ensure this doesn’t happen again (T345204) and later this month we will set official Service-Level Agreements to ensure a certain level of uptime.
We plan to scale the new Impact Module to all Wikipedias soon, but first we are investigating a bug with the job that refreshes the Impact Module data (T344428).
We disabled the “Add an image” task temporarily (T345188) because there was a failure in the image suggestions pipeline (T345141). This should be resolved soon, and the Growth team will enable the task on wikis where it was previously enabled.
The Growth team has completed most of the actionable IP Masking work that relates to Growth features. There is more work to be done to update Flow (T342831), and Recent Changes filters (T343322), and Thanks (T327420#9132354), but some of this work is blocked until decisions about how to proceed are made.
As the Growth team wraps up IP Masking work, Community configuration will be our next focus. We are in the planning phase of this project and we are collaborating with internal stakeholders to write up a technical approach to share with the community for feedback (T344144).
Update 2023-08-24: Wikimania, Mentorship, and Newcomer Homepage publication
Mentoring new editors on Wikipedia (Youtube recording). In this workshop, we reviewed why the Growth team built Mentorship tools, and then learned how communities can utilize these tools to help newcomers on their wikis. We also reviewed recent results from Mentorship preliminary analysis, where a WMF Data Scientist reviewed how Mentorship impacts newcomer activation, retention, productivity, and revert rates. After a Q&A session, participants brainstormed ways to improve mentorship and make mentorship more well-known and rewarding for participants.
Supporting moderators at the Wikimedia Foundation (Youtube recording) Product Managers from the Wikimedia Foundation shared plans for supporting moderators (e.g. patrollers, administrators, and stewards) in this year's annual plan. Growth, Editing, Moderator Tools, and the Android App team's Product Managers shared upcoming project plans. The Growth team's Product Manager shared information about the Community configuration feature, and our exploration into improvements we hope to implement as part of our upcoming Community configuration 2.0 project.
The Growth team made an exploratory analysis of mentorship in English and Spanish Wikipedia in August 2023. We find that about 2.5% of newcomers ask their mentor a question, with variation in English Wikipedia between desktop and mobile web users. Those who ask their mentor a question tend to do so only once. If the mentor question is a newcomer's first edit, it tends to happen quickly after registration (i.e. within minutes), while for those who have made edits before it can happen later in their journey. We also examine mentorship's effect on key Growth metrics and find increases on activation, often driven by mentor questions, as well as other impacts.
We are preparing to scale the "Add a link" structured task to more Wikipedia language editions soon (T308138). Communities can configure how this feature works locally, and evaluate usage and reverts associated with the “add a link” task.
The Growth team is continuing work on IP Masking. There are some further decisions and code changes needed in order to wrap up the Growth team side of this effort, but we will soon complete this work and shift our focus to the technical planning and efforts needed for the Community configuration 2.0 project.
Update 2023-08-11: Wikimania, Image API, & IP Masking work
The Growth team's Product Manager will attend Wikimania and share information about Growth features in two sessions:
Mentoring new editors on Wikipedia: The majority of first time editors never return to edit again. Learn how Mentorship can help newcomers on your wiki, then brainstorm further improvements to Mentorship with the WMF Growth team.
Supporting moderators at the Wikimedia Foundation: Staff from the Wikimedia Foundation will share plans for supporting moderators (e.g. patrollers, administrators, and stewards) in the upcoming annual plan. We will host an open discussion about your needs and how we can best support you with product investments.
Android App Image Recommendation project: the Growth team has completed work to ensure the Wikipedia mobile apps can access Growth’s image suggestions API. The Android app team plans to incorporate an image-related task in the Wikipedia Android app in the future (T341150).
The Wikimedia Foundation's Fundraising team has started a community discussion so volunteers can learn more about fundraising and share ideas for how we can improve the 2023 English fundraising campaign: Wikipedia:Fundraising/2023 banners One theme that emerged from volunteer feedback was around the need to recruit more editors, rather than just fundraise: "We need editors, not money." We plan to discuss this idea further with the English Wikipedia community to see if the Thank you page experiment would be a good fit for English Wikipedia. If you have thoughts on this project, please join the discussion about encouraging donors to edit via a revised Thank you page.
This week we fulfilled a community request to add a reverted edits scorecard to the Mentor dashboard Personalized praise module. The new scorecard will show mentors how many reverted edits the mentee has (T337510). Soon Mentors will also be able to configure a revert limit so mentees with many reverts aren’t suggested for praise (T338263). https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/9/91/Mentorship_positive_reinforcement.png
"Add a link" experiment analysis finds that this structured task leads to increases in newcomer participation, particularly by making constructive (non-reverted) article edits:
The probability that newcomers make their first article edit (+16.6% over baseline, +10.1% over the unstructured add links task)
The probability that they are retained as newcomers (+16.2% over baseline, +5.7% over the unstructured link task)
The number of edits they make during their first couple of weeks on the wiki (+18.7% over baseline, +13.5% over the unstructured link task)
We have completed IP Masking usability tests conducted in English, Spanish, Arabic, and Japanese. Designs have evolved based on user feedback and now Growth team engineers are starting to focus on this project: IP Editing: Privacy Enhancement and Abuse Mitigation. This project will ensure the IP addresses of unregistered editors on Wikimedia projects remain private from everyone except those who need access to fight spam, vandalism, harassment and disinformation. The Growth team will focus mainly on the logged out user to temporary account holder user experience, as well as ensuring that Growth owned extensions and features work as expected with this new temporary account type (T326877).
Update 2023-07-14: Mentorship increase at Enwiki, Suggested Edits improvement, & Community Configuration 2.0 planning
English Wikipedia has so many new accounts created each day, that when we enabled Mentorship at English Wikipedia we needed to limit it to only 10% of new accounts created so that the new group of mentors didn’t get overwhelmed with newcomer questions. With a recent drive to encourage more experienced editors to serve as mentors, we have recruited enough new mentors to rollout Mentorship to more newcomers (T323045). Now 25% of new accounts created at English Wikipedia are assigned a mentor (T341399).
A WMF data scientist will be looking at the impact of Mentorship on Spanish and English Wikipedia in the coming month (T341387).
Suggested Edits, sometimes known as Newcomer tasks, are now receiving topic predictions via the new Language-Agnostic Topic Classification (sometimes referred to as “Outlinks”). This update will allow newcomers to receive a greater diversity of task recommendations if they have topics selected in non-English Wikipedias. There will be about an estimated 60% increase in article coverage on non-English Wikipedias [1]. The change is gradual as incoming edits propagate the new topics, and the Research team will evaluate the impact in a few months (T328276).
After a community discussion with English Wikipedia mentors, we will move forward with a plan to increase the number of new accounts that receive Mentorship (T341399).
A data scientist will investigate the impact of Mentorship on newcomer activation, retention, and productivity at Spanish and English Wikipedia (T341387).
A Growth team member will lead a session at this year’s Wikimania: Mentoring new editors on Wikipedia. Workshop attendees will help brainstorm improvements to Growth’s mentorship features.
The Growth team is shifting focus to work on a project that touches many different WMF teams: IP Editing: Privacy Enhancement and Abuse Mitigation. This project will ensure the IP addresses of unregistered editors on Wikimedia projects remain private from everyone except those who need access to fight spam, vandalism, harassment and disinformation. The Growth team will focus mainly on the logged out user to temporary account holder user experience, as well as ensuring that Growth owned extensions and features work as expected with this new temporary account type (T326877).
Update 2023-06-30: Feature improvements and Growth team changes
We released a minor improvement for the Personalize praise feature T338525. We will no longer suggest any newcomer accounts for praise if they have been blocked.
In the upcoming fiscal year, our technical lead, Kosta Harlan, is shifting into a new role in which he will work more closely with the Trust & Safety team and the Anti-Harassment Tools team.
Next week, Martin Urbanec is joining the Growth team as a full time software engineer. Martin has served as an Ambassador on the Growth team for many years, while also working as a part-time contractor primarily focused on software engineering work related to Mentorship and Community configuration. Martin is a Czech Wikipedia administrator, bureaucrat and checkuser, a Wikidata administrator, a board member of Wikimedia Czech Republic, and a Wikimedia Steward. We are thrilled to have Martin’s engineering expertise and general Wikimedia expertise on the Growth team full time!
Update 2023-06-23: New “add an image” task released to Growth Pilot wikis!
The new section-level “add an image” structured task has been released to Growth pilot wikis (Arabic, Bengali, Czech, and Spanish)!
This task is meant to help increase the number of images used on Wikipedia articles while also providing new editors with a structured and attainable way to contribute. The API that supports this task was created as part of the Structured Data Across Wikipedia project.
Communities can customize how this feature works on their wiki by making updates to Special:EditGrowthConfig.
Communities can track the overall usage of the section-level “add an image” task in Growth’s Grafana dashboard. Task completion rates will be low initially as this is a task that users “level up” to as they are successful with other Suggested edits.
Communities and patrollers can also easily track this task by filtering Recent changes to the edit tag: #Suggested: add images to sections (eswiki example).
The initial leading indicators for the Personalized praise project have been published. Although this is still a relatively small sample, results seem healthy and show that Mentors are indeed receiving notifications and clicking through to view their praise-worthy mentees. Based on this data and feedback from Mentors, the Growth team will pursue the following tasks to help improve this feature:
Add revert scorecard to Personalized praise module on Mentor dashboard (T337510)
Exclude blocked accounts from the Personalized praise suggestions (T338525)
Update 2023-06-16: Section-level “add an image” release & What Growth is working on next
The new section-level “add an image” structured task will be released on June 20th to Growth pilot wikis: Arabic Wikipedia, Bengali Wikipedia, Czech Wikipedia, and Spanish Wikipedia (T339126). This feature will be Community configurable, and we will provide a summary in early July which includes: task completion rate, caption stage bounce rate, and revert rates (T332344).
In July, we will start the engineering work needed to support certain aspects of the IP Masking project.
Community configuration 2.0 is our first Annual Planning priority. This project will be to focus on moving Community configuration from the GrowthExperiments extension to MediaWiki core, so the feature can be used more widely. We will start gathering feedback from community members and stakeholders and share initial designs before the engineering work begins.
The Growth team completed an initial community consultation about one of hypothesis we are considering as part of the Growth team Annual Plan: If we provide more guidance and guardrails in the article creation process, then patrollers will need to review fewer low-quality articles. You can read a summary of the main points made by community members here. If you have feedback that isn’t represented, please share your feedback here.
We will start a more targeted community consultation about our Community configuration hypothesis soon. This hypothesis relates to moving the Community configuration feature from the GrowthExperiments extension to MediaWiki core: If editors with extended rights can transparently and easily configure important on-wiki functionality for all users, communities will have control over how features function on their wikis, and WMF teams will be able to ship new functionality quickly.
The new section-level “add an image” structured task is now available by default on beta wikis in English, Arabic, Bengali, Czech, and Spanish. We are in the final phase of testing and fixing minor issues before release; in the last week Growth team engineers merged 44 patches! We are currently on track for a June 20th release date to Growth pilot wikis. This feature will be Community configurable via Special:EditGrowthConfig.
Update 2023-06-02: Scaling the Impact module & beta testing the Section-level "add an image" structured task
The Growth team scaled the first part of the Positive reinforcement project, the new Impact module, to 10 more wikis on Wednesday, May 31, 2023 (T336203). Feedback from newcomers and experienced users regarding the new impact module has been positive. We have also gathered initial impact module experiment data from an A/B test on the Growth pilot wikis, and we want to gather further experiment data from a larger set of wikis before we scale further. The following wikis received the new Impact module this week:
Greek Wikipedia (el)
Persian Wikipedia (fa)
French Wikipedia (fr)
French Wiktionary (frwikt)
Indonesian Wikipedia (id)
Polish Wikipedia (pl)
Portuguese Wikipedia (pt)
Romanian Wikipedia (ro)
Turkish Wikipedia (tr)
Vietnamese Wikipedia (vi)Section-level "add an image" task
We have released an initial version of the section-level “add an image” structured task to several beta wikis this week (en, ar, bn, cs, es). The new task is set as an A/B test, so it will not appear to all users, but we will release the task as a default on these beta wikis soon. Once this task has been thoroughly tested internally and by Growth Ambassadors, we hope to release the new task to Growth pilot wikis: Arabic Wikipedia, Bengali Wikipedia, Czech Wikipedia, and Spanish Wikipedia (T335715). The feature will be Community configurable via Special:EditGrowthConfig.
Update 2023-05-26: Personalized praise
The Personalized praise feature on the Mentor dashboard
The final part of the Growth team's Positive reinforcement project has been released to Growth's pilot wikis: Personalized praise is now available on Arabic, Bengali, Czech and Spanish Wikipedias. Personalized praise is a new module featured on the Mentor dashboard, which is available to mentors. The module allows mentors to identify, praise and work more closely with prospective newcomers with high-quality contributions. By default, mentors receive up to one notification per week if there is a praiseworthy newcomer (mentors can increase or decrease the notification frequency, or fully disable such notifications).
The feature was created because research shows that receiving praise and encouragement from other users increases editor retention. We hope that the newly released feature enables mentors to work more closely with newcomers assigned to them and help to increase newcomer retention
The Growth team is busy working on a new section-level variation of the “add an image” task. This task is designed to augment the number of images in Wikipedia articles, while simultaneously offering newcomers a structured task to progress to after they have successfully completed the article-level "add an image" task (T321754).
We recently concluded a community consultation with Growth pilot wikis to evaluate the localized designs and plans for this new section-level "add an image" task (T332530). Given the similarity of this task to the existing article-level "add an image" task, the feedback received was not extensive. However, the primary community discussions centered on the issues of offensive images and caption writing:
There were concerns within some communities about the possibility of offensive or "not safe for work" images being presented to new editors. There are some basic safeguards in place: only images available on Commons that are used on other wikis or linked to Wikidata items are suggested, and communities will have the ability to modify Community configuration to exclude articles from suggestions if they contain certain templates or categories. Additionally, we have added a task to delve deeper into this issue: T336825
We have also received several suggestions for additional enhancements to the caption stage. Following the MVP release, we will consider two other tasks aimed at further refining the caption writing stage of this task: T298119 & T322925
Update 2023-05-19: Scaling “add a link” & Personalized praise release
This week we started discussions with community members regarding potential Growth team projects for next fiscal year. Conversations have been started at Growth pilot wikis, French Wikipedia, and English Wikipedia.
Further improvements for the new Personalized praise Mentor dashboard module will be released to Growth pilot wikis Wednesday, May 24, 2023 (T317817 & T334630). Starting Wednesday, mentors at Growth Pilot wikis will start to receive notifications weekly when they have “praise-worthy” mentees. Mentors can configure their notification preferences or disable these notifications.
Update 2023-05-12: Scaling “add a link” and WikiConference India
Another round of Wikipedias will receive the "Add a link" task on Wednesday, May 17th (T308134). The Wikipedia language versions that will receive this newcomer structured task include: Gorontalo Wikipedia, Hausa Wikipedia, Hakka Chinese Wikipedia, Hawaiian Wikipedia, Fiji Hindi Wikipedia, Croatian Wikipedia, Upper Sorbian Wikipedia, Haitian Creole Wikipedia, Interlingua Wikipedia, Interlingue Wikipedia, Igbo Wikipedia, Iloko Wikipedia, Ingush Wikipedia, Ido Wikipedia, Icelandic Wikipedia, Inuktitut Wikipedia, Jamaican Patois Wikipedia, Javanese Wikipedia). This is part of the progressive deployment of this tool to more Wikipedias. Communities can configure how this feature works locally.
Our Growth team Bengali Ambassador, Ankan, participated in WikiConference India. One of the major takeaways from this conference is the fact that many community members don't have a clear understanding of Growth features. The Growth team hopes to conduct more community outreach in the coming fiscal year. A summary of Growth team outreach is available on Growth’s Community events report page.
Read about current Growth team annual planning ideas here: Growth/Annual_Plan_2023-2024. This is still a draft, and we will start to engage more with communities to get feedback on these ideas. The first quarter of the fiscal year will likely be focused on committed work (IP Masking project) and moving Community configuration out of the GrowthExperiments extension so it can be extended and used by other WMF teams and community developers, but plans for the remainder of the year are still to be determined.
The new Mentor dashboard module is now released at Arabic Wikipedia, Bengali Wikipedia, and Czech Wikipedia (T317817 & T334630). We will release the feature to Spanish Wikipedia soon.
This is the “beta” release of the new mentor dashboard module (T334630). For the "beta" release, the new Mentor dashboard module will be available to all mentors at these wikis, but notifications are disabled. This approach should allow us to collect some initial feedback before we start surfacing the feature to mentors via notifications.
There are a few improvements already planned based on feedback from mentors (T333036 & T333035).
The Growth team is partnering with the Structured Data team to work on a new section-level variation of the “add an image” task. Growth team Ambassadors completed a second round of evaluation of Section-level image suggestions, and results are posted in the associated task (T330784). Suggestions improved considerably since the first round of evaluation (T316151), this is due to several improvements made to filter out sections and suggestions that are likely not a good fit. As expected the level of accuracy varies considerably by language and by the type of suggestion. The structured data team plans to ramp up the confidence threshold for suggestions, which will result in a smaller number of more reliable suggestions.
The Growth team is conducting a community consultation with Growth pilot wikis to review the localized designs and plans (T332530).
This section-level “add an image” task is one aspect of the Structured Data Across Wikipedia project, so the Growth team will need to release this task to at least one wiki by the end of June to meet grant deadlines.
Growth feature scaling:
On Monday, May 1st, German Wikipedia scaled Growth features to 100% of newcomers. Wikimedia Deutschland was conducting their own analysis of Growth features and Mentorship, so they had requested to keep a control group of 20% to conduct their own analysis of features. They reviewed data and requested to scale Growth features to all newcomers.
Update 2023-04-28: Progress on new “add an image” task & beta release of Personalized praise
The Growth team is now partnering with the Structured Data team to work on a new section-level variation of the “add an image” task. This new task will provide image suggestions that are relevant to a particular section within an article. This section-level "add an image" task will be considered a more difficult task that will only be suggested to newcomers who are successful at the current article-level “add an image” task.
This week, Growth team Ambassadors completed a second round of evaluation of Section-level image suggestions. Results will be posted in the associated task soon (T330784).
We also completed user testing of the "add an image" design prototype. Next week we will start a discussion with Growth pilot wikis. We will post localized designs, plans, and questions at Arabic Wikipedia, Bengali Wikipedia, Czech Wikipedia, Spanish Wikipedia, as well as share further details on the "add an image" project talk page.
The new Personalized praise Mentor dashboard module has been available at Beta and Test wikis for several weeks, and we plan to deploy a Beta version to Growth pilot wikis next week (T317817 & T334630).
Update 2023-04-21: Positive Reinforcement updates & Mentorship on English Wikipedia
Newcomers who complete 5 edits of a given Suggested edit task type are asked to try a different task so they can gain experience with other types of tasks. So far, almost 70% of newcomers opt to try the new task type!
Newcomers who completed a regular article edit will be prompted to try Suggested Edits in the post-edit dialogue on their 3rd and 7th edit. Currently about 20% of newcomers click through to try a Suggested edit. We will track the actual completion rates and retention rates in future experiment analysis (T328057).
We are looking into mobile activation rates further, as we are seeing a slight difference in activation, where there should be none (T334411). Before a user edits for the first time (activates) the A/B tests should be essentially the same, so we shouldn’t see any differences in activation. We plan to follow up and investigate a few issues (T335125 & T335005) and re-run the mobile experiment.
Growth team Ambassadors and our QA engineer are testing these features and we hope to set a release date next week. We’ve decided on a very low impact way to release these features to mentors in an incremental way (T334630).
English Wikipedia is recruiting Mentors via a Watchlist message that will display through the end of April. Since the message was added, the number of mentors at English Wikipedia has grown by 55%! This will allow English Wikipedia to increase the number of newcomers who receive Mentorship when they create accounts (T323045).
Update 2023-04-14: Mentorship recruitment & Community configuration
English Wikipedia is trying to recruit more volunteers to help newcomers via Growth’s Mentorship features. For the rest of April, the following message will display on the Watchlist on English Wikipedia:
A portion of new users are automatically matched with mentors to help guide and support them; experienced editors are invited to sign up to be a mentor.
Growth team representatives participated in a Let’s Connect Learning Clinic to share Growth tools with campaign organizers. A summary of what was shared and learned is available on our Community events report page.
This year’s Wikimedia hackathon schedule will include a session focusing on Community configuration – letting communities take control by JSON configuration. This is a joint proposal from Growth’s Martin Urbanec (WMF) in partnership with Norwegian admin and bureaucrat, Jon Harald Søby (T331865).
We completed a quick analysis of the Donor Thank you page work that was recently scaled to more wikis. Initial analysis shows that this flow from donation to creating an account continues to be healthy and a low-effort way to encourage new types of people to edit Wikipedia (T331495).
Update 2023-04-07: Newcomer tools for campaigns and scaling “Add a link”
Newcomer tools for campaign organizers
Growth team representatives will participate in a Let’s Connect Learning Clinic. The focus of the session will be to share effective strategies for retaining and re-engaging new editors during and after the Wiki for Human Rights campaign. The session will be held on Apr 11, 2023 and is open to all Wiki for Human Rights campaign organizers in the Central and Eastern Europe region and in other regions who are participating in this year's campaign. Learn more here.
Over 30 more Wikipedias will receive the "Add a link" task on Wednesday, April 12 (T304551 & T308133). The Wikipedia language editions that will receive this newcomer structured task include:
Arpitan Wikipedia frp
Basque Wikipedia eu
Danish Wikipedia da
Darija Wikipedia ary
Dinka Wikipedia din
Emiliano-Romagnolo Wikipedia eml
Esperanto Wikipedia eo
Estonian Wikipedia et
Ewe Wikipedia ee
Extremaduran Wikipedia ext
Faroese Wikipedia fo
Fijian Wikipedia fj
Finnish Wikipedia fi
Friulian Wikipedia fur
Fulah Wikipedia ff
Gagauz Wikipedia gag
Galician Wikipedia gl
Gilaki Wikipedia glk
Goan Konkani Wikipedia gom
Gothic Wikipedia got
Greek Wikipedia el
Guarani Wikipedia gn
Guianan Creole Wikipedia gcr
Gujarati Wikipedia gu
Irish Wikipedia ga
Lower Sorbian Wikipedia dsb
Manx Wikipedia gv
Northern Frisian Wikipedia frr
Scottish Gaelic Wikipedia gd
Tumbuka Wikipedia tum
Võro Wikipedia fiu-vro
Another group of almost 20 wikis will receive “add a link” soon (T308134).
Update 2023-03-31: Positive reinforcement and what’s next for the Growth team
There are three main parts to this project, and soon all three parts will be released to Growth pilot wikis:
The new Impact module was released to Growth pilot wikis in December 2022. We’ve reported on initial leading indicators, and plan to follow up with full experiment analysis soon (T327581).
Leveling up features were released as an A/B test on Growth pilot wikis. We will report on initial leading indicators soon (T328055).
The Personalized praise project involves some improvements to the Mentor dashboard. The new dashboard module will surface “praiseworthy” new editors to Mentors, and encourage Mentors to send them encouragement. The new Personalized praise Mentor dashboard module was deployed to Beta wiki this week. After a few more improvements and further testing it will be ready for deployment to Growth pilot wikis (T322443).
On English Wikipedia and Spanish Wikipedia, so many new accounts are created that there aren't enough mentors to adequately support all newcomers; so currently not all newcomers are assigned to a mentor. The number of mentors on Spanish Wikipedia has increased enough that we were able to increase the percentage of newcomers that receive a mentor to 50% (T332737).
We have started work on a new section-level “add an image” task, that will suggest images to new editors that likely fit within a specific section in an article (T321754).
We will work on improvements to the “add an image” feature based on user feedback and funnel analysis (T293711).
The Growth team will soon start engineering work on the product improvements needed to support the IP Masking project (T326877 ).
We have already been working on initial designs (T300273), preparing translated designs for user testing (T328616), and conducting user research to help refine designs (T328368).
Annual planning
The Growth team will soon set objectives and key results that align with the overall Product and Technology Annual Plan. We’ll discuss potential ideas with community members, and schedule a focus group discussion. If you are interested in participating, please just let us know on the Growth talk page.
Update 2023-03-24: Thanks usage analysis, Leveling up release
We completed a quick analysis of Thanks, which is now available on Commons: Thanks usage (T332441). Our quick analysis does not find a clear signal that the wider availability of the feature resulted in more edits being thanked. Patterns of usage are different between wikis, both in the sense of what proportion of edits are thanked as well as whether we see differences in January and February compared to December. There are clear differences when it comes to Thanks given by editor tenure.
As of Wednesday, March 22, 2023, Leveling up features have been released as part of the Positive Reinforcement A/B test on Arabic Wikipedia, Bengali Wikipedia, Czech Wikipedia, and Spanish Wikipedia (T330358)! We will carefully monitor interactions with these new notifications and features. We will share initial data soon (T328055) and more detailed experiment analysis once we’ve gathered enough data (T328057).
Growth team Ambassadors completed a second community consultation about Personalized praise. There were requests for additional functionality, and those ideas have been added to Phabricator. Thank you to all community members who offered feedback on these designs!
Update 2023-03-17: Add a Link scaling & donors in more languages are invited to try editing
A new set of Wikipedias received the "Add a link" task: Chavacano de Zamboanga Wikipedia, Min Dong Chinese Wikipedia, Chechen Wikipedia, Cebuano Wikipedia, Chamorro Wikipedia, Cherokee Wikipedia, Cheyenne Wikipedia, Central Kurdish Wikipedia, Corsican Wikipedia, Kashubian Wikipedia, Church Slavic Wikipedia, Chuvash Wikipedia, Welsh Wikipedia, and Italian Wikipedia (T304550).
Based on positive results from the Thank you page experiment, we scaled this change to five more language wikis: Swedish Wikipedia, Italian Wikipedia, French Wikipedia, Dutch Wikipedia, and Japanese Wikipedia (T321370). Donors land on a “thank you” page after donation, and that landing page now also includes a call to action to try editing: Example Thank you page in French.
All newcomer suggested edits receive a “Newcomer task” tag. Previously that tag was linking to the Newcomer tasks project page, which contained a full project overview rather than a succinct explanation for patrollers. Each newcomer task should now link to a section within a Newcomer Tasks documentation page this is aimed to address the questions of patrollers and other content moderators (T329906)
Next week Leveling up features will be released as part of the Positive Reinforcement A/B test on Arabic Wikipedia, Bengali Wikipedia, Czech Wikipedia, and Spanish Wikipedia (T330358).
Update 2023-03-10: Leveling up release & upcoming shift in focus to “add an image”
Growth team engineers are hard at work finishing up Leveling up tasks and testing the new features. Leveling up features will be released as part of the Positive Reinforcement A/B test on Arabic Wikipedia, Bengali Wikipedia, Czech Wikipedia, and Spanish Wikipedia on Monday, March 20th (T330358).
We will quickly check some of the experiment leading indicators to make sure initial results look promising (T328055) and then we will follow up with a full experiment analysis report once we’ve gathered enough data to have significant newcomer retention data (T328057).
In the month of February 2023, over 5,000 images were added to Wikipedia articles via the newcomer “add an image” feature. Since “add an image” was launched, over 36,000 images have been added to articles via this newcomer task.
After the Growth team wraps up Positive Reinforcement work, we will re-focus on “add an image” work. We will work on improvements to the feature based on user feedback and funnel analysis (T293711).
We will also start work on a new section-level “add an image” task (T321754). In other words: the current “add an image” task suggests images that illustrate the article as a whole, while this new task will suggest images to articles that already have an article-level image, but could use an image to illustrate a specific section within the article.
We fulfilled a community request from Spanish Wikipedia to add a talk page link for each mentee in the “Your mentees” module on the Mentor dashboard (T322750).
Growth pilot wikis have been testing a new “add a link” prioritization formula that prioritizes articles that are more likely to be underlinked. This new prioritization formula seems to be working well for newcomers and possibly even decreasing the ratio of edits that end up reverted. We are now scaling this change to all wikis (T330535).
The Thank you page experiment proved that inviting Wikipedia donors to create accounts through the Thank you page is a sustainable and low-impact way to grow the number of new editors on Wikipedia. We are continuing to expand this work to more languages and regions. Next Thursday this new “Try editing Wikipedia” call to action will be added to the donor thank you page on Swedish Wikipedia, Italian Wikipedia, French Wikipedia, Dutch Wikipedia, and Japanese Wikipedia (T321370). We will follow up with a quick analysis (T331495) and evaluate the funnel (thank you page visitors > account registrations > constructive activation) once we have enough data.
Update 2023-03-03: Positive Reinforcement & Add a Link
Experiment analysis for the Impact module A/B test has started (T327581), and we plan to make some improvements to the empty state of the Impact module based on initial experiment results (T330614).
Since our initial community consultation about Personalized praise plans, we’ve iterated on ideas and designs, so we started a second community consultation to review the current plan. This consultation will include discussions on Mediawiki, English Wikipedia, Arabic Wikipedia, Bengali Wikipedia, Czech Wikipedia, and Spanish Wikipedia.
Engineering on the new Mentor Dashboard module for “personalized praise” continues (T317817).
Growth features are now the default experience on both test.wikipedia.org and test2.wikipedia.org. Now that Growth features are the default for all newcomers, it was a time our testing environments had the same user experience (T330748).
We completed a community consultation in which we reviewed the most recent Leveling up designs with the Growth Pilot wikis. This consultation was completed in English on Mediawiki, and at Arabic Wikipedia, Bengali Wikipedia, Czech Wikipedia, and Spanish Wikipedia (T328356). In general, feedback was quite positive. These two tasks help address the only critical feedback mentioned by those that provided feedback:
Leveling up: Second design iteration of "Try a new task" dialog (T330543)
The Growth team is wrapping up a few remaining tasks that are necessary for the initial release of Leveling Up features. After testing is complete and translations are in place, we will release these new features in an A/B test to Arabic, Bengali, Czech, and Spanish Wikipedias.
We looked at edit and revert data on Growth pilot wikis before and after the release of T301096. It appears that the new prioritization formula may result in more newcomers completing "add a link" tasks and also result in a lower revert rate (although this was not a true A/B test, and revert rates are low enough that it is difficult to draw a conclusion with confidence). Given these results combined with a prior manual evaluation by Growth Ambassadors, and positive reception from Pilot communities, we plan to move forward with releasing this new prioritization formula to all wikis that currently have the "add a link" structured task (T330535).
Update 2023-02-17: Leveling up community consultation & evaluation of section-level image suggestions
The Growth team is almost entirely focused on completing Leveling Up work (which is one part of the Positive Reinforcement project). We have started a community consultation in which we are following up with community members who offered us feedback in a previous community discussion. We are also sharing our current designs and plans, and asking some questions to help guide future work. This consultation is happening in English on Mediawiki, and at Arabic Wikipedia, Bengali Wikipedia, Czech Wikipedia, and Spanish Wikipedia (T328350).
The current “add an image” tool only suggests images to entirely unillustrated articles. The "add an image" feature suggests article-level image suggestions; images meant to illustrate the article as a whole. The WMF Structured Data team is working on the backend needed to provide image suggestions for specific sections in an article. These section-level image suggestions will power a new Growth team structured task for section-level image suggestions. We are starting design work on this task (T321756), and Growth team Ambassadors helped with a first evaluation of these section-level image suggestions (T316151).
Leveling Up & Personalized Praise work continues. Designs have been localized into Arabic, Bengali, Czech, French, and Spanish so we can discuss further with Growth pilot communities (T329229).
A UI improvement was released to help differentiate between and/or topic filtering (T318597). This “and” topic matching feature is currently only released to Growth pilot wikis (T305399).
The new Impact module is released as an A/B test to Growth pilot wikis and we’ve released several minor improvements and bug fixes (T327849, T324675, T327824). Next up we will complete experiment analysis to determine how this change has affected newcomers (T327581).
We are wrapping up some analysis to better understand where we should set baseline Leveling Up prompts (T322433)
Engineering work has started on improving the post-edit dialog when a newcomer has topics or tasks selected that result in no suggestions (T324177).
The main purpose of Leveling up work is to encourage newcomers to try new and more difficult types of tasks, and our initial work on that effort has started (T322386).
Special account creation pages for donors are now available on SV, IT, JA, FR, and NL Wikipedias (T321370). This work expands the Thank you page experiment in which we encouraged donors in certain languages / on certain wikis to try editing Wikipedia.
We added more details to the Positive Reinforcement project page about some initial experiment data (T323788). And we’ve now gathered enough data that we can start the full experiment analysis (T327581).
We’ve been busy finishing Impact module work (T222310). The Growth team is now shifting to focus on Leveling Up work (T317813) and Personalized Praise work (T317817).
Growth SpecialPages
Now you can find all Growth SpecialPages together under “Growth tools” on Special:SpecialPages.
The Growth team has been partnering with other WMF teams to conduct several experiments aimed at increasing new editor activation and retention. An overview of the four main projects completed are available here: Newcomer experience projects
There are three parts to the Positive reinforcement project, and we are nearly complete with the first. The work needed to complete the new Impact module is almost complete (T222310). The Growth team is now shifting to focus on Leveling Up (T317813) and Personalized Praise (T317817).
On January 30th, we will deploy the welcome survey to Vietnamese Wikipedia (T325376). After this update, all language editions of Wikipedia with Growth tools enabled will receive the Welcome survey.
Newcomer experience + New article creation
A few Growth team members are meeting with New Pages Patrol representatives and other English wikipedia community members to discuss improvements for newcomers who come to the wikis primarily interested in article creation (meeting details). The Growth team hopes to learn more about current NPP challenges and consider how a project around Article Creation for Newcomers fits into the plans of the Growth team. If this project is prioritized we will spend more time gathering feedback from other wikis and especially focus on feedback from new editors.
Update 2023-01-13: Positive reinforcement updates and Mentorship improvement
We released several Impact module improvements including a change to the logic of how we are displaying “Total edits” (T325216).
The new Impact module is still being A/B tested on Pilot wikis. We will conduct a thorough analysis once the experiment has run long enough to gather retention metrics, but in the meantime the impact module leading indicators appear healthy.
Thanks has been added to Watchlists, Contributions, and Recent Changes (T51541, T90404). We will soon work on design ideas for improvements to the confirmation step (T315859).
We have worked on a few changes recently to help ensure that when a Mentor is blocked locally or globally they don’t continue to receive questions from mentees (T325087, T318819).
Newcomers at Growth pilot wikis will now receive “add a link” suggestions for articles that are more clearly "underlinked" (T301096). After discussing this change with Pilot communities and looking at “add a link” metrics we will decide if this change should be released to more wikis.
