Growth/Newsletters
Starting , the newsletter is published every quarter. It covers the latest major improvements, and the upcoming projects. Local deployments, minor improvements and bug fixes are documented in Tech News.
A quarterly update from the Growth team on our work to improve the new editor experience.
This year, the Growth team is exploring ways to help more new account holders start editing—and do so constructively, meaning their edits are not reverted. Our latest experiments include:
- Gradual rollout of "Add a Link" at English Wikipedia – We are gradually introducing the "Add a Link" structured task to newcomers at English Wikipedia (T386029). This serves as a natural A/B test to measure its impact on activation, retention, and revert rates (T382603). Previous experiments on pilot wikis showed that "Add a Link" increases newcomer participation, particularly by helping them make constructive (non-reverted) edits.
- Testing in-article suggestions for first-time editors – Many new account holders want to contribute but don’t know where to start. To help, we’re piloting a feature that surfaces structured task suggestions directly in an article’s read view for brand-new editors (T385343). These suggestions will appear for logged-in users with no edits, providing a clear, simple way to begin contributing that is surfaced while they read.
Newcomers often struggle to find their place in Wikipedia’s collaborative environment. While experienced editors easily discover events like edit-a-thons and writing campaigns, newcomers often miss out.
- To bridge this gap, we launched the Community Updates module for the Newcomer Homepage. This module is disabled by default, allowing Community Admins to decide how (or if) to use it.
- If your community hosts events, consider setting up a Community Update to engage and welcome newcomers! Learn more on Diff. To configure, visit Special:CommunityConfiguration.
Community Configuration is now available across all wikis, including non-Wikipedia projects (T383910). Community Configuration allows admins to customize various features like Growth features and Automoderator for their communities, and more recently the Babel extension now allows admins to modify configuration:
- Babel customization – Admins can now configure Babel settings (T374348), including category naming, automatic category creation, and more. See an example on Wikimedia Commons.
- Upcoming configurable features – Projects exploring community configuration options include: Incident Reporting System (T374113) and Cite backlinks (T378807).
Mentors play a key role in guiding new editors. If you’re interested in mentoring, or turning mentorship on at your wiki, check out the Mentorship FAQ
- Starting February 17, 100% of new accounts at English Wikipedia will be assigned a mentor (T384505).
- At Spanish Wikipedia, only 50% of newcomers get a mentor. Experienced contributors are encouraged to join mentorship so that Spanish Wikipedia can provide a mentor to all new users.
Looking Ahead
[edit]In the coming months, we will continue balancing maintenance work—such as deprecating EditGrowth Config (T367574) and migrating Statslib (T359352) — with user-facing improvements that support new editors and foster the next generation of contributors.
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Here are all archived Growth team updates.
2025
[edit]- #34 - June 2025 (draft)
- #33 - February 2025
2024
[edit]2023
[edit]- #29 - November 2023
- #28 - October 2023
- #27 - July 2023
- #26 - May 2023
- #25 - March 2023
- #24 - January 2023
2022
[edit]2021
[edit]2020
[edit]2019
[edit]- #11 - November 2019
- #10 - September 2019
- #9 - July 2019
- #8 - June 2019
- #7 - April 2019
- #6 - March 2019
- #5 - February 2019