Talk:Growth/2019

Discussion related to the old Growth team is archived at Talk:Growth/Growth 2014.

Conflict and editor retention

I'd like to post an interesting article about Wikipedia interactions (preprint):

"The Wisdom of Polarized Crowds" (29 November 2017). arXiv:1712.06414 [cs, stat]. 

In summary, it says that conflict is unpleasant and drives editors away, but it makes article content better. The authors welcome feedback.

I'm wondering if telling editors that conflict is productive might make it less unpleasant, especially as "I'm wasting my time here" is a frequent reaction to conflict. It would be interesting to do some experiments with different messages and see if they affect retention or productivity. HLHJ (talk) 22:32, 20 January 2019 (UTC)

I don't think "conflict" by itself makes the article better. Rather, conflict as an accessory to shared goals ''can'' (but not always) make an article better. Kosboot (talk) 23:42, 20 January 2019 (UTC)

Perhaps I should have said "conflicting views"; obviously calling someone a numbskull will not improve content. HLHJ (talk) 00:35, 21 January 2019 (UTC)

Well, consider conflict as the default path to improve articles is not really the best one. We should avoid conflicts. Trizek_(WMF) (talk) 14:13, 21 January 2019 (UTC)

Thanks for the link, @HLHJ. I'll check the article out. One question I would have right off the bat is what percent of newcomers actually are around long enough to experience what this article would call "conflict". MMiller (WMF) (talk) 01:38, 24 January 2019 (UTC)

Depends on what the first article you edit is, I guess. "Donald Trump" will probably run you straight into conflict, even if you are a really competent editor, while (hitting the random article button) "Alastair Macdonald" would probably not. HLHJ (talk) 04:01, 23 February 2019 (UTC)

Hungarian Wikipedia

Hi, we've just started a new project on the Hungarian Wikipedia for editor retention. The Hungarian Wikipedia fits perfectly to your target wikis, and I was wondering whether we could join to the Growth program? Samat (talk) 21:10, 9 April 2019 (UTC)

Hello Samat, and thank you for your interest on Growth projects.

We are going to discuss it within the team and keep you informed. Trizek_(WMF) (talk) 13:02, 10 April 2019 (UTC)

Thank you, I am looking forward to the result :) Samat (talk) 19:12, 10 April 2019 (UTC)

Hello Samat

We have discussed a bit about involving your community and we think it is a good community. We need to work on some details before we start the process.

In the meantime, can you confirm that someone will be able to do the following: translate messages, translate newsletters, provide links, motivate people to reply to newcomers questions, and to have meetings sometimes (maybe every two weeks)? Trizek_(WMF) (talk) 17:11, 17 April 2019 (UTC)

Dear Trizek, thank you for reply. I don't know exactly, what are the needs of the project (for example how long are these newsletters :)), but I am glad to participate and help. It would be useful if you could inform me about the details of the planned activities, necessary tasks etc. Since beginning of April I am the project manager of our retention program, and the Growth program fits very well what we would like to try and achieve, and I would like to use the synergy between the two programs. Samat (talk) 21:52, 17 April 2019 (UTC)

We can separate the work to do in two parts:

First, setting-up the tools.

Growth tools require configuration and translations. Setting them up would require your community to provide a lot of things (like links to some help contents, explain the context of your community dynamics, translate the interfaces and some help contents...). We are working on setting up a document to recap all of that.

Then, when the tools are deployed, the community needs to make a great effort to reply to newcomers on the help desk. Your retention program will very likely cover those needs.

So it is a question of how much time your community can spend on preparing the tools for deployment, and then to maintain an effort around newcomers. That effort is important: some communities are surprised by the number of requests they have to face.

Newsletters are posted once a month .You can find exemples on Growth/Newsletters. We recently changed our format and now the newsletter is translatable.

We also have some community ressources Growth/Communities that are translatable and, of course, open for discussion to be improved.

As I said, we have some work to do on our side. I'll keep you posted about the next steps. :) Trizek_(WMF) (talk) 16:28, 18 April 2019 (UTC)

Dear Trizek, I would go forward. Let me know what is the best way setting-up the tools, what is the priority order for the tasks? I've talked in the community, and we would try to join the program. I will do my best to make it smooth, and there will surely be a few editors who will help. Samat (talk) 15:57, 27 April 2019 (UTC)

Hello Samat

As you know, at the moment, we have a short list of wikis we work with and monitor. Adding yours requires a bit of work. since you've the first wiki to ask for those tools.

We definitely want to deploy the help panel for you (that require no monitoring), but we're deciding about the other components.

You can start translating the Growth pages on mediawiki.org, so as our community ressource for help desk, and figure out if community members are ready to reply to newcomers following those best practices. You can also ask from volunteers to translate the interfaces.

I'll keep you posted with updates soon. Trizek_(WMF) (talk) 17:10, 29 April 2019 (UTC)

Hi @Samat -- our team is now ready to bring Growth features to Hungarian Wikipedia. We've published a checklist here of what communities need to do in order to be ready. Please take a look and let us know if you have any questions, or if you want to discuss! We are excited to be working with your community. MMiller (WMF) (talk) 21:05, 13 June 2019 (UTC)

Dear Marshall, thank you for your and for your team's help. We will go through the checklist to prepare the Growth features for the Hungarian Wikipedia. I will let you know if we have any question. Samat (talk) 21:24, 16 June 2019 (UTC)

Encourage the newcomers feedback

I've been heavily editing Wikipedia:Wikipedia:Encourage the newcomers, trying to give fairly concrete and evidence-based advice, and it occurs to me that there are some experts here, too. I'd appreciate any criticism, commentary, or contributions. HLHJ (talk) 03:00, 7 October 2019 (UTC)

Thank you for sharing this! I've read it and I think it is a good approach to introduce the work with newcomers.

Here are some ressources you can use to enrich your page, as examples or as inspirations:

• New Editor Experiences - a research program about new users (typologies, what are their motivations...)
• How to interact with newcomers - an help page created by Growth to help mentors interacting with newcomers
• Editing Wikipedia with my parents may be a good reading, to see how newcomers make their first steps
• An analysis of two reports made by French Wikipedia and Hungarian Wikipedia about welcoming new users (in German), published on the Kurier. FYI, the French part was done by volunteer-me. Trizek_(WMF) (talk) 09:14, 7 October 2019 (UTC)

Hi @HLHJ -- I think it's really cool that you're working on that page. How will other editors find it and read it? One thing that I definitely recommend including is advice on how experienced editors can recommend tasks to newcomers. Many newcomers arrive with something specific and challenging they want to do, such as write a new article. They don't realize that writing a new article is one of the most difficult things to do on Wikipedia, and so they try, fail, and leave. It can be good for an experienced editor to say something like, "It's good that you want to write a new article about a band. That's one of the most challenging things to do on Wikipedia. I bet you'll end up succeeding with your article if you practice some easier edits. Here are some existing articles about bands that could use some copyediting." MMiller (WMF) (talk) 23:41, 7 October 2019 (UTC)

Sorry for the slow reply, I have some problems with my use of the notifications system, as you know :).

• An analysis of two reports made by French Wikipedia and Hungarian Wikipedia about welcoming new users (in German), published on the Kurier.] (archived version, as link above now broken)
  • I think this is a bit out-of-scope for the essay, which is more about individual actions than community ones (though I'd agree that the latter are important changed my mind, added draft content). I'll add in "How to interact with newcomers", though, it's an excellent collection of traditional knowledge, if I can use that for a community of ca. 1 generation age. It would be really great if that page had citations to empirical evidence, maybe an observational study... I assume you've seen this on de's checked version system?

"Editing Wikipedia with my parents" is fascinating; I tend to see it as confirmation of my preconception that the main good/bad experience determinant is the interactions with other editors. I barely interacted with other editors at all for the first decade or so on en; IP editing, not even revert notifications. I guess that put me in the "Knowledge sharer" profile. On fr and de, though, I've generally had edits reverted for inadequate language skills; the implication that the editors there do not consider my edits worth ten seconds of their translation-polishing time is rather demotivating. I polish translations on en, and while sometimes the English is hard to understand ("velvet municipality"? oh, Samtgemeinde) I find that amusing.

"Encourage the newcomers" gets about 50 views a day these days.[1] I did link it from WP:BITE, which is fairly trafficked, so hopefully anyone interested will find it. I've added some material on recommending tasks and new editors' goals, though it's still pretty rough and poorly-integrated; I'll come back to it when I've thought it over. HLHJ (talk) 05:04, 10 November 2019 (UTC)

Interesting discussion involving two new editors at en:User talk:Clovermoss#Editor retention, typo trivia. HLHJ (talk) 06:33, 5 February 2020 (UTC)

@HLHJ -- thanks for pointing it out! I put some thoughts there. MMiller (WMF) (talk) 20:01, 6 February 2020 (UTC)

Growth/Navbar

Would it be possible that the links in the Template:Growth/Navbar point to the localized pages? If somebody reads a localized page with the navbar, and would like to use it to navigate between the projects, arrives always to the English pages instead of the localized ones. This can be confusing even for experienced editors. Samat (talk) 18:02, 2 November 2019 (UTC)

I realized, that it works as I wanted, as soon I change the surface language from English to X (Hungarian in this case). Sorry. Samat (talk) 10:16, 3 November 2019 (UTC)

I havent found a nice way to add a direct link for translations. If you have an idea, I'm interested! :) Trizek_(WMF) (talk) 10:28, 5 November 2019 (UTC)

NavWiki project space is in development on the Outreach wiki

Participants on this talk page, particularly @MMiller (WMF) and @Kudpung, may remember this video project. I am creating a project space for the videos and associated information on the Outreach wiki at https://outreach.wikimedia.org/wiki/NavWiki. Please post on the project talk page on Outreach if you have questions or comments. I plan to send a newsletter with project status information to all tutorial newsletter subscribers during the next few weeks. Regards. ↠Pine (✉) 07:54, 6 November 2019 (UTC)

Hi @Pine -- thanks for letting us know. I'll post a couple questions for you on Outreach. MMiller (WMF) (talk) 19:45, 7 November 2019 (UTC)

Tools

I would propose a few tools to support and give feedback to both newcomers and oldtimers. (Just me trying to write down some ideas, aka ranting… )

Random award

People tend to continue doing things where they get a slightly random award. People tend to keep trying to get such rewards, even if the likelihood are pretty small. Compare to casino-like games.

It is rather well-documented how and why this work, and some people use it as an argument for free contributions vs paid contributions. That is probably wrong, but the argument is made anyhow. Its origin could be hunter-gatherers, and a continued quest for food even if they often failed.

That makes me believe there should be a page where new contributions are highlighted. A kind of special page “in the work”. That page can pick pages with larger contributions after they are patrolled or some time after the contributions are uploaded. Because the list should be limited it would be slightly random which page (contributions on that page) reach the special page. It is a feature that only some reach that page, but it could be possible to include more on the page if the reader choose to do so. Imagine the page as a “recent changes” with a lead paragraph with a list of the last contributions, and notify the user when his/her contributions reach the special page.

A practical implementation would pick pages that are above a certain threshold in size, and likewise a threshold on contribution. Above that threshold it would be included with a probability that scale with the accumulated size of the contributions.

Activity feedback

Users at Wikipedia are very eager on measuring their impact and reach, which makes me wonder if it is possible to create some kind of simple indexes or badges. It could be a kind of “six degrees of wikiholicks” with some funny comment popping up in the notification centre when you reach a higher level. As activity changes, it could be measured over some timespan, with some feedback (badges) early on that is pretty simple to get. Later on it could be logarithmically harder to get badges. Now our only feedback to newcomers seems to be a notification that their edits are rolled back, which gives a negative feedback.

Comparable systems are Khan Academy, Duolingo, and several other.

Ongoing work

I've been wondering if it would be a good idea to have a note on user pages about what page the user is editing. It would be like an implicit Kanban queue. If a page is open for edit in a tab, we could use a ping to the server and keep track of it in the session, and the user has several recent changes to the page, then it gets posted as “current work” or “work in progress” on the user page. If the user hasn't any contributions to the page, or if the contributions are too old, then it will not be listed. Likewise if the edits are not patrolled. A similar note can be posted on the content page itself, thus giving a positive feedback to the editing user. By limiting the number of listed pages it will give the contributor a sense of what s/he should focus on, ie. finish the current work, yet it allows the user to do random edits on other pages.

Note that “current work” should follow the page, and when another user moves the page to another title the note should keep pointing to the correct page. Jeblad (talk) 20:25, 7 November 2019 (UTC)

Hi @Jeblad -- thank you for thinking about our work and for writing out these ideas. I'm sorry that it has taken a little while to get back to you. I have some notes and questions about each of your points:

• Random award: our team has talked many times about how to use awards to help motivate newcomers. Some of our notes are here. There is definitely evidence that awards can work, such as this paper about an experiment in German Wikipedia. In that experiment, a random set of newcomers was given an award for completing their first edit. They were then listed in public as one of the recipients of the award. This increased their retention by 10%. It's notable that in the experiment, the award came from a group of people (a WikiProject), as opposed to from "the system". Our team wants to extend the impact module on the newcomer homepage to give users awards that make sense for them, and we know we'll have a lot of thinking to do with our communities to make sure the awards are appropriate and incentivize healthy behavior.
• Activity feedback: I see this as related to the "awards" concept, because it's all about recognizing people for the work they have done. If you take a look at the homepage's impact module (shown in these designs), how good of a job do you think we're doing here? What should be different?
• Ongoing work: this reminds me of conversations our team has around a concept we call "neighborhoods". We think that it would help newcomers for them to be able to clearly say that there is activity happening in the wiki, so that they can join in (we have some notes on that here). Right now, it's hard to see activity unless you go to Recent Changes. So we think newcomers could have some kind of "activity feed" on their homepage, that could be tailored to topics that they care about, e.g. "Music", "History", etc. But it sounds like you're also saying that recent edits could be clearly listed on a user page. That would fit in well with some of our ideas around a potential structured user profile (some notes on that here, and I've added your idea to the bottom).

How does this sound? What do you think? MMiller (WMF) (talk) 22:19, 19 November 2019 (UTC)

Random award is a bit weird. You tend to be more enthusiastic over a random award when you expect none, compared to a situation where you expect the award and get none. Even if the overall level of awards are the same. If people are giving the award, and you are expecting an award, then it quickly turn into a grudge toward the users that did not give you the expected award. Either the award should be really unexpected, that is statistically random, or it should be deterministic. A deterministic award is an activity feedback. It should also be given by a non-human, so to avoid disgruntled users. In the mean two different users at the same level should be given the same amount of random award, even if they have been given different awards at any given moment.

Activity feedback is a deterministic awards. You should be able to expect an activity feedback, but a random award should be unexpected. All users doing the same amount of work should be given the same activity feedback. Call it “activity award” and “random award” if it is easier to understand.

Ongoing work is the users “own work”, and limited to the users present major work. It makes him focus on his own work, possibly triggering a higher completenessrate. You could create interest groups, by collecting over a group of users from the categories where the user are editing. Note the difference between the users own activity, users interests, and articles where there are activity. Some user editing a random article does not imply he has a profound interest in neither the article nor the category. Only after accumulating edits over some time you know the users actual interest. The users interest could be modelled as the categories from the articles where (s)he contributes, weighted by the amount of work invested in each article. The categories should probably be simplified somewhat. You can make a metric for group activity both from users contributions and from recent changes. It depends on the level of granularity you want.

I'm not sure about the present standing on paid editing (Gneezy U; Rustichini A; (2000) Pay enough or don’t pay at all. Quart.J. Econom. 115(3):791–810.) I tend to believe the communities have made up their mind on a fairly weak (or even non-factual) basis. That could have implications for what kind of awards that can be used, and it makes it virtually impossible to use the most effective means for content production – payment. It seems like Wikipedia has at the same standing on corporate contributions as Linux in in the late 90s.

Note that awards in a system like Wikipedia relates more to cultural capital than social capital. Facebook and Twitter are more about social capital. LinkedIn tend to be social capital, but with a twist on educational and commercial capital. This has impact on what kind of awards will be regarded as important, and what kind is simply fun. Jeblad (talk) 14:10, 20 November 2019 (UTC)

مشاركة

مرحباً اريد المشاركة في فريق النمو 156.213.191.123 (talk) 06:04, 16 December 2019 (UTC)

أهلا وسهلا ومرحبا، هل يمكننا أن نتعرف على اسم حسابك على ويكيبيديا؟ شكرا. Dyolf77 (WMF) (talk) 09:12, 16 December 2019 (UTC)