Talk:Growth/2022

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

Assessment of deployment at tewiki

Hi,

Project growth is deployed at tewiki in March 2021. But there has been no update on the use and benefits of the project. Can you publish a detailed report at the earliest, as it will be useful for the community to consider next steps. Arjunaraoc (talk) 05:12, 10 January 2022 (UTC)

Hello

Thank you for your interest. We already have published one report, where we found that newcomers edit more wen they use Growth features. A new report will soon be published soon, which confirmes this trend.

Let me know if you need more specific details. Trizek_(WMF) (talk) 16:30, 10 January 2022 (UTC)

@Trizek (WMF), Thanks for your response. The report you quoted was published in Nov 2020. So it did not cover Telugu Wikipedia deployment which began in March 2021. Based on my observation of edits related to growth project, I feel that the impact is not much, compared to our other method of greeting new editors and responding to their help requests by other editors. I think that enrolling all new editors, who create accounts themselves without their choice also may make it difficult to assess the impact of the project. Arjunaraoc (talk) 00:32, 11 January 2022 (UTC)

The reports are based on data collected at multiple wikis. The global trend is that the tools are working. We can't provide specific data for Telugu Wikipedia as your wiki is too small to provide relevant data.

Providing the tools to all new editors is something we believe to be efficient. It is actually an identified need. Turning on some features will be done by anyone who has confidence. But this is not everyone's profile. As a consequence, we encourage newcomers to make edits by offering some articles they can work on, we reassure them y providing guidance and immediate access to help pages, and, at some wikis, we give them someone they can contact. For the latter, as a volunteer mentor at French Wikipedia, I really think it is important: I often receive messages from users who are not confident and ho seek for advice. Their message is often the first edit they mage on Wikipedia.

How do you currently greed newcomers?

Could you provide me some examples of your observations and feelings?

Let me know if you need anything else, I'm happy to help! Trizek_(WMF) (talk) 14:24, 11 January 2022 (UTC)

@Trizek (WMF), We had in place from the beginning of our wiki, a way of greeting new users, by welcoming them with a welcome message on their talk page. We have improvised the welcome message, by adding a help request link, which by clicking enables them to post a help request comment on their talk page. Though an embedded template, the help request is made visible on Village pump and Community portal through a floating table. As experienced Wikipedians visit these pages on daily pages, the help request is answered at the earliest. The request status is changed or the page is moved into unaddressed help requests through a change to the template in the help request section in due course. The status is always reflected on Village pump and Community Portal pages. New users also quickly learn that they can get help on any other page, by adding the help request template to their request. You can see the template which is based on the English Wikipedia template:help me. The advantage of this method is that there is no dependence on a specific assigned mentor to service the request and promotes collaboration with the larger Wikipedia community.

I understand from your reply that the availability of tools is universal, whereas assigning mentors is optional, which is news to me. I feel that forcibly assigning mentors is contrary to philosophy behind Wikipedia and would like to work towards making it optional. Let me know how it is done on other Wikipedias, to help me push for it on Tewiki.

Based on my observation of help requests associated with Project growth, I find most messages are general greetings or expression of wishes to contribute to Wikipedia. Even if the usage is small on Tewiki, it will help to know how much percentage of new users made use of the tool, for how long and for what featuresl.

Apart from that, based on whatever little understanding I have from the project pages, I think that some information about the demographics and/or the intention behind creating account is collected to help the project suggest tasks. If you can share a report on that it will help us understand our new users better and work on ways to make their initial experience better. Arjunaraoc (talk) 09:26, 12 January 2022 (UTC)

Thank you for sharing this workflow with me. It is really inspiring.

What you describe is something you can also do with the Growth features. When newcomers use Growth features, such as the Homepage and the Help panel, they can ask a question from them.

Do you know that communities have the ability to change the configuration of Growth features? At Special:EditGrowthFeatures, in the "Help panel settings" section, you can select at which place newcomers can post their messages. We offer two options in the form: Mentor talk pages, and Help desk. If you select "Help desk", you can actually put any page title there. It can be the Village pump, so that you can have all questions at the same place.

Regarding having a central help desk (or the like) or a personal mentor, both solutions have their pros and cons. Central places have a lower response time, but specific mentors are better for long-term collaboration, with a better knowledge of how the newcomer progresses. It is literally up to the community to have one option or the other. At my home wiki, we went for mentoring, with a possible backup to the help desk for urgent requests. As a volunteer, I had the pleasure to help newcomers to become experienced editors. It is really rewarding.

Regarding greetings and such, we see newcomers testing the process. Wikipedia procedures aren't familiar to most people, some newcomers believe that they will face robots! By the way, this is where mentoring has a benefit.

I will gather some data for you soon. I'm currently learning how to gather it, so your request arrives just on time for me to practice!

I also want to thank you for your questions, as they are a way for us to improve our documentation and our communication regarding the features. Trizek_(WMF) (talk) 15:24, 12 January 2022 (UTC)

@Trizek (WMF) Thanks for your appreciaton and additional info. I read through the configuration and found it useful. My preference for help requests is at the user's talk page for general problems or the article discussion pages for article specific problem. I understand that project does not allow help requests at article talk pages.

Regarding the mentors identification, at least in Tewiki, currently anyone who has been editing for some time can sign up as a mentor. Sometimes, they may not have good knowledge to help newbies. Their availability may also change based on their other commitments. I think a better approach would be to start the newbie with basic home page and suggested tasks panel. If they desire to get mentored, they can request mentorship and the mentors on the roster can sign up to be a mentor for specific period of 1-3 months. The mentor or mentee can also opt out of mentoring when they decide that mentoring is no longer needed.

Let me know whether Project growth supports the scenario above.

I am happy to know that my interactions are helpful and that you will be working on assessing the deployment at Tewiki. Arjunaraoc (talk) 05:07, 13 January 2022 (UTC)

From what I see at the wikis I visit, a mentorship program newcomers have to contact doesn't work. This has been proven by research: "inspiring, trusted, and well-connected intermediaries are a critical asset in recruiting and supporting new editors." Showing that someone is ready to help is a way to retain newcomers.

At te.wp, only only autoconfirmed users can add their names to the mentor list.

Through Growth tools, it is already possible to opt-out mentoring. Mentors just have to remove their name from the list (we are working on improving this process); newcomers juste have to ignore their mentor (we are working on this as well), or opt-out Growth features. It is also possible to create a list of mentors that don't get newcomers assigned to them, but who can choose which mentees to work with.

Regarding mentorship, it is up to the community to decide on what to do on who can be a mentor, or how mentorship works. I suggest you to discuss about all this with the currently listed mentors.

Speaking of mentors, I will provide some data on the mentors' talk page at the beginning of next week. Trizek_(WMF) (talk) 12:46, 13 January 2022 (UTC)

User research for talk page notices

Hi Growth Team and happy New Year! I had an idea that I wanted to plant in case you have interest or downtime. Aside from the new user dashboard features, there are many existing practices Wikipedians follow to welcome and onboard new users. If you haven't already, it would be supremely beneficial to order a round of user research on how those practices are working. I could see, for example, us finding out that blasting newcomers with a bunch of talk page templates is ultimately a waste of time for us and them if it (1) doesn't actually impart information, and (2) doesn't convert them into longer-term editors. Even something as simple as seeing how users respond to different talk page templates could give our volunteer community better insight into how our own time could be spent more effectively. (And of course there are all kinds of ways to improve our automated tools if we know the best ways to reach out to individuals.) User testing is a big blind spot for volunteers—we can template other users all day but to know what works best, we depend on pooling resources so a group like the WMF/your team can run a study for us. Happy to chat more, if useful. czar 04:35, 17 January 2022 (UTC)

A very good point. Nick Moyes (talk) 07:57, 17 January 2022 (UTC)

Hello Czar and Nick. Happy new year to you too! Thank you for stating this discussion.

While I'm not working on talk pages, I have a few things in mind, where talk pages and messages left there are studied.

Testing welcome messages at French Wikipedia, where no interaction was found regarding the messages. We actually have no idea if newcomers visit their talk page. And if they understand that they have a proper message to read there.

Only half editors read their messages (study conducted in 2012). Overall, messages are important and, when they are constructive, they can lead to more edits from newcomers.

The New Editor Experiences report has some clear findings:

• "Many new editors could not find or use talk pages to communicate with other editors on-wiki". (page 18)
• "New editors don’t know how to communicate with others on Wikipedia, because communications on Wikipedia are perceived to be foreign and hidden" (page 25)

During the Talk pages consultation 2019, we found that newcomers often have no idea of how to use talk pages. Which leads the Editing team to work on talk pages improvements. One of their ideas is to offer an environment where people would identify that they are on a talk page, not on a random Wikipedia content page.

I'm still unsure if newcomers understand that messages are posted at the bottom of the talk page...

Some easy improvements are at reach though (personal thinking below):

In my volunteer capacity, I also observe that a lot of volunteers (including me) unconsciously use jargon or technical terms when they interact with newcomers. Templated messages reflect this. Which could be a push back for some people who managed to find the message but don't understand what it means. Rewriting messages is a first possible step.

Also, I frequently find messages where there is no way to contact a human. At fr.wp, a small group I belong to as a volunteer decided to have some best practices regarding messages. One of them is to add a "please contact me link" to templates, to increase chances for newcomers to find a real human, and also to force users who overuse templates to take their responsibilities, by being forced to explain why they left this message. I sometimes have a few messages asking for follow up explanation now that this has been implemented; previously, I had zero follow-ups.

This being said, within WMF teams, we work to offer a cohesive user experience. So Editing and Growth work together on helping newcomers both editing and interacting with others. I let @MMiller (WMF) respond there, as he has a more cross-team vision than I have. :) Trizek_(WMF) (talk) 12:13, 17 January 2022 (UTC)

The situation that really matters is:

1. I edit
2. I don't notice/read the message on my User_talk: page
3. I edit again

The situation that doesn't matter so much is:

1. I edit
2. I never see any messages because I never edit again.

This should be possible to study. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 18:17, 2 February 2022 (UTC)

Help for Catalan Wikipedia

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Hi! Congrats for this tool. I have already been translating most of its interface into Catalan. To keep improving it in Catalan, may I ask you to give me permission or special access to edit Special:EditGrowthConfig in ca.wikipedia?

As you can see here, I've been managing several wikiprojects and mentorizing newcomers since years ago, so happy to test it and play with it in my language until it's a bit more mature and I can train some other wikipedians to start using it. Thank you in advance! Best regards. Xavier Dengra (talk) 23:26, 22 January 2022 (UTC)

Anyone who can edit pages in the MediaWiki namespace can use Special:EditGrowthConfig—on Catalan Wikipedia, this currently means administrators and interface administrators. So you should apply for one of these rights in the way they’re handled on Catalan Wikipedia. (Or you can propose creating an interface editor group—it exists on a few wikis—, which could include only the specific right to edit the MediaWiki namespace, and not editing gadgets or blocking users.) Tacsipacsi (talk) 02:17, 23 January 2022 (UTC)

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Inactive mentor

See ro:Discuție Wikipedia:Listă mentori#Mentori inactivi. NicolaS961, a mentor at Romanian Wikipedia, was last active on 18 October 2021, and a newcomer even observed this inactivity (see this question). What are the steps that should be follow in order to remove an inactive mentor from the list? --Paloi Sciurala (talk｜contribs) 12:40, 29 January 2022 (UTC)

Hello @NGC 54, thanks for the question! If you remove a mentor from the list of mentors, they will no longer be assigned newcomers. They will, however, retain their old mentees. While the majority of questions is asked within their first few days on the wiki, it is still possible some question will appear on the former mentor's talk page.

If you want to avoid that, we can reassign their mentees to the other mentors. To request that, just let me know here (you can also create a task in Phabricator similar to :phab:T292958).

Happy mentoring, Martin Urbanec (WMF) (talk) 14:27, 29 January 2022 (UTC)

Encourage mentors to check mentees contribution + More Feedback

This is my opinion about the Growth feature, I've just checked contribution of the last user that asked a question. I've seen that he has some newcomers tasks done, (added wiki links to some pages). And I've seen that often metees ask how long it will take for their edit to be approved (on Polish Wikipedia edits need to be approved to be visible).

The problem I see is that there are not much connection between mentor and mentees. When I sign up for being a mentor (in Polish Wikipedia) they said that I will answer questions maybe once or twice a week. There is MentorDashboard but I don't think that is really useful. I don't check it that often.

But if there was a page that list all my mentees recent edits that, maybe with some filters not sure what they should be, it would be much better if mentor can look at new edits and approve them faster. Maybe it would be even better of the edits are inline with button to approve, so it will be fast and easy for mentor to just check and approve the edits and hide edits that he checked.

Also one more feature that this page should have is thank you link on each edit.

And all this because if someone add his first edit and get it approved and visible faster, and mentor will give him personal thanks. It will increase the number of people that will keep using Wikipedia as editors. It would probably also be good idea to send notification when newcomer edit is approved, this will "force" them to open Wikipedia and see his/her edits. Those can be Preferences set by default, even on Wikipedia that don't require approval for a change to be visible (like in English Wikipedia). Notification for the newcomers that his or her edits was approved, would probably be boost of dopamine for the newcomers and he or she would like to edit more.

Another idea is that it would probably be fun to add some Gamification to newcomers, not sure how. Gamification is the topic that I'm interested and need to give more focus in 2022. Jcubic (talk) 19:45, 7 February 2022 (UTC)

For the FlaggedRevs notifications about accepting edits see phab:T54510. Tacsipacsi (talk) 01:11, 8 February 2022 (UTC)

Thank you for sharing your thoughts with us, @Jcubic!

In recent changes, you can filter down your mentees' edits: https://pl.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?mentorship=all&limit=100&days=7&title=Special:RecentChanges&urlversion=2. Then you have access yo the usual tools to validate pending edits.

Implementing Thanks in Recent changes is a Community Wishlist proposal you can vote for (if not already done).

I agree on the fact that quick validation would probably help newcomers to edit more. About thanking users, it has been proven that it helps on retention.

I'm keeping your suggestions in mind for our upcoming thinking regarding how to help mentors. Given the feedback we already received, we will focus on the Mentor dashboard first.

Regarding Gamification, it is something we have considered. We try to pursue with Add a link (available at pl.wp, have you tried it?) and with Add an image. Trizek_(WMF) (talk) 15:40, 8 February 2022 (UTC)

@Trizek (WMF) something is really off that special page shows https://pl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedysta:XaxeLoled on the list, and he is an admin, how can he be my mentee? Also in Metor dashboard shows person that joined in 2016-01-03 that have 4225 edits.

Should I report this as a bug? If so where? Jcubic (talk) 16:21, 8 February 2022 (UTC)

It is not a bug: we have assigned a mentor to everyone for practical reasons. I understand it is confusing; you are not the first person to mention it.

We plan to work on a feature to opt-out mentoring so that experienced users won't have a mentor, I hope we can work on it soon. Edit: It is also possible to filter down your mentees on the mentor dashboard: you can set a maximum number of edits there. Trizek_(WMF) (talk) 16:33, 8 February 2022 (UTC)

Can you explore the experience of newcomers on Wikipedia?

Just a question. I have no idea how the feature work from newcomers perspective. Is there a way to see it for yourself?

Maybe some live demo or video. It would be nice to see how the experience look like to know how to improve.

Are there was any UX research done, with actual users, that was recorded? Jcubic (talk) 19:49, 7 February 2022 (UTC)

The best way to test the features to create a new test account.

We have a demo video, but some details may be a but outdated.

We do UX research on all our new features. Our usual process is the following: we create a first prototype that is tested by people who aren't Wikipedia editors. When done, we refine the prototype to fix the most important points we discovered. Then we test once again with different people. The recordings are kept private per user agreement from usertesting.com, the service we use.

At this prototype stage, we usually ask experienced users at our pilot wikis to check on this prototype. We also announce prototype testings into our newsletter, so that anyone can comment on the idea. Some of Growth team members are also experienced editors in our volunteer capacity, who work with newcomers (I include myself there).

Let me know if you have any other question. :) Trizek_(WMF) (talk) 15:57, 8 February 2022 (UTC)

Remove banned accounts from the mentor panel

Is it possible to remove or (permanently) hide banned accounts from the mentor panel, since they are absolutely useless there and only add to the clutter? DarwIn (talk) 23:51, 16 February 2022 (UTC)

Hello Darwin

In theory, in Special:MentorDashboard, indefinitely blocked users shouldn't be visible. Which account do you see there so that we can investigate a possible bug?

Thank you! Trizek_(WMF) (talk) 12:16, 17 February 2022 (UTC)

Without mentors

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If I want to use suggestions and analytical data from the homepage, is there a way to opt out of the mentor function? Mentors can take participants who did not have a mentor before and intercept a participant by rewriting to themselves. (for example, you can take any account and start stalking it just because of the technical possibility https://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D0%92%D0%B8%D0%BA%D0%B8%D0%BF%D0%B5%D0%B4%D0%B8%D1%8F:%D0%A4%D0%BE%D1%80%D1%83%D0%BC/%D0%92%D0%BE%D0%BF%D1%80%D0%BE%D1%81%D1%8B#GrowthExperiments_%D0%B8_%D0%B0%D0%B4%D0%BC%D0%B8%D0%BD%D0%B8%D1%81%D1%82%D1%80%D0%B0%D1%82%D0%BE%D1%80%D1%8B-%D0%BF%D0%BE%D0%B4%D0%BE%D0%BF%D0%B5%D1%87%D0%BD%D1%8B%D0%B5 ) The participant can't do anything about it. The mentor can observe the contribution statistics and activity time for an unprecedented long time (even logged actions that are usually not observed by others) that the extension makes to him. Or let's make a trusted WMF account, to which the participants of each wiki could switch when you don't need your statistics to be collected for another and you don't need a chat. Sunpriat 13:52, 1 March 2022 (UTC)

We are working on a way for users to opt-out mentoring, so that they won't have any mentor assigned to them. Trizek_(WMF) (talk) 14:26, 1 March 2022 (UTC)

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重新分配學員

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我是中文維基的導師，但現在有事長期不能指導，可否麻煩將我的學員重新分配？ ChhTJ096 (talk) 16:03, 18 March 2022 (UTC)

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Can someone answer my question about A/B test?

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Hi, I posted a question on here 3 months ago, but have not taken a reply.

Does restoring the default settings restore settings set by EnablePercentage?
Topic on Extension talk:GrowthExperiments

Can someone respond? Lens0021 (talk) 14:45, 14 April 2022 (UTC)

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What the newbie see

Is there a video about what the newbie see? Recently I figured out that newbies ask questions on something we dont know how it looks like. I.e. newbies receive dialogs we dont know about. Juandev (talk) 07:02, 22 April 2022 (UTC)

Ahoj @Juandev! Děkujeme za zájem o funkce týmu Growth i Tvou otázku. Ano, nějaká videa existují. Na české Wikipedii jsem například před nějakou dobou vyvěsil videa ukazující, jak registrace funguje dnes a jak fungovala dříve. Díky tomu je možné změnu v uživatelském zážitku snadno a rychle porovnat. Jsou sice, pravda, trošku staršího data, ale myslím, že pro ukázku jsou vcelku dostačující (ale stejně je zkusím v nejbližší době aktualizovat).

Je také možné vyzkoušet si funkce týmu Growth vlastnoručně. Buď registrací nového uživatelského účtu (čímž získáš přehled o tom, jak cesta nováčka probíhá od A do Z), anebo zaškrtnutím možností „Zobrazit Domovskou stránku nováčka“, „Odkaz na uživatelské jméno vede na Domovskou stránku nováčka“ a „Povolit panel Potřebuji pomoc“ ve svém nastavení. První dvě zaškrtávací políčka jsou na kartě Údaje o uživateli, to poslední na kartě Editace. Podrobnější instrukce najdeš na Help:Growth/Tools/Enable_the_Homepage/cs.

Kdyby tě o funkcích týmu Growth zajímalo cokoli více, dej vědět – rád otázky zodpovím.

S přáním hezkého zbytku dne, Martin Urbanec (WMF) (talk) 14:23, 22 April 2022 (UTC)

Translation strings

Hello! :) Where can I find out about new strings that need to be translated? I haven't found any news that a new feature pack has arrived (opt out mentorship). And I have some lines either not translated or with poor translation.

@Trizek (WMF), can you help me with it? :) Iniquity (talk) 14:30, 26 May 2022 (UTC)

https://watch-translations.toolforge.org/ might help you? Jdforrester (WMF) (talk) 16:45, 26 May 2022 (UTC)

Thanks, I also found out about this link a couple of hours ago :)

Personally, it will help me, but if I suddenly leave (busfactor), how will others know that an update has arrived? Iniquity (talk) 16:54, 26 May 2022 (UTC)

I really hope that you won't get hit by a bus, Iniquity! ;)

All strings are located at this address. Only a regular check can help someone who doesn't use watch-translations, I'm afraid. Trizek_(WMF) (talk) 20:29, 26 May 2022 (UTC)

> I really hope that you won't get hit by a bus, Iniquity!;)

I hope so too xD

> All strings are located at this address. Only a regular check can help someone who doesn't use watch-translations, I'm afraid.

Just given that this interface is being shown to newbies and is under active development (i.e. there are new lines) it is very important that it be translated, in my opinion. This affects the engagement and understanding of the interface :( Can we come up with a scheme where new lines would be published? Iniquity (talk) 20:34, 26 May 2022 (UTC)

We plan to have much more regular updates of our newsletter, to inform communities about new releases.

I usually post messages to the mentors' talk pages at the wikis when something big is scheduled, as these users are more likely to help. Would it help if I also inform mentors of important changes that needs to translate a few new strings? Trizek_(WMF) (talk) 20:39, 26 May 2022 (UTC)

Of course! This will be the best solution :) Iniquity (talk) 21:08, 26 May 2022 (UTC)

Noted. :) Trizek_(WMF) (talk) 12:37, 27 May 2022 (UTC)

Add a link: Feature idea - „Target article name ambiguous“

Hi and thanks for a great feature! Having been using it for a couple of days on Swedish Wikipedia, I have run into the following situation a few times:

1. The algorithm marks a word and suggests a corresponding article.
2. Reviewing the suggested article shows that the title is correct, but it still is the wrong target, since it has an ambiguous name without for example a qualifier between parenthesis. A (maybe farfetched) example could be one article „Naples“ as opposed to two articles „Naples (FL)“ and „Naples (Italy)“.
3. Since this function/ algorithm keeps „finding“ this kind of articles would I like to suggest implementing a means of capturing the valuable insights they give. As it is now, one can only say „No“ to the link suggestion and then tick „Other“ as the reason (unfortunately also without being able to add a comment), and thus the insight is lost.
4. If, above the checkbox „Other“ on the „Reason“ screen after clicking „No“, there would be a checkbox „Target article name ambiguous“ or similar, followed by two fields suggesting the two new article names, then this information could, for example, be posted as a template entry in the target article, thereby inviting more advanced users to possibly rename the identified article to clear the ambiguity and also maybe create the second one, i.e. the one that „Add a link“ revealed „to be missing“.
5. In this way the feature would be useful in identifying these ambiguous article names, letting the newbies contribute in a way they now how to (delivering the article names they believe should be there), and then leaving enough bread crumbs for more experienced users to fix the issue. Gunboz (talk) 21:39, 31 May 2022 (UTC)

Hi Gunboz, and thank you for your feedback!

We are collecting the reasons given by users when they click "no", but we aren't collecting "suggested link is too ambiguous" as a reason for rejection. It is a idea we should consider, thank you for suggesting it.

The example you give about Naples is precisely where a human is needed and valued.

It is not possible to make comments for a simple reason: read all of them requires a workforce we don't have. :)

Regarding posting it on the article talk page, I'm not sure to get your point. Do you suggest to have newcomers adding these links no matter what, and then having experienced users to handle them, or do you suggest to have these possible links to be suggested on the talk page? Trizek_(WMF) (talk) 13:47, 1 June 2022 (UTC)

Hi Trizek and thanks for your quick response, and I agree, that this is perfect human-KI-integration, I love it! Sorry if I was being unclear in my post. My suggestion would be (using a fictitious example):

1. The ”Add a link” system (in an article about ”Volcanoes in Europe”) finds the word Naples and suggests linking it to the Article ”Naples”, which however covers Naples in Florida.
2. As a user, I now mark this as a ”No”, i.e. ”do not link to the suggested article” (since that would be wrong).
3. The system now presents me with the ”Reasons” screen.
4. Now the new, added choice on that screen is ”Target article name ambiguous“
5. Ticking this box provides me with two string fields, where I can enter my article suggestions: ”Naples (FL)” and ”Naples (Italy)”. The first one would be my new suggested name for the already existing ”Naples” article (whereto I think it should me moved/ renamed). The second one the name for a possible new article (the one that I would have needed for my ”Volcanoes…”-article).
6. The system could then put a template/ tag at the beginning of the original ”Naples” article (not the talk page) like: {New suggested disambiguation | Disambiguation page = Naples | Current article name suggestion = ”Naples (FL)” | Suggested additional article = ”Naples (Italy)”}.

The template/ tag under 6. could then entice an experienced user to get his/ her hands dirty and implement the necessary disambiguation. This could not be automated. Neither could there be a link entered in the ”Volcanoes…” article at this time, since there simply is no article about ”Naples (Italy)” (yet). However, imho here the ”missing link” is the minor issue, compared to the unresolved ambiguity, which the tool ”just happened” to stumble upon. Through this addition to the ”Add a link” tool, it would start helping find and point out those ambiguities. Gunboz (talk) 16:52, 1 June 2022 (UTC)

Add a link: word exclusion list (per language)?

Hi! I wonder if there is an easily accessible ”exclusion” list, which tells the system not to use certain words as ”link targets”?

As an example, in Swedish, my main language, the words ”Lika” and ”Ingå” often appear as suggested links. While Lika is a province in Croatia (=suitable link target), in swedish it also means ”same as” (like in ”like for like”). Needless to say, that this creates quite a few ”false positives”. The same with ”Ingå” (a smaller river =suitable link target), the word however also means ”is included in”.

If I knew where to add words to such a list (if it exists), then I’d be happy doing this myself as I run into them? Gunboz (talk) 22:01, 7 June 2022 (UTC)

Thanks @Gunboz for the feedback!

We are evaluating this and several other ideas for improving "add a link" accuracy, while also investigating ways to make these edits easier to review.

What's your experience like with "add a link" tasks? Besides occasional incorrect suggestions, do you feel like this task is working well on Swedish Wikipedia? Do you have any experience patrolling these tasks, and if so: do you have any recommendations for making these edits easier to review? KStoller-WMF (talk) 20:56, 8 June 2022 (UTC)

Hi and thanks for reaching out!

1. I think the task/ feature is excellent: it’s like ”low threshold” editing when I’m too tired or similar to write or proofread outright. It brings me to surprising new subjects, and quite often I also end up fixing some other small stuff after posting the links to an article. And it helps finding quite a few ambiguous articles (pls see my other suggestion on that subject on this page).
2. Re. patrolling: I have roll-back authority (and have used it on occasion when seeing stupid stuff happening to articles on my watch list), but I have not yet performed any ”systematic patrolling”. I will now check with some more experienced users on svwp, how I could go about doing that (unless you have some ideas or hints), and then get back to yourself in a week or so, reporting on my experience on patrolling these add a link edits, if that would be useful to you and your team? Gunboz (talk) 22:10, 8 June 2022 (UTC)

Thanks so much for the feedback, @Gunboz !

1. That's great to hear!
2. That would be so helpful, thank you! Since "add a link" makes these small edits so easy to complete, we've had some patrollers mention that it's a burden to review them all. I'm curious to know if this has been an issue on svwp, or if svwp has any other feedback or recommendations for improving "add a link". Thank you! KStoller-WMF (talk) 17:13, 9 June 2022 (UTC)

Hi again @KStoller-WMF! I’ve had a look at this. First of all, I don’t know if this has been an issue on svwp (yet), one reason being that the feature was just released there very recently. However, I noticed a couple of (possible) issues with how patrolling these links does work today:

1. One gets to see ”the whole article” on the left side of the screen, just like with any other edits that have been performed on an article, and then a comment on the right side, saying like ”article xxx has been linked”.
2. This setup is imho not really helpful: a) one does not need to see the ”whole article” (left side) in this case, as when reviewing an edit of content. Maybe just the sentence with the new link would suffice, possibly the sentende before and/ or after could be helpful in addition, but absolutely not more. This would save a lot of unnecessary scrolling in the linking article. b) On the other hand, on the right side, where today only the link target article name is shown, this is definitely to lean. There is no way to determine if a link to Swan is to the animal or the sailing boat by just seeing that one word ”Swan”. If here instead the first one or two sentences of the target article would be displayed, it would be immediately clear if the new link is suitable or not (in this way I can immediately see the context around the new link on the left side and then the subject where it links to on the right, right next to each other, helping me take a split-second decision re. suitable or not).
3. The result of such a change/ suggestion would be, that the patroller would be presented a table of linking snippets on the left (text around where the link was inserted) and a clear description of the link target on the right, where each table row represents one new link. This would mean, that the table has two main columns. One could also add a third column on the left side of the table with a hyperlink to the ”linking article”, in case the patroller would like to access it for further overview or editing, although I doubt that this would be used very much in this context. And on the right side there should definitely be a hyperlink to a ”remove link” function, where the insert of the new link could be easily reverted by the patroller, if deemed unsuitable. In all a table with 4 columns.
4. With such a setup I believe, that the patrolling of these links would cost 1-5 seconds per new link, and I think that I would prefer to get a chunk of 20 to 100 such new links to verify in one go, as opposed to one by one, as with normal content edits. And I think that this would be feasible, since newly added links (especially as in this case, based upon the recommendation of the system) can create considerably less harm, than destructive editing can, so that this patrolling is much less time critical, i.e. one could wait and collect a batch of these added link edits and then let a ”link patroller” sink his/ her teeth into one such batch.
5. The way the patrolling of this has to be done today, it is imho definitely neither easy nor fun. I believe that this would be completely turned around if based on the suggested table- and batch method.
6. Needless to say, that I would be happy to take a look at or beta-test such a function, if you were to go ahead and give it a try. Gunboz (talk) 00:09, 10 June 2022 (UTC)

Thank you @Gunboz for the extensive feedback! We are still in the early stages of determining how we can improve the patroller experience for these edits, so this is super helpful. I will likely have further questions once we can focus on this more, and I'll be sure to reach out if I have further questions or we have some designs ideas ready for feedback. Thank you! KStoller-WMF (talk) 23:08, 10 June 2022 (UTC)

There may also be a next step to this: The other day I had a chat with another user on svwp, @Plumbum208, who actually brought me to you guys in the first place. His analysis, using Petscan was, that the Add a link tool "finds easy links", i.e. links to certain relatively well known subjects, which then end up with a lot of incoming links, possibly leaving other subjects "by the wayside" which might be rarely used and less commongly known, but still (and possibly therefore) would deserve to be more noticed. One use of this insight, after the patrolling issue is handled (btw. svwp does not enforce patrolling, like for example dewp, which might make this issue less severe on svwp), may be to present more than three link suggestion for an article, maybe also in a table with text snippets, then sort these based on the number of incoming links to put the less used on top, or some variant of this idea. Gunboz (talk) 05:38, 11 June 2022 (UTC)

Thanks for this idea @Gunboz, I've filed it as T310120 KHarlan (WMF) (talk) 09:12, 8 June 2022 (UTC)

Comment encourager les novices à modifier davantage ?

Voici quelques réponses publiées sur Wikipédia en français :

https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sujet:Ww312tmfxaabb3ou -- Nemo ^Discuter 14:14, 15 June 2022 (UTC)

Merci Nemo ! Les conclusions de cette conversation globale ont été résumées ici et il me semble que tes commentaires rejoignent ceux d'autres personnes. Trizek_(WMF) (talk) 15:55, 15 June 2022 (UTC)

Optimising your statistics …

I see that the new growth features put an emphasis on some statistics.

Has it been thought how to measure the perverse effects that some of this could have ?

For example :

• It can occur that optimising the statistics become the prime motivator of contributors.
  • This could entail that the quality become secondary in their eyes,
  • or that they get upset because someone opposed to them because they do to much of whatever they do as an attempt to make a number become bigger. This in turn could entail more conflict between contributors with different motivation and way of contributing, which may in turn entail some people to leave the project if they don’t like conflict

Is there a plan to detect such adverse effects ? TomT0m (talk) 13:20, 5 July 2022 (UTC)

Merci for your question, @TomT0m!

In the design that was attached to the lastest newsletter shows the number of edits made, but also the number of thanks received. We are still in the exploration phase, so we still gather more feedback about it.

We know that some users will user whatever method to "earn points". This is why we are working on promoting qualitative edits. We want new users to consider the quality of their work as being rewarding, instead of increasing their usercount. We can't only consider the number of edits made, as it has already been proven to be rejected by communities: we both know that some users making multiple small edits to artificially increase the number of edits they've made.

So, instead of detecting users who artificially increase their editcount, we currently consider to decrease the importance of the number of edits by adding some other parameters to the equation. The idea is that newcomers will have to keep all their parameters in good balance. The contract would be clearly given when they start.

Our question ar the moment is to know what are the tools and data used by communities to detect the quality of an edit. This way we will decide which leads we can follow to increase the quality of the edits. we will very soon ask some communities about how they consider the quality of edits for individual users. French Wikipedia will be part of this feedback loop, I hope to see you there! Trizek_(WMF) (talk) 13:39, 6 July 2022 (UTC)

I contacted French WIkipedia at these places about quality of edits:

• patrol noticeboard
• mentors noticeboard
• help and welcome coordination project Trizek_(WMF) (talk) 10:30, 7 July 2022 (UTC)

Placeholder when submitting a question in mentorship module

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@Trizek (WMF), hi, can you help me, please :)

When trying to ask a mentor a question from the home page, the form is pre-filled with the following text: "Здравствуйте! Как создать". Can you tell me where it is configured and why it exists in general? Iniquity (talk) 16:59, 6 July 2022 (UTC)

Hello

Happy to help! :)

Could you tell me precisely where you find this message?

When I go to my homepage and click on "ask your mentor a question" (Задать вопрос вашему наставнику) a pop-up opens. In this pop-up, I read the placeholder "Поздоровайтесь и задайте ваш вопрос." I don't see the message you mention. Trizek_(WMF) (talk) 18:08, 6 July 2022 (UTC)

I took a screenshot :) https://prnt.sc/NnxC-z5bQyoV Iniquity (talk) 18:38, 6 July 2022 (UTC)

Oh, sorry, we found out where it came from. It seems that I haven't asked a question for a very long time (more than a year ago). And I still have it in localStorage: homepage-questionposter-question-text-mentorship. Iniquity (talk) 20:06, 6 July 2022 (UTC)

No worries!

So the text you have is one you typed, right? Trizek_(WMF) (talk) 10:26, 7 July 2022 (UTC)

Yes, a very long time ago :) Iniquity (talk) 13:43, 7 July 2022 (UTC)

Gotcha. Maybe it is time to send it now? :p Trizek_(WMF) (talk) 11:22, 8 July 2022 (UTC)

Yes, I think it's time too xD Iniquity (talk) 21:53, 8 July 2022 (UTC)

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PageTriage code reviews

Hello Trizek (WMF) and growth team. Nice to meet you guys. You're listed as the stewards of PageTriage. Would you guys be willing to help with code reviews for PageTriage patches? Who are the best software engineers from your team to tag in Gerrit code reviews? Thanks! Here's the patch I wrote: https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/c/mediawiki/extensions/PageTriage/+/814350 –Novem Linguae (talk) 23:11, 18 July 2022 (UTC)

Hi @Novem Linguae, per our project page, PageTriage is in "passive maintenance" by our team, meaning we will help fix "unbreak now" level issues and do code review, when there is time. In the short term, there have been a few contributors to PageTriage among the developer community recently, who could perhaps review and test your patch? In the longer term, if you would like more direct support from WMF for this extension, I would suggest filing a code stewardship request to start a process for getting improved support/maintenance for the extension. KHarlan (WMF) (talk) 08:24, 19 July 2022 (UTC)

Ability to skip a suggested article before and during editing

Our newcomers began to make strange edits to skip the proposed article: [1], [2]. It seems to me that this is not very good :(

@Trizek (WMF), what do you think? :) Iniquity (talk) 02:49, 17 August 2022 (UTC)

Thanks, @Iniquity, for escalating this and linking to two examples. I know @Sunpriat also mentioned this issue on the Newcomer tasks talk page too. @Trizek (WMF) is out for a few weeks, so I'll try to help and follow up here.

I don't believe this has been reported as an issue on other wikis, but let me check with our Growth Ambassadors to see if they have ever received similar reports. I'll also see if our QA Engineer, who is fluent in Russian, can test this flow on Russian Wikipedia. Based on her feedback and our UX designer's feedback, I'll see if we should look into what you are suggesting: adding an easier way to skip a suggested edit after starting an edit.

Are there just these two examples strange edits from newcomers, or are there more of these types of edits I should be aware of? Thanks!

Thanks again for always providing the Growth team with valuable feedback! KStoller-WMF (talk) 16:59, 17 August 2022 (UTC)

Oh, I didn't know about the topic from Sunpriat, thanks!

> I don't believe this has been reported as an issue on other wikis, but let me check with our Growth Ambassadors

Yes, I'm also interested, I do not believe that only we have such a problem. That's why I did not immediately create a task on the Phabricator.

> Are there just these two examples strange edits from newcomers, or are there more of these types of edits I should be aware of?

So far, only such and very rare, maybe I was looking badly. Iniquity (talk) 17:14, 17 August 2022 (UTC)

@Iniquity I've checked with our Czech, Arabic, and Spanish Ambassadors and they report that this hasn't been an issue on their wikis.

Looking into those strange edits: [3], [4], one is by a user who made many single-character edits, most of them while not utilizing Growth tools, and the other is made by a user who made a single-character edit and then never edited in article space again.

As newcomers experiment with editing there will be some degree of confusion and mistakes, hopefully it's not very common though. But please keep me informed if it seems like these type of edits are fairly regular and I can dig into the issue further. Thanks! KStoller-WMF (talk) 23:24, 18 August 2022 (UTC)

@KStoller-WMF, Thanks for your research! I will monitor this behavior.

In any case, as part of the "feature", I think change the article after open it would be useful.

Thanks again :) Iniquity (talk) 00:25, 19 August 2022 (UTC)

Add Additional Resources to the Mentor Dashboard

Hi again! :) We discussed the mentor panel here and the mentors suggested adding links to the mentors forum so that we can jump in and discuss things quickly: ru:Обсуждение проекта:Помощь начинающим.

And I would like to add a link to the beginner help project there, since the project contains many links to resources: ru:Проект:Помощь начинающим.

Question. What is the best way to do this?

cc @VladimirPF Iniquity (talk) 17:32, 17 August 2022 (UTC)

Hello @Iniquity! :) I'm glad that mentors are discussing mentorship together, and I agree providing a quick link to navigate to that discussion makes sense.

I believe admins can edit and add Resources here: https://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/MediaWiki:GrowthExperimentsConfig.json

If that isn't what you are looking for, please just let me know and I'll can follow up. KStoller-WMF (talk) 21:40, 19 August 2022 (UTC)

@KStoller-WMF, I can't find where to add resources to mentor dashboard in this file :( Iniquity (talk) 21:48, 19 August 2022 (UTC)

Sorry, I misunderstood. Those Resource links might not be modifiable currently: https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T288879 but I believe the intention is to allow communities to customize them in the future: https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T279152. Perhaps after the rollout of the structured mentor list, that's an improvement we can consider prioritizing.

I'll chat with our team to make sure I'm not missing any other potential solutions. KStoller-WMF (talk) 23:05, 19 August 2022 (UTC)

Do I need to create a separate task for this? Iniquity (talk) 14:28, 20 August 2022 (UTC)

No, this task should cover adding the functionality you are asking for: https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T279152

I've added a note to the task about your request; feel free to follow that task or add more details in the task if you wish.

Thanks again for thinking about ways to improve Growth features, I agree that it would be great to allow customization of the References list! KStoller-WMF (talk) 16:11, 20 August 2022 (UTC)

Thanks for the explanation! :) Iniquity (talk) 17:13, 20 August 2022 (UTC)

Deployment table needs updates?

According to Growth/Deployment table the features are only enabled for 10% of users on English Wikipedia, but according to w:en:Wikipedia:Growth Team features they are enabled for 100%. Not editing it myself as maybe there are other languages which need updating too. the wub "?!" 22:49, 17 August 2022 (UTC)

Thanks, I'll double-check the full deployment table to make sure it's up-to-date. KStoller-WMF (talk) 23:21, 17 August 2022 (UTC)

trying..

..but failing...

I am trying to use in el-wiki the "Add an image" feature, as I translated @Trizek (WMF) message to :el:Βικιπαίδεια:Αγορά#Το_«Πρόσθεσε_μια_εικόνα»_είναι_διαθέσιμο_για_νέους_συντάκτες_στη_Βικιπαίδεια. I have not managed to find out where it is. Taking into account that I am an experienced user, either my mind is not operating clearly today, or the documentation is not very clear.

I am using Chrome. I activated (eventually) the homepage. I see three options (easy/medium/hard), but adding images in nowhere. I suppose that either I am doing something wrong, or ??? FocalPoint (talk) 20:38, 24 September 2022 (UTC)

@FocalPoint, the message tells that 50% of new users get this feature, but nothing is said about old accounts getting it. I suppose it cannot be voluntary switched on just yet. Ата ^(talk) 11:52, 25 September 2022 (UTC)

ha ha ha ... I am in the 0% of existing users who get it, apparently. Still, I am interested to try it, please let me know if and when you make a switch available. In my opinion, it might be interesting also for existing users. FocalPoint (talk) 14:21, 25 September 2022 (UTC)

Καλημέρα @FocalPoint! You can use this snippet in your browser console on Special:Homepage: ge.utils.enableImageRecommendations()

Thank you for helping with translations! KHarlan (WMF) (talk) 08:47, 26 September 2022 (UTC)

Hello @KHarlan (WMF), I managed it. It works well. It may not fit as a tool for new users in my opinion - but you are doing an experiment, which will tell more than the opinion of a user. I believe that it is an excellent tool for experienced users. FocalPoint (talk) 18:15, 26 September 2022 (UTC)

Consultation re: Echo notifications

Hello Growth team! Reaching out on behalf of the Campaigns team re Echo notifications via email: https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T316772#8257610:

Growth is still listed as the maintainer of Echo (though there's a note that it needs a new owner) - is there a specific person you would recommend that we ask? Thanks, all! LDelench (WMF) (talk) 14:25, 26 September 2022 (UTC)

Hello Lauren

I think you should ping your peer, Mariya.

But Growth has no plans regarding the improvement of email notification sent via Echo. And even if we are listed as maintainers, the ones who worked on this feature are now elsewhere. Your team is as skilled as we are to work on this, IMO. :) Trizek_(WMF) (talk) 15:13, 26 September 2022 (UTC)

Apologies if I wasn't clear! We're seeking a bit of technical consultation on the approaches @Daimona Eaytoy outlined inhttps://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T316772#8257610 - not program management consultation. If that's not possible, perhaps Growth team should be removed entirely from Echo on Developers/Maintainers. LDelench (WMF) (talk) 21:42, 26 September 2022 (UTC)

Like us, a lot of teams have a responsibility in maintaining some key features used by the Movement. We can be pinged for big crashes, but we lack the history behind product choices that were made years ago.

So I still think you should ask @MShilova (WMF). She will add your request to our next technical meeting agenda. Then, you'd then get multiple brains thinking about the approach Diamona suggests. IMO, it is the best approach but I let Mariya decide. Trizek_(WMF) (talk) 13:21, 27 September 2022 (UTC)

Discussion

Bonjour, je signale cette discussion sur la Wikipédia en français. Cela a été annoncé quand? J'ai pensé que ce changement pourrait venir de votre projet car il est nommé ici sur Phabricator. Cordialement, 37.103.1.0 (talk) 15:28, 11 October 2022 (UTC)

Hello, sorry for the frustration!

The Growth Team is currently the maintainer of Recent changes, so we appreciate you reporting this discussion.

Unfortunately I don't know of any Growth team work that would have caused this change. Perhaps @Trizek (WMF) or @KHarlan (WMF) can track down more information for us? KStoller-WMF (talk) 21:56, 11 October 2022 (UTC)

Bonjour

Le gras et les cercles pleins mentionnés dans cette conversation est la présentation par défaut des listes de suivi depuis au moins 4 ans. Concernant les triangles, il s'agit de la vue compacte, accessible depuis les préférences.

Beaucoup d'utilisateurs expérimentés ont modifié l'affichage de leur liste de suivi pour qu'il corresponde à leurs besoins. Sans doute est-ce là qu'il faut regarder si un gadget local n'a pas changé quelque chose, ou voir si un souci de configuration a remis à zéro les préférences de chacun.

La tâche Phabricator est une proposition, rien n'a été fait pour appliquer cela. Trizek_(WMF) (talk) 12:02, 12 October 2022 (UTC)

What is the change exactly? Sorry, having a hard time reconciling the translated text with what I see in the phabricator link, which seems like a different issue... KHarlan (WMF) (talk) 13:07, 12 October 2022 (UTC)

@Trizek (WMF) @KHarlan (WMF) Merci pour les responses. Oui, les points étaient déjà là, mais le visuel (layout) a beaucoup changé: maintentant les points flottent dans l'espace blanc, ils sont bien trop en evidence, à qui dois-je le signaler ? Les dates sont apparues en plus. Je n'avais pas modifié des gadgets ou activé la "vue compacte" le Spécial:Préférences#mw-prefsection-rc, j'aimerai savoir pourquoi la "vue compacte" a été activée ou si elle s'est activée tout seul par erreur. Cordialement, 151.42.132.94 (talk) 09:58, 13 October 2022 (UTC)

Pourriez-vous m'envoyer une capture d'écran par email (ou tout autre moyen) ? Ainsi, nous pourrons comparer les interfaces. Trizek_(WMF) (talk) 14:56, 17 October 2022 (UTC)

@Trizek (WMF) Capture d'écrans envoyées aujourd'hui par courriel. Cordialement, 151.42.159.1 (talk) 11:07, 10 December 2022 (UTC)

Bonjour et merci pour ces captures d'écran.

Tout semble fonctionner normalement, tant pour les points pleins et vides que pour les triangles ou l’espace blanc : c'est la présentation par défaut.

Entre temps, j'ai regardé si le problème avait été rapporté ailleurs, et je n'ai pas trouvé de rapport. Honnêtement, je n'ai pas d'idée. Par expérience, je pencherai pour un gadget ou script local qui a du dysfonctionner ou être réparé, amenant à ce conflit. Pour ma part, je n'ai pas eu le problème sur mon compte bénévole. Trizek_(WMF) (talk) 15:18, 12 December 2022 (UTC)

API for getting a list of mentors with all the data

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Hi, we use the list of mentors to form the pattern when the participant does not have a tutor (very old accounts). Now, to get the mentor's nickname, you need to make two requests: one for the GrowthMentors.json and the other for MediaWiki API.

Is it possible to get a list through the api that contains the names and other data about the mentor?

fyi @Trizek (WMF), @Martin Urbanec (WMF) Iniquity (talk) 14:52, 27 October 2022 (UTC)

Fixed here: https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T331444 Iniquity (talk) 10:30, 27 March 2023 (UTC)

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List of all real unstructured mentors

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After updating the list to structural, I'm sure there are many mentees who are still attached to mentors who have not passed the QuitMentorship procedure.

There is a possibility to get this list for ruwiki? I want to think about what to do with them. Iniquity (talk) 16:06, 27 October 2022 (UTC)

@Martin Urbanec (WMF), any idea?

We should look at other wikis, as well, and reassign mentees to mentors who aren't in any list anymore. Trizek_(WMF) (talk) 11:23, 28 October 2022 (UTC)

I thought of writing a task later to remove mentees from those who are completely inactive (like this phab:T321884). And ask those who are active, but no longer a mentor, re-enter mentoring and exit it or establish a status to 'away'. Iniquity (talk) 12:33, 28 October 2022 (UTC)

Hello @Iniquity, thanks for the question!

Fortunately, it is possible to create this list quite easily, because the Growth team decided in late 2021 to publish all mentorship data via dumps.wikimedia.org. Each Saturday, mentorship data are released at https://dumps.wikimedia.org/other/growthmentorship/. It is then possible for anyone interested to download the data and to build on top of them.

It is also possible to query the mentorship data via the API. For example, if I want to see all mentees assigned to you at Russian Wikipedia, I can do this: https://ru.wikipedia.org/w/api.php?action=query&format=xml&list=growthmentormentee&gemmmentor=Iniquity.

To create a list of users with at least one mentee, regardless of whether they are currently signed as mentors, the dumps are more convenient, as they provide access to the complete data.

To make it easier for you, I created an example PAWS notebook which generates this list.

You can find the list at the end of the notebook's page, together with the code I used to generate the list.

Let me know if the list is useful to you, or if you have any questions about how to make use of the mentorship data -- I'll be happy to help!

Best wishes, Martin Urbanec Martin Urbanec (WMF) (talk) 16:08, 28 October 2022 (UTC)

It's gorgeous. Thank you so much for all the links, they are very helpful! Iniquity (talk) 16:28, 28 October 2022 (UTC)

Glad to be of service! Martin Urbanec (WMF) (talk) 16:38, 28 October 2022 (UTC)

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Prohibited from becoming a mentor. How to?

Tracked in Phabricator
Task T322047

There is a problem. I have a partially blocked mentor who I want to exclude from mentoring/change his status to away and make sure he can't come back. There is a possibility? Iniquity (talk) 02:35, 30 October 2022 (UTC)

First of all, you should exclude them from mentorship. While being away, this mentor can still have their name displayed at some newcomers. Excluding this mentor, using Special:ManageMentors, will reassign their mentees.

But this mentor can still reapply. Hence, I filled T322047 to provide an option to exclude users from mentorship.

Side note: if the user is excluded from mentorship because they are toxic, the best solution is to exclude them from the wiki. These users may "do useful things", but they also prevent more users who'd do useful things to join. :) Trizek_(WMF) (talk) 17:05, 31 October 2022 (UTC)

Thanks! He's not toxic, he's just quite young and has a very strange way of communicating, which in my opinion can be very bad for newcomers: they get very bad answers. In addition to blocking NS Wikipedia, it is contraindicated to be a mentor :) Iniquity (talk) 17:22, 31 October 2022 (UTC)

Technical note: As of today, only sitewide blocks affect mentorship features (by fully excluding them from mentorship). I described several solutions how we can extend the partial blocks to mentorship features at T322047#8359548, thoughts are welcomed. Martin Urbanec (WMF) (talk) 12:16, 1 November 2022 (UTC)

Anomalous reassignment of mentors

Tracked in Phabricator
Task T322374

@Trizek (WMF), @Martin Urbanec (WMF).

Hi, I need your help. What happened here? https://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D0%A1%D0%BB%D1%83%D0%B6%D0%B5%D0%B1%D0%BD%D0%B0%D1%8F:%D0%96%D1%83%D1%80%D0%BD%D0%B0%D0%BB%D1%8B?type=growthexperiments&user=%D0%97%D0%B0%D0%B3%D1%80%D0%B5%D0%B1%D0%B8%D0%BD+%D0%98%D0%BB%D1%8C%D1%8F&page=&wpdate=&tagfilter=&subtype=&wpFormIdentifier=logeventslist

History: we kick one person from mentorship by admin and then he came back and leave by himself. When he got out he started reassigning mentors to everyone twice. Iniquity (talk) 15:20, 3 November 2022 (UTC)

I think it is related to https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T321382. Iniquity (talk) 15:22, 3 November 2022 (UTC)

There is a suspicion that the same pain can happen to this account: https://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/Участник:Sipuha_From_Ruwiki Iniquity (talk) 16:38, 3 November 2022 (UTC)

And it is possible that there is no double-click check when exiting mentoring. Iniquity (talk) 16:59, 3 November 2022 (UTC)

Thanks for the report Iniquity, as always! This is an interesting case.

> And it is possible that there is no double-click check when exiting mentoring.

At a first sight, that seems like a plausible explanation. I filled T322374 to further investigate this. Martin Urbanec (WMF) (talk) 21:22, 3 November 2022 (UTC)

Thanks! Iniquity (talk) 21:26, 3 November 2022 (UTC)

Growth team product KPIs

The following discussion is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.

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@Martin Urbanec (WMF), hi, what difference between "Question posted via help_panel_question" and "Question posted via mentorship_panel_question"? :) Iniquity (talk) 09:54, 4 November 2022 (UTC)

Hi @Iniquity,

the difference is in the origin and target of the questions. There should be an explanation text under the (i) icon in top-left corner of each chart, but that can be improved if it's not sufficient.

Currently, newcomers can ask questions in three different ways:

• To their mentor, via Special:Homepage: this is measured under "Question posted via mentorship_module_question"
• To their mentor, via the Help panel: this is measured under "Question posted via mentorship_panel_question"
• To the help desk, via the Help panel: this is measured under "Question posted via help_panel_question"

The last way (asking questions to the help desk) is currently kept as a fallback, in case the Help desk is configured, but mentorship isn't.

Hope this helps! Martin Urbanec (WMF) (talk) 15:49, 4 November 2022 (UTC)

Thanks for the answer! Yes, it helped :)

> There should be an explanation text under the (i) icon in top-left corner of each chart

Oh, I didnt see this button.

> that can be improved if it's not sufficient

I looked, there is a very complex text, it seems to me that there is not enough human description, as you wrote to me here :) Iniquity (talk) 15:55, 4 November 2022 (UTC)

Great to hear that!

Unfortunately, I can't make the (i) button more visible, as it's put there by Grafana itself (the software that renders the charts).

We can definitely improve the description wording though. I changed the text in the dashboard to use the phrasing I used here. Is it more understandable now? Martin Urbanec (WMF) (talk) 17:40, 4 November 2022 (UTC)

> help_panel: question posted via the help panel, mentorship is not enabled mentorship_module: question posted via mentorship module on Special:Homepage mentorship_panel: Questioned posted via help panel with mentorship enabled

I have this description, and I think you can add "To the help desk, via the Help panel:" phrase :) Iniquity (talk) 17:45, 4 November 2022 (UTC)

Oh, cache! I was changed. Now thats perfect, thanks! :) Iniquity (talk) 17:46, 4 November 2022 (UTC)

Great! Martin Urbanec (WMF) (talk) 19:03, 4 November 2022 (UTC)

The discussion above is closed. Please do not modify it. No further edits should be made to this discussion.

Thank you so much :)

I want to express my gratitude to you for your responsiveness, working with communities (you listen to us and hear us) and creating cool tools for beginners and mentors (setting up an extension through json and a special page is just gorgeous).

Keep up the good work :) I really like Growth team.

Special thanks to @Trizek (WMF) and @Martin Urbanec (WMF), you are cool! Iniquity (talk) 16:16, 7 November 2022 (UTC)

Well Iniquity, thank YOU for being so supportive, for being the good and bad news bearer for both Growth and Russian Wikipedia, and for being a great person. It is really a pleasure to work with you, and our common project grows (pun intended) because of all the great you put in it. Keep going! 😊 Trizek_(WMF) (talk) 16:37, 7 November 2022 (UTC)

Thanks for the kind words 😍 Iniquity (talk) 17:41, 7 November 2022 (UTC)

Mentoring function analytics

Hi all! I want to host a small conference/meeting for Russian wikipedia mentors. What analytics do you think would be interesting/useful? Have you had any meeting experience? Iniquity (talk) 15:10, 24 November 2022 (UTC)

Hello

Community events reports might help you regarding events we attend.

I can share some resources with you, just let me know what you need! Specifically for mentors, we already have Growth/Communities/Mentors training. Trizek_(WMF) (talk) 20:37, 29 November 2022 (UTC)

Hello @Iniquity, thanks for considering hosting a conference for mentors!

The Growth team recently added more mentor-related analytics to the Growth Team Product KPIs dashboard. You can narrow down and see just the ruwiki metrics here. Scroll down to learn where most mentor questions are posted/asked (from the newcomer homepage mentorship module or the help panel). You can also see graphs showing how many "automatically assigned" mentors are active, the number of newcomers registering per mentor, and the number of inactive mentors.

Notice that you can adjust the date rage at top, and that most of the Mentorship graphs have an "i" info icon you can click on to get more information about the metric.

Does that help? Let us know if you have further questions about mentorship analytics, as we are open to adding in more data based on community requests. KStoller-WMF (talk) 16:58, 30 November 2022 (UTC)

Hello everyone :) Thanks for the links, I knew about them, but looked again. From the statistics, I'd like something about the "growth" of success.

For example:

1. How many newbies asked questions via the help panel or module on the home page in two years

2. How many of them received their answers in two years

3. How many "suggested edits" were made in two years, and how many of them were rolled back.

4. It would be very interesting to know the statistics on the "welcome survey".

5. Statistics on "popular topics" for "suggested edits". What topics are usually chosen for editing.

6. Some statistics on retention due to the "work of mentors". Iniquity (talk) 21:18, 1 December 2022 (UTC)

@Iniquity Thanks for the feedback!

1. How many newbies asked questions via the help panel or module on the home page in two years

Russian Wikipedia’s Special:Tags page gives the following count for the various edit tags:

• help panel question: 441 edits
• mentorship module question: 7,649 edits
• mentorship panel question: 1,614 edits

3. How many "suggested edits" were made in two years, and how many of them were rolled back.

You can see graphs for #1 and #3 in Grafana (although not all the way back 2 years), but I assume you want to see an easy "total", not just the graph. Correct? Let me see if I can grab this data for you ASAP.

2. How many of them received their answers in two years

@Martin Urbanec (WMF) we have metrics on how many mentor questions are asked, but is there a way to also include how many questions received answers? Or perhaps just a percentage of mentee questions that are answered?

4. It would be very interesting to know the statistics on the "welcome survey".

Agreed, we've talked about making this info more publicly accessible, but it's not as straightforward as other aggregate data. We also only retain this data temporarily, so that's another consideration. @Trizek (WMF) I'm not seeing a Phab task for this, do you think we should add one?

5. Statistics on "popular topics" for "suggested edits". What topics are usually chosen for editing.

Interesting, I'll chat with our Data Scientist about this. I know we hope to switch to a language agnostic topic model in the future, so we might want to wait on this one.

6. Some statistics on retention due to the "work of mentors".

I'll chat with our Data Scientist about this one too. My guess is that this might be a challenge to add to a dashboard, but we are certainly looking at retention closely with the Positive Reinforcement project, and particularly at how encouragement from mentors (personalized praise) might help with retention, so hopefully we will at least have some data around retention and mentorship to share early next year. KStoller-WMF (talk) 19:31, 2 December 2022 (UTC)

@KStoller-WMF, thanks for detaled answer!

> Russian Wikipedia’s Special:Tags page gives the following count for the various edit tags:

I know that beginners can ask a few questions to the mentor. Are there clear statistics on users not edits? :) Iniquity (talk) 16:16, 5 December 2022 (UTC)

You mean the number of users who ask questions, instead of the number of edits tagged? Trizek_(WMF) (talk) 17:46, 5 December 2022 (UTC)

Yep, I am :) Iniquity (talk) 13:58, 7 December 2022 (UTC)

@Iniquity

Sorry for the delay, I wanted our data scientist to double-check the data I pulled before I shared it:

How many "suggested edits" were made in two years, and how many of them were rolled back.

• 74,088 newcomer tasks were made on Russian wikipedia between Nov 1, 2020 - Oct 31, 2022.
• 6,138 reverts of newcomer tasks on Russian wikipedia between Nov 1, 2020 - Oct 31, 2022.
• So in the last two years, about 8% of newcomer tasks on Russian wikipedia were reverted.

Some statistics on retention due to the "work of mentors".

We should have more data to share on this after our Positive Reinforcement project. :)

It would be very interesting to know the statistics on the "welcome survey".

Last month, between Nov 1, 2022 - Nov 30, 2022, it looks like about 49% of newcomers complete the welcome survey (it's not required). Of those that complete the survey, for the first question Why did you create your account today? the responses were as follows:

~ 37% To create a new Wikipedia article

~ 19% To read Wikipedia

~ 13% To add or change information to a Wikipedia article

~ 11% To fix a typo or error in a Wikipedia article

~ 1 % To add a photo or image to a Wikipedia article

~ 3 % I'm participating in a program, class, or event

~ 16% Other or N/A

Let me know if you are interested in other welcome survey data and I can grab more info for you. KStoller-WMF (talk) 01:41, 15 December 2022 (UTC)

> Last month, between Nov 1, 2021 - Nov 30, 2022,

Last month or last year? :) Iniquity (talk) 15:47, 17 December 2022 (UTC)

Ack, sorry, typo! That should have said "Last month, between Nov 1, 2022 - Nov 30, 2022" KStoller-WMF (talk) 21:53, 18 December 2022 (UTC)

Thanks for the stats! I will use it at my next meeting :) Iniquity (talk) 11:45, 17 December 2022 (UTC)

Is there any statistics on how many newcomers register from mobile, and how many from desktop? Iniquity (talk) 18:16, 17 December 2022 (UTC)

@Iniquity We have that information, but I'm not positive I know how to combine data correctly to grab that exact data for you.

This data is easier to access, although not exactly what you are looking for:

- Newly registered users on Russian Wikipedia

- Unique devices accessing Russian Wikipedia split by Mobile and Desktop

However, you would prefer to see that first graph (Newly registered users on Russian Wikipedia) but split by Mobile and Desktop, correct? KStoller-WMF (talk) 19:58, 21 December 2022 (UTC)

Thanks! :)

> However, you would prefer to see that first graph (Newly registered users on Russian Wikipedia) but split by Mobile and Desktop, correct?

Yes, I would like to understand how to make help documentation, and whether it is necessary to focus on mobile users.. Iniquity (talk) 20:11, 21 December 2022 (UTC)

Ok, understood. I'll look into this, but I likely won't have an answer for you until January.

Thanks for thinking about documentation improvements for new editors. I'll chat with you in 2023!  :) KStoller-WMF (talk) 16:40, 22 December 2022 (UTC)

Thank you! I will wait for it :) Iniquity (talk) 21:21, 22 December 2022 (UTC)

@Iniquity I don't have data yet for all of 2022, but here's some data from 2021 for Russian Wikipedia:

About 36% of accounts created were created from a mobile device.

Mobile users were less likely to Activate as compared with Desktop users.

Mobile users were less likely to be Retained as compared with Desktop users.

|Registration only counts users who self-registered on the given wiki (meaning autocreated accounts and accounts created by others are ignored).

|-

|Activation means making at least one edit within 24 hours after registration.

|-

|Retention means a user was activated and then went on to make at least one edit over the next two weeks after their first 24 hours.

|}

Hope that helps! KStoller-WMF (talk) 22:56, 13 January 2023 (UTC)

Thanks a lot! Yes, that's what I need! :) Iniquity (talk) 23:21, 13 January 2023 (UTC)

@Iniquity I just wanted to follow up since I now have the data for all of 2022.  :)

I've included Russian, English, and Growth pilot wikis so you have some comparisons:

• Numbers shown are monthly averages over 12 months from 2022-01 through 2022-12.
• Registration only counts users who self-registered on the given wiki (meaning autocreated accounts and accounts created by others are ignored).
• Activation means making at least one edit within 24 hours after registration.
• Retention means a user was activated and then went on to make at least one edit over the next two weeks after their first 24 hours.
• There are two ways to measure retention, either as proportion of users who activated, or as the proportion of users who registered. We show both in their respective columns.

|Language

|N Registered

|N Activated

|N Retained

|Activation rate

|Retention rate (of activated)

|Overall retention

|-

|Arabic

|8,871

|2,904

|340

|33%

|12%

|4%

|-

|Bengali

|1,804

|487

|54

|27%

|11%

|3%

|-

|Czech

|1,227

|518

|82

|42%

|16%

|7%

|-

|English

|99,787

|32,897

|4,714

|33%

|14%

|5%

|-

|Russian

|9,939

|3,330

|433

|33%

|13%

|4%

|-

|Spanish

|14,895

|5,056

|626

|34%

|12%

|4%

|}

|Language

|Platform

|N Registered

|N Activated

|N Retained

|Activation rate

|Retention rate (of activated)

|Overall retention rate

|Mobile proportion

|-

|Russian

|Desktop

|5,736

|1,670

|270

|29.3%

|16.2%

|4.7%

|42.3%

|-

|Russian

|Mobile

|4,204

|1,660

|163

|39.5%

|9.8%

|3.9%

|

|}

Also you might find this data useful: Wiki comparison, as the most recent data was just added.

I hope this is helpful! KStoller-WMF (talk) 23:02, 10 February 2023 (UTC)

{{#mentor}} load in Hello templates

The following discussion is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.

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Hello! We want to think and make it so that when arranging greeting templates, {{#mentor}} is inserted without substitution. How critical will the server load be if this word is used on hundreds of thousands of pages? Iniquity (talk) 16:32, 7 December 2022 (UTC)

Hello!

Not much, otherwise we wouldn't have provided it. :) Trizek_(WMF) (talk) 18:39, 7 December 2022 (UTC)

Thanks! :) Iniquity (talk) 16:23, 8 December 2022 (UTC)

The discussion above is closed. Please do not modify it. No further edits should be made to this discussion.

"Shorter version" should be put on jawp:Announcements

@Trizek (WMF): , Hi, I enjoy translating Growth Newsletter time to tome. I wish to convey you voices from jawp editors/users, mainly two points which tastes kind of sharp but the reality: There are inputs suggesting that providing News in full in foreign language is not a very wise choice, whichever WMF team initiates. If you want ppl to read and join you, please reconsider and perhaps tailor made the outreach to each local language and page you target.

The Growth Newsletter is a treasure trove, full of passionate reports and invitations, surely. But, maybe too big/too rich to publish on the present format, causing heart-burns? FYI, the Announcement page functions on jawp as a day-to-day bulletin board, very practical similar to old-fashioned, such like "lost-and-found". Could we make something as short as 200 words to introduce a new issue of Growth Newsletter?

I'll be frank to relay the murmurs of jawp editors.

• Growth Newsletter is too long and chokes other more practical announcements that needs attention for more concrete and urgent matters;
• Esp that Newsletter is not popular not inviting: why published in English on local page?
• When you do need to discuss further and in details, that is up to each reader. Do not nag in loud voice at me; If some group publish long long newsletter solely written in Japanese, are the enwp editors ready to accept such dis-manner?

We can publish shorter, Table_of_Contents type of circulars provided in local language. As much as the Newsletter is thought provoking, you need time to read. If TOC type of circular is published, and somebody finds a topic in it interesting, then they will set aside time to read the details. Don't we attract more insights in return on the talkpage, maybe? That way, at least it will be reader friendly publication. And at the most, that will open many doors across languages, I cross my fingers.

Good example is that from the Tech team (Tech News, published weekly). For the contents, we can't compare tech-related reports/announcements to what Growth team heads for, though, for readers, what is more handy?

Please take time and comprehend that each wiki needs Announcement pages for their own use, too.

Addendum: If I may translate the unspoken thoughts of jawp editors very plainly. "We are pushed into Knowledge Gap whenever we see lengthy announcement in English. Many teams of WMF tries to outreach through Announcement page. Surely, that and Village Pump is open to anybody including the Foundation, but actually the publication format unnerves ppl even to doubt the intention. Why is WMF utilizing jawp and its local hub of information as a dish to serve things in non-Japanese language? Are they sure ppl will spend time reading it with dictionary? No budget or resources for Knowledge equity? Squatting lines after lines in non-Japanese language is very rude in ja culture, because English is not a local language: it stands against the pride Wikipedia community holds in providing knowledge in native language."

IMHO, the above underlines the editors' discomfort, which we seldom tell somebody causing such situation, as taling back in English is not what ppl care. Dis-communication on the surface, but backed with cultural ethics. Let's look into how practically we convey the activities and resources the Newsletter delivers to people. I stand by the hours and researches each writer has poured into very rich content on each issue, and Newsletter should never contribute and have readers-to-be earmark "Growth-things", look away and negate. Ping me, and I'll try and find time to support TOC translation when you are ready. Omotecho (talk) 15:43, 20 December 2022 (UTC)

@Omotecho thank you for spending the time to offer such detailed feedback!

I'm the Product Manager of the Growth team and I think a lot about how we can better involve and communicate with all of the wikis and languages we build products for. It's certainly a challenge to find the right level of detail for our communication, and ensure it's translated and properly localized!

We currently post more detailed Weekly Updates (which I see you've also helped translate - thank you!) and the Newsletter is meant to be a more widely shared and succinct overview of our work. However, based on your feedback, it sounds like we should aim to make the Newsletters even more succinct in the future and ideally make sure it is fully translated before it is shared.

Once @Trizek (WMF) returns, I'll discuss your feedback further with him and make sure it is also shared more widely with Wikimedia Foundation Community Relations Specialists. Our Community Relations Specialist team has a far deeper understanding of how to prepare and deliver multilingual newsletters than I do, so I imagine they may have other ideas for how we can improve communication.

Thanks again for taking the time to provide feedback! @Trizek (WMF) is working to improve the Growth team's communication strategy, so we will certainly use your feedback when considering improvements to how we communicate. KStoller-WMF (talk) 19:10, 21 December 2022 (UTC)

@KStoller-WMF: Appreciate so much for your prompt attention. Yes, please ping me anytime, and I will link you to the latest local discussion that if Wikipedia:Announcement/ja^※ should segregate any Newsletter or message from WMF staffer into a subpage.

That motion was turned down for knowledge equity on global standard, and IMHO not sure how long we opposers could hold back if the same proposal will be made, as the WMF input looks flooding lately, even to a bilingual person. Expecting that trend will accelerate makes me worry very much as on the US calendar, we are in Q3-FY2022 now.

Could we also cast a light on different Fiscal Year systems?

FYI, past the New Year’s holiday, our social calendar in Japan moves on to the last quarter for Fiscal Year 2022, or the Q4-FY2022, on an April-March calendar: I suppose the Foundation will be in the Q3-FY2022, June-May, and activities can be in fuller swing, much more to share globally than the previous Q2 (November 2022).

Such gap of time frame based on different Fiscal Year Calendar (FY), and how practitioners plan their workflow. On June-May FY system, I suppose you have more time to move things on in January, before the dawn/Q4-2022. On the contrary, Japan (and a few other countries/regions) is toward the deep night/recounting a year in Q4.

That suggests cases in Q4 workflow: discussions starting in Q4 with a non-Wikimedia partner/a public sector rather leave over a new agenda into future FYs in Japan. Then June, not April, will be when public offices and legislatures in Japan practically start the real work for, say FY2023. Because the Diet approves the Supplementary Budget for that FY by the last week of May.

Private sectors in Japan, including ja Wikimedia community and events/program organizers, and WMF Grantees, negotiate with public sectors and may need to set aside the waiting period April-May. You will be 100% sure official decisions is final and safe to give a go to local projects.

So going full circle, news needs to be fresh thus Newsletters are valued. Degrading factors such as FY systems might least affect "call for actions" go old or expired, if we plan timing and see how we pitch the ball (news) and hit, catch, and pass among us. I hope translation is a wide receiver mid-fielder to speak, enjoyable task if given enough time ahead. (※ = prefix "Wikipedia:" is applied on jawp; "Project:" on other /jp MW wikis, and enwp.)

Cheers, Omotecho (talk) 23:46, 21 December 2022 (UTC)

Thanks again for the details!

I've asked the Senior Manager of the WMF Community Relations Specialists team to review your thoughts, since this is definitely an issue that is more global than the Growth team.

Some of our staff have already started a winter holiday break, so your concerns might not be reviewed until January 2023, but I'll be sure they are discussed with other WMF staff soon. Thank you for spending the time to pass along your feedback and concerns! KStoller-WMF (talk) 01:08, 22 December 2022 (UTC)

Hello @Omotecho, and thank you for sharing your feedback and ideas with us. Japanese Wikipedia has the reputation of being a difficult to reach community, so I'm happy that you share this feedback with us. Also, I'm sorry for the late reply, but I took some time off.

Your message reflects some feedback I already heard, regarding the length of our newsletter and its content. It is a challenge, and it is a challenge for all newsletters. Hence I will split my reply in to parts, one covering the overall newsletters' challenges, and the other covering Growth challenges.

Regarding newsletters challenges

Community Relations Specialists take care of newsletters. Since I joined, newsletters have been a challenge. Our goal is to provide newsletter in the best format, in the right length and with comfortable options for translations.

We get feedback in favor of all possible (and conflicting) options: longer or shorter newsletters, translated versus untranslated but in a simpler English contents (even if translated contents have more supporters), posting at community boards versus posting at individuals talk pages, etc. Even the most appreciated newsletter we care about, Tech News, get some conflicting opinions about its content. :)

What is the best option regarding English versus local language? Should we offer information in English, even if not everyone can get the information or is frustrated by it, or not posting at all if we don't cover the local language? I'm personally in favor of posting in English if no translation has been provided, as the important thing is to inform users.

An other question Community Engagement has is about translations. It is difficult to find translators, and communities complain about it as they get the messages in English, with no way to translate it in an easy way after posting. Also, if the newsletter has a short edition, or partially translated, or if it redirects to a page in English, will it suit all users' needs? Of course, we have received some suggestions around paying translators, but we have more than 300 languages to take care of, and prioritizing one over another may feel unfair.

We also have the question of the right place where to post. We observe community pages that are full of announcements and newsletters, and we have no clue if the contents are read. We also have some communities asking us to post at a given page, knowing that it is a dead end as nobody goes there. So I like a lot the fact that you contacted us to improve the contents!

I took good note of the quarters' cultural differences. This is something I'll carefully consider on further publications. This is typically the king of feedback we look for. WMF fiscal year starts in July. It might be different and not standardized: I asked my relatives about their businesses, and they start their fiscal year respectively in October and January (case of businesses in France). The important point is to tell when the year starts, or to offer better timeframes. Instead of saying "In fiscal year Q3..." we should write "Starting in January...".

Regarding Growth newsletter

As @KStoller-WMF mentions, we are refining our communication strategy. We look for feedback and we test new approches.

One of the changes is the Highlights section in the newsletter. The goal is to have the essential information being displayed for users who just skim the newsletter. Maybe we could only send this short version to users who'd like to get the most important news? We have to find a good balance as we also hear from people who like the level of detail we provide. Out of curiosity, how would you summarize the latest Growth newsletter in 200 words?

We are also want to know more about our target audience. We want to inform experienced editors primary. We have two kind of users we'd like to target: the ones who care about newcomers, and the ones who are curious about changes we provide to newcomers' first steps. I'm taking the opportunity here to ask you about these users (of course without putting aside the rest of the conversation): are they profiles we can find at Japanese Wikipedia? Could they be interested by a conversation about which information they look for? Also, is Wikipedia:お知らせ/ウィキメディア共通 the right place to post the Growth newsletter?

As a conclusion (for now)

I'm really curious about any other feedback or idea you might have, so as on-wiki conversations you could share with us. We look for feedback to improve our services, and this conversation is promising. Again, thank you very much for starting it. Trizek_(WMF) (talk) 14:15, 3 January 2023 (UTC)

Happy New Year to you and your team! Right, I also share the many challenges Growth team has looked into, as I am saddened how ja community distances thmeselves from the Community sphere as if we are a loner, even in the 2020s. I appreciate you have come up with the Forum where any language is accepted, and wish it will live long.

The discomfort that ringers in ja community.

IMHO, one thing is that jawp is a group of writers and editors, period. Many inputs from WMF (news/newsletters/notices etc) are felt as coming _down_ to bother writership, misunderstood as the act of bureaucracy (pardon me for the sharp taste).

• There is a ja expression, "上位下達" (jōi katatsu) that somebody/something on a very high parch drops anything down out of the blue, regardless of how the downstairs' residences appreciate/dislikes;
• Obviously, free riding, or piggybacking on WMF servers does not irritate your feeling of fairness in ja culture, thus prevents you to think about your share is what you care and act for. (sigh)

How WMF has began walking with each community/Hubs, and I wish it will be appreciated how it will make our editorship/readership sustain and extend. Well, naturally, it involves much reading assignments: newsletters in en floods your inboxes, no way to catch up the volume if you are so thrilled to edit/write encyclopedia.

Wikipedia:お知らせ/ウィキメディア共通

literally, the subpage is a ja:announcement:wikimedia_subjects, to save space for jawp specific topics/action items.

• those who care about how ja community will sort out newsletters has decided to arrange the inbox into multiple layers. That is hoped to yield the negative feelings soiling how information is shared:
• Important and friendly message from WMF teams are buried and choked because of the total volume; the volume is not functioning to extend knowledge, rather ends up WMF teams competing for attention, no winner;
• on top of that, at the moment, the subpage kind of looks like a closet that things are thrown in at random; you can't dig out your favorite raincoat;
• if the newsletters are easily sorted, not by the readers, but by the posters. Icons? Color bands on its headline? Visual identity might help readers stop ignoring easily, go harvest their pick and become regular supporters.

Disorientation about how WMF and its reams are laid0out;

Does WMF has a simplified chart of teams/departments, or can we offer a navbox type of sorter? In Japanese society, we always look for charts how an institution or NPO lays out its sections;

• If you imagine the diagram laying out 10 metro lines posted above metro ticket vending machines in Tokyo. Maybe we could mend the disoriented feeling to how WMF functions day-to-day. Myself, too, loves to know the directory, not as a chart of power, but rather to save time and find the better reception desk where I will consult.
• How about categorizing newsletters to specific topic of interest? Digging into the mass of newsletters is not handy without proper cues. Esp when you are a writer/editor much more used to look at the page bottom and care about the categories. I guess it involves community discussion locally and name categories or not?

200 words' newsletter

As a translator, my analog sense of word count is bound by 200-400-600 and so forth to translation source in en: it will fit to approx. 400 characters in ja the maximum, even when I embed translator's note to terminology. 400 characters are a volume you digest and comprehend the contents as a reader with out too much pain;

• the Tech News wisely fits its word count into the range of short memory circuit I guess; like giing external or interwiki links, can't we engineer our newsletters that way? For Growth newsletter, we have TOC page separate from the full-length one, and that TOC will function well to fit short memory circuit, that the essence of each issue will reach to wider readers: novice/Junior and hardcore/passionate but searching for what you can do; to Senior and believe you know the map, rather hesitate to try newer path, but somehow confident you will lead the way if the input is translated.

What I wish to change will be:

I wish to catch up before those notices arrive on ja communities in raw form, or in en; you can bring a horse to the riverbank, but can't force it to drink, you know...

• many notices are yet to be perceived as a chance to tell what you feel, even though more meetings invites you with interpreters/pre-posted list of agenda; offered in en, then instantly counted out as another thing "not mine", and unread, rot (archived).

Basic understanding of how we all support the Wikimedia is less comprehended in ja community as I see;

• some clutch their arms and very much sound as if preaching new comers that you don't go near WMF-ish things, as they came _after_ Wikipedia came into our world;
• it might have looked/sounded cool (in the 2010s), but no more, as I eyewitness more newcomers to jump over the fence and reach out to Meta or Mediawiki;
• too bad that those jumped into wider Wikimedia sphere stumbles as the common/standard language, English, is a too wide a ditch in front of you.

Even after newsletters be offered in translation, it might not change drastically how ja community members are motivated to read more input from WMF. A jawp editor/writer is too afraid to allow themselves and spend time reading things not directly contributes to the article page(s), in which you pour your free hours to comb and brush up. How can we change that superstitious thinking pattern? What can we sell better to those picky buyers of information? Omotecho (talk) 18:22, 3 January 2023 (UTC)

if the newsletters are easily sorted, not by the readers, but by the posters. Icons? Color bands on its headline? Visual identity might help readers stop ignoring easily, go harvest their pick and become regular supporters.

The problem with any visual distinction is that if a wiki doesn’t have a separate page for newsletters (most wikis don’t have, they’re just thrown on village pumps), these visually distinguished messages sent by some outsiders (from the wiki’s point of view) are much more prominent than messages sent by users of the given wiki, specifically aimed at users of that wiki. What could work is wrapping the message in MediaWiki messages that don’t do anything by default, but can be locally overridden to provide styling, like

{{MediaWiki:wikimedia-newsletter-start|growth}}
...
{{MediaWiki:wikimedia-newsletter-end|growth}}

(these two messages need to be defined as empty in the WikimediaMessages extension). Japanese Wikipedia could override them to respectively open and close a colored <div> (or add an icon in the opening one or whatever you want). Tacsipacsi (talk) 21:30, 3 January 2023 (UTC)

Hello

A quick update about these topics: as we will improve the Growth team's communication strategy, the ideas and suggestions shared here will be tested when possible. To be continued. :) Trizek_(WMF) (talk) 19:14, 16 January 2023 (UTC)

A new issue is ready for translation.

We tried to keep it short.

With this newsletter, we test a solution to reach more translators. We offer a new option for translators to be informed of a new issue, by receiving a message directly on their talk page. Please signup for next issues! Trizek_(WMF) (talk) 13:25, 27 January 2023 (UTC)

Finished the latest issue, and wow, very crisp to read/translate! I sense much editorship was needed to condense the important issues and topics into that length, which is scientifically very handy to read: think about how ppl will open your newsletters on the way to office, as Tokioan workers spends 45-80 minutes on train (;

And appreciate so much you showed translators-to-be that they are wanted. Kindly ping me if your analysis between how ja community readers are motivated to read on, clicking links in the digest newsletter. Arigatō.

BTW, Do we put "xyz minutes' read" kind of teaser? I bump into such strategy more often, and in WMF circle too. Very wise. Cheers, Omotecho (talk) 11:29, 29 January 2023 (UTC)

Thank you for your feedback, but you were the one who gave is the ideas we implemented. :) If you want to be pinged for the next issue when ready for translations, please signup here.

We don't gather data on how many people read, from where they are, etc. The only way we have to know if an issue is read is when we get follow-up questions, or when we observe community discussions, or community changes.

Reading the "xyz minutes' read", we never considered it as our audiences are very broad. It would be up to translators to guesstimate a reading time. And even with a guess, it would be very imperfect. For instance, I read English less faster than a native speaker. And I know some users who read the newsletter in a language that is not their first or even second language. Reading times are definitely irrelevant for them; it could actually impress them and make them feel dumb because they need three to four times the needed time -- it is not what we want to do. Trizek_(WMF) (talk) 14:47, 30 January 2023 (UTC)

Please please do some market research considering newsletters and how much they are read. Or casual chat at Wikimania in Singapore? IMHO among NPOs like one for the wild birds, they put a one-minute quiz or enquette time to time: it is to get the general idea how the readership perceives/enjoysthe contents, to scale the impact versus the energy to edit and publish newsletters.

Thank you @Trizek, very interesting insight regarding the reading time.

My understanding syncs with yours as I am also not a native English speaker/reader either, and still, reading time given towards native readers just makes me judge: if the writer has considered how busy the readers are and/or it needs hook to - grasp hearts of readers. As far as it is titled a newsletter, details will be linked and all I need is headlines with good summary.

Lengthy ones are called reports, aren't they? (; As far as newsletters are a kind of love letter/job report, we need to grasp our readers at the first "blow".

Of course, not 100% of us users/editors, though if you allow me share you my personal view, I don't mind reading lengthy reports or academic theses as word count does not signal too negative contents or intention to cover up unwelcome news. But the lengthier the public post named "news"...

Actually, I now realize how my eyeglasses have been tinted with those Japanese public posts by public offices titled newsletters. If I need to scroll down too many times, that signals some thing negative has been covered up misusing the community resources they have demanded for the job.

Foundation and us:

Cultural thing. Kindly consider that in some culture including that in East Asia, anything named with a "Foundation" tends to, either horseback racing or children's book or free knowledge frontline, makes esp ja peers sense they need to be protective being in a structure of power: It's an instinct telling us we are not on the top layer but downstairs, practically necks will ache looking upstairs. I am glad that purist mindset has been changing among ja wikis. And hope less ppl will panic at posts in non-ja language on the Village Pumps/ja or Announcements/ja...

My motive to translate things from and to anything English is to expand chances to my peers and understand we are together on the bandwagon named Wikimedia Movement. And my hunch tells me I am facing the same direction with you, Trizek, using our second language. Very Movement-oriented !^o^! Have a nice day, cheers, Omotecho (talk) 06:13, 31 January 2023 (UTC)

I like the idea of making some market research about newsletters, in the context of the Wikimedia movement.

We would certainly discover that one would like to keep the newsletter short, whine an other would really prefer to have muche more details, or the case of users complaining because the language is too simplistic or too complicated. And probably many more contradictions, on which we would have to find the right balance... Without proper

I'd love to have time to work on this, but time for out of annual plans projects is a rare commodity.

This is where community members can step in and offer their help. It is another way to participate to the movement's life. And it is easier for me or my colleagues to assist a project like this than leading it from start to finish. Trizek_(WMF) (talk) 13:55, 31 January 2023 (UTC)

Yes, I owe you a cup of good coffee for all your thoughtful relies. We are lucky bumping into Community Wishlist Survey, yey! I will brainstorm myself and offer my cup of coffee there. Cheers, Omotecho (talk) 14:10, 31 January 2023 (UTC)

@Omotecho @Trizek (WMF)

(Hi Trizek, I'm Junko, an MSG facilitator for the Japanese language since the very late 2022)

I have read through the interesting discussion, nodding frequently to both of your comments. And I obviously don't have any solution, I just wanted to throw in my perspective as a Japanese WMF staff who is also a newbie to the world of Wikimedia.

Survey would definitely be helpful to understand the readers and their needs for improve the contents and how they are presented. I also think that there's another challenge that perhaps many of the main target readers have not found the newsletter in the first place. Seeing that a lot of effort is made in editing and translating the newsletter, it would foremost be in the best interest that the newsletter is read by those who can appreciate the contents, and that number being as many as possible.

The biggest challenge for me so far in Wikimedia is that I feel I am always overwhelmed and lost in this vast ocean of text information. To be honest, I've found out about this newsletter thanks to Omotecho but otherwise, not sure when and how I would have found my way here. So I can easily imagine a similar scenario for many of the newcomers.

I wish there is "a world map" like thing where you can have a bird's eye view style glance and get a grasp of simply, "what is where". Making a map of the entire Wikimedia world would probably be unrealistic, but just the major projects including this newsletter which newcomers can benefit from?? (afterall, "treasure hunt maps" never show thorough information)

The Wikimedia is a world full of adventures, and I think more newcomers can venture out and enjoy the treasure hunt if there's a map to get them started (then again, maybe it already exists and I just don't know about, it which is something that happens constantly ;) JNakayama-WMF (talk) 04:01, 1 February 2023 (UTC)