I've been heavily editing Wikipedia:Wikipedia:Encourage the newcomers, trying to give fairly concrete and evidence-based advice, and it occurs to me that there are some experts here, too. I'd appreciate any criticism, commentary, or contributions. HLHJ (talk) 03:00, 7 October 2019 (UTC)
Topic on Talk:Growth/2023
Thank you for sharing this! I've read it and I think it is a good approach to introduce the work with newcomers.
Here are some ressources you can use to enrich your page, as examples or as inspirations:
- New Editor Experiences - a research program about new users (typologies, what are their motivations...)
- How to interact with newcomers - an help page created by Growth to help mentors interacting with newcomers
- Editing Wikipedia with my parents may be a good reading, to see how newcomers make their first steps
- An analysis of two reports made by French Wikipedia and Hungarian Wikipedia about welcoming new users (in German), published on the Kurier. FYI, the French part was done by volunteer-me.
Hi @HLHJ -- I think it's really cool that you're working on that page. How will other editors find it and read it? One thing that I definitely recommend including is advice on how experienced editors can recommend tasks to newcomers. Many newcomers arrive with something specific and challenging they want to do, such as write a new article. They don't realize that writing a new article is one of the most difficult things to do on Wikipedia, and so they try, fail, and leave. It can be good for an experienced editor to say something like, "It's good that you want to write a new article about a band. That's one of the most challenging things to do on Wikipedia. I bet you'll end up succeeding with your article if you practice some easier edits. Here are some existing articles about bands that could use some copyediting."
Sorry for the slow reply, I have some problems with my use of the notifications system, as you know :).
- An analysis of two reports made by French Wikipedia and Hungarian Wikipedia about welcoming new users (in German), published on the Kurier.] (archived version, as link above now broken)
- I think this is a bit out-of-scope for the essay, which is more about individual actions than community ones (though I'd agree that the latter are important changed my mind, added draft content). I'll add in "How to interact with newcomers", though, it's an excellent collection of traditional knowledge, if I can use that for a community of ca. 1 generation age. It would be really great if that page had citations to empirical evidence, maybe an observational study... I assume you've seen this on de's checked version system?
"Editing Wikipedia with my parents" is fascinating; I tend to see it as confirmation of my preconception that the main good/bad experience determinant is the interactions with other editors. I barely interacted with other editors at all for the first decade or so on en; IP editing, not even revert notifications. I guess that put me in the "Knowledge sharer" profile. On fr and de, though, I've generally had edits reverted for inadequate language skills; the implication that the editors there do not consider my edits worth ten seconds of their translation-polishing time is rather demotivating. I polish translations on en, and while sometimes the English is hard to understand ("velvet municipality"? oh, Samtgemeinde) I find that amusing.
"Encourage the newcomers" gets about 50 views a day these days. I did link it from WP:BITE, which is fairly trafficked, so hopefully anyone interested will find it. I've added some material on recommending tasks and new editors' goals, though it's still pretty rough and poorly-integrated; I'll come back to it when I've thought it over. HLHJ (talk) 05:04, 10 November 2019 (UTC)
Interesting discussion involving two new editors at en:User talk:Clovermoss#Editor retention, typo trivia. HLHJ (talk) 06:33, 5 February 2020 (UTC)
@HLHJ -- thanks for pointing it out! I put some thoughts there.