Topic on Talk:Growth/Personalized first day/Newcomer homepage

In order to help newcomers as best as possible, I suggest that the "ask for help" button should open a chat window and connect the newcomer to an experienced user who provides help in real time and on the spot. This is not meant as an introduction of chat for all users, but only as a tool for which experienced users who want to help could sign up for. I believe that is is often difficult for newbies to write down what their problem or question actually entails and even more difficult to understand the answers written down by wikipedians. Real-time chat would help to come to the point since both participants could ask further questions to identify the specific problem the newcomer is facing. Ideally, this would be combined with a kind of back-end view, showing the experienced user the page which the newcomer is looking at (similar to a remote support functionality, but read-only).--~~~~

This is the best statement of the problem that I have seen!

often difficult for newbies to write down what their problem or question actually entails and even more difficult to understand the answers written down by wikipedians

As someone who very occasionally visits en-wp Teahouse and Helpdesk, and was recently looking at VE-feedback, I’ll say it’s quite common to see a post that make me go “huh? what?”. Another big issue is not knowing whether the newbie has come back and read the responses, as they rarely post an acknowledgement. It can be discouraging writing answers that will just get archived after a few days. Perhaps live help could be (sometimes) rewarding for the helper as well as the helpee?

Hi @Pelagic -- thanks for checking out these materials. I agree that newcomers have trouble formulating strong questions. This is definitely something we've struggled with in the help panel project. We've tried a couple ways to frame the prompt to ask questions, but we continue to get plenty of newcomers whose question is simply something like, "Hello" (which, I suspect, is because they expect someone to chat them back a "hello" right away).

And it is definitely also a problem that newcomers frequently don't see the responses. Our data from the help panel makes us think it is less than half of users who return to view the responses they get to their questions. To address this, we've encouraged newcomers to add email addresses to their accounts (via the newcomer homepage) and told them to expect a notification on wiki (via the help panel). We haven't yet revisited whether we increased how many newcomers read responses.

I agree that live chat help could be rewarding for the helper, and this has been an ongoing topic of conversation on our team: how to make the helping of newcomers feel rewarding and productive. One idea we have is the mentor dashboard, which would allow mentors to monitor how their mentees are doing, and to track the kind of impact they may have had through helping those newcomers succeed. Please feel free to add any of your ideas to that talk page!

But overall, the team has not yet prioritized to digging in how we could make live chat work -- we have been prioritizing the "newcomer tasks" features that you commented on separately. I do hope we can return to this idea.

Hi @Poupou l'quourouce -- thanks for reading about our team's work and proposing this idea. The idea of "chat" has come up a lot in our team's work, especially around the help panel feature. Newcomers frequently expect the help panel to have live chat, and experienced community members have expressed interest in supporting it. And at Wikimedia Hackathon 2019, we actually built a small prototype. But there are a couple of really big challenges around it that have kept us from working on it too much, and I'm wondering whether you have ideas around these:

• Resourcing: how could we make sure that enough experienced editors are available at all times to respond to chats?
• Patrolling: live chat could potentially be a vector for abuse, and we would want to make sure that it is a safe place for all users.

I'm CCing @Trizek (WMF) so he can follow along.

Resources and potential abuse are indeed relevant issues. I do not think that there will be enough editors available at all times for live-support. But in that situation there could just be a note saying "sorry, no live chat available at the moment, please try again later or leave your questions at XYZ, where they will be answered within the next days".

For abuse reasons there should be an easy way for the newcomer to end the conversation any time. And, possibly more important, the tool should (from a back-edn perspective) not be available to anyone, but only to experiecned users that have been approved by others, for example users who have mentor status (in de Wikipedia they are elected similar to admins, I do not know about other versions). Those users who engange would need to have some sturdy attitude, so they do not bother too much, in case they receive abuse messages from fake newcomers. Regards,--~~~~

Thanks, @Poupou l'quourouce. These sound lke sensible ideas. We'll keep them in mind if/when we decide to work on live chat for the help panel.

Hi folks, on top of Poupou's idea I would like to suggest: Do add a) some function for appointments / individual "office hours" and b) videochat. Since 2020/21 produced an enormous leap towards videocalls e-v-e-r-y-w-h-e-r-e: Some newcomers would greatly appreciate an instant or appointed face-to-face-talk. I would prefer some function as in moodle: one click opens a zoom-session.

Hi Sven!

To be honest, the Wikimedia Foundation will probably never built a video conferencing software. :)

Have you considered to have office hours announced on wiki (could be on the Homepage we provide), and use Jitsi or another FLOSS software?