Topic on Talk:Growth/2023

Hello. I'm from the Hebrew Wikipedia and I helped in deploying the Growth's newcomer features to the Hebrew Wikipedia, which have been recently deployed to our wiki. I just wanted to point out several suggestions and issues that were raised from our Wikipedia, in hope they will be solved, and therefore it will be easier for us to promote the features for frequent usage (and hopefully to set them as default in the future):

-It was suggested that the features should also suggest to new users to write new articles that don't currently exist (the ideas for such articles can be taken from lists we have in our various wikipedia's portals). I suggest that such edits can be suggested to users who choose the "hard" difficulty level of edits in the newcomers' suggested edits.

-It was asked that the blue button on the left side will not have a question mark on it. Although I personally don't think it's problematic, I would like to hear what is your opinion in this manner. Maybe it is better using something else instead?

-If the features are applied as default, will the homepage for newcomers be applied as default to every user (including the experienced ones), or only to these who register since then? The problem is that if it's applied to anyone, many users who don't really need mentors will have to manually remove the random mentor which was assigned to them (because they don't need one), which is quite an inconvenience to say the least.

Thanks

Hello @המקיסט -- thank you so much for helping deploy these features to your wiki and for communicating about them with your community. So far, there have been 298 suggested edits from 39 users! There have also been 106 mentor questions and 33 help panel questions.

I also heard about some community thoughts from @Aaharoni-WMF, so I'm tagging him here in case he wants to weigh in.

"It was suggested that the features should also suggest to new users to write new articles that don't currently exist (the ideas for such articles can be taken from lists we have in our various wikipedia's portals). I suggest that such edits can be suggested to users who choose the "hard" difficulty level of edits in the newcomers' suggested edits."

• It's interesting to hear you say this, because we have always thought about it the other way around. Usually, it seems like many newcomers want to create new articles, but they fail either because they don't understand the technology or don't understand policies. And so our features try to encourage newcomers to try easier edits first before they create new articles. How are you thinking about this? Is your wiki comfortable with newcomers creating new articles? Or maybe only after they've accomplished some easier edits?

"It was asked that the blue button on the left side will not have a question mark on it. Although I personally don't think it's problematic, I would like to hear what is your opinion in this manner. Maybe it is better using something else instead?"

• In general, when we design a feature, we actually try to design it in similar ways that other kinds of software do it. The reason is that people on the internet get used to certain symbols meaning certain things. Then when they see those symbols in our products, they automatically know what they mean instead of having to learn a new symbol. A common example is using an "X" to close a window. That's why we use the question mark -- we think people already know that the question mark means "help". Does that make sense?

"If the features are applied as default, will the homepage for newcomers be applied as default to every user (including the experienced ones), or only to these who register since then? The problem is that if it's applied to anyone, many users who don't really need mentors will have to manually remove the random mentor which was assigned to them (because they don't need one), which is quite an inconvenience to say the least."

• The way the features work right now is that all new accounts created on Hebrew Wikipedia since the deployment date have an 80% to receive the features. The other 20% are in our "control group", meaning that we compare the work of the 80% to the 20% to see if the Growth features have impact. So as time goes on, more and more users will have the features available, and will hopefully be used to them. Many experienced editors have asked us to adapt the homepage to be more useful for their work. That's certainly something that's possible in the future, but it's just that the Growth team's goal is to focus on newcomers for now. Regarding the mentors -- why do you say that experienced users would have to remove the mentor? If the user doesn't intend to ask any mentor questions, they can just leave the mentorship module alone, and choose not to ask any questions.

Let me now what you think!

About lists of articles in portals:

There are a couple of issues here:

1. To begin with, it's not necessary about article creation. Portals at the Hebrew Wikipedia also include lists of articles to improve, sometimes manually curated, and sometimes as a link to a category of stubs on the topic. The bigger issue is how can they be connected to the product you are developing. Or, to generalize it even more: How can wiki editors —in any wiki, not just in Hebrew— directly influence the topics and the suggested articles in them. If I understand correctly, they are currently built by analyzing WikiProject templates in the English Wikipedia, processing it with some algorithms, and applying the results to other languages. While this produces reasonable results from what I've seen, it's quite different from the usual way in which wiki editors work: They are used to influencing things directly by editing wiki pages and seeing the results applied immediately in lists or categories. The current technology has several layers that remove the topics from the editors' control. So it's not specifically about portals, but more about having a way to control things directly.
2. Talking about article creation, the Hebrew Wikipedia is not substantially different from English in this regard. Some articles created by new editors are good, and some are not so good. The English Wikipedia is simply much larger, and has much more new article creation, and primarily because of that it has stricter rules and technical limitations about that.

About the question mark icon:

Indeed, one user said this, and indeed, there are many other sites that do this. We are just passing the message. That user said that he doesn't like this icon because it is used on other websites, and on other websites it's often ineffective. I don't know if there are many other people who think like he does, but he may have a point: by itself, the fact that it's used on many other sites and apps doesn't mean that it's good and effective. Other than saying that, I trust the Growth designers and the design researchers to make good choices here.

@MMiller (WMF), @Amire80 Thanks for your comments. It's great to hear that the features are used more and more in our wiki.

As for the adaptation of the homepage, I'm happy to hear that it applies to more and more users by default. Indeed, there are experienced users who want to use the homepage also in our wiki. However, many experienced users preferred to remove the mentor and just try the experience of the homepage.