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.
Topic on Talk:Growth/2023
A very good point.
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. :)
The situation that really matters is:
- I edit
- I don't notice/read the message on my User_talk: page
- I edit again
The situation that doesn't matter so much is:
- I edit
- I never see any messages because I never edit again.
This should be possible to study.