User talk:Sadads

Welcome to Meta!

Hello Sadads, and welcome to the Wikimedia Meta-Wiki! This website is for coordinating and discussing all Wikimedia projects. You may find it useful to read our policy page. If you are interested in doing translations, visit Meta:Babylon. You can also leave a note on Meta:Babel or Wikimedia Forum (please read the instructions at the top of the page before posting there). If you would like, feel free to ask me questions on my talk page. Happy editing! Tempodivalse [talk] 21:20, 17 November 2009 (UTC)

Wikimedia Travel Guide: Naming poll open

Hi there,

You are receiving this message because you voiced your opinion at the Request for Comment on the Wikimedia Travel Guide.

The proposed naming poll opened a few days ago and you can vote for as many of the proposed names as you wish, if you are eligible. Please see Travel Guide/Naming Process for full details on voting eligibility and how the final name will be selected. Voting will last for 14 days, and will terminate on 16 October at 06:59:59 UTC.

Thanks, Thehelpfulone 22:07, 6 October 2012 (UTC)

Grantmaking Barnstar

	Individual Engagement Grant Barnstar
	Thanks for the thoughtful participation in IEG proposal discussions - hope to have your ideas and input again in round 2! Siko (WMF) (talk) 19:49, 2 April 2013 (UTC)

Thanks! Sadads (talk) 20:09, 2 April 2013 (UTC)

No

No. I did not write that for you nor for your project, and you have no right taking credit of its creation as being part of your project. Ottava Rima (talk) 19:02, 8 October 2013 (UTC)

Removing it, it was in the window of time when the project has been active. It wasn't a claim to ownership of any sort, Sadads (talk) 19:46, 8 October 2013 (UTC)

" but Ottava Rima also appears to have plagiarized a few things in writing the (such as the Damon quotes I just added quotation marks to)." No. This was my version. Your quote came from Dmitrismirnov as well as other instances of plagiarism. I pointed out that he added original research, plagiarism, and lied about what sources said. I have sent out such instances to many people so far. Not only am I an actual scholar in the area (which neither of you are), I have written many FAs and GAs in the field. The additions by him would have him expelled from college because of the academic dishonesty (plagiarism and false attribution) they contain. The page is clearly not encyclopedic, and many of your pages aren't. Ottava Rima (talk) 03:20, 25 October 2013 (UTC)

@Ottava Rima: You are correct on my statement, I had misread where in the additions that was from (notice I prefaced the comment with my tiredness). I removed the comment, and will do a more careful reread of Dmitrismirnov's work. However, generally, his work has not been "original research, plagiarism, and lied", rather its writing of someone who is still learning the ropes of the kinds of writing need for high quality work. His paraphrasing is sometimes poor - yes I can agree with that - but I have yet to find a moment where he outright misused a quote or demonstrated some egregious use of sources. Remember, Wikipedia is both a work in progress and a place where people learn to contribute and build human knowledge, not some pillar of the academy. I currently teach writing, and know that every one of my students, whether a good or poor writer, will make mistakes about source use. Academic dishonesty is when individuals purposefully present information as there own in order to gain additional credit, not when someone makes minor (uneducated) errors of judgement when quoting and paraphrasing.

Also, I am going to regret asking this, but why tack on the "many of your pages aren't"? These kinds of comments only work to irritate whoever you are writing towards. Just in a couple of interactions, you are impressing upon me why your editing ban still holds in English Wikipedia. As a language and literature scholar, you should be familiar with the ideas of Ethos and Pathos when writing to persuade others. Does your language really engender an opportunity where others will want to be persuaded by your position? If you are a 19th century scholar, I would appreciate continued help in cooperation with the w:William Blake Archive through the project you disavowed above (you should be familiar with that organizations scholarly authority). However, simply addressing me with "No" and insults, makes me really resistant. Hope you are well, and I hope that we can interact on better terms in the future, Sadads (talk) 03:56, 25 October 2013 (UTC)

Fair use requires summarizing. He has infringed on Damon's text by taking the full copyrighted work of The Mental Traveller excerpt. He didn't use quotation marks when he used most of it. When he does summarize, he got the summarizing wrong and often says things that are opposite of the text yet claimed I did such to hide from his problems. This is not unique to The Mentally Traveller page.

"why tack on the 'many of your pages aren't'?" Have you not noticed how many of the Blake project pages the user has edited? Almost all of the new ones you have listed on the project page. All of the pages he touched has these problems. This has happened because you waded into something without the ability to have a forceful hand to prevent such problems. It should be obvious that "not everyone can edit" if you are trying to make something academic. A lot of people need to be watched carefully because they will only add problems.

As for the last point - addressing with "no" is blunt but not an insult. I already have enough problems with people adding my work to their projects and taking credit for it - I've had long fights with the Ada Lovelace people after they point to my additions as proof that they can add to the encyclopedia while ignoring that their only real additions have been claims of affairs or gambling problems. My work is my own and no one else's, and I prefer to keep it that way because my academic reputation is intrinsically connected to what I have added here. Ottava Rima (talk) 04:08, 25 October 2013 (UTC)

@Ottava Rima: As regards the plagiarism, I am beginning to go through the more recent edits now, and can see the problems. I confronted D on those issues at his talk page and hopefully we can use this as a learning experience for him. If not, I will keep a closer eye on his work.

As regards "This has happened because you waded into something without the ability to have a forceful hand to prevent such problems. It should be obvious that "not everyone can edit" if you are trying to make something academic." I knew exactly what I was wading in to: a huge gap in humanities materials on Wikipedia. The Editor I am working with from the Blake Archive is less interested in that the contributions are academic and more interested that we have better documentation of Blake and Blake scholarship on the Web. The archive is the location for Academic material to be present on the Web. On the other hand, Wikipedia offers an opportunity to lay more foundations for a public gateway to this knowledge. Wikipedia is by no means an academic place, rather it's a, per Whitson and Whittikar's recent book on Blake and digital remixing, a w:Folksonomy that gathers and present relevant information and directs people to sources outside the project, if they really are intrepid enough to continue researching. I don't use a forceful hand, because any work is a contribution to the space, and can be polished in later practice, for example my recent revisions of w:Beulah_(Blake). Sure that article is not a great examination of the topic, but it provide enough that the less then 10 visitors a day can get some basic questions answered, and go looking for more if that is what they want.

As for adding work to the Blake project: it has nothing to do with credit, it has everything to do with documenting the changes that occur during a period, so that people can see the dynamics of project. I am in the process of trying to get several Digital Humanities projects (including the Blake) to allocate funding for graduate interns to be researching, and developing Wikipedia materials. Without showing the changes that happen during a period, both in sync and out of sync with my direct intervention, I can demonstrate the value of additional academic support of Wikipedia.

I would greatly appreciate additional higher quality content related to Blake, as I know that you have produced before, but without supportive and cooperative collaboration, I am stuck with the much more amateur manpower that is choosing to help (for a relatively inexperienced editor in the English Wikipedia community, he is doing a fairly good job). Again, happy editing, and I appreciate you bringing to attention the problems with copyvio (I will do some revision to clear that up), Sadads (talk) 15:38, 25 October 2013 (UTC)

Check out w:Ode: Intimations of Immortality. That is an academic page. That is what Wikipedia would excel at, and that would be good for everyone. I also wrong w:Kubla Khan, but it has since deteriorated by a guy who inserts original research, plagiarism, and other problematic material. That is what happens to these pages unless you can keep people who plagiarize and put in nonsense out. I do not like having pages that I wrote associated with plagiarism and other problems, which is why I don't like them being connected to groups in general. The larger the organization, the higher chance for these problems to happen. And these individuals tend to spread like a plague, infecting page after page, and they go through organizations like wildfire. You can find a list of poetry pages to base formatting on here. Standard is 1. Lead 2. Background (general history of writing and publishing) 3. Poetry summary (in the style of Bloom's "Reader" analysis of short analysis and short excerpts of key points), 4. Themes (critical discussion of themes, not quotations as this section is for agreed upon ideas and not controversial/unique ideas unless it has been debated) 5. Reception (critics saying if a poem is good or bad and comparisons to the quality of other poems). Ideally, 1 sentence should be the summation of 10 or more sentences in a critical work. Anything less starts to cross the line of what is fair use and what is not. Ottava Rima (talk) 17:11, 25 October 2013 (UTC)

(from a passerby, I hope you both don't mind): Ottava Rima, didn't you mean "anything more [than 10 percent] starts to cross the line"? I'm interested in this as a rule of thumb that I could use in guiding others. I am aware of a 10 percent guideline for how much of someone's work can be used without violating copyright (like I think a teacher can safely and ethically photocopy and distribute 1 chapter out of a 10+ chapter work without permission), and am vaguely aware of a U.S. court case being cited as the source for the 10 percent threshold. Your suggestion of applying 10 percent as a guideline for when summarizing is done is different but sounds like a good one. Can you comment more? If here, please ping me. --Doncram (talk) 17:10, 26 October 2015 (UTC)

Thanks for the advise @Ottava Rima:. I definitely have tried to keep within the standard you lay out in my own work (though mostly on novels, here it is w:en:User:Sadads#Contributions), but thinking from an outreach perspective, it makes sense to encourage multiple different types of users to develop pages. Dmitrismirnov's work hasn't all been bad: take w:en:Visionary Heads for instance, which has, after community review and work, become quite good. I think the problem is that he hit w:en:The_Mental_Traveller with a little too much zeal (and I can see that now, and will begin doing some shaping). I poked Johnbod to take a look at some of Dmitrismirnov's other work, and when I get time, I will do the same. However, even if we don't catch it now, I imagine we will continue seeing improvements, per Wikipedia's work in progress ethos, hopefully.

Also, I would like to reach out again and offer: If you want to write articles for some of the gaps we still have in either terms or poems that would be great! (I can move them over to Wikipedia). I have a Wikipedia article writing assignment working on the SoI&oE poems Laughing Song (Songs of Innocence), "Night" (Songs of Innocence), "Spring" (Songs of Innocence), "The Little Boy Lost" (Songs of Innocence) and "The Little Boy Found" (Songs of Innocence). Otherwise, though, there are still quite a number of gaps, that even smaller articles, like w:en:The Grave (poem) would greatly add value too. I am also trying to use the Archive images for illustration across projects, and have a transcription going at s:en:Index:Father's_memoirs_of_his_child.djvu which need some more manpower. Hope you can help, Sadads (talk) 20:22, 28 October 2013 (UTC)

The background section of Visionary Heads reads too much like a pop culture New Yorker piece than an encyclopedia. You could trim down on the "opinions" and focus more on dates, hard numbers, and publications. Those are essential pieces of information a reader will be looking for. Opinion goes at the bottom in a critical reception type section. Also, the listing of all of the images and other things doesn't do the page any favor. Categories are designed to easily lump subpages together. Think of it this way - you have 3 days to do an assignment. You need basic information of a poem to write your paper. What do you want? Quick background so you know the context of it compared to other works, a brief summary of critical opinion, and some key facts so you can better visual a topic. That is your goal. Ottava Rima (talk) 18:30, 29 October 2013 (UTC)

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Wikidata

Hi. I have been creating the wikidata items related to the first articles you created during the 100wikidays challenge. Why don't you try it yourself ? It's easy. Wikidata is a very powerful tool, and knowing how it works is quite useful. Best, Trace (talk) 22:49, 6 August 2015 (UTC)

@Trace:Thats the thing: last couple times I have tried to login via my connection with En-Wikipedia it says its not logged in to WikiData. Didn't want to spend too much time debugging, try for todays, but don't understand how to add arguments. Sadads (talk) 13:11, 7 August 2015 (UTC)

Well, I see you managed to log onto wikidata and create a new item. And even add statements for "Dreaming Emmett" ! Perfect. It is really useful, especially for articles that only exist on one wiki - it helps translating them, etc.

Best, Trace (talk) 11:10, 7 August 2015 (UTC)

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typo note

Hi, i arrive here from reading through the WikiProject X report and seeing your comments at the end, at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Grants:IEG/WikiProject_X/Renewal. You meant "precedent" rather than that word's homonym "president" (or almost homonym, as it sounds almost exactly the same). Maybe you want to change that for better understanding by other readers (i expect it would be confusing for some including those not having English as their first language).

Also I read through discussion above with Ottava Rima and hope you don't mind my asking a question there. You both seem very thoughtful to me. --Doncram (talk) 17:10, 26 October 2015 (UTC)

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Community Wishlist Survey votes

Hi Sadads, thanks for participating in the Wishlist Survey! I'm sorry that this wasn't clear -- this is the proposals phase of the survey, when people are posting and discussing proposals. The voting phase starts in a couple weeks, on November 28th. We're not counting votes that are cast early, because the proposals can change during this phase, and you might end up voting for something that changes in a way that you didn't expect. I've added some text at the top of the page, explaining this better.

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Hello again! Just wanted to let you know that if you are supporting a proposal, to use the {{support}} template. I noticed at 2016_Community_Wishlist_Survey/Categories/Watchlists#Watchlist priorities or Multiple watchlists you did not specify your position. Thanks for participating! MusikAnimal (WMF) (talk) 18:11, 28 November 2016 (UTC)

It looks like you didn't specify your stance on this proposal either: 2016 Community Wishlist Survey/Categories/Watchlists#Only watchlist certain categories for membership changes. Thanks! MusikAnimal (WMF) (talk) 22:37, 28 November 2016 (UTC)

You shouldn't provide references

Wikidata goal was to create items about concepts from real world: 2. It refers to an instance of a clearly identifiable conceptual or material entity

Some users simply don't fit this project, despite being active since 2013.

• https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q33197000 https://www.wikidata.org/w/index.php?title=Special%3ALog&type=&user=&page=Q33197000
• https://www.wikidata.org/w/index.php?title=Q3919654&action=history
• https://www.wikidata.org/w/index.php?title=Q4229435&action=history

User stalks edits by Fractaler and D1gggg and makes vandalism left and right. D1gggg (talk) 11:48, 8 December 2017 (UTC)

site plan (Q1284677) isn't global

I doubt that e.g. Vatican have it. Not individual buildings, but whole country (city).

Same about African countries.

You may not know every country where site plan is regulated, but I don't understand why you are removing correct claims

Don't follow path of user in section above. D1gggg (talk) 12:56, 8 December 2017 (UTC)

@D1gggg: I see that you have been banned from Wikidata for cross-wiki harrasment. I also find that many of the contributions that you are point at, are unreferenced claims that misuse existing properties. Please see the Wikipedia articles pointed at for Q1284677: this is a generic concept. Perhaps the item needs to be split to represent specific concepts from other language Wikipedias. Sadads (talk) 17:12, 8 December 2017 (UTC)

@Sadads: don't make harm to country-specifc items. Don't vandal statements. They are constantly reverted

>are unreferenced claims that misuse existing properties

Is this what you think or Stewards want you to think? I don't vandal Wikidata

I'm sorry we don't know who you are. D1gggg (talk) 17:23, 8 December 2017 (UTC)

>Perhaps the item needs to be split to represent specific concepts from other language Wikipedias.

Site plans are almost the same when they are used.

You could create 2-30 more specific items per every country and place P17 at each item, but you didn't.

Now we don't have information about P17 at all.

explain this removal?

explain another removal?

Exactly who need to google instead of you "Градостроительный кодекс Российской Федерации" "генеральный план"? And why at all?

Your removals are nonsense. D1gggg (talk) 17:38, 8 December 2017 (UTC)

Template Wizard script available for testing

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JSTOR account redistribution (The Wikipedia Library)

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Growth team updates #2

Welcome to the second newsletter for the new Growth team!  

The Growth Team's objective is to work on software changes that help retain new contributors in mid-size Wikimedia projects.

Our plan for the next quarter is ready

After consulting with many communities on the best ways to increase retention, we will focus during the next 3 months on these projects:

• Understanding first day: to see what new editors do right after creating their accounts. We will be careful with user privacy, and we hope to share initial results in December.
• Personalized first day: this idea will also help us learn a lot about new editors by adding some optional questions to the new editor’s registration process. We hope to share initial results in December.
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We have set up our plan based on the 8 ideas we were considering. You can read about our analysis in our team updates, and detailed discussion on each idea.

We are looking for volunteers

Do you want to participate to our experiments? We are looking for new communities to work with us (especially a new mid-size wiki), and people to become ambassadors to help us to communicate with the different communities. Discover how you can involve yourself or your community.

Learn more about us

You can visit our team page to find out why our team was formed and how we are thinking about new editors, and our project page for detailed updates on the projects we'll work on.

Growth team's newsletter prepared by the Growth team and posted by bot, 13:31, 4 October 2018 (UTC) • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.

Community Health Metrics Kit consultation

The Community Health Metrics Kit is a new project to measure more aspects of our communities. If you are interested in metrics, statistics, and measurement of editing and contributing, please join us to discuss how and what the new project should measure! Please share this with anyone else you think may be interested in this work.

This message is also available in other languages. Joe Sutherland (Wikimedia Foundation) (talk) 22:06, 10 October 2018 (UTC)

The Community Wishlist Survey

Hi,

You get this message because you’ve previously participated in the Community Wishlist Survey. I just wanted to let you know that this year’s survey is now open for proposals. You can suggest technical changes until 11 November: Community Wishlist Survey 2019.

You can vote from November 16 to November 30. To keep the number of messages at a reasonable level, I won’t send out a separate reminder to you about that. /Johan (WMF) 11:24, 30 October 2018 (UTC)

Growth team updates #3

Welcome to the third newsletter for the new Growth team!  

The Growth team's objective is to work on software changes that help retain new contributors in mid-size Wikimedia projects.

Two Growth team projects to be deployed in next two weeks

We will be deploying the "Understanding first day" and "Personalized first day" projects on Czech and Korean Wikipedias in the coming weeks. See the new project pages below for full details on the projects, and our project updates page for their progress.

• Understanding first day: learn about the actions new editors take right after creating their accounts. We will be careful with user privacy, and we hope to share initial results in December.
• Personalized first day: learn about new editors' objectives by adding some optional questions to the new editor’s registration process, and personalizing their onboarding. We hope to share initial results in December.

Third Growth team project begins

• Focus on help desk: direct newcomers to the local help desks where they can ask questions to help them make their first edits. We hope to have an initial experiment running in December.

Best practices for helping newcomers

We are going to direct newcomers to help desks. But what's the best way to reply to a newcomer there? We have gathered some best practices for successful interactions, based on community experiences and some external documentation. The page has also been reviewed by some experienced community members who suggested some changes. That page is now open for translations. Comments and suggestions are still welcome!

We are still looking for volunteers

Do you want to participate to our experiments? We are looking for new communities to work with us (especially a new mid-size wiki), and people to become ambassadors to help us to communicate with the different communities. Discover how you can involve yourself or your community.

Also, please share this update with your community and interested people!

Learn more about us

You can visit our team page to find out why our team was formed and how we are thinking about new editors, and our project page for detailed updates on the projects we'll work on.

Growth team's newsletter prepared by the Growth team and posted by bot, 13:30, 7 November 2018 (UTC) • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.

Growth team updates #4

Welcome to the fourth newsletter for the new Growth team!  

The Growth team's objective is to work on software changes that help retain new contributors in mid-size Wikimedia projects.

We need your feedback!

We have two requests for community members:

1. Now that data is coming in for the welcome survey, we are planning how to use that data to personalize the newcomer's first day. See our current thoughts here, and join the conversation here.
2. Try out the help panel's interactive prototype, and read about how we're planning to roll it out, and post any thoughts or reactions here.

Two Growth team projects have been deployed (detailed updates here)

• Personalized first day (welcome survey) was deployed on November 20 on both Czech and Korean Wikipedias.
  • The survey is now being shown to half of new users (A/B test). Responses are being recorded in the database. We'll report on initial results during December.
  • We are planning to test a second version of the survey, called "Variation C", which we think will maximize the number of users who complete the survey and stay on the wiki.
  • The original objective of this project was to give newcomers the materials they need to achieve their goals, and so now we are currently planning how we will use the information collected in the welcome survey to personalize the newcomer's experience. We hope community members will read our current thinking and join the conversation here. Some of the plans we are considering include:
    • Making it easy for newcomers to see editing activity around the topic areas in which they indicated that they're interested.
    • Connecting interested newcomers to experienced editors.
    • Surfacing the help content most relevant to the reason for which the newcomers created their accounts.

• Understanding first day (EditorJourney) was deployed on November 15 on both Czech and Korean Wikipedias. It has been done after a longer security review and final testing than expected. Data is now being recorded for all new users on those wikis, and we've been auditing the data and preparing to make initial reports during December. Stay tuned for the next newsletter!

Help panel is under construction

• Focus on help desk (help panel) is planned to be deployed during the week of January 7 on both Czech and Korean Wikipedias.
• This interactive prototype is the best way to see the design and wording in the feature.
• We ran live user tests on the prototype, with results posted here.
• In addition to giving the ability to ask a question, the help panel will also contain a set of links to existing help content. Our ambassadors on Czech and Korean Wikipedias are determining the right initial set of most helpful links in this task.
• We encourage community members to try out the prototype and read about the rules for who will get the feature, and add any thoughts to this discussion.

We are still looking for volunteers

Do you want to participate to our experiments? We are looking for new communities to work with us (especially a new mid-size wiki), and people to become ambassadors to help us to communicate with the different communities. Discover how you can involve yourself or your community.

Also, please share this update with your community and interested people!

Learn more about us

You can visit our team page to find out why our team was formed and how we are thinking about new editors, and our project updates page for detailed updates on the projects we work on.

Growth team's newsletter prepared by the Growth team and posted by bot, 09:31, 7 December 2018 (UTC) • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.

Growth team updates #5

Welcome to the fifth newsletter for the new Growth team!  

The Growth team's objective is to work on software changes that help retain new contributors in mid-size Wikimedia projects.

New projects for discussion

We began the "Personalized first day" project with the welcome survey so that we could gather information about what newcomers are trying to accomplish. The next step is to use that information to create experiences that help the newcomers accomplish their goal – actually personalizing their first day. We asked for community thoughts in the previous newsletter, and after discussing with community members and amongst our team, we are now planning two projects as next steps: "engagement emails" and "newcomer homepage".

• Engagement emails: this project was first discussed positively by community members here back in September 2018, and the team how has bandwidth to pursue it. The idea is that newcomers who leave the wiki don't get encouraged to return to the wiki and edit. We can engage them through emails that send them the specific information they need to be successful – such as contact from a mentor, the impact of their edits, or task recommendations. Please read over the project page, and comment on its discussion page with any ideas, questions, or concerns. Do you think this is a good idea? Where could we go wrong?
• Newcomer homepage: we developed the idea for this project after analyzing the data from the welcome survey and EditorJourney datasets. We saw that many newcomers seem to be looking for a place to get started – a place that collects their past work, options for future work, and ways to learn more. We can build this place, and it can connect to the engagement emails. The content of both could be guided by what newcomers say they need during their welcome survey, and contain things like contact from a mentor, impact of their edits, or task recommendations. Please read over the project page, and comment on its discussion page with any ideas, questions, or concerns. Do you think this is a good idea? Where could we go wrong?

Initial reports on newcomer activity

We have published initial reports on each of the team's first two projects. These reports give the basic numbers from each project, and there are many more questions we will continue to answer in future reports. We're excited about these initial findings. They have already helped us define and design parts of our future projects.

• Welcome survey: the initial report on welcome survey responses is available here. Some of the main findings:
  • Most users respond to the survey, giving it high response rates of 67% and 62% in Czech and Korean Wikipedias, respectively.
  • The survey does not cause newcomers to be less likely to edit.
  • The most common reason for creating an account in Korean Wikipedia is to read articles—not for editing—with 29% of Korean users giving that responses.
  • Large numbers of respondents said they are interested in being contacted to get help with editing: 36% in Czech and 53% in Korean.
• Understanding first day: the initial report on what newcomers do on their first day is available here. Some of the main findings:
  • Large numbers of users view help or policy pages on their first day: 42% in Czech and 28% in Korean.
  • Large numbers of users view their own User or User Talk page on their first day: 34% in Czech and 39% in Korean.
  • A majority of new users open an editor on their first day – but about a quarter of them do not go on to save an edit during that time.

Help panel deployment

The help panel was deployed in Czech and Korean Wikipedias on January 10. Over the past four weeks:

• About 400 newcomers in each wiki have seen the help panel button.
• About 20% of them open up the help panel.
• About 50% of those who open it up click on one of the links.
• About 5% of Czech users ask questions, and about 1% of Korean users ask questions.

We think that the 20% open rate and 50% click rate are strong numbers, showing that a lot of people are looking for help, and many want to help themselves by looking at help pages. The somewhat lower numbers of asking questions (especially in Korean Wikipedia) has caused us to consider new features to allow people to help themselves. We're going to be adding a search bar to the help panel next, which will allow users to type a search that only looks for pages in the Help and Wikipedia namespaces.

How to create a good feedback page?

What is the way to built a good help page? What blocks you when writing an help page? Your replies will help to create better help contents to newcomers, that would be used on Help panel.

Growth team's newsletter prepared by the Growth team and posted by bot, 14:15, 13 February 2019 (UTC) • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.

Growth team updates #6

Welcome to the sixth newsletter from the Growth team!

The Growth team's objective is to work on software changes that help retain new contributors in mid-size Wikimedia projects.

Plans for the next three months

The Growth team has been working on features to increase new editor retention for the last seven months. We have made a lot of progress and learned a lot, and we've just finished planning for our next three months. During the next three months, we're going to focus on iterations of the help panel and the newcomer homepage. We have decided not to start the engagement emails project, because we think that we will be able to do better work by improving the projects we have already started. Specifically, these are our team goals:

• Deploy and iterate on newcomer homepage
• Continued iteration on help panel
• Make the help panel available to more wikis
• Add a fourth Wikipedia to our set of target wikis
• Publish in-depth quantitative reporting on the data from this year
• Assemble a report on what our team has learned so far about newcomers

Newcomer homepage

Mockup of potential design for newcomer homepage

The newcomer homepage is our current major project. We hope that community members can read over the project page, and comment on its discussion page with any ideas, questions, or concerns. You can see in the accompanying mockup how we are thinking about the homepage.

We have recently decided on the specifications for an initial version that we can deploy and iterate on:

• Shown in the User space
• Desktop only (mobile comes next)
• Four modules
  • Help module: help links and ability to ask help desk questions
  • Mentorship module: all newcomers assigned a mentor to whom they can ask questions
  • Impact module: shows the number of pageviews for pages the newcomer edited
  • Account completion module: gives some very simple recommendations of how to get started (add an email, start your user page)
• Layout not yet personalized for each user

We're currently running live user tests on this configuration. Future work will include adapting the homepage for mobile, working on a task recommendation module, and considering how to encourage newcomers to visit their homepage.

Help panel

Screenshot from Vietnamese Wikipedia showing the help panel open on the Community Portal, including the "search" bar.

During the last month, the help panel was deployed on Vietnamese Wikipedia, adding it to Czech and Korean Wikipedias.As of 2019-03-14:

• 2,425 newcomers have seen the help panel
• 422 of them have opened it
• 175 have clicked links
• 27 have run searches
• 40 have asked questions

We have been analyzing the data around usage, and we'll be publishing numbers in the coming weeks. At a high level, we see at least some users are being helped by the panel, with many clicking on links, running searches, and asking questions. We do not yet see any problems that have arisen from the help panel. Therefore, we think that the help panel is generally a positive feature – though data is still coming that will allow us to see its numerical impact. If other wikis are interested in using the help panel, please contact us on our team's talk page, in the language of your choice.

Over the past month, we have iterated on the help panel to take into account the usage patterns we are seeing. You can see in the accompanying image how the help panel currently looks.

• We added a search capability, in which users can search the Help and Wikipedia namespaces.
• The help panel was previously available whenever a newcomer was in "edit" mode. We are now also showing the help panel when a newcomer is in "read" mode on a page in the Help, Wikipedia, or User namespaces.

We want to see whether users find the "search" useful. If so, we may spend time on improving search results. We're also looking forward to learning whether exposing the help panel in "read" mode in more namespaces will increase usage.

Growth team's newsletter prepared by the Growth team and posted by bot • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.

18:19, 18 March 2019 (UTC)

Growth team updates #7

Welcome to the seventh newsletter from the Growth team!

The Growth team's objective is to work on software changes that help retain new contributors in mid-size Wikimedia projects.

Newcomer homepage release this week

Screenshot of newcomer homepage in Test Wikipedia, in English.

The main feature that the team has been working on over the last month is the newcomer homepage. This feature gives newcomers a place on the wiki to get oriented, learn about editing, and see their impact (see the accompanying screenshot from Test Wikipedia). We intend to release this feature to Czech, Korean, and Vietnamese Wikipedias on May 2nd.

Like the other Growth team features, this will be deployed in a controlled experiment, in which half of newcomers will have access to their homepage and half will not. Users with the feature will be able to access it by clicking their username at the top of their browser, and it will only be available on desktop -- not mobile. Experienced users who want to see their homepage will be able to turn it on in their preferences.

Wikis receiving the newcomer homepage can expect these things:

• Additional questions will come to the help desk from the "help module" on the homepage.
• Mentors who have signed up for the "mentorship module" will start to receive questions on their user talk pages.
• More users may create and edit user pages through the "start module".

Mockups for potential designs of mobile homepage

Recent and future homepage development

The most important piece developed for the homepage over the last month is the "start module", which gives newcomers clear actions to take when they are new: add/confirm their email, go through a tutorial, start their user page. We learned about the need for this module from user tests last month. The next priorities for the newcomer homepage are:

• Mobile design: to work well in mobile browsers, the homepage needs a separate design and engineering. See the accompanying mockups for potential mobile designs.
• Features for discovery: only about 15% - 30% of newcomers will discover their homepage by clicking their username at the top of their browser. We are going to be designing additional ways for newcomers to find out about it.
• Additional modules: the initial version contains some of the simpler modules. Potential upcoming modules include task recommendations and a feed of activity on the wiki.

Other updates

• Help panel leading indicators: our team published data on the help panel's initial performance. The evaluation exposes some areas for improvement, but we think the help panel's behavior so far is healthy and that it is not having a negative impact on the wikis. We will be publishing additional data, making plans, and asking for community thoughts around the future of the help panel over the course of the next two weeks. If you are interested in trying out the help panel on your wiki, please let us know on our team's talk page.
• Long term plans: the team had a week of planning meetings, in which we talked about some longer-term ideas for Growth work. Some of the top ideas are: to extend the newcomer homepage to help user's build their identity through a user profile, and to revisit the "engagement emails" project that the team put on hold. Over the next month, we will be asking for community conversation around how the team can spend our time in the next fiscal year, that starts in July.

Growth team's newsletter prepared by the Growth team and posted by bot • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.

16:19, 29 April 2019 (UTC)

Call for submissions for the Community Growth space at Wikimania 2019

Welcome to a special newsletter from the Growth team! This special newsletter is not about Wikimedia Foundation Growth team projects. Instead, it is a call for submissions for the Community Growth space at Wikimania 2019. We think that many people who receive this newsletter may have something valuable to contribute to this space at Wikimania. We haven't translated the newsletter, because Wikimania's language is English.

Please see below for the message from the organizers of the Community Growth space at Wikimania.

---

Wikimania 2019 is organized into 19 “spaces”, which are all accepting proposals for sessions. This message comes from the team organizing the Community Growth space.

Since you are interested b Growth team projects, and potentially involved in welcoming newcomers initiatives on your wiki, we would like to invite you to submit a proposal to the Community Growth space because of the actions you’ve done around newcomers on wikis. The deadline for submission is June 1. See below for Community Growth submission topics and session formats. Topics and sessions have to be in English.

In the Community Growth space, we will come together for discussions, presentations, and workshops that address these questions:

• What is and is not working around attracting and retaining newcomers?
• How should Wikimedia activities evolve to help communities grow and flourish?
• How should our technology and culture evolve to help new populations to come online, participate and become community members?

Recommended topics: please see this link for the list for the list of recommended topics. If you do not plan to submit a proposal, you can also suggest additional topics here. If your topic does not fit into our space, remember that there are 18 other spaces that could welcome you sharing your knowledge and perspective.

Types of session. We prefer sessions that are participatory, interactive, promote conversations, and give a voice to parts of our movement that are heard less often. Please see this link for the list of recommended session formats.

Poster submissions. Posters are also a good way to introduce a topic, or show some results of an action. Please consider submitting one!

More information about the Community Growth space, topics, and submission formats is available on the proposal page.

Please submit your proposal. The reviews will happen at the beginning of June.

If you have questions about Wikimania in general, please ask them on the Wikimania wiki.

On behalf of the Community Growth leadership team, Trizek (WMF), 11:45, 16 May 2019 (UTC)

Growth team updates #8

Welcome to the eighth newsletter from the Growth team!

The Growth team's objective is to work on software changes that help retain new contributors in mid-size Wikimedia projects.

May was a busy month, and we apologize for a slightly late newsletter.

General news

• The Growth team will begin to work with the Arabic Wikipedia community as a new target wiki. This is in addition to Korean, Czech, and Vietnamese Wikipedias.
• Several members of the Growth team attended Wikimedia Hackathon. To see what we worked on and learned, read this update (in English).
• Wikimania 2019 is coming up in August. The conference will include a "Community Growth" space, for sessions about how our communities expand through software and programs.

Early results from newcomer homepage release

A newcomer homepage on Czech Wikipedia (displayed in English language)

• The newcomer homepage was deployed in Czech and Korean Wikipedias on May 6 for desktop users. It is deployed in an A/B test, so that half of newcomers have access to the homepage and half do not. They access it by clicking on their username in their personal tools along the top of the window.
• After about a month of usage, we see a few interesting trends. We think that the usage is going well so far, as we continue to work on the feature
  • About half of users who visit the homepage click on a link or button.
  • About half of users visit the homepage more than once, with about a fifth of users visiting on multiple days.
  • Users are interacting with all the different modules on the page -- there is no clear favorite.
  • Users have been asking questions to their mentors -- but not on the help desk.

Next steps for homepage

Mockup of mobile newcomer homepage

• Because we are seeing good reactions to the homepage from the first users, we are prioritizing work that helps more users find their homepage:
  • Mobile homepage: the team is currently building the mobile version of the homepage. We tested this design with five users, giving us confidence that the design is strong.
  • Features to aid discovery: only a minority of newcomers who have a homepage will find their homepage on their own. The team is designing features that help newcomers learn where to find their homepage. The most important feature will point to the homepage link using a GuidedTour.
• User tests showed that the most important thing to add to the homepage are clear task recommendations to help newcomers get started with editing right away. This is the module that we will be working on next.

Future of team in the next year

• The Growth team has been working since September 2018, and we're now planning for the work we'll be doing for the next fiscal year, which begins in July.
• Though we have not yet developed a feature that clearly increases growth in our target wikis, we believe that the features we have been developing have high potential to increase growth if we continue to work on them.
• Therefore, the team will continue to work on the features we have started, and we will develop related features that improve the overall newcomer experience. These features may include:
  • Improvements to how newcomers can build their user pages and develop their on-wiki identity. See initial notes here.
  • Improvements to how newcomers receive notifications on-wiki and through email, so that they quickly find out if other users are contacting them.
  • Processes that help newcomers get awards or recognition for good work.
  • Ways for newcomers to see the activity on the wiki and find others who share their interests.
• We will start discussions with communities to help us define these ideas before we work on them.

Growth team's newsletter prepared by the Growth team and posted by bot • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.

09:02, 13 June 2019 (UTC)

Growth team updates #9

Welcome to the ninth newsletter from the Growth team!

The Growth team's objective is to work on software changes that help retain new contributors in mid-size Wikimedia projects.

Opening Growth features to more wikis

The Growth team has existed for about one year. During that time, we have developed several features that we think can help increase retention. Though we are still gathering data to detect scientifically whether the features increase retention, we think that some of the features are ready to be deployed on more wikis that want to experiment with them. If your community is enthusiastic about welcoming newcomers, we encourage you to contact us so that we can verify together if your wiki is eligible.

Then, go through the checklist to start the process of getting these features:

• Help panel: allow newcomers to find help and ask questions while they edit.
• Welcome survey: learn what topics and types of edits newcomers are interested in.
• EditorJourney: learn what workflows newcomers go through on their first day.

General news

Indicator that encourages users to look at their Notifications for responses to their questions

• A new quarter of the year has started, and the team has set our goals for the next three months. The most important goals are:
  • Newcomer homepage: increase activity through a task recommendations module. Now that we have seen several weeks of positive activity on the newcomer homepage, we think that the most important thing to add is a way for newcomers to find tasks to work on. The challenge will be recommending the right kind of tasks at the right point of their journey.
  • Newcomer homepage: increase feature discovery rate by 100%. Right now, only 20% - 30% of newcomers ever visit their homepage. We want to double that number by making sure all newcomers know how to find it.
  • Help panel: increase usefulness through improvements to affordance, search, and UX flow. We have looked closely at data and anecdotes from the usage of the help panel, and we plan to pursue specific improvements to increase its effectiveness (see accompanying image of a feature that helps newcomers find responses to their questions).
• Wikimania is coming up next month, which includes a "Community Growth" space. We hope to see people from all communities there to talk about how to bring newcomers into our movement.
• We have started to deploy features to our team's fourth target wiki: Arabic Wikipedia. That wiki is the biggest one we target, it has a high percentage of mobile users, and also is our first right-to-left language. This will help us make sure that our features are valuable for as many types of users as possible.

Mobile homepage and early analysis

Button to help newcomers find their homepage from their empty Contributions page

• The mobile version of the newcomer homepage was deployed to Czech, Korean, and Vietnamese Wikipedias. Now, newcomers can access their homepage from both desktop and mobile devices.
• We have published our first set of data about the performance of the newcomer homepage. In summary, we are happy with the homepage's performance so far. We see about half of visitors clicking on something, and the majority of them returning to the homepage multiple times.
• Because we see positive usage of the homepage, we will deploy several small features in the next two weeks that help more newcomers discover their homepage (see accompanying image of a feature that helps newcomers discover their homepage from their empty Contributions page).
• As listed in our goals above, we'll be starting to focus on adding task recommendations to the newcomer homepage. We'll be publishing early thoughts on this feature so that community members can give their thoughts and advice.

Growth team's newsletter prepared by the Growth team and posted by bot • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.

14:26, 23 July 2019 (UTC)

Growth team updates #10

Welcome to the tenth newsletter from the Growth team!

The Growth team's objective is to work on software changes that help retain new contributors in mid-size Wikimedia projects.

General news

• Growth team features are now fully deployed in Arabic Wikipedia and Basque Wikipedia (along with Czech, Korean, and Vietnamese Wikipedias). If your community is enthusiastic about welcoming newcomers, we encourage you to contact us so that we can verify together if your wiki is eligible. Then, go through the checklist to start the process of configuring the features.
• We have deployed features that help newcomers find their newcomer homepage. These features were successful, and more than doubled the number of newcomers who find their homepage. In Czech Wikipedia, 72% of newcomers visit their homepage and in Korean Wikipedia, 49% of newcomers visit their homepage.
• You can now join the Growth discussion space on the Wikimedia Space. This space has been created during Wikimania, to coordinate initiatives around welcoming newcomers. Please come and say hello!

Growth at Wikimania

Opening panel in the Community Growth space

• Several members of the Growth team attended Wikimania in Stockholm. We helped organize a conference track around Community Growth, presented about our team's work, and had many conversations with community members from around the world.
• Here are the most important links:
  • Notes and learnings from Wikimania
  • Video of Growth team presentation about our work and learnings from the past year
  • Slides from Growth team presentation
• These are some of our topline notes:
  • Alignment on newcomer retention: It seems like Wikimania attendees generally believe that newcomer retention is an important problem.
  • Connecting offline to online: Enthusiasm for ideas that connect our features better to offline events, such as making homepage mentors correspond to offline mentors.
  • Mentor dashboard: Experienced users requested a dashboard with which they could monitor newcomers who may need help.

Newcomer tasks -- feedback needed!

Mockup of newcomer tasks

• The Growth team's main project right now is newcomer tasks, which will suggest easy edits for newcomers. It will be built as a new module for the newcomer homepage.
• We hope that this project will help newcomers build their skills before attempting more difficult edits, such as creating new articles or adding images.
• These are the three main challenges we've been working on:
  • Where to find the tasks? After considering many different sources for tasks, we've decided to start by using maintenance templates, which are applied by editors on most wikis, and including tasks like copy editing, adding links, and adding references.
  • How to match to interests? Research shows that users are more likely to work on articles that are related to their interests. We are currently prototyping methods to ask newcomers their interests and then find articles that match.
  • How to guide the newcomer? Once a newcomer has selected a recommended article, they will need guidance on how to complete the edit. We have decided to use the help panel to provide that guidance while the newcomer edits.
• We are currently engineering on this feature, and we recently published notes from user tests that give mostly positive feedback.
• You can explore the design for newcomer tasks in these interactive mockups. We hope to hear from you about your thoughts on the project talk page. Do you think this could be helpful for newcomers? What are we missing?

Growth team's newsletter prepared by the Growth team and posted by bot • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.

18:49, 2 October 2019 (UTC)

Community Wishlist Survey 2020

Hello!

You are getting this message because you've previously participated in the Community Wishlist Survey, in either the Wikisource or Wiktionary categories. I wanted to let you know that this year's survey is now open for proposals. You can suggest technical changes until November 11. Unlike previous years, we are only accepting proposals for non-Wikipedia content projects with no dedicated teams (i.e., Wikibooks, Wiktionary, Wikiquote, Wikisource, Wikiversity, Wikispecies, Wikivoyage, and Wikinews). You can learn more on the survey page.

You can vote on proposals from November 20 to December 2. To keep the number of messages at a reasonable level, I won't send out a separate reminder to you about that. We look forward to your participation. Thank you! IFried (WMF) (talk) 18:52, 22 October 2019 (UTC)

Growth team updates #11

Welcome to the eleventh newsletter from the Growth team!

The Growth team's objective is to work on software changes that help retain new contributors in mid-size Wikimedia projects.

General news

• Expanding to more wikis: the team is preparing to deploy Growth features to Ukrainian and Hungarian Wikipedias. Wikis that already have the features are Czech, Korean, Arabic, Vietnamese, and Basque Wikipedias. If your community is enthusiastic about welcoming newcomers, we encourage you to contact us so that we can verify together if your wiki is eligible. Then you can go through the checklist to start the process of configuring the features.
• Mentor training: we tried out our first training for mentors with the Czech community, so that experienced users can build skills that help them retain newcomers.
• The guide for mentors has been updated. Translations are welcomed!

Help panel results

Mockup of guidance while doing a suggested edit, using the help panel

The help panel was first deployed to newcomers in January 2019, and we have now finished analyzing data to determine its impact. A brief summary is below, and more in-depth information can be found here (in English).

• In summary, although we have seen a good amount of usage of the help panel, the help panel has not shown an increase in activation (whether a user makes their first edit) or retention (whether a user returns to edit again).
• This is a disappointing result, and our team has discussed potential reasons for the result and ideas for the future. Although we have many ideas for how to improve the help panel, we have decided to keep our attention on the newcomer homepage and newcomer tasks projects for the coming months.
• We'll be using the help panel as part of the newcomer tasks project: using it to guide newcomers while they complete suggested edits.
• We welcome questions and thoughts about this on the project's talk page.

Newcomer tasks deployment

Mockup of topic matching in newcomer tasks

• The first version of the newcomer tasks workflow (V1.0) will be deployed in the next weeks on our 4 priority wikis. This version will suggest articles to edit based on maintenance templates. In this first version, we expect many newcomers to initiate the workflow, but not many to select articles to edit or complete edits. We expect future versions of the feature to increase those behaviors.
• We're excited about this project because the majority of newcomers visit their newcomer homepage, and this will be the first element of the homepage that clearly asks the newcomer to start editing.
• These are the next two versions of the feature, which are already being planned:
  • V1.1 (topic matching): will allow newcomers to choose topics of interest (such as Art, Music, Sports, or Technology) to personalize their suggestions. After evaluating several approaches, we have decided to use a new ORES model built by the WMF Scoring team. The model will automatically identify the topic area of each article. We expect this to increase how often newcomers select articles to edit.
  • V1.2 (guidance): once newcomers arrive on an article to edit, we will use the help panel to provide guidance about how to complete the editing task. We expect this to increase how many newcomers actually complete productive edits.
• The project page includes links to the designs of the workflow, and we welcome questions and thoughts on the talk page.

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15:02, 18 November 2019 (UTC)

Growth team updates #12

Welcome to the twelfth newsletter from the Growth team!

The Growth team's objective is to work on software changes that help retain new contributors in mid-size Wikimedia projects.

General news

• A training for mentors has been published. The training was first tried with the Czech community, and went well.
• Growth team features have been deployed to Hungarian, Ukrainian, and Armenian Wikipedias. If your community is enthusiastic about welcoming newcomers, we encourage you to contact us so that we can verify together whether your wiki is eligible. Then you can go through the checklist to start the process of configuring the features.

Productive edits from newcomer tasks

We deployed the basic workflow for newcomer tasks to our target wikis on November 20, and the early results are exciting.

Suggested edits by type of edit.
Graph captions (top to bottom):
■ Copyedits
■ Add links
■ Expand article
■ Add reference
■ Advanced edits

• About 1.5% of newcomers who visit their homepage complete the workflow and save a suggested edit. So far, this has amounted to over 450 edits, on all wikis, coming from both desktop and mobile users.
• When we look at the edits that newcomers make, we see that they are largely positive! We are pleased to see that this feature does not appear to encourage vandals.
  • 75% of the edits are productive and unreverted.
  • 95% of the edits appear to be in good faith.
• Most of the edits include copyedits and adding links, with some newcomers also adding content and references. Copyedits are suggested most strongly.
• Click here to learn more specifics about the results so far.

Topic matching deployed

The results from our user tests showed us that newcomers are likely to do more suggested edits if they can choose articles related to a topic that they're interested in, such as "science", "music", or "sports".

• On January 21, we deployed topic matching on our pilot wikis. Newcomers are now using it. We expect it to cause more newcomers to try suggested edits, and to keep making more of them.
• In the coming weeks, we will be making improvements to the accuracy of the algorithm used to topic matching, which is part of the ORES project.

Next steps for newcomer tasks

Prototype of how the help panel will "peek" from the bottom of the page to offer guidance on mobile.

Because we are seeing positive results from newcomer tasks, the Growth team plans to concentrate our efforts on improving the workflow and encouraging more newcomers to use it.

• Guidance: next, we will be using the help panel to provide guidance to newcomers as they do suggested edits, and to prompt them to do another edit after completing their first one. In user tests for this feature, demo videos were one of the favorite features, and we will think about how these might be added.
• Starting the workflow: only about 20% of newcomer who visit their homepage begin the newcomer tasks workflow. We are going to be trying out different layouts of the homepage to encourage more newcomers to try newcomer tasks.
• Additional task types: we are researching methods to recommend more specific tasks to newcomers, such as specific links to add, or images that could be added to articles from Commons.

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17:39, 4 February 2020 (UTC)

Community Wishlist Survey 2019 - Section Name in Diff

Hello!

The Community Tech team (WMF) has officially started the project for Section Name in Diff, the #9 wish from the 2019 Community Wishlist Survey!

You previously voted for this wish, so we are now contacting you. We invite you to visit the project page, where you can read a project analysis and share your feedback.

We hope to see you on the project talk page, and thank you in advance!

-- IFried (WMF), 14:13, 9 March 2020 (UTC)

Growth team newsletter #13

Welcome to the thirteenth newsletter from the Growth team!

The Growth team's objective is to work on software changes that help retain new contributors in mid-size Wikimedia projects.

Join the conversation: structured tasks

Sketch of an idea for a structured workflow for adding links to an article. The goal is to help newcomers edit at high volume.

We are looking for community input on a new project to make it easy for newcomers to make real article edits.

In our previous newsletter, we talked about the productive edits coming from the newcomer tasks feature. Those good results have continued: about 900 newcomers made over 5,000 suggested edits so far. We've learned that newcomers are interested in receiving suggested edits.

Now, we are thinking about how to supply them a feed of easy edits that will help more of them be successful quickly. We have a new idea called "structured tasks". This would aim to break down edits into steps that are easy for newcomers and easy on mobile devices.

In the past, certain kinds of editing tasks have been structured. For instance, adding categories through HotCat. Now, we are thinking about how to structure the editing of articles. The goal is to allow newcomers can make large content additions, especially from their mobile devices.

Please visit the project page and respond to the discussion questions listed on the talk page. You are welcome to show this project to others in your community. You can help by translating the materials to your language so that more voices can join in. We will be having this conversation until June 18.

Expanding to more wikis

We have expanded to six new wikis, and are looking for more interested communities.

In the last two months, we deployed Growth features to six new wikis: Ukrainian, Serbian, Hungarian, Armenian, and Basque Wikipedias, and French Wiktionary. Newcomers from these wikis have already contributed over 600 edits through Growth features.

We want to expand to more wikis in the coming months, and we are looking for interested communities. French Wikipedia already agreed and will be the next one to join the experiment. We will contact several other wikis in the coming weeks to offer them to participate.

Do you think the Growth Team features would be a good addition to your wiki? Please see this translatable summary of Growth features. You can share with your communities and start a discussion. Then, please contact us to begin the process!

Other updates

39 topics are now available for newcomer tasks

Work continues on improving newcomer tasks and the homepage.

• In March, we deployed an upgrade to the topic matching in newcomer tasks. The current version offers 39 different topics using new ORES models.
• In April, we completed an A/B test of two homepage configurations. We learned that more newcomers will attempt suggested edits if the module is made more prominent. We are implementing those learnings in our next test. See the full results here.
• We are currently working on guidance for newcomer tasks. It will use the help panel to guide newcomers through completing easy edits.
• Our next step is to create new configurations of the homepage. The goal is to encourage more newcomers to begin doing suggested edits.

As usual, we are still welcoming your feedback and questions about our features. Please contact us on the project talk page!

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14:29, 18 May 2020 (UTC)

Community Tech Launches Wikisource Improvement Initiative

Hello,

We hope you are all healthy and safe in these difficult times.

The Community Tech team has just launched a new initiative to improve Wikisource. We have created the first project (Improve ebook exports), which came out of the 2020 Community Wishlist Survey. We now invite you to share your feedback on the project talk page. Please let us know what you think of our project analysis; we want to hear from you! Furthermore, we hope that you will participate in the other Wikisource improvement projects, which we’ll address in the future. Thank you in advance and we look forward to reading your feedback on the project talk page!

-- IFried (WMF) (Product Manager, Community Tech)

Sent by Satdeep Gill (WMF) using MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 09:51, 28 May 2020 (UTC)

Feedback requested: August update for Wikisource ebook export project

Hello, Sadads! The Community Tech team has posted an August update to the Wikisource Ebook Export Improvement project, and we would love your feedback. The update includes findings from our community consultation, results from two technical analyses, and proposed next steps for the project. Your feedback is crucial, and it will help us understand how to approach our work. For this reason, we invite you to check out the latest update and share your feedback on the project talk page. Thank you in advance! --IFried (WMF) (talk) 03:06, 25 August 2020 (UTC)

Growth team newsletter 14

Welcome to the fourteenth newsletter from the Growth team!

The Growth team's objective is to work on software changes that help retain new contributors in mid-size Wikimedia projects.

Success with guidance

The star on this image is the week we deployed "guidance".

We deployed the "Guidance" feature on June 15.

This feature uses the help panel to explain what to do after selecting a suggested edit. For instance, if a newcomer selects a copyedit task, they are guided on what sorts of errors to look for. They can see examples of how to rewrite the text. You can try this feature on test.wikipedia.org. First enable the homepage and the help panel in your preferences there.

Since we launched "Guidance", the data we collected show good results (see image). Now, we see more users completing suggested edits than before Guidance was deployed.

Structured tasks

Design concept for the "add a link" structured task

Structured tasks is a project that aims to break down editing workflows into a series of steps. We hope newcomers can accomplish these tasks easily.

In the previous newsletter, we asked for feedback from community members on the idea. We had a good discussion in six languages with 35 community members (summary here). We have now posted new design mockups. We hope community members can check the mockups out and react to them (in any language). They are posted along with some of the main questions we are thinking about as we continue to refine our plans.

Other technical updates

Mockup of Variant D of the homepage on desktop.

• We are currently working on Variants C and D (adjacent image) of the homepage. The goal is to increase the number of newcomers who start the newcomer tasks workflow. This is the team's main project at the moment.
• We've made it easier to hide the help panel when not needed. [1]
• The welcome survey has a new question for people who created their account: language skills. The goal is to find out how many newcomers know multiple languages, so that we can learn whether it is a good idea to integrate Content Translation as a newcomer task. To make room for this question, we removed one that is not being used. [2]

Community outreach

• We continue to engage with more communities. We recently deployed the Growth features to Persian, Hebrew, and Russian Wikipedias. Learn more about getting the features.
• If your community is having a remote event, and you are interested in hearing from the Growth team, please contact us! We have already participated to two community events online:
  • The Polish Wikiconference (recording on Google Drive)
  • The Celtic Knot 2020 (video available on Youtube).

Growth team's newsletter prepared by the Growth team and posted by bot • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.

09:33, 7 September 2020 (UTC)

Invitation to complete a survey regarding WPWP Campaign

Hello Sadads,

Many thanks for participating in the WPWP campaign.

We are excited about the level of participation, this year and we are happy to inform you that over 90,000 articles were improved with photos in 272 languages Wikipedia.

We'd love to get your feedback. Your feedback will allow us to better meet your expectations for the campaign in the next editions.

Please complete a brief survey so that we may learn about your participation in the campaign, strengths, challenges and your expectations. This information will enable us to improve the next editions of the Campaign.

Follow this link to the Survey:
https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSeL7I25Uxx_3Tyu9EgS2Bhix32Mh073LRsrr4tuH-i1yyRCZg/viewform

Or copy and paste the URL below into your internet browser:
https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSeL7I25Uxx_3Tyu9EgS2Bhix32Mh073LRsrr4tuH-i1yyRCZg/viewform

Thank you in advance for taking this survey. Stay safe!

Kind regards,
Tulsi Bhagat ^{[ contribs | talk ]}
Communication Manager, WPWP Campaign
-- Message sent using MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 05:17, 23 September 2020 (UTC)

Growth team updates #15

Welcome to the fifteenth newsletter from the Growth team!

The Growth team's objective is to work on software changes that help retain new contributors in mid-size Wikimedia projects.

Variants C and D deployed

Variant D in Portuguese Wikipedia

Variants C and D are two new arrangements of the newcomer homepage. We hope they will increase the number of users using suggested edits. They both make suggested edits the clear place where newcomers should get started on the page. They have some differences in their workflows, because we want to test which design is better. We deployed these variants on October 19; half of newcomers get each variant. After about 5 weeks, we will analyze the data from the tests. The goal is to determine which variant is helping more newcomers to make more suggested edits. We will identify the better variant and then use it with all newcomers.

Structured tasks: add a link

Concept A for add a link.

As we discussed in previous newsletters, the team is working on our first "structured task": the "add a link" task. After community discussion on design ideas, we ran user tests on the mobile designs. We decided on the design concept we want to use moving forward: Concept A. We're now engineering the backend for this feature. Next, we will be running user tests for desktop designs.

Learn more about the findings.

Community news

• We recently deployed the Growth features to Polish, Portuguese, Swedish and Turkish Wikipedias. 18 wikis now have Growth features. Learn more about getting the features.
• Have you recently checked if all interface messages are translated for your language?

Growth team's newsletter prepared by the Growth team and posted by bot • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.

10:09, 1 November 2020 (UTC)

Community Wishlist Survey 2021: Invitation

The 2021 Community Wishlist Survey is now open! This survey is the process where communities decide what the Community Tech team should work on over the next year. We encourage everyone to submit proposals until the deadline on 30 November, or comment on other proposals to help make them better. The communities will vote on the proposals between 8 December and 21 December.

The Community Tech team is focused on tools for experienced Wikimedia editors. You can write proposals in any language, and we will translate them for you. Thank you, and we look forward to seeing your proposals!

SGrabarczuk (WMF)

18:25, 20 November 2020 (UTC)

Growth team updates #16

Welcome to the sixteenth newsletter from the Growth team!

The Growth team's objective is to work on software changes that help retain new contributors in mid-size Wikimedia projects.

Growth features show impact

Newcomer task experiments results

The team recently published our analysis of the impact of newcomer tasks. We are happy to announce that we found that the Growth features, and particularly newcomer tasks, lead to increased editing from newcomers.

In November 2019, the Growth team added the "newcomer tasks" feature to the newcomer homepage. After six months, we collected data from Arabic, Vietnamese, Czech, and Korean Wikipedias. We analyzed the overall impact of the Growth features, including newcomer tasks.

This analysis finds that the Growth features lead to increases in:

• the probability that newcomers make their first article edit (+11.6%)
• the probability that they are retained as editors
• the number of edits they make during their first couple of weeks on the wiki (+22%)

We also find that the quality of their edits, as measured by revert rate, is comparable to that of a control group.

• 

  The number of suggested edits completed by each wiki each week, going from December 2019 to November 2020, with a line for the total.

• 

  The number of distinct users completing suggested edits by each wiki each week, going from December 2019 to November 2020.

Because of these results, we think all Wikipedias should consider implementing these features. Learn more about how to get them.

You can find more details about this experiment on the report page. Please post any feedback or questions on the talk page

General metrics

As of November 2020, across all wikis where the features have been deployed:

• more than 5,000 newcomers have made more than 40,000 edits using Newcomer tasks.
• more than 14,000 questions have been sent to volunteer mentors by more than 11,000 users.
• more than 2,000 questions have been asked on help desks by more than 1,500 users.

Learn more about Growth results here, and please post any feedback or questions on the talk page.

Variants C and D

Variants C and D are two new arrangements of the newcomer homepage. We deployed them in October. After six weeks of these variants being deployed, we can see that they have led to increased interactions with newcomer tasks. Next, we will determine which variant is best and use that for all newcomers.

News for mentors

Mentors are volunteers ready to help newcomers in their first steps. Newcomers can contact them using the mentorship module on their homepage.

A separate list for workshops hosts

During workshops organized by education programs through the communities, workshops hosts like to mentor people they train on wiki. Several wikis requested to have a way to claim their mentees without having other newcomers being randomly being assigned to them. To address this need, a separate list can be created on wiki, for mentors that wish to claim mentees, but prefer not to have random mentees being assigned to them. Learn more about this feature.

Claiming multiple mentees at once

Mentors can use Special:ClaimMentee to claim a newcomer as their mentee. The feature now allows mentors to claim multiple newcomers at once.

Community news

The help panel allows people to post a message to the local help desk while editing. Previously, the tool always posted messages to the bottom of help desks. Wikis are now able to configure it to display new messages at the top of the help desk page. T261714

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14:22, 7 December 2020 (UTC)

Community Wishlist Survey 2021

We invite all registered users to vote on the 2021 Community Wishlist Survey. You can vote from now until 21 December for as many different wishes as you want.

In the Survey, wishes for new and improved tools for experienced editors are collected. After the voting, we will do our best to grant your wishes. We will start with the most popular ones.

We, the Community Tech, are one of the Wikimedia Foundation teams. We create and improve editing and wiki moderation tools. What we work on is decided based on results of the Community Wishlist Survey. Once a year, you can submit wishes. After two weeks, you can vote on the ones that you're most interested in. Next, we choose wishes from the survey to work on. Some of the wishes may be granted by volunteer developers or other teams.

We are waiting for your votes. Thank you!

SGrabarczuk (WMF)

16:09, 11 December 2020 (UTC)

Share your feedback on the OCR improvements!

Hello, everyone! We (the team responsible for the Community Wishlist Survey) have just launched the project for OCR improvements! With this project, we aim to improve the experience of using OCR tools on Wikisource. Please refer to our project page, which provides a full summary of the project and the main problem areas that we have identified.

We would then love if you could answer the questions below. Your feedback is incredibly important to us and it will directly impact the choices we make. Thank you in advance, and we look forward to reading your feedback!

SGrabarczuk (WMF) 17:48, 26 January 2021 (UTC)

Growth team newsletter #17

Welcome to the seventeenth newsletter from the Growth team!

The Growth team's objective is to work on software changes that help retain new contributors in mid-size Wikimedia projects.

Structured tasks

Add a link: the team is continuing to engineer on our first "structured task", which will break down the workflow of adding wikilinks to articles, and assist newcomers with an algorithm to identify words and phrases that could be made into links.

Add an image: even as we build our first structured task, we have been thinking about the next one. "Add an image" is a structured task in which newcomers would be recommended images from Wikimedia Commons to add to unillustrated articles. This is an ambitious idea with many details to consider. We have already learned a lot from community members, and we encourage everyone to look at the project page and join the discussion.

Moving forward: more wikis to get the features

Last November, our team published the analysis of the impact of newcomer tasks. We announced that we found that the Growth features, and particularly newcomer tasks, lead to increased editing from newcomers. Because of these results, we believe all Wikipedias should implement these features.

We have started to contact more wikis to deploy the features, including Wikipedias of all sizes. Bengali Wikipedia recently began using Growth features, and Danish, Thai, Indonesian, and Romanian Wikipedias will be coming soon. Please contact us if you have questions regarding deployment.

We are looking for translators who can help by translating the interface. Translating is done on Translatewiki.net (it requires a different account that your Wikimedia one). Communities that already have the Growth features being deployed are invited to check on the translations. Access translations here.

Variant testing

As mentioned in our previous newsletter, we ran a test of two variants of the newcomer homepage, meant to find a version that increases users completing suggested edits. We have completed the experiment, and learned that one of the variants leads to more edits on desktop while the other leads to more edits on mobile. Therefore, we will deploy the strongest variants for each platform to all newcomers.

News for mentors

Mentor dashboard: we have interviewed mentors from several communities as we plan a mentor dashboard feature, which would help mentors track the progress of their mentees. We encourage all mentors to share their thoughts on tools that would help them.

Magic word for mentors: it is now possible to use a magic word, {{#mentor}}, to display the name of a given newcomer's mentor. This can be used on welcome messages, userboxes, etc.

Help panel questions going to mentors: in most wikis, newcomers using the help panel ask questions to the help desk. On Czech Wikipedia, we have experimented with sending these questions to mentors instead. This simplifies the newcomer experience, and only led to a increase in mentorship questions of about 30%. We tried this in Arabic, Bengali, French and Vietnamese Wikipedias, and we are making it the default experience.

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16:02, 3 March 2021 (UTC)

Queering Wikipedia 2021 User Group Working Days: May 14-16

The Wikimedia LGBTQ+ User Group is holding online working days in May. If you’re an active Wikimedian, editing on LGBTQ+ issues or if you identify as part of the LGBTQ+ community, come help us set goals, develop our organisation and structures, consider how to respond to issues faced by Queer editors, and plan for the next 12 months.

We will be meeting online for 3 half-days, 14–16 May at 1400–1730 UTC. While our working language is English, we are looking to accommodate users who would prefer to participate in other languages, including translation facilities.

More information, and registration details, at QW2021.--Wikimedia LGBT+ User Group 15:46, 24 April 2021 (UTC)

Growth Newsletter #18

Welcome to the eighteenth newsletter from the Growth team!

The Growth team's objective is to work on software changes that help retain new contributors in mid-size Wikimedia projects.

Structured tasks

A screenshot of "add a link" feature in development in beta.

"Add a link" is now being tested in production and is nearing release on our four pilot wikis (Arabic, Czech, Vietnamese, and Bengali Wikipedias). We'll be doing final tests this week and next week, and then plan to deploy to the four wikis either during May 24 week, or May 31 week. After two weeks, we will analyze the initial data to identify any problems or trends. We expect that this feature will engage new kinds of newcomers in easy and successful edits. If things are going well after four weeks, we'll progressively deploy it to the wikis with Growth features.

News for mentors

Mockup of the Mentor dashboard.

• We are currently working on a Mentor dashboard. This special page aims to help mentors be more proactive and be more successful at their role. The first iteration will include a table that shows an overview of the mentors current mentees, a module with their own settings, and a module that will allow them to store their best replies to their mentees questions.
• We've conducted our quarterly audit on Growth's four pilot wikis to see the activity of mentors. It appears that the vast majority of mentors are active.

Community configuration

Community configuration editing form under development

We are working on project to allow communities to manage the configuration of the Growth features on their own. In the past, communities have needed to work directly with the Growth team to set up and alter the features. We plan to put this capability in the hands of administrators, through an easy-to-use form, so that the features can be easily tailored to fit the needs of each community. While we developed it initially for Growth features, we think this approach could have uses in other features as well. We'll be trying this on our pilot wikis in the coming weeks, and then we'll bring it to all Growth wikis soon after. We hope you check out the project page and add any of your thoughts to the talk page.

Scaling

• Growth features are now available on 35 wikis. Here is the list of the most recent ones: Romanian Wikipedia, Danish Wikipedia, Thai Wikipedia, Indonesian Wikipedia, Croatian Wikipedia, Albanian Wikipedia, Esperanto Wikipedia, Hindi Wikipedia, Norwegian Bokmål Wikipedia, Japanese Wikipedia, Telugu Wikipedia, Spanish Wikipedia, Simple English Wikipedia, Malay Wikipedia, Tamil Wikipedia, Greek Wikipedia, Catalan Wikipedia.
• A new group of Wikipedias has been defined for the deployment of Growth features. Please contact us if you have questions about the deployment process, or if your community likes to get the features in advance.
• After discussion with the English Wikipedia community, the Growth features will be tested on a small percentage of new accounts. At the moment, registered users can test the features by turning them on in their preferences.

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15:23, 17 May 2021 (UTC)

Join Wikipedia Pages Wanting Photos 2021

Hello Sadads,

Many thanks for participating in the maiden edition of Wikipedia Pages Wanting Photos in 2020.

We are glad to inform you that the 2021 edition starts today (1st of July). You are invited to participate in the campaign again this year to help improve the quality of Wikipedia articles with photos. For more information, please visit the campaign page here.

If you have any questions or query please feel free to contact anyone from the Organizing Team of WPWP Campaign.

Kind regards,
Tulsi Bhagat ^{[ contribs | talk ]}
Communication Manager, WPWP Campaign
Message sent using --MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 10:15, 1 July 2021 (UTC)

Growth Newsletter #19

Welcome to the nineteenth newsletter from the Growth team!

The Growth team's objective is to work on software changes that help retain new contributors in Wikimedia projects.

Structured tasks

"Add an image" prototype, showing suggested image for the article

• "Add a link" is the team's first structured task. It uses machine-learning to suggest wikilinks as easy edits for newcomers. It was deployed in May 2021 on four Wikipedias and then in July on eight more Wikipedias after we evaluated the initial results. So far, we've seen a high level of engagement from newcomers. Communities that have the feature suggested valuable ideas for improvement. We'll work on improvements and then contact more communities to deploy it.
• "Add an image" is the team's second structured task, currently in development. It is an editing task that suggests Commons images for unillustrated Wikipedia articles. We have conducted many community discussions and tests. Then, we've decided to build a first prototype. We'll first deploy it only to our pilot Wikipedias, to learn whether newcomers can be successful with the task. The project page contains links to interactive prototypes. We are very interested to hear your thoughts on this idea as we build and test the early versions. These prototypes have already been tested by newcomers, in English and Spanish.

News for mentors

• The Mentor dashboard is available at our pilot wikis: Arabic, Czech, and Bengali Wikipedias. It will soon be available at a few more volunteering wikis, as a test. [3]
• At wikis where the mentor dashboard is deployed, a new filter is available for mentors. Mentors can monitor their mentees' activity in Watchlist and RecentChanges, so they can help support their mentees' work. For privacy reasons, this filter can't be accessed by someone else than the mentor itself. This filter only filters mentees assigned to the mentor. This filter is not visible for people who are not listed as mentors [4]

Community configuration

• Communities now have the ability to configure how Growth features behave on their own wikis. At Special:EditGrowthConfig, community members can add a list of volunteer mentors, alter the templates used for suggested edits, update help links, and more. This special page is editable by administrators and interface admins.

Scaling

• We are proud to announce that all Wikipedias now have the Growth features! Thank you to all the community members who helped the team build the features and bring them to their wikis. The only exception is Chinese Wikipedia (zh), for technical reasons. [5]
• The wikis that have Growth features deployed have been part of A/B testing since deployment, in which some newcomers did not receive the new features. Now, all of the newcomers on 280 of the smallest of those Wikipedias have the features. [6][7]
• A test is undergoing at English Wikipedia: 25% of newcomers receive the Growth features. The results from this test will be part of a discussion of how to proceed on that wiki.
• Now that Growth features are available at Wikipedia, the Growth team considers to extend them to other projects. Some Wikisource users have expressed some interest in getting Growth features. There is currently a discussion about implementing them on Wikisource.

News for communities

• Do you have questions about the Growth features? This translatable FAQ contains answers to the most common questions about the Growth team work.
• The Growth features were recently used in a test amongst Latin American donors to give donors the opportunity to learn to edit. You can see the results here.
• Interface translations are important for newcomers. Please help for your language, by translating or copyediting interface translations for the Growth features.
• Help:GettingStarted was a feature developed in 2013, which directed newcomers to articles that needed editing. We recently removed this feature from all wikis, because it has been replaced by the Growth features.

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18:36, 26 October 2021 (UTC)

Campaigns Product Update #2

Hello Campaigns Product Newsletter subscribers. We are excited to share our updates:

• Request for Feedback: We have shared our project principles, wireframes for the desktop version, and open questions for you about the team’s event registration project. See the latest status updates here.

Wireframes are design tools that imagine the future interface of the software. We haven’t built anything yet. We need your feedback on these designs so that we can make better product decisions. You can give feedback on the talk page regarding the design and features of the wireframes. We would love to hear your comments to help us establish the next necessary steps for the project.

Please share with us your feedback!

• Presentations: The Campaigns Product team participated in WikiArabia 2021 and WikiConference North America 2021 to give a brief introduction on how the team works. Alex Stinson gave an overview about campaigns and how we can scale the organizing experience within the Movement. Ilana Fried gave an introduction to the Product Team and the project wireframes of the first campaign software solution: the on-wiki registration tool. View the recorded presentation here.

• Team update: We have hired our first team engineer, JCarvalho and our Campaign Organizing Fellow, IBrazal. Newsletter updates will be done by IBrazal and she will be coordinating with you! We hope to have the rest of the engineering team onboard soon!

What is next?

Testers Needed! We will be partnering with YUX, a design research agency, to learn how our team can improve the experience of Wikimedia campaign organizers and participants in Africa. For this reason, we are looking for community members who are willing to be part of the rapid testing sessions. Preferably, we want organizers and editors who have worked in an African context. If you would like to participate in testing, please email ibrazal-ctrwikimediaorg.

Upcoming Conference. Wiki Indaba 2021. This year, the conference will be held virtually on November 5-7, 2021 with the theme "Rethink + Reset : Visions of the future". Read more about the conference here or register to join the event. We will be presenting the registration features on Sunday November 7.

We will also be attending CEE Conference, which is digital again this year November 5-7, 2021. We will be presenting the registration on November 6 as part of our communication and sharing process.

Translation Support. We are also beginning to translate the updates on Registration. If you think your language community would benefit from updates, please translate here.

Invite other organizers to subscribe to this newsletter for upcoming updates!

The Campaign Product Team

MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 15:17, 28 October 2021 (UTC)

Growth Newsletter #20

Welcome to the twentieth newsletter from the Growth team!

The Growth team's objective is to work on software changes that help retain new contributors in Wikimedia projects.

Suggested edits

As of February, 300,000 suggested edits have been completed since the feature was first deployed in December 2019.

Add a link is the team's first structured task, deployed in May 2021. It has improved outcomes for newcomers. The team is now working on a second iteration based on community feedback and data analysis. Improvements will include: improved algorithmic suggestions, guardrails to prevent too many similar links to be added, and clearer encouragement for users to continue making edits. After adding these improvements, we will deploy this task to more Wikipedias.

Add an image is the second structured task built by our team. It was deployed in November 2021 to four pilot Wikipedias. This is a more challenging task for newcomers. However, it adds more value to articles (so far, over 1,000 images have been added). We are currently learning from communities and from the data on what is working well and what needs improvements. The project page contains links to interactive prototypes. We are very interested to hear your thoughts on this idea as we build and test the early versions. We will soon deploy this task to more Wikipedias as a test.

"Add a link" and "Add an image" now both have a limitation on how many of these tasks newcomers can do per day. It is meant to discourage careless newcomers from making too many problematic edits.

Positive reinforcement

Over the last two years, the Growth team has focused on building suggested edits: easy tasks for newcomers to start with. We have learned with this experience that these tasks help many newcomers to make their first edits. Now, the team is starting a new project : "positive reinforcement". Its goal is to make newcomers proud of their editing and to make them want to come back for more of them. With the positive reinforcement project, we are considering three kinds of features:

• Impact stats: give newcomers the ability to see how many people read the articles they edit.
• Leveling up: encourage newcomers to progress from easier tasks to harder tasks.
• Personalized praise: encourage mentors and other editors to "thank" and award newcomers for good work.

This project is just beginning, and we hope for community thoughts on the direction. We know that things can wrong if we offer the wrong incentives to newcomers, so we want to be careful. Please visit the talk page to help guide the project!

News for mentors

• The mentor dashboard is available at all wikis. It helps mentors see who their mentees are and keep track of their activity. It is automatically activated where a list of mentors has been created. If you need assistance to create a list of mentors, please contact us.
• The mentor dashboard has a new module: settings. It is now possible for mentors to define their status (active or away). They can specify the volume of questions they want to receive, and they can claim mentees in an easier way. It is also possible for mentors to quit, which will automatically reassign their mentees to other mentors.
• We are working on an ability for a mentee to opt-out (and back in) to having a mentor.
• Previously, in the table that displays mentees activity, the filters displayed all mentees, even the ones with zero edits or lots of edits. We have changed this so that only mentees with between 1 and 500 edits are visible by default. Mentors can change this value in their filters.
• We are currently working on a special page for mentors to sign-up.

Some wikis have created userboxes that mentors can display on the user pages. If your wiki has one, please link it to Wikidata!

Scaling

Previously, at most Wikipedias, only 80% of newcomers were getting the Growth features. This was done for experimentation, to have a control group. We have changed this setting. Now 100% of new accounts at all Wikipedias get the Growth features (except a few, kept as test wikis). We invite communities to update their onboarding documentation and tutorials. Please include the Growth features in it. To help you, we have created an help page that can be translated and adapted to your wiki.

How to help

Do you have questions about the Growth features? This translatable FAQ contains answers to the most common questions about the Growth team work. We regularly update it.

Interface translations are important for newcomers. Please help for your language, by translating or copyediting interface translations for the Growth features.

Growth team's newsletter prepared by the Growth team and posted by bot • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.

17:12, 16 March 2022 (UTC)

Growth team newsletter #21

Welcome to the twenty-first newsletter from the Growth team!

New project: Positive reinforcement

Mockup of the Impact module, redesigned to add Positive reinforcement.

• The Growth team started a new project: Positive reinforcement. We want newcomers to understand there is an interest in regularly editing Wikipedia, and we want to improve new editor retention.
• We asked users from Arabic, Bangla, Czech and French Wikipedia about their feedback. Some people participated at mediawiki.org as well.
• We summarized the initial feedback gathered from these community discussions, along with how we plan to iterate based on that feedback.
• The first Positive Reinforcement idea is a redesign of the impact module: incorporating stats, graphs, and other contribution information. This idea received the widest support, and we plan to start our work based on the design illustrated on the side.
• Please let us know what you think of this project, in any language.

For mentors

• We have worked on two new features, to inform them about the mentorship:
  • In the Mentor module, we now provide more information about the public nature of the mentors/newcomer relationship and the fact that talk pages are public.
  • We now allow newcomers to opt-in and opt-out of mentorship.

Scaling

• "Add a link" available at more wikis ― Add a link feature has been deployed to more wikis: Catalan Wikipedia, Hebrew Wikipedia, Hindi Wikipedia, Korean Wikipedia, Norwegian Bokmål Wikipedia, Portuguese Wikipedia, Simple English Wikipedia, Swedish Wikipedia, Ukrainian Wikipedia, Abkhazian Wikipedia, Achinese Wikipedia, Adyghe Wikipedia, Afrikaans Wikipedia, Akan Wikipedia, Alemannisch Wikipedia, Amharic Wikipedia, Aragonese Wikipedia, Old English Wikipedia, Syriac Wikipedia, Egyptian Arabic Wikipedia, Asturian Wikipedia, Atikamekw Wikipedia, Avaric Wikipedia, Aymara Wikipedia, Azerbaijani Wikipedia, South Azerbaijani Wikipedia. This is part of the progressive deployment of this tool to more Wikipedias. The communities can configure locally how this feature works.
• "Add an image" available at more wikis ― Add an image feature will be deployed to more wikis: Greek Wikipedia, Indonesian Wikipedia, Polish Wikipedia, Chinese Wikipedia. These communities will be able to configure locally how this feature works. [8]

Suggested edits

• Selecting topics ― We have created an "AND" filter to the list of topics at Special:Homepage. This way, newcomers can decide to select very specific topics ("Transportation" AND "Asia") or to have a broader selection ("Transportation" OR "Asia"). At the moment this feature is tested at pilot wikis.
• Changes for Add a link ― We have built several improvements that came from community discussion and from data analysis. They will be available soon at the wikis.
  • Algorithm improvements ― The algorithm now avoids recommending links in sections that usually don't have links and for first names. Also, it now limits each article to only having three link suggestions by default (limited to the highest accuracy suggestions of all the available ones in the article).
  • User experience improvements ― We added a confirmation dialog when a user exits out of suggestion mode prior to making changes. We also improved post-edit dialog experience and allow newcomers to browse through task suggestions from the post-edit dialog.
  • Community configuration ― We allow communities to set a maximum number of links per article via Special:EditGrowthConfig.
  • Future change for Add a link feature ― We will suggest underlinked articles in priority. [9]
• Patrolling suggested edits ― Some users at Arabic Wikipedia, Spanish Wikipedia, and Russian Wikipedia told us that "Add a link" and "Add an image" edits can be challenging to patrol. We are now brainstorming improvements to help address this challenge. We have already some ideas and we started some work to address this challenge. If you have any thoughts to add about the challenges of reviewing these tasks or how we should improve these tasks further, please let us know, in any language.

Community configuration

Communities can configure how the features work, using Special:EditGrowthConfig.

• Communities can set the maximum number of "add an image" suggested tasks a newcomer can complete daily. [10]
• Future change: allow communities to customize the "add a link" quality gate threshold easily, using Special:EditGrowthConfig. [11]

Growth team's newsletter prepared by the Growth team and posted by bot • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.

13:03, 5 July 2022 (UTC)

Growth team newsletter #22

Welcome to the twenty-second newsletter from the Growth team!

Newcomers tasks reach the 500,000 edits milestone — more data publicly available

As of the last week of June 2022, the newcomers of the world have completed over 500,000 newcomer tasks. In other words, newcomers have made over half a million Wikipedia edits via Growth’s “Suggested Edits” module.

• About 30% of those edits were completed on mobile devices.
• Usage continues to increase; in June 2022 almost 50,000 newcomer tasks were completed.

We have added some new data to Grafana. You can now check the number of edits and reverts by task types, or the number of questions asked to mentors. You can filter the data by wiki.

If you have any questions, or there is more data you want access to, please let us know.

Ongoing projects and explorations

The new impact module is part of the Positive Reinforcement project. The image displays the mockup for mobile we used for user testing.

We are continuing our work on our new project, Positive Reinforcement. User testing of initial Positive Reinforcement designs was just completed. Interviews were conducted in Arabic, English, and Spanish. The outcome has been published on the Positive Reinforcement page. We are now utilizing user testing feedback along with prior community feedback to iterate and improve designs.

We are exploring the idea of a Copy Edit structured task. We have tested copy edits in Wikipedia articles for arwiki, bnwiki, cswiki, eswiki (Growth pilot-wikis) and enwiki with two different methods: LanguageTool and Hunspell. We will share more details here and on the associated Copy Edit page once the evaluation is complete.

Add an image was utilized at GLAM events in Argentina, Mexico, and Chile. For an overview of what was learned from these events, read: #1Pic1Article I: how Latin American heritage experts added images to Wikipedia (in English).

Experiments analysis

Add a Link Experiment Analysis has been published. The most important points are:

• Newcomers who get the Add a Link structured task are more likely to be activated (i.e. make a constructive first article edit).
• They are also more likely to be retained (i.e. come back and make another constructive article edit on a different day).
• The feature also increases edit volume (i.e. the number of constructive edits made across the first couple weeks), while at the same time improving edit quality (i.e. the likelihood that the newcomer's edits aren't reverted).

Newcomer task edit type analysis has been published.

• Communities had expressed concern that newcomers whose initial edits were structured tasks wouldn’t go on to learn how to complete more difficult tasks. The Growth team data scientist conducted a Newcomer task edit type analysis to see if this was indeed the case.
• Results from analysis indicate that this likely isn’t a significant concern. More than 70% of users who start with the easy task "Add a link" also make another task type. Read the full analysis and methodology here.

News for mentors

A new system for the mentors list

The configuration of the mentors list will change over the next weeks. In the future, mentors will sign up, edit their mentor description and quit using Special:MentorDashboard. This new system will make the development of new features for mentors much easier.

At the moment, the mentor list is a simple page anyone can edit, unless it’s protected. With the new page, mentors will be able to edit only their own description, while administrators will be able to edit the entire mentors' list if needed.

The deployment will happen first at the pilot wikis, then at all wikis. Existing lists of mentors will be automatically converted, no action will be needed from the mentors. [12][13]

Mentors will be informed about the next steps soon, by a message posted on the talk page of existing Mentor lists.

Learn more about this new structured page on mediawiki.org.

A tip for mentors

Did you know that mentors can filter their mentees' changes at Special:MentorDashboard (and star the ones that require attention)? This feature helps to keep an eye on newcomers' edits, helping mentors to fix minor details, and encourage them if necessary.

And did you know that mentors have special filters to highlight their mentees' edits at Special:RecentChanges? Look for the following filters in RecentChanges: Your starred mentees, Your unstarred mentees.

Other improvements

Some improvements will be made to the mentor dashboard in the coming weeks:

• While we now offer some options for mentors to take a break, the option to quit mentoring was not easy to find. This will be improved. [14]
• Mentors at wikis using FlaggedRevisions will have a way to discover their mentees' pending edits. [15]
• Dashboard discovery for new mentors will be improved. [16]

Recent changes and fixed bugs

• We moved to a new Image Suggestions API. This new API will allow us to deploy Add an Image to more wikis. [17]
• Starting September 19, a few more wikis now offer Add an image to newcomers. These wikis are Greek Wikipedia, Polish Wikipedia, Chinese Wikipedia, Indonesian Wikipedia, Romanian Wikipedia. [18]
• Add an image has been disabled for a few days due to technical issue. "Add an image" added a blank line instead of an image. This has been fixed. [19]
• In order to know if Special:EditGrowthConfig is used by communities, we now instrument page loads and saves of configuration. [20]

Have a question? A suggestion?

Please let us know! You can also read our FAQ page.

Growth team's newsletter prepared by the Growth team and posted by bot • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.

17:18, 21 September 2022 (UTC)

Growth team newsletter #23

Welcome to the twenty-third newsletter from the Growth team!

Highlights

• Mentorship: We released the new structured mentor list to all wikis. This change makes mentorship easier to setup, manage and use.
• Positive reinforcement: An improved impact module is available for testing.

Screenshot of the positive reinforcement module improvements.

Positive reinforcement: an improved impact module to test

The goal of the Growth team is to encourage newcomers to try editing for the first time, and encourage them to keep editing. We want to increase newcomers' motivation by showing them how impactful their edits are.

Newcomers have access to an impact module; you can find yours at Special:Impact. The revised impact module provides new editors with more context about their impact. It will display the number of edits, the number of thanks received, the last time they edited, the number of consecutive days they edited, and the number of views for the articles they edited.

This module will soon be available at our pilot wikis starting December 1. You can already test this new module at Beta Wikipedia. For safety reasons, do not use your regular account and password at Beta wiki. Create a new, specific account for this wiki, with a different password.

Structured tasks: improvements based on patroller feedback

After the deployment of Structured tasks, we received feedback from various communities regarding how patrollers of recent changes were feeling overwhelmed by an increase in edits to check, and how some edits were poor quality or of poor relevance.

We made several improvements based on the feedback we received. Several points of improvement have already been addressed:

• Patroller fatigue:
  • By default, newcomers can complete up to 25 "add a link" tasks and 25 "add an image" tasks per day. If patrollers are overburdened, each community can use Special:EditGrowthConfig to lower that limit.

• Quality of edits: what constitutes a "quality edit" is not a well defined concept. We initiated a discussion and summarized our findings. We also worked on the following improvements:
  • Add a Link
    • Underlinked articles are now prioritized, so it's less likely that newcomers are adding links to articles that are already have a lot of links.
    • The confidence score was increased, so suggestions are more likely to be accurate.
    • The default number of suggested links per article has been lowered to 3. This can be changed at Special:EditGrowthConfig. Communities can also exclude articles containing certain templates or categories from being suggested.
  • Add an Image
    • Lists will no longer receive "add an image" suggestions.
    • Disambiguation pages will no longer receive "add an image" suggestions.
    • We have many further improvements we plan to make to "add an image" in early 2023. [21]

The Positive Reinforcement project will also address some of the concerns around encouraging newcomers to progress to higher value edits. The Growth team will soon work on strategies geared at "Leveling up" newcomers so they progress from easy to more difficult tasks.

Recent changes

• All Wikipedias now have the same onboarding experience. Previously, at a few wikis, 20% of new accounts didn't get the Growth features when they created their account. These 20% of new accounts were used as a control group, in order to know if the Growth features were changing newcomers' behavior. Experiments have shown that Growth features improve activation and retention, and as we want to provide the same onboarding experience at all Wikipedias, we have decided to remove the control groups. We will utilize control groups when testing new features, and German Wikipedia keeps a control group at their request. [22]
• The quality score for "add a link" suggestions will change. We will suggest less links for each article, but they will be more accurate. We will first deploy it at our pilot wikis, and then to all other wikis where this feature is available. [23][24]
• Growth's features FAQ has been updated and expanded. This page centralizes all the information about Growth features. We invite you to read it, and, if you can, to translate it.

News for mentors

• All Wikipedias can now setup and manage a mentorship program in an easier way.
  • We changed the process to make it more reliable, easier to improve and easier to use.
  • Wikipedias where mentorship hasn't been enabled yet can turn mentorship on following a new process. When done, mentors can sign-up by visiting Special:MentorDashboard.
  • Wikipedias where the list of mentors already existed have been converted to the new system.
  • A new special page — Special:ManageMentors — now displays the list of mentors. This page can be transcluded on any other page. There are also new processes to signup as a mentor or to quit mentorship, and we improved community mentorship management.
• The Mentor dashboard's "Your mentees" module will have a new footer, called "Recent changes by your mentees". This footer will include a link to Recent changes, where mentors can see only edits made by their own mentees. [25]

Deployments

• Add a link has been deployed to a 5th round of wikis. [26]

Improving this newsletter

We plan to have a more regular newsletter, every two months. We also want to know if the current format suits you! Let us know what you like, what you like less and your suggestions of improvements: leave us a comment, in your preferred language.

Growth team's newsletter prepared by the Growth team and posted by bot • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.

20:57, 29 November 2022 (UTC)

Growth team newsletter #24

Welcome to the twenty-fourth newsletter from the Growth team!

Newcomer experience projects

The Growth team partnered with other WMF teams to conduct several experiments around increasing account creation and new editor retention. Results from four of these experiments are now available:

• Thank you pages & banners - Encourage donors to create accounts through thank you pages and banners.
• Marketing experiment - Run ads on-wiki and off-wiki to see how this impacts account activation.
• "Add an image" GLAM events - Host GLAM events that focus on using the "Add an image" tool.
• Welcome emails - Experiment sending welcome emails to newly created accounts.

Newcomer tasks

• Several communities suggested improving "add a link", by suggesting underlinked articles first. We released this change to Growth pilot wikis. We will review the data and collect feedback before considering releasing it to more wikis. [27]
• The deployment of the "add a link" to all Wikipedias is still in progress. Suggested links use a prediction model, which has to be trained. The deployments will resume after we finish training all models. [28]

Mentorship

• When someone wants to signup as a mentor, they are now informed if they don't meet the defined criteria. [29]
• Workshop hosts asked us to have workshop attendees assigned to them. They can soon use a custom URL parameter. This way, workshop hosts will continue mentoring the event's attendees after the workshop. It will be available in February. [30]
• Have you considered to help new editors on your wiki, by signing up to be a Mentor?
  • Please visit Special:MentorDashboard to check on the conditions to be a mentor, and sign up.
  • If your wiki does not have Mentorship enabled, consider setting it up. The Growth team can provide advice and assist as needed. Please ping Trizek (WMF) for assistance.

Other news

• In Special:SpecialPages, Growth experiments now have their own section. [31]
• This newsletter will have a new publication period, 6 times a year: January, March, May, July, September, November.

Translations

• Newsletter translation: We are looking for translators for this newsletter. If you are interested and have the needed English language proficiency to assist, then please add your name to this list. You will receive an invite on your talk page to translate the newsletter when it is ready.
• Interface translation: You can also help by translating the interface, or reviewing translations to make them more inclusive. Interface translations are hosted at translatewiki.net.

Growth team's newsletter prepared by the Growth team and posted by bot • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.• Help with translations

14:44, 31 January 2023 (UTC)