Wikimedia Foundation Annual Plan/Quarterly check-ins/Audiences2 Notes October 2018

Notes from the Quarterly Review meeting with the Wikimedia Foundation's Audiences teams, October 31, 2018, 8:00am - 9:30am PDT.

Please keep in mind that these minutes are mostly a rough paraphrase of what was said at the meeting, rather than a source of authoritative information. Consider referring to the presentation slides and other official material

QCI Audiences #2 session

Intro to new content programs: Toby

• TN: "all models are wrong, but some are useful" - this one is obviously incompletely, e.g. doesn't contain donors
• We call it a flywheel cos each aspect supports each other
• At the moment we are still in research and design phase
• [chat question: what is new content about? https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation_Annual_Plan/2018-2019/Audiences#New_Content ]

Progressive onboarding

• Danny: found that retention is really low
• need tools to have newbies learn abotu practices etc

• Abbey: research project on new editors' needs
• mapped those needs to personas

Growth Projects: Marshall

• is about increasing retention of new editors
• retention is a problem especially in mid-size wikipedias
• funnel for kowiki – ~45% ever make an edit, ~8% come back to make another edit; seek to increase both of those proportions
• built on new editors research by abbey et al
• focus on day 1 - most who make edit do it on day 1
• 3 ideas selected from a long list based on in-team discussion, research and Community consultations

• personalized 1st day: don't know so far what [aim] people arrive with
• in-context help
• all these 3 projects in flux currently
• depending on initial outcomes may also start pursuing a couple of other top design interventions (Engagement emails and in-context lessons/tutorials in Q3)

Mobile Contribution

• Danny: lots of new internet users in middle income countries where laptops are expensive but everyone has a phone

• Abbey: mobile personas in US
• ... in India
• Margeigh on mobile contributions learnings
• Toby: understanding users in their context then using personas to make this influence development

Contribution tools on Mobile Web: Olga

• Olga: Mobile Web improvements for existing contirbutors
• Began with design research (interviews, data, feedback on prototypes)
• design looks quite busy, on purpose - added most links that editors have on desktop
• Toby: Still going to have the floating toolbar??
• Olga: Still tbc, but there will be sticky top bar, more in side nav
• Olga: Initially Editors are super excited about the work, learnings through research as well about how to reach out to and communicate with Editors for feedback
• Olga: team made mental switch from supporting readers to editors. some of these had been requested for a long time
• Toby: very exciting
• Olga: ... (next steps)
• Toby: moderation tools are just important as editing tools, so it's great to see work on this aspect (curation, e.g. making Special pages more usable and accessible on mobile)

VE on mobile: Dan

• this q: find out what challenges people face, how we can address them
• Generally VE edit success was lower than Wikitext since more experienced users used Wikitext, but breaking down by all experience levels, VE actually does perform better.
• Another key finding from Heuristic research was that help was missing in mobile VE - confirmed previous NE research and work being done on Growth
• making VE faster should make fewer people drop off

Mobile for existing contributors on iOS: Josh

• Josh: this has been a design and research quarter
• added wikidata description editing (which Android did last year) - not very tightly aligned, but good to get start on contribution
• Chelsy provided great data research report on mobile app editors on iOS - first time done in the apps and will inform future metrics
• A ton of design research (generative, evaluative) by CMadeo to review other mobile editing contexts as iOS ramps up work on contributor UIs
• e.g. notetaking and coding apps
• Toby: if you have questions or concerns whether people contribute on mobile at all, read that report: they do
• ...
• Josh: heard from editors that navigating within wikitext can be a challenge, so we're designing some features to help with that, starting with syntax highlighting
• data: as jk discussed in yesterday's QCI, error bars are like 90% in some of the metrics [that were initially envisaged in the AP], so need to find more suitable ones

Mobile for existing contributors on Android: Charlotte

• notifications: released on Monday
• can we move the app editor retention metric with these initial Welcome, Milestone and Thanks Echo notifications in the app?
• V0 test but also support longer term goals for introducing editor Uis into the apps

• Small mobile contributions will be introduced next quarter
  • intentionally not showing mocks yet, just want to introduce the concept of how users can contribute simply in smaller bites
  • there will be "quality gates" on each contribution type being trialled to ensure these small tasks are not [damaging] - like last year the revert rate for Wikidata description edits
• Toby: even though there is a large difference in (readers) audience size between apps and web, apps can become a fully valuable platform for contribution at current dimensions already

Content Translation: Pau

• V2 of Content translation (CX) tool will be slowly introduced after initial rounds of feedback, with end goal of making V2 the default
• Improvements for Translate extension, connected to TranslateWiki.net (Pau)

Release Cadenece: Toby

• Toby: there were questions about release cadence

• Jaime: how are you going to use model going forward?
• Toby: understand how pieces fit together, how they inform team
• e.g. when previously focused on readers
• Jaime: model is useful, helps rest of us understand what you're doing
• Toby: also helps to inform outreach efforts, for knowledge equity
• JK: in the past struggled with funnel model - community is complicated, refine
• Josh: might even quantify some of this