Growth/Newsletters/12

Welcome to the twelfth newsletter from theGrowth team!

The Growth team's objective is to work on software changes that help retain new contributors inmid-sizeWikimedia projects.

General news

• Atraining for mentorshas been published. The training was first tried with the Czech community, and went well.
• Growth team features have been deployed toHungarian, Ukrainian, and Armenian Wikipedias.If your community is enthusiastic about welcoming newcomers, we encourage you tocontact usso that we can verify together whether your wiki is eligible. Then you can go throughthe checklistto start the process of configuring the features.

Productive edits from newcomer tasks

We deployed the basic workflow fornewcomer tasksto 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

• About1.5% of newcomerswho visit their homepage complete the workflow and save a suggested edit. So far, this has amounted toover 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 featuredoes notappear 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 hereto 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 deployedtopic matchingon ourpilot 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 theORES 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 thehelp panelto 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 theirhomepagebegin the newcomer tasks workflow. We are going to betrying out different layoutsof 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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