Growth/Communities/Wikisource

Tracked in Phabricator
Task T290441

The Growth team primary worked on helping newcomers who'd like to edit Wikipedia. Growth features are now available at all versions of Wikipedia, and some sister projects communities have expressed their interest in getting the Growth features as well. This is the case of Wikisource community.

This page summarizes the conversations between the Growth team and the Wikisource communitues, and the different findings.

At the moment, our lead question is: which kind of tasks newcomers could do when arriving at Wikisource?

What are the Growth features?

Growth features provide a set of tools to ease newcomer's first steps:

a Welcome survey to know more why people register.
a central Homepage where newcomers can find:
- Suggested Edits tasks to work on, based on common tasks for the wiki and, potentially, topics newcomers can select
- Mentorship, with a mentor who'd help them editing
- Impact module, which shows the top 5 of pages views help links
- Help module, which shows 5 help links curated by the community and a link to more help resources.
a Help panel that provides guidance to the newcomers while they edit. It also includes the Help module.

We really encourage you to test the features out before participating to this page. If you'd like to know more about Growth tools, go to your favorite Wikipedia, and turn the features on there.

Growth features and Wikisource

Growth team's goal is not to just apply the features as they are to all wikis beyond Wikipedia especially when some of these features aren't designed for Wikisource. The team wants to provide proper tools to the communities and their newcomers.

The following sections are a summary of our findings and questions, and they will be edited when new conversations happen.

Welcome survey

Questions at the Welcome survey may need to be more Wikisource specific.

Homepage

The Homepage is composed of modules. These modules could be displayed and hidden during the configuration, but it might require some additional design from the Growth team.

Suggested edits

Suggested edits have been designed for Wikipedia and need to be adapted to Wikisource.

At Wikipedia, people select a topic of interest (sport, Asia, music...) and a type of maintenance task based on a maintenance template. It appears that at Wikisource, maintenance templates aren't that common (they are non-existent at Indic WIkisources^[1]).

Regarding topics

The way they've been defined for Wikipedia won't fit Wikisource. Instead, it could be adapted to general topics:^[1] fiction, non fiction, poetry...

Regarding tasks

Proofreading pages is the easiest kind of task.^[1]
Reviewing a page is medium as it requires to know a few templates, check on the spelling and submit it for review.^[1] Not all tasks or books can suit newcomers. Maybe have a way to select Indexes of books that can be safely reviewed?^[1]
One of the hardest tasks would be to create a table of contents, or transclude a book.^[1]
Overall, prose is an easier task than poetry. There is a shift to consider between these two kind of texts.^[1]

Post edit dialog

When an edit has been completed, new users are invited to work on another article/page.

At Wikisource, pages of a book are connected through an Index. They are categorized at most Wikisources but not all. Going to the next task should rely on the table of content of a book, to give the next page to the user.

Mentorship

The mentorship works well and doesn't need improvements.

Impact module

This module hasn't been covered during the first conversation.

At the moment, the impact module gives the number of views for an article, which would be, for Wikisources, a page. Is it relevant?^[1]

Maybe the impact module could display the the number for validations of pages by a given user?^[1]

Help module

The help module doesn't need improvements, since the links can already be curated by the community.

Help panel

The help panel is connected to Suggested edits, in order to provide.

Growth team specific work

The Growth team gathers some anonymised data about newcomers' editing experience. We'd need to check if we plan to work on Wikisource data, and, if so, what to measure.

Wikisource specials

Not all pages have an index. ProofreadPage is not used everywhere.^[2]
There is a maintenance template related to quality of pages not using ProofreadPage, used at some Wikisources: {{TextQuality}}.^[2]

Possible next steps

Two possibilities for the next steps are to be considered:

deploy Growth tools minus SuggestedEdits,
wait until a variation of SuggestedEdits is created for Wikisource.

Updates on this project

2021-10-19: creation of this page
2021-09-27: meeting with Indic communities
2021-09-06: first contact about "consider Wikisource"

Notes

↑ ^1.0 ^1.1 ^1.2 ^1.3 ^1.4 ^1.5 ^1.6 ^1.7 ^1.8 https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T290441#7379710
↑ ^2.0 ^2.1 https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T290441#7463457 see https://phetools.toolforge.org/statistics.php for the stats of use.

[:0-1] 1.0 ^1.1 ^1.2 ^1.3 ^1.4 ^1.5 ^1.6 ^1.7 ^1.8 https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T290441#7379710

[:1-2] 2.0 ^2.1 https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T290441#7463457 see https://phetools.toolforge.org/statistics.php for the stats of use.

[1]

[2]