Growth/Growth team updates
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This page contains updates on the Growth team's work to increase new editor retention in Czech and Korean Wikipedias. The planning for this work began in June 2018. The team works on multiple projects at a time, but they will all be discussed on this page. During July, August, September, and October 2018, the team was also simultaneously working on a project to improve the Articles for Creation process and New Pages Feed in English Wikipedia, which is discussed on its own page.
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Growth team updates
Updates on multiple projects to increase new editor retention
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How to get involvedEdit
It is important that our work is grounded in the reality of the communities we hope to help. If you have thoughts or ideas around this project or our team's work, please comment on this project's talk page.
Project updatesEdit
Updates for 2022 are listed below, from this page. Watch 2022 updates. ● See also the Release Timeline ● Growth team updates: 2022, 2021, 2020, 2019, 2018.
Update 2022-05-23: positive reinforcement updates and other Growth team workEdit
- Annual planning
- We are planning for our coming year, and we’ll post our thoughts in the next couple weeks so that community members can react to our plans and help make sure we’re on the right track.
- Positive reinforcement
- This is the next big project that the Growth team will focus on. We want newcomers to understand there is progression and value to sustained contributions on Wikipedia, and we want to improve new editor retention.
- We have started a Positive Reinforcement discussion with contributors in English, and we will also discuss the project in more detail with our pilot wikis (Arabic, Czech, and Bengali Wikipedias) who receive Growth team features first. You can see some of our ideas in the accompanying image. Please join the discussion to share your thoughts!
- The three main ideas part of the Positive Reinforcement project are:
- Impact: An overhaul of the Impact module based on incorporating stats, graphs, and other contribution information.
- Leveling up: It is important to communities that newcomers progress to more valuable tasks. For those who do many easy tasks, we want to nudge them toward trying more difficult tasks.
- Personalized praise: Research shows that praise and encouragement from other users increases newcomer retention. We want to think about how to encourage experienced users to thank and award newcomers for good contributions.
- Add an image
- There have been no changes lately to this feature, but we are gathering data and community thoughts to plan iteration 2. So far, over 5,000 images have been added to articles.
- Add an image was used in four successful GLAM events, in which 67 people made 198 image edits. We also learned many of these contributors returned and continued to make edits following the GLAM event.
- Add a link
- We have completed "iteration 2", which involved several improvements that came from community discussion and from data analysis:
- Algorithm improvements:
- Avoid recommending links in sections that usually don't have links.
- Avoid suggesting first names.
- Limit 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:
- Add a confirmation dialog when exiting out of suggestion mode prior to making changes.
- Improved post-edit dialog experience.
- Allow newcomers to browse through task suggestions from the post-edit dialog.
- Community configuration:
- Allow communities to set a maximum number of links per article via Special:EditGrowthConfig
- Algorithm improvements:
- With those improvements, we are confident about releasing "add a link" to more wikis, and so this past week the feature was released to these wikis:
- Catalan Wikipedia
- Hebrew Wikipedia
- Hindi Wikipedia
- Korean Wikipedia
- Norwegian Bokmål Wikipedia
- Portuguese Wikipedia
- Simple English Wikipedia
- Swedish Wikipedia
- Ukrainian Wikipedia
- The next group of wikis that will receive "add a link" are documented in this this Phabricator task. The list may change slightly as we test and evaluate models and ensure the level of precision and recall in each language is adequate.
- We have completed "iteration 2", which involved several improvements that came from community discussion and from data analysis:
- Marketing:
- We are currently partnering with the Marketing team to test the efficacy of social media ads (bringing users into our projects) and welcoming emails (retaining new users). This newcomer experience marketing pilot includes an inspiring video full of community members. We’ll post results in a few weeks.
- Fundraising:
- We are working with Fundraising on ideas for how to give donors the opportunity to learn to edit. Next week we will start an experiment (in fundraising campaigns in Latin America, South Africa, and India) that shows donors a thank you message that also encourages them to create an account to start editing and improving Wikipedia.
- Donors included in this fundraising campaign who create accounts will then be brought to the newcomer homepage to get started.
Between January and May 2022, some team members transitioned to new positions and responsibilities. As a consequence, only the main events have been written down below.
Update 2022-02-25: positive reinforcement project beginningEdit
- Add an image
- This feature was originally deployed on mobile on 2021-11-29. On 2022-01-28, we deployed a desktop version so that newcomers can use it on either platform.
- On 2022-02-16, we added Spanish Wikipedia to the test. Now, 40% of newcomers on Spanish, Arabic, Bengali, and Czech Wikipedias are receiving "add an image" as their first task.
- Usage of the feature remains low, but with some users completing many edits day after day. We are now analyzing the full conversion funnel in detail to understand how to increase participation. We are also analyzing the captions users write to understand their quality and how those can be improved.
- This feature will be used in a GLAM event by Wikimedia Argentina on March 7, to help museum professional illustrate articles in Spanish Wikipedia. If it goes well, it will be used in several subsequent events in Latin America.
- Add a link
- The first iteration of "add a link" was deployed on 2021-05-29, and it is now on 11 wikis. Our data analysis shows that this feature has a substantially positive impact on constructive article activation -- it increases the likelihood that a newcomer makes an unreverted edit to an article by 17% (details forthcoming).
- In the past months, we have collected community feedback, usage data, and user feedback. We are now taking this information to make a series of improvements that we're calling "iteration 2". After making these improvements, we'll plan to ask more Wikipedias to take on this feature. The improvements underway include:
- Positive reinforcement
- In building suggested edits, the Growth team has successfully caused more newcomers to make their first edits to Wikipedia. But our analysis shows that although the features increase how many people make their first edits, they do not additionally increase the share who come back and edit again another day (retention). For this reason, we are prioritizing a project called "positive reinforcement", which is about helping newcomers be proud of their impact and be excited about coming back to continue their editing.
- This project has three main ideas, and we'll begin conversations about them with communities:
- Impact: the newcomer homepage contains a rudimentary impact module that we could improve to make more interesting.
- Leveling up: it is important to communities that newcomers progress to more valuable tasks. For those who do many easy tasks, we want to nudge them toward trying more difficult tasks.
- Personalized praise: research shows that praise and encouragement from other users increases newcomer retention. We want to think about how to encourage experienced users to thank and award newcomers for good contributions.