This page contains updates on the Growth team's work to increase new editor activation and retention.
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.
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.
Spanish Wikipedia increases Mentorship rollout, so that 70% of newcomers receive a Mentor when they create an account on Spanish Wikipedia (T392869). The Growth team will increase Mentorship to 85% of newcomers soon, unless we hear concerns from Spanish Wikipedia mentors (T394867).
Surfacing “Add a Link” on Mobile (Constructive Activation experiment) is still underway on on pilot wikis (fr, fa, id, pt, arz). Initial experiment data is under analyst review; we hope to have a final report to share next month.
We are progressing with work to allow communities to limit "Add a Link" to newer accounts (T393769)
We're implementing an improvement to the enwiki "Add a Link" model to ensure link suggestions more closely align with the enwiki Manual of Style.
Designs are finalized, and engineering has begun on a supportive notification (Echo/email) for new accounts with 0 edits. Early research indicates this type of nudge increases editing activity (T392256)
Communities will soon have the ability to limit “Add a link” to newer editors. This helps address concerns about misuse by experienced editors or overburdening moderators.
The change includes moving the "Add a Link" task to the “Starter” difficulty level and notifying newcomers when they’ve reached the usage threshold.
You can see related designs in the following tasks:
Move Add a link task to the newcomer task difficulty level "Starter" (T393767)
Disable task type X for a user when the configured threshold is reached (T393769)
Send a notification to newcomers when Add a link threshold is reached (T393771)
We're addressing complaints about irrelevant link recommendations. A technical investigation is underway.
Together, these improvements aim to make “Add a Link” more useful, more trusted, and more appreciated by communities. Let us know if you'd like to get involved or provide feedback!
Once an account confirms their email address, we will remove the "email module" from the Newcomer Homepage (T275155).
We are also taking some time to clean up old code and feature flags to decrease the complexity of working within GrowthExperiments extension (T379568 & T379566).
We aim to increase the data cap for the the Impact Module, so the metrics are more relevant to experiences editors who routinely bypass the edit count limit (T341599).
The data on the Mentorship dashboard was not updating for a period of time, due to the associated script causing issues. Growth Engineers have had to work on various changes to improve performance and batch data handling (T391695).
Engineering Maintenance
We have completed several tasks to clean up and remove old code and feature flags (T379566).
We provided the Spanish Wikipedia community with the “Add an Image” data they were seeking (T390075).
Update 2025-04-11
Growth team offsite
As a distributed team working around the world, we only have the chance to get together once each year to work together! This year we met with a few other Core Experience teams in Philadelphia, to draft initial plans that align with the Wikimedia Foundations 25/26 Annual Plan.
We will focus on the WE1.1 Key Result: Key result WE1.1: Increase constructive edits [i] by X% for editors with less than 100 cumulative edits, as measured by experiments by the end of Q2.
i. "Constructive edits" = edits that are not reverted within 48 hours of being published
The Surfacing Structured tasks A/B test on pilot wikis is was launched across six wikis, covering both desktop and mobile (T386029) . While impressions are expected to be higher than in the alpha test, additional work is underway to increase the number of link suggestions without delaying release (T386250).
Growth data
We are continuing work to migrate GrowthExperiments client code to statslib (T359352).
Update 2025-02-27 "Add a Link" rollout and experiment on English Wikipedia
On English Wikipedia, the incremental rollout continues smoothly, with expansion to 15% of newcomers this week (T386029)
The analysis of the English Wikipedia “Add a Link” experiment is in progress. Preliminary data aligns with previous pilot results (indicating that it’s likely that results will show that the “Add a Link” task increases constructive activation on English Wikipedia), however, a final QA of the activation analysis is underway before exact figures will be shared. Once the constructive activation metrics are finalized, Product Analytics will shift focus to assessing the impact on newcomer retention. (T382603)
Mentorship was released to 100% of newcomers at English Wikipedia on February 17, 2025 (T384505).
We will start to work with Spanish Wikipedia to increase Mentorship to 100% (T285235). All other wikis that utilize Mentorship have the feature released to 100% of newcomers.
Update 2025-02-14 "Add a Link" & Constructive Activation Experiments
Next week, we’ll increase the “Add a link” rollout on English Wikipedia to 15% (T386029).
The Growth team reviewed community feedback on the “Add a link” task and documented key themes and potential solutions. As we expand exposure to this task, we aim to incorporate improvements based on insights from experienced editors and moderators.
We are also exploring enhancements to the “Add a Link” models. The Research team is investigating a new approach that ensures more regular training for the models and reduces infrastructure complexity while maintaining language-specific models.
We’re exploring ways to encourage newcomers who leave an edit session without saving to try again. Our idea is to provide a supportive message with a clear next step—such as a Structured Task—to guide them back into editing. This concept is in the early design and community feedback stage (T385541), and we’d love to hear your thoughts!
After a discussion with English Wikipedia Mentors, there was agreement to release Mentorship to all newcomers on English Wikipedia. This week bumped up the percentage of newcomers who receive Mentorship to 75%, and on February 17th 100% of new accounts will be paired with a experienced editor Mentor. T384505
Newcomers often struggle to find a starting point on Wikipedia. The Growth team has developed features like the Newcomer Homepage to provide guidance through suggested edits, mentorship, and impact tracking. However, editing isn’t just about individual contributions—it’s also about collaboration. While experienced editors easily find events like edit-a-thons and writing campaigns, newcomers often miss out.To bridge this gap, the Growth team introduced the Community Updates module on the Newcomer Homepage, making community events and initiatives more visible and accessible to new editors.
The Growth team’s Community Updates module, launching globally on February 11, 2025, helps by making community events and initiatives more visible on the Newcomer Homepage. The feature will be disabled by default, allowing Community Admins to decide how (or if) to utilize it. Trials on Arabic, Czech, French, and Spanish Wikipedias provided insights for future improvements ideas. If your community hosts events, consider setting up a Community Update to welcome and engage newcomers. We’re excited to see how communities use this feature—let us know your thoughts!
Update 2025-01-31 Babel Extension Now Supports Community Configuration on All Wikis
The “Add a link” rollout on English Wikipedia has increased to 10% (T384551). We will start to review results from this A/B test soon (T382603).
In late 2024, German Wikipedia independently enabled the “Add a Link” task and has since been actively discussing its impact. We’ve received a request to provide data on the "Add a Link" structured task for dewiki (T385103).
Update 2025-01-24 Resuming Work on Helping New Account Holders Start Editing
We're continuing our efforts to support constructive activation for new account holders. This week, we’re focusing on preparations for a pilot experiment testing the impact of surfacing "Add a Link" tasks to brand-new account holders. Here’s what’s happening:
Key Updates
Improving the "Add a Link" Task Flow We’re updating the task flow to surface only the specific link tapped on, when the task is initiated from the Read view (T381450).
This change aims to simplify the user experience (UX) and address feedback from patrollers.
Patrollers have shared that when some links in an edit are incorrect, it creates extra work to fix the edit instead of a simple "revert." This adjustment will help mitigate that frustration.
Expanding Link Suggestions We’re significantly increasing the number of link suggestions available for our pilot wikis:
Smarter resource allocation: We’ll store when no link suggestions were generated for a page and avoid reprocessing the article until it’s edited again (T382270). This prevents wasted resources.
More tasks per topic: We’re increasing the minimum number of "Add a Link" suggestions generated for pilot wikis, scaling up suggestions tenfold (T383714).
Addressing Community Feedback
We’re also planning to address feedback from experienced editors about "Add a Link" tasks. Some ideas include:
Adding additional rejection reasons for edits (T384403).
Allowing admins to define rules for linking (or not linking) via Community Configuration (T384405).
Explore more improvement ideas listed as subtasks of T276517.
We’ll continue iterating on these features to support both newcomers and experienced contributors alike. Feedback is always welcome!
Update 2025-01-17 Engineering Maintenance & Add a Link Release
Engineering Maintenance
We kicked off 2025 with a focus on technical priorities that are often challenging to address amidst endless product initiatives and WMF Annual Plan commitments. It's important to balance new feature development with engineering maintenance because a stable, well-maintained code ensures that new innovations are reliable, scalable, and sustainable over time. Without regular maintenance, technical debt can accumulate, leading to system inefficiencies, increased costs, and potential disruptions to user experience. Here are the highlights of what we worked on:
Remove Marketing experiment related code from GrowthExperiments T382499
Create a generic Campaign parameter for the Donor Thank You page T380405
Switch GETempLinkRecommendationSwitchTagClearHook to true at all wikis T379522
Running extensions/Babel/maintenance/migrateConfigToCommunity.php with BabelUseCommunityConfiguration=false results in a fatal error T383904
PHP Warning: Stats: Cannot add labels to a metric containing samples for 'update_mentee_data_seconds' T383477
Migrate GrowthExperiments.Mentorship Module to statslib T374048
Ensure ORES topics are not loaded through legacy CommunityConfiguration code T367576
