Growth/Newcomer Homepage Translation task

Group:	Growth
Start:	2024-02-23
Lead:	Tech Lead: Sergio Gimeno Product Manager: Kirsten Stoller
Updates:	Most updates posted here.

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This page describes the Growth team’s work adding a Content translation module to the newcomer homepage. The Content translation module will link to the Content translation interface (Special:ContentTranslation) for editors interested in exploring this feature. It will be Community Configurable.

Current Status

2024-02-23: Initial project page created
Up next: Growth Pilot wiki community discussion

Summary

The Growth team will experiment with adding a new Content translation module to the Newcomer homepage, and A/B test the impact of exposing this feature on the Newcomer homepage.

As new editors progress in their involvement on the wikis, the Newcomer homepage should evolve and offer more complex tasks that also encourage new editors to engage in more meaningful ways. This new task can be used to help bring attention to content gaps on high-impact topics, which aligns with the 2030 Movement strategy’s “Topics for Impact” recommendation.

Hypothesis

If we present Newcomer homepage editors with Content translation tasks that are filtered to high-impact topics, then more articles that address knowledge gaps will be created.

To evaluate this hypothesis, we'll examine several key questions and track corresponding metrics:

Do users interact with this new module?
- Metric: The click through rate of Newcomer homepage visitors in the experiment group (that receives this new module).
Is this task suitable for newer editors who find the suggested task on their Newcomer homepage?
- Metric: The task completion rate for editors who start a Content translation task (from the Newcomer homepage call to action).
Did this task actually lead to more Content translation tasks being completed?
- Metric: When A/B tested, editors that receive the Content translation task on their Newcomer homepage complete more Content translation tasks than the control group that doesn’t receive the module.
Are there any drawbacks, negative patterns, or anti-patterns that arise from using this module?
- Quality guardrail:
  - Metric: Article quality & deletion stats.
- Task suitability guardrail:
  - Metric: The number of wikis that remove this module from the Newcomer homepage via Community Configuration.
- High-impact topics guardrail:
  - Metric: The percentage of new articles created that relate to high-impact topics.
- Bias guardrail:
  - Metric: The percentage of new articles created that may contribute to systemic-bias.
Does this module help fill knowledge gaps?
- Metric: A 1 percentage point increase (Year-of-Year) in the portion of newly created or improved articles on high-impact topics with acceptable quality, per the “global quality score”, that are created or edited on Wikipedia, starting with underrepresented geographic regions and gender. (This is the WikiExperiences 1.3 Key Result from the WMF Product & Technology department's Objectives and Key Results.)

Target Audience

This project will primarily target Learners: registered editors whose experience falls between Newcomers (fewer than 10 edits or 4 days of activity) and Experienced Editors (500+ edits, >30 days of activity).

We will target both mobile and desktop Newcomer homepage visitors.

Our primary wiki audience is mid-sized Wikipedias, but the feature will be Community Configurable so that it can be adjusted to work well for all Wikipedia language editions.

Research

The project is guided by many previous research projects and experiments:

Community Discussion

The Growth team will initiate a discussion on our current Pilot wikis (Arabic Wikipedia and Spanish Wikipedia), along with a conversation in English on the associated MediaWiki talk page. Questions for Community Discussion:

Do you have any feedback or concerns about this project idea?
Do you have any suggestions for making this feature more impactful or meaningful to your community?

Design

The following are initial design mockups of the mobile layout of the newcomer Homepage, including two new modules: the Content Translation task and the Community Updates module.

English mockup
Spanish mockup
Arabic mockup

Measurement and Results

Ideas for further improvements

The Growth team aims to release experiments quickly, so the first version of this feature may have more limited functionality. After initial experimentation, if this feature proves valuable, then we should consider the following improvements:

Improved targeting.
Consider integrating translation tasks into Suggested Edits, when Content translation articles can be filtered by the editor’s self-selected topical interest.