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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.

Growth team updates
Updates on multiple projects to increase new editor retention
Group: Growth
Start: 2018-07-01
Team members: Gergő Tisza (senior software engineer), Benoît Evellin (community relations specialist), Elena Tonkovidova (QA engineer), Dennis Mburugu (engineering manager), Sergio Gimeno (software engineer), Kirsten Stoller (product manager), Mariya Shilova (Senior Technical Program Manager), Kosta Harlan (senior software engineer), Morten Warncke-Wang (data analyst), Rita Ho (UX designer)

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 2023 are listed below, from this page. Watch 2023 updates. ● See also the Release Timeline ● Growth team updates: 2023, 2022, 2021, 2020, 2019, 2018.


Update 2023-03-17: Add a Link scaling & donors in more languages are invited to try editingEdit

Update 2023-03-10: Leveling up release & upcoming shift in focus to “add an image”  Edit

  • Positive Reinforcement
    • Growth team engineers are hard at work finishing up Leveling up tasks and testing the new features. Leveling up features will be released as part of the Positive Reinforcement A/B test on Arabic Wikipedia, Bengali Wikipedia, Czech Wikipedia, and Spanish Wikipedia on Monday, March 20th (T330358).
    • We will quickly check some of the experiment leading indicators to make sure initial results look promising (T328055) and then we will follow up with a full experiment analysis report once we’ve gathered enough data to have significant newcomer retention data (T328057).  
  • Add an image
    • In the month of February 2023, over 5,000 images were added to Wikipedia articles via the newcomer “add an image” feature. Since “add an image” was launched, over 36,000 images have been added to articles via this newcomer task.
    • After the Growth team wraps up Positive Reinforcement work, we will re-focus on “add an image” work. We will work on improvements to the feature based on user feedback and funnel analysis (T293711).
    • We will also start work on a new section-level “add an image” task (T321754). In other words: the current “add an image” task suggests images that illustrate the article as a whole, while this new task will suggest images to articles that already have an article-level image, but could use an image to illustrate a specific section within the article.
  • Mentorship
    • We fulfilled a community request from Spanish Wikipedia to add a talk page link for each mentee in the “Your mentees” module on the Mentor dashboard (T322750).
  • Add a link
    • Growth pilot wikis have been testing a new “add a link” prioritization formula that prioritizes articles that are more likely to be underlinked. This new prioritization formula seems to be working well for newcomers and possibly even decreasing the ratio of edits that end up reverted. We are now scaling this change to all wikis (T330535).
  • Newcomer Experience Projects
    • The Thank you page experiment proved that inviting Wikipedia donors to create accounts through the Thank you page is a sustainable and low-impact way to grow the number of new editors on Wikipedia. We are continuing to expand this work to more languages and regions.  Next Thursday this new “Try editing Wikipedia” call to action will be added to the donor thank you page on Swedish Wikipedia, Italian Wikipedia, French Wikipedia, Dutch Wikipedia, and Japanese Wikipedia (T321370). We will follow up with a quick analysis (T331495) and evaluate the funnel (thank you page visitors > account registrations > constructive activation) once we have enough data.    

Update 2023-03-03: Positive Reinforcement & Add a LinkEdit

Update 2023-02-24: Leveling up & Add a LinkEdit

  • Leveling Up  
    • We completed a community consultation in which we reviewed the most recent Leveling up designs with the Growth Pilot wikis. This consultation was completed in English on Mediawiki, and at Arabic Wikipedia, Bengali Wikipedia, Czech Wikipedia, and Spanish Wikipedia (T328356). In general, feedback was quite positive. These two tasks help address the only critical feedback mentioned by those that provided feedback:
      • Leveling up: Community configuration (T328386)
      • Leveling up: Second design iteration of "Try a new task" dialog (T330543)
    • The Growth team is wrapping up a few remaining tasks that are necessary for the initial release of Leveling Up features.  After testing is complete and translations are in place, we will release these new features in an A/B test to Arabic, Bengali, Czech, and Spanish Wikipedias.  
  • Add a Link
    • We looked at edit and revert data on Growth pilot wikis before and after the release of T301096. It appears that the new prioritization formula may result in more newcomers completing "add a link" tasks and also result in a lower revert rate (although this was not a true A/B test, and revert rates are low enough that it is difficult to draw a conclusion with confidence). Given these results combined with a prior manual evaluation by Growth Ambassadors, and positive reception from Pilot communities, we plan to move forward with releasing this new prioritization formula to all wikis that currently have the "add a link" structured task (T330535).

Update 2023-02-17: Leveling up community consultation & evaluation of section-level image suggestionsEdit

  • Leveling Up community consultation
  • Add an image: section-level image suggestions
    • The current “add an image” tool only suggests images to entirely unillustrated articles. The "add an image" feature suggests article-level image suggestions; images meant to illustrate the article as a whole. The WMF Structured Data team is working on the backend needed to provide image suggestions for specific sections in an article. These section-level image suggestions will power a new Growth team structured task for section-level image suggestions. We are starting design work on this task (T321756), and Growth team Ambassadors helped with a first evaluation of these section-level image suggestions (T316151).

Update 2023-02-10: Positive reinforcement community discussions & Suggested edits topic filteringEdit

Update 2023-02-03: Positive reinforcement, Mentorship for workshop attendees, & "Try editing" prompt for donorsEdit

  • Positive Reinforcement
    • Impact Module
      • The new Impact module is released as an A/B test to Growth pilot wikis and we’ve released several minor improvements and bug fixes (T327849, T324675, T327824). Next up we will complete experiment analysis to determine how this change has affected newcomers (T327581).    
    • Leveling Up
      • We are wrapping up some analysis to better understand where we should set baseline Leveling Up prompts (T322433)
      • Engineering work has started on improving the post-edit dialog when a newcomer has topics or tasks selected that result in no suggestions (T324177).
      • The main purpose of Leveling up work is to encourage newcomers to try new and more difficult types of tasks, and our initial work on that effort has started (T322386).  
    • Personalized Praise
      • The backend work needed to support the new “personalized praise” module on the Mentor dashboard has been completed (T322444).  
  • Mentorship
  • Newcomer experience projects
    • Special account creation pages for donors are now available on SV, IT, JA, FR, and NL Wikipedias (T321370). This work expands the Thank you page experiment in which we encouraged donors in certain languages / on certain wikis to try editing Wikipedia.
  • Welcome Survey
    • Vietnamese Wikipedia now has a newcomer welcome survey (T325376).

Update 2023-01-27: Positive reinforcement, SpecialPages, PageTriage, & MentorshipEdit

Update 2023-01-19: Newcomer experience projects & Positive reinforcement updateEdit

  • Newcomer experience projects
    • The Growth team has been partnering with other WMF teams to conduct several experiments aimed at increasing new editor activation and retention. An overview of the four main projects completed are available here: Newcomer experience projects
  • Positive reinforcement
    • There are three parts to the Positive reinforcement project, and we are nearly complete with the first. The work needed to complete the new Impact module is almost complete (T222310). The Growth team is now shifting to focus on Leveling Up (T317813) and Personalized Praise (T317817).  
  • Welcome survey
    • On January 30th, we will deploy the welcome survey to Vietnamese Wikipedia (T325376). After this update, all language editions of Wikipedia with Growth tools enabled will receive the Welcome survey.
  • Newcomer experience + New article creation
    • A few Growth team members are meeting with New Pages Patrol representatives and other English wikipedia community members to discuss improvements for newcomers who come to the wikis primarily interested in article creation (meeting details). The Growth team hopes to learn more about current NPP challenges and consider how a project around Article Creation for Newcomers fits into the plans of the Growth team. If this project is prioritized we will spend more time gathering feedback from other wikis and especially focus on feedback from new editors.

Update 2023-01-13: Positive reinforcement updates and Mentorship improvementEdit

  • Positive Reinforcement
    • We released several Impact module improvements including a change to the logic of how we are displaying “Total edits” (T325216).
    • The new Impact module is still being A/B tested on Pilot wikis. We will conduct a thorough analysis once the experiment has run long enough to gather retention metrics, but in the meantime the impact module leading indicators appear healthy.
    • Thanks has been added to Watchlists, Contributions, and Recent Changes (T51541, T90404). We will soon work on design ideas for improvements to the confirmation step (T315859).  
  • Mentorship
    • We have worked on a few changes recently to help ensure that when a Mentor is blocked locally or globally they don’t continue to receive questions from mentees (T325087, T318819).
  • Add a Link
    • Newcomers at Growth pilot wikis will now receive “add a link” suggestions for articles that are more clearly "underlinked" (T301096). After discussing this change with Pilot communities and looking at “add a link” metrics we will decide if this change should be released to more wikis.
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