Growth/Translation task for homepage

Tracked in Phabricator
Task T337433

Note: This is a potential project that is in the early design / brainstorm phase; this page is intended to gather and refine ideas.

Positive reinforcement Translation task on the newcomer homepage Group: Growth Start: 2023-05-01 Updates: Most updates posted here .

The Growth Team's mission is to design and construct engaging, user-friendly, and inclusive products that broaden the appeal of editing to a more diverse audience. A key strategy that has proven beneficial in the onboarding process of new editors is the use of Content translation.

The objective of this project is to integrate the Content Translation tool into the Newcomer homepage, providing a convenient entry point for those interested in contributing to Wikipedia through translation. To ensure adaptability and customization, we will design this feature to be Community configurable. This will empower local Administrators with the discretion to enable or disable the task, tailoring the tool to best suit the needs of their specific community.

Current status

• 2023-05-01: Early design ideation

• Next: Share early stage project idea and designs with the community

Hypotheses

• If the homepage provides a newcomer-friendly translation task, then the number of newcomers who activate and are retained will increase.
• If a translation task is prominently featured as a task on the homepage, then more new editors will be attracted to this type of editing.

Goals

We want to:

• Increase activation and retention of diverse, multilingual users on Wikipedia by providing them with relevant and high impact contribution translation tasks.
• Provide an access point to the Content Translation (CX) and Section Content Translation (SX) tool from the Newcomer homepage for people interested in translation as a way of contributing to Wikipedia.
• Allow communities to disable this homepage module if surfacing Content translation isn't a priority.
• Create configurable "quality gates" so communities can decide if this task is only surfaced to editors who meet certain criteria.

We don't want to:

• Create a whole new Content Translation task that doesn’t use the existing functionality.
• Facilitate the translation of articles that are not notable or likely to get deleted.
• Guide newcomers in a way that results in many poor quality articles being created that ends up creating more work for content moderators.
• Confuse newcomers about how editing works.
• Draw complaints from experienced community contributors who do not want less experienced editors to make translations fearing bad-faith or bad-quality edits.

How we will measure success:

• Newcomers activate and/or are retained via edits from CX/SX accessed via the Newcomer homepage
• Large percentage of users who return to try Suggested edits after using CX/SX
• Greater number of translations made by newcomers (less than X edits) via access from Newcomer homepage
• Article deletion and revert rates are lower than for "regular" edits.

Research

This is a low-effort project that will allow for quick experimentation, and guided by previous research:

• Welcome survey analysis shows that a significant number of newcomers are multilingual, although this varies considerably by wiki.
• Expert translators from the Medical Translation Task Force estimated their productivity increased 17% with content translation. [1]
• Content translation is a significant portion of the articles created on some smaller wikis. [2]
• Over 1 million Wikipedia articles have been created via Content Translation. [3]
• Newcomers who create articles with Content Translation are more successful than newcomers creating articles on their own. In 2022, across all languages and devices, for new editors with accounts that were less than a week old:
  • 21% of mainspace articles created using Content Translation by newcomers were deleted. [4]
  • 44% of mainspace articles created NOT using Content Translation by newcomers were deleted. [5]
• Results are similar for Section translation, which supports expanding existing articles with the assistance of machine translation. In 2022, across cs, bn Wikipedias on mobile, for new editors with accounts that were less than a week old:
  • 14% of edits to existing articles using Content Translation on mobile by newcomers were reverted. [6]
  • 25% of edits to existing articles NOT using Content Translation by newcomers on mobile were reverted. [7]

Community discussion

Early feedback

• We could nudge editors to translate red-link pages that have article(s) in other language than their local one. (From Omotecho, Making homepage feature discoverable for all users discussion).

Community consultation

We will consult with Growth pilot wiki communities regarding the initial project ideas and share initial design prototypes.

Design

TBD

Measurement and results

TBD