ウィキメディアのプロジェクト群は広範で深いコンテンツの集合体（ハブ） であり続けるために、新規の寄稿者を恒常的に受け入れなければなりません。
新規の寄稿者とは、活動が止まっている編集経験者に取って代わる存在です。
また編集コミュニティもより多様になります。
新規の編集者がたくさん入ってくると、プロジェクト群ではコンテンツが拡張し、その多様性も増していきます。
ところがウィキメディアのプロジェクト群では活発な寄稿者数は、現状維持もしくは減少傾向にあり、新規の寄稿者数もやはり同じ傾向を示しています。
この課題の研究は2013年に論文 The Rise and Decline of an Open Collaboration System: How Wikipedia's reaction to popularity is causing its decline に発表されています（仮題：オープンな投稿システムの盛衰：こうしてウィキペディアはその人気のせいで衰えた）。
執筆者陣は2007年以降、英語版ウィキペディアにおける活発な寄稿者数は減少を続け、主な素因として寄稿者にとって技術面と文化面の壁が増えた点を指摘しています。
それ以降、類似のパターンはウィキメディアの他のプロジェクト群でも散見されました。
To better understand what causes new contributors to stay and to leave, the Wikimedia Foundation completed the New Editor Experiences research project in 2017. The project identified the main challenges experienced by new contributors to Wikipedia, and a set of potential solutions. See the “Challenges” and “Solutions” sections below for the details.
The Growth team formed to take action on the challenges and solutions identified by the research project. We will continue our relationship with the Czech and Korean communities by testing changes in those wikis first. When we discover changes that increase contributor retention, we will engage other communities to consider deploying those changes in more wikis.
Although much valuable research has already been done to help our team understand new editors, important open questions remain. The team records and prioritizes our open questions on this page.
We will be deliberate about using research, data, surveys, and feature instrumentation to answer them.
Principles
The following is a list of healthy characteristics that we think wikis should exhibit with respect to new contributors. They are guiding principles for our team, and we hope to help make them a reality in the wikis we work with.
Diverse contributors lead to wikis with broad and deep content.
Contributors who want to make useful improvements to a wiki should all be able to find a place in the community where they fit in.
Contributors should be able to learn to edit on their own.
Contributors of any skill level should be able to ask for and receive help from other community members.
Contributors should be able to learn and edit in a supportive and non-confrontational environment.
Growth team mission
The mission of the Wikimedia Foundation's Growth team is to support new account holders by designing and building engaging, intuitive, and inclusive products that make it easier to join the Wikimedia movement.
Growth team vision
We envision a thriving Wikimedia community where the barrier to entry for contributing to Wikipedia and other Wikimedia projects is lower, allowing more people to successfully become active editors, and advance into roles that require more experience, leading to a sustainable and diverse knowledge commons.
Challenges
There are challenges that stand in the way of the principles above. The main challenges were identified by the New Editor Experiences research project that was completed in 2017. With the help of Czech and Korean community members, researchers interviewed 64 contributors to Czech and Korean Wikipedias to learn about why they started editing, what they found easy or difficult, and if they've stopped editing, why they stopped. The project surfaced a set of technical, conceptual, and cultural challenges, summarized below (2017 observations). Growth team’s work, along with other Wikimedia Foundation teams, helps wikis overcome these challenges so that the principles can become reality.
Technical: new contributors struggle with specific skills needed to contribute.
Editing: though Visual Editor is helpful for new contributors, it is hard for them to learn the process of building, citing, and publishing.
Communication: new contributors have trouble finding and using Talk pages. This is because Talk pages do not use Visual Editor, and because they work differently than other internet discussion systems.
Finding help: many wikis have scattered and inconsistent help materials that are difficult for new contributors to find and use.
Conceptual: new contributors have trouble learning core wiki policies and best practices. The following are the concepts that are most challenging.
Community: many new contributors do not realize there is an active community behind each wiki project.
Verifiability and citations: all content must be attributed to reliable sources.
Notability: all content must have garnered enough broad attention to deserve an article.
Encyclopedic style and neutral point of view: articles should present content without bias toward one side of an argument.
Copyright: content should not violate the licensing of its sources.
Cultural: the wiki environment can be discouraging to new contributors who are trying to find where they fit in.
Personas: new contributors have different objectives for why they are editing, but it is hard to figure out how to accomplish them.
Framing: the way that contributors communicate impacts whether new contributors stay. Negative feedback can discourage further contribution.
Solutions
The Growth team will attempt multiple solutions to the above challenges, and we will learn and expand as we go along. These are the findings from the New Editor Experiences project that will guide the solutions we attempt:
Intermediaries: many new contributors have succeeded because a partner or mentor helped them learn to edit. These partners are frequently found in off-wiki places like schools, libraries, or meetups.
Iterative learning: new contributors have more success when they learn editing skills over time in safe environments.
Outside help: new contributors frequently search for help outside of Wikipedia, either in off-wiki communications, or through other internet resources.
Those trends lead to two main categories of solutions to the challenges described above. The work of our team will usually fit into one of these categories:
Human-to-human help: forums and programs that connect contributors to each other so that experienced contributors can help newer contributors succeed. This can include help desk forums, mentorship opportunities, or even off-wiki connections.
In-context help: changes to the Wikipedia editing experience to surface helpful guidance around technical and conceptual challenges. This is guidance surfaced at the time it is needed, in the place where it is needed -- as opposed to on a separate page that may be difficult to find.
These are links and research that underpin the background, principles, challenges, and solutions above, and that continue to shape our team’s thinking.
