Help:Growth/Mentorship

How mentorship works? A presentation of Mentorship by Habib Mhenni at WikiIndaba conference 2024 (in English).

The Growth features offer a mentorship system. This system is used by various features the Growth team maintains, namely the Newcomer homepage (which offers a mentorship module to newcomers; they can use it to ask questions) and at some wikis, the help panel.

Mentorship relies on two types of users:

mentors: experienced users who volunteer to help newcomers in their first steps,
mentees: newcomers who are assigned to a mentor, and who can potentially interact with them.

This page summarizes various features relevant to mentorship, as introduced by Growth features.

Enrolling as a mentor

Each project has its own list of mentors. You can find the list of mentors for your project on Wikidata.

For more information on how to enroll, please see Growth/Communities/How to configure the mentors' list .

Mentors involvement

Mentors are the first point of contact for newcomers. The mentor's name is shown at the Newcomer homepage.

We provide a mentor for each new account. It's an equal chance for all new users to find help if they need it. Most new accounts will never contact their mentor, while some other will do it first thing.

Sometimes, mentees don't follow up when mentors reply. Be patient: as an experienced user, you are probably every day on wiki, which is far from being true for newcomers. We are aware of cases where the newcomers respond to their mentor after 6 hours, but also after 6 days, 6 weeks, 6 months...

Mentors answer mentees' questions, including the rare ones that aren't related to the wiki. Don't forget that Wikipedia is a visible place where people have an easy access to.

Claiming a mentee

Several communities have their own wiki courses or in-person mentorship activites. To let them claim newcomers they know in person, a claim mentee feature was enabled. The feature is available to all mentors by default, plus for a list of wiki instructors.

You can learn more details at Help:Growth/Tools/How to claim a mentee .

The Mentor Dashoard, a central place for mentors

The Mentor Dashboard is the central place for mentors. You can find it at Special:MentorDashboard, and in the user menu on wiki. Like the Watchlist, the Mentor dashboard is a personal page, unique to each user.

The dashboard allows mentors to do the following actions:

change their welcome message shown to newcomers
select newcomers they want to mentor
monitor their mentees' activity
[not available at all wikis] filter mentees that should be encouraged for their efforts
set themselves as away for a short pause, or quit mentorship

Mentors can also filter or highlight their mentees' actions in Recent changes or on their Watchlist.

Integrating Growth mentorship with other parts of the project

Several communities already had existing mentorship system, or have a welcome message.

It is possible to integrate Growth mentorship to these existing initiatives. This is possible using the magic word {{#mentor}}, which provides mentor's username for any given user.

For more information about usage, please see Help:Growth/Mentorship/Integrating mentorship .

Mentorship for Workshops or Campaigns organizers

Growth Mentorship allows Workshops or Campaigns organizers to assign a mentor to each participant. This mentor will assist their mentee during the event, but will also be available between sessions, or after the event.

The Growth team provides a way for organizers to create a custom link to register to Wikipedia. This link is populated with designated mentors so that newcomers will be given a mentor who participates to the event. If an attendee already has an account, a mentor can claim them.

Mentors can monitor their mentees' activity using the Mentor dashboard.

For more information about usage, please see Help:Growth/Mentorship/Workshops or Campaigns organizers .

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