Help:Growth/Mentorship/Integrating mentorship

The following procedure is only applicable to wikis where the Growth tools are available .

Context edit

Some projects have already some sort of mentorship system in place. A common example are bots that post welcome messages on the talk pages of newcomers, signed by a random experienced user from a list, or by the bot itself. The Growth features also assign a random mentor to newcomers from a list.

Therefore, enabling the Growth features on such projects can duplicate mentorship for newcomers, with newcomers seeing that they have different mentors from different places.

It makes sense to allow such projects to retrieve the Growth Team mentor assigned to each user, so they can integrate it with their own mentorship systems, and give the newcomer the same mentor in all places.

Magic word edit

This is now possible via a magic word {{#mentor}}, which was introduced in February 2021. The magic word takes one parameter, the username of the mentee, and returns raw username of the mentor. The magic word will return an empty string in case the mentee does not have any mentor assigned (for instance, because they don't have the newcomer homepage enabled).

Usage edit

For example, to get the mentor of User:Martin Urbanec (WMF), one would write {{#mentor:Martin Urbanec (WMF)}}, which would return the raw username of the mentor.

You can use the magic word together with the {{#if}} parser function, to incorporate a fallback mechanism into your project's templates.

Examples

The examples below assume that the mentee is User:Mentee, who is mentored by User:Mentor.

  • {{#mentor:Mentee}} – will output Mentor
  • [[User:{{#mentor:Mentee}}]] – will output User:Mentor
  • {{#mentor:{{PAGENAME}}}} – used in a welcome message on the mentee's talk page, will output Mentor
  • {{#mentor:{{BASEPAGENAME}}}} – used on the mentee's draft page ([[User:Mentee/Draft]]), will output Mentor
  • [[User:{{subst:#mentor:Mentee}}|{{subst:#mentor:Mentee}}]] – will ping Mentor. Important: the subst: part is required; pinging will not work without it.

Limitations edit

Only new accounts who have been created after the deployment of the Growth team features, or accounts created after the list of mentors for Growth has been setup, will get a mentor.

100% of new accounts get a mentor from the mentor's lists. However, at the moment (February 2021), the Growth features are only available to 80% of new accounts, since the Growth team keeps the remaining 20% as a control group to see if the tools are not harmful. Even if 100% of mentees get a mentor, not all of them will access the Growth Homepage, for instance.