Help talk:Growth/Tools/How to claim a mentee

Hi! @Martin Urbanec (WMF), as this is now deployed more widely, "This feature is only available on a short list of wikis." and maybe some other bits could be updated.

Thank you for spotting it Papuass! I'm currently updating the documentation. Don't forget that it is a wiki: you can be bold and edit. ;)

When claiming a mentee that has no log of ever being claimed before, the claim log shows a "prior" mentee. Where is this value being populated from? See examples here Xaosflux (talk) 14:53, 7 June 2021 (UTC)

Hello @Xaosflux, thanks for asking this question! I have two answers. In this case, you claimed users registered long before Growth features were installed to the English Wikipedia. The explanation is simple for those users – the claim mentee feature uses wrong method to retrieve the mentor's name (it uses getMentorForUser, which assigns a mentor if it fails to find one). I'll upload a fix patch for that soon.

If you claimed users who registered after Growth features were installed, the information would actually be legitimate. The Growth features assign a mentor to all new accounts (including users who do not have Growth features enabled). This is to empower communities to integrate their own mentorship-related activities with Growth mentorship via the #mentor magic word, see details at Help:Growth/Mentorship/Integrating mentorship.

I hope this information makes sense. If you have any other questions about mentorship, I'm happy to answer them. Best,

Thanks User:Martin Urbanec (WMF) - so just a bug, thanks for following up! I don't think I love the other behavior on this, that is force-placing everyone to a mentor, especially without a "drop mentee" option; and with a low number of listed mentors compared to a huge number of new accounts getting created the number of many:one mappings are going to get very large, very fast correct? What if a mentor doesn't want any more mentees right now, do they have to unlist themselves from the wikitext? Are there administrative functions to break the relationship if needed? (that is can you only be claimed, not orphaned? - can you orphan yourself?) I guess I could go on and on, but didn't really mean to get in to the design here - just the apparent bug :D

Any time @Xaosflux. The promised patch: https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/c/mediawiki/extensions/GrowthExperiments/+/698572.

BTW, to be honest, I'm happy to talk with people about issues they see in Growth features (especially if it concerns mentorship, as that's my area of expertise).

You're right that mentors who no longer want to hear from/have any mentees don't have a way to do it yet (see T272376). If you remove your name from the mentor list, you won't receive more mentees, but you will still have mentees assigned to you from the time when you were listed as a mentor. Note that according to the team's experience with mentorship from other wikis, newcomers very rarely ask questions after their first day (see graph of all questions in last 90 days), which makes this issue less worrying than it might sound like.

We plan to address this issue with the mentor dashboard (currently under development), which should allow mentors to quit mentoring if wanted (reassigning all their mentees to someone else).

Best,