Topic on Talk:Growth/Positive reinforcement/2023

I don't know if this is the right place to post this, but I am rather concerned that the mentors proposed on the homepage are themselves relatively new users.

Hello Kudpung

It is up to communities to decide who can or can't be a mentor. Most wikis are on a "please volunteer" mood, as questions asked by newcomers are pretty basic.

Most mentor lists are Autoconfirmed protected. Only users with more than 500 edits and 90 days of presence are allowed to edit the list to add their name. This limit has been chosen because it is the highest available by default on wikis (except admin-protected). Any community is free to define conditions to become a mentor. Maybe it is a discussion to have with English Wikipedia mentors?

We are currently working on a new way to manage mentors lists. We are considering to let communities define by themselves the number of edits and the length of involvement to be a mentor.

Thanks for your reply Trizek. I didn't really want to interfere, but I was a bit surprised. I've actually not seen much mention of the Positive reinforcement project on the English Wikipedia. I used to be an admin for many years, but I've been in semi-retirement now for a couple of years. I think your project has potential. Keep up the good work 🙂

Hi @Kudpung, thanks for checking out the Growth features! And thank you @Trizek (WMF) for responding!

Although we've been researching and hoping to start on the Positive Reinforcement project for some time, it's just now starting to enter the development phase. We've been gathering feedback from our pilot wikis first, and we'll use this feedback to improve designs. We will then iterate on the features further once they are testable on pilot wikis. Once the features have been tested and improved on our pilot wikis, we'll start the process of rolling them out on more wikis and discuss the features in more detail on English Wikipedia.

I'm so glad to hear you think the project has potential! I really think the Positive Reinforcement project has the potential to help improve newcomer retention, but we'll be sure to have a data scientist analyze retention and other metrics to ensure our work is moving things in the right direction before we release it to more wikis.

If you want to stay in the loop on this project and other Growth projects, I post weekly Growth team updates and we also have a Growth Newsletter.

(I'll follow up more on the Mentor-side of your question in the other Mentor thread you started).