New Mentor Dashboard module:
As part of the Growth team's Positive Reinforcement project, we plan to add a new module to the Mentor Dashboard.
This module will surface mentees that match certain criteria. For instance, in the screenshot, you will notice a mentee who made 20 edits total and has no reverts over the last 48 hours. Some of these parameters can be changed in the module’s settings. We also display some other user metrics like "Thanks received" and "Longest streak" of days edited in a row.
Then, Mentors are invited to “Send appreciation” to this new editor (possibly after reviewing their edits or talk page). These messages of appreciation may be prefilled with a default message (which can be customized in settings). You can edit this message before posting, as we will redirect you to the newcomer’s talk page to post the message.
Multiple studies have found that newcomers’ editing activity is increased when they receive thanks and other positive messages about their work from an experienced editor or mentor [1]. We designed this module with the hope that it will improve new editor retention with a minimal time-investment from Mentors.
Our questions to you about this design are:
- Would this new module encourage you to send appreciation to your mentees?
- If you had to provide appreciation to this mentee, do you have all the information you need to decide to praise this user?
- Do you think some Mentors will hesitate to “Send appreciation” because it’s not clear that there is an additional step (visit the talk page and confirm message) after clicking that button?
- Do you have any comments or suggestions regarding this feature?
Settings:
We want this new module to work for everyone, so we plan to make the settings configurable by Mentors.
First, you can define the number of edits within a given time frame a newcomer needs to make to be suggested as praiseworthy.
Then you can define the default message that will be used when you send praise to the newcomer. Both the subject and the content of the message can be pre-defined.
Finally, you can decide to get a notification when a mentee matches your selection settings.
Our questions to you:
- Is the edit time frame setting enough to cover your needs to find mentees to praise?
- Should we provide a pre-defined message you can edit later?
- Would you use notifications to be informed of a new mentee to be praised?
- Is there a setting you’d like to see in the module’s settings?
Thanks in advance to anyone willing to provide feedback!
Note: we are also currently discussing this on English Wikipedia [1] and on Arabic Wikipedia, Bengali Wikipedia, Czech Wikipedia, and Spanish Wikipedia.