Wikipedia talk:Growth Team features

Why do I have a mentor?

I've been here for over 15 years, was on ArbCom, etc. Somehow I clicked on something that gave me that big question mark on the bottom right hand page. Doug Weller talk 14:18, 2 February 2024 (UTC)

Every user has a mentor assigned, but most established users do not have "mentorship" options activated - you may have opted in somehow. In Special:Preferences you can uncheck the Newcomer editor features at the bottom of the page and see if that solves your issue. — xaosflux ^Talk 14:40, 2 February 2024 (UTC)

Thanks. Doug Weller talk 15:27, 2 February 2024 (UTC)

Mentorship Twinkle welcome template?

Hi! I was wondering if there was some welcome template I could use with my mentees, as {{Welcome student}} doesn't really apply. — ♠Ixtal ^{( T / C )} ⁂ Non nobis solum. ♠ 18:20, 17 February 2024 (UTC)

Hi Ixtal! There's {{Mentor welcome}}, or this one I use that I ripped off from Panini! (though its current format doesn't use revisionuser). Happy editing, Perfect4th (talk) 18:31, 17 February 2024 (UTC)

Lawsuit pending, I copyrighted that. Panini! • 🥪 18:56, 17 February 2024 (UTC)

What's with all the "noinclude" in there? Doesn't seem to change anything if I remove it? -- asilvering (talk) 19:48, 27 February 2024 (UTC)

Two reasons, both because I'm lazy: at the bottom, I wanted it to auto-sign, and everywhere else, I was trying to get it to substitute page names correctly and I'm not incredibly familiar with that kind of markup so I just copied over from another template (I forget which) and it worked so I left it. "Noinclude" just means that everything wrapped in those <noinclude></noinclude> tags won't be included in a substitution of the page – so, for example, the <nowiki> tags will be removed at the end when the template is substituted, allowing the ~~~~ to sign it for me. Happy editing, Perfect4th (talk) 20:14, 27 February 2024 (UTC)

Oh, here I was assuming you were just copying the source code out every time. That makes more sense! I'll just start substing this directly instead of stealing it and modifying it, then. Panini will have to sue us both. (you're welcome). -- asilvering (talk) 20:18, 27 February 2024 (UTC)

Nah, too much work. I'd suggest double-checking that it correctly identifies you as the mentor, as I had trouble getting that to work correctly when I tried earlier, though I think it's fixed now. (Do we split the costs then, or do we have to pay double?) Perfect4th (talk) 20:21, 27 February 2024 (UTC)

yep, it works! Capitalized, alas, but I suppose I could always kidnap and edit it in the future if that drives me enough crazy. -- asilvering (talk) 20:41, 27 February 2024 (UTC)

I'm already named in too many lawsuits right now (tongue in cheek) so I'll stick to @Panini!'s original template, modified by @Perfect4th, that remains for public use. lol --ARoseWolf 20:26, 27 February 2024 (UTC)

Seeking feedback of 'beginner' editors for research

Dear Growth Team mentors, I hope this is an appropriate post to make.

The project I am attached to, Wikidata for Wikimedia Projects at Wikimedia Deutschland is currently holding interviews for the experiences of editors knowledge, awareness and experience of Wikidata and its integrations into the sibling projects (Wikipedia, Commons, Wikisource and the others). We have heard from many expert or very experienced editors, but we lack insights and experiences from new or 'beginner' editors.

If any of your mentees may be interested or you have ideas on where I can post to reach this audience, I would be happy if you could share the Signup link below or reply to my post.

Interview Information:

• Conducted in English.
• Compensation is available.
• Sign up survey: This link can be shared and sent to interested editors.
• Experience Level: Ideally we are seeking feedback from editors who may only have a passing or surface-level knowledge of Wikidata and are at the start of their editing lifetime.

We are also taking feedback here in written form for those who cannot or do not want to attend an interview. Thank you for any help you can provide, Danny Benjafield (WMDE) (talk) 16:09, 27 February 2024 (UTC)

A large but non-random sample of beginning student editors can be found through the Wikipedia Education program. These student editors have different motivations than are typical of new editors (i.e., succeed at their Wikipedia-associated university course) and are likely to leave Wikipedia for good when their course is over, but if that doesn't matter for the purposes of your research, maybe they could help. They have done surveys before, such as for their training program. Adding Sage Ross (WMF). Mathglot (talk) 19:42, 27 February 2024 (UTC)

Growth News, April 2024

The Growth team will now send quarterly reports to keep you in the loop. Growth team weekly updates are available on wiki (in English) if you want to know more about our day-to-day work.

If you want to receive more general updates about technical activity happening across the Wikimedia movement (including Growth work), we encourage you to subscribe to Tech News.

Community Configuration

Growth features are currently configurable at Special:EditGrowthConfig. This quarter we are working on making Community Configuration accessible for other MediaWiki developers while also moving Growth feature configuration to the new CommunityConfiguration extension.

An early version of Community Configuration can be tested at Spanish Beta Wikipedia. We plan to release the new Community Configuration extension to pilot wikis (Arabic and Spanish Wikipedia) in early May, 2024. The first non-Growth team feature to utilize Community Configuration will be Automoderator.

In parallel with the development, the Growth team will propose Community Configuration usage guidelines, Community Configuration design guidelines, and provide technical documentation.

Experiment Results

Add a Image experiment analysis results

The Growth team conducted an experiment to assess the impact of the “Add an Image” structured task on the Newcomer Homepage's "Suggested Edits" module. This analysis finds that the Add an Image structured task leads to an increase in newcomer participation on the mobile web platform, particularly by making constructive (non-reverted) article edits:

• The likelihood that mobile web newcomers make their first article edit (+17.0% over baseline)
• The likelihood that they are retained as newcomers (+24.3% over baseline)
• The number of edits they make during their first two weeks on the wiki (+21.8% over baseline)
• A lower probability of the newcomers' edits will be reverted (-3.3% over baseline).

Personalized praise experiment results

This feature was developed for Mentors as part of the Growth team's Positive Reinforcement project. When A/B testing on Spanish Wikipedia, we found no significant impact on retention, but we found a significant positive impact on newcomer productivity. However, we concluded that the results weren’t positive enough to justify the time investment from Mentors. We plan to discuss this feature with our pilot wikis, and consider further improvements before scaling this feature further. Meanwhile, communities willing to test the feature can ask to have it deployed. (T361763)

English donors encouraged to try editing

As in previous years, donors were directed to a Thank you page after donation (example). However, this year we tested a new “Try editing Wikipedia,” call to action on the Thank You page. This call to action linked to a unique account creation page. From this account creation page we were able to track Registrations and Activation (editing for the first time). During the English banner campaign, the Donor Thank you page led to 4,398 new accounts, and 441 of those accounts went on to constructively edit within 24 hours. (T352900)

Future work

Annual Plan

The Growth team and the Editing team will work on the WE1.2 Key Result in the coming fiscal year. We will start initial discussions with communities soon to help finalize our plans. (T361657)

Newcomer Homepage Community Updates module

We plan to A/B test adding a new Community Configurable module to the Newcomer Homepage that will allow communities to highlight specific events, projects, campaigns, and initiatives. We are early in the planning phase of this project that will take place first at our pilot wikis and wikis volunteering. We welcome community feedback on initial designs and plans, in any language at our project talk page.

Growth team's newsletter prepared by the Growth team and posted by bot • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.

18:55, 23 April 2024 (UTC)

A new feature for newcomers: "Suggested links"

We have a "new" feature for English Wikipedia's newcomers: Add a link. It is new to English Wikipedia, but it's been released on almost all other Wikipedia language editions.

TL;DR
Add a link allows newcomers to discover editing by adding relevant links between articles. We will make the Add a link task available starting May 21, but the activation is up to your community.

Current situation
One of the suggested edits at English Wikipedia is adding links between articles. This task is based on some maintenance templates. If this maintenance template is not used, then no task is available. I just checked how many article were available for this task: three. Last time I checked, on April 13, one (1!) article was suggested to newcomers.  

We observed that the low availability of articles to edit, and the lack of diversity, can create frustration for newcomers.

Add a link, using link suggestions, is available at all Wikipedias (minus a few tiny new wikis). English and Germain are the two ones without this easy task.

A new experience
"Add a link" offers a new experience. It creates a "suggest" editing mode, where an algorithm suggests links. Users have to select if the link is relevant. At the moment, links are relevant in 70% of cases. The idea is to encourage newcomers to use their judgment to decide whether the link fits well.

The full process is described at mw:Help:Growth/Tools/Add_a_link. You can test it at any other Wikipedia, for instance at simple.wikipedia.org.

This new experience is beneficial for newcomers:

• they are guided during all steps of the process
• they are more likely to make edits and return editing, as they see that they can edit (see "add a link" Experiment Analysis)
• they are more likely to be retained as editors
• as they are empowered to make decisions, they make more edits

The feature is community configurable, and some limits have been set: some sections or elements of an article are excluded from receiving links (infobox, bibliographies, references...). The number of links added per article per day, and the number of articles newcomers can edit each day, is configurable too. The algorithm is configured to avoid overlinking, to prevent WP:SEAOFBLUE, etc.  

Communities' feedback, and our responses
As we deployed this tool to all Wikipedias, we heard the following questions and concerns:

• "These links are not useful"
  • There is a global understanding that the most important thing is that newcomers understand that they really can edit Wikipedia and that Add a link helps achieve this. Overall, added links are not considered harmful by the vast majority of community members we chatted with.  The fact that adding links is limited on a daily basis for each user makes newcomers switch rapidly to tasks that are perceived as more productive.
• "Edits that add links are too numerous”
  • It is possible to diminish this perception by lowering the number of edits each newcomer can make daily (the default is 25), in the community configuration. Limiting this number, newcomers switch to other task types.
• "These links are difficult to patrol"
  • 70% of links are accurate, but not all newcomers read instructions to select them.   Sometimes, one of the added links isn't accurate, and it has to be removed. A full revert of the edit might not be the best option, as it is not really an encouraging sign for the newcomer. We encourage experienced users to edit the link; a good tool to help to do this is DiffEdit. Also, the number of links to be added for each article is limited to 3 in the default community configuration. However, lowering this number could disengage newcomers.
• "I see one user adding useless links repetitively”
  • Like any other user editing, telling them to improve their edits is a first step. And like for any other editor not following rules or advice, it is perfectly acceptable to tell them to stop editing.
• "I understand why this task exists: it is a good way for editors to start editing. And it is harmless"
  • Yes! :)

How can you help us?
“Add a link” will be available at your wiki on May 21, but not activated. Rather than enabling this feature by default, we will release the task as "turned off" and any English Wikipedia admin can turn it on via special:EditGrowthConfig. Next step is up to English Wikipedia community: turning Add a link on, as a test, or as a pillar of newcomer's onboarding.

If you have any questions, let us know!

KStoller-WMF (talk) and Trizek_(WMF) (talk) 19:11, 30 April 2024 (UTC)

I think this is a great addition for new editors. Is there any way to suggest articles that could be improved by adding links?

And is there a feature that would allow searches for Wikipedians to add links between articles? For example, a major task for our new Wikipedia:WikiProject Electronic literature is to connect the dots between Wikipedia articles about authors who have written electronic literature works, the works themselves (that often refer to other works in the genre), museums and collections that hold the works, and an explanation of what electronic literature is.

Thank you for this new feature. LoveElectronicLiterature (talk) 15:10, 6 May 2024 (UTC)

@LoveElectronicLiterature, the way to suggest them is to add Template:Underlinked to the article. You can do this easily with WP:Twinkle. -- asilvering (talk) 17:15, 6 May 2024 (UTC)

I just checked how many article were available for this task: three. Last time I checked, on April 13, one (1!) article was suggested to newcomers. This isn't because people don't use the maintenance tag, but because newbies are already coming to do this task thanks to the article suggestions on the newcomer homepage. It's one of English wikipedia's few backlogs that aren't actually backlogged!

This does cause a problem where if someone doesn't come by regularly to remove articles from this maintenance category, the articles there get extremely, extremely overlinked. I'm glad that the algorithm in this new function was designed with this in mind when it comes to suggesting words to add a link to. But another component of the problem is that newbies are hesitant to remove the maintenance tag themselves, which ends up being a self-reinforcing problem as new editors show up, think "huh, I guess I'm supposed to link even more articles?", do that, and... still don't remove the tag. Does the add a link task remind editors to remove the maintenance tag when they're done? It doesn't look to me like it does. -- asilvering (talk) 17:26, 6 May 2024 (UTC)

Yes, that was a major hurdle for me as a newbie editor last year. I did not know how to remove maintenance tags and I was not sure how to edit. Some of the tagged maintenance articles needed a lot more help than grammar or simple editing. I think a clear instruction on how to add links and search on articles within Wikipedia to add links--and then how to remove the tag would be helpful as first editor steps. I will start tagging a few elit articles for link help. We are also in the early stages of planning a world-wide elit wikipedia editathon for August 15 2024 at 3 pm UTC, so this is perfect timing for us. LoveElectronicLiterature (talk) 17:35, 6 May 2024 (UTC)

@LoveElectronicLiterature, the task described above is indeed a clear instruction on how to add links and search on articles within Wikipedia to add links, so no worries there. It's just the removing of the tag that I think it's missing. -- asilvering (talk) 17:38, 6 May 2024 (UTC)

Thank you both for your comments! :)

At the moment, the articles needing links are selected based on the Underlinked template. If this template is used at English Wikipedia, it is not at most wikis. This is the reason why we decided to shift to algorithm predictions. With the deployment of Add a link, we would not rely on the template anymore.

I checked on Recent changes, and I found very interesting cases. As not many articles are suggested, they are all very heavily edited to add links. In this example, the article was edited 22 times over 12 hours, by 16 newcomers! It even continued after the template was removed, because the article was still cached on our side. Fr this one, we have 7 newcomers adding links to the same article in a very short period of time. There is a real need for more articles choice.

We also observed the case you describe, where newcomers make changes, but don't remove the maintenance template. Most people believe they will automatically vanish. We can't blame them, as it is far from being obvious (French Wikipedia added a message to the template "please remove it when done" and it pretty much works). We plan to work on easing patrollers/maintainers' tasks regarding suggested edits, and one of the possibilities would be to have maintenance tasks. This is an option among many, and I'd be curious to know your thoughts around these new task types.

Trizek_(WMF) (talk) 13:35, 7 May 2024 (UTC)

Oh, I misunderstood, then - I thought the algorithm was suggesting which words to link, not that it was also finding new articles that might need links. That sounds much more helpful! -- asilvering (talk) 16:40, 7 May 2024 (UTC)

You are true regarding how it works: the algorithm suggests articles within certain topic, and suggests links (number of links being configurable), while the "old" one only surfaces articles that match a given topic topic. :) Trizek_(WMF) (talk) 17:11, 7 May 2024 (UTC)

This is probably more information that anyone here wants to dig into, but we've documented how the Link Recommendation algorithm works here: Link_recommendation_model_for_add-a-link_structured_task, and we've made further improvements to ensure we are prioritizing "underlinked" articles (T301096). One benefit I've seen at other wikis, is that this task helps surface somewhat neglected articles; sometimes after a link is added, that newcomer or another editor will make further improvements to the article. KStoller-WMF (talk) 17:53, 7 May 2024 (UTC)

Thanks for the link! This is actually the information I did want to dig into. :) -- asilvering (talk) 18:20, 7 May 2024 (UTC)