Growth team updates #1

Growth team updates #2

Welcome to the second newsletter for the newGrowth team!  

The Growth Team's objective is to work on software changes that help retain new contributors inmid-size Wikimedia projects.

Our plan for the next quarter is ready

After consulting with many communities on the best ways to increase retention, we will focus during the next 3 months on these projects:

• Understanding first day: to see what new editors do right after creating their accounts. We will be careful with user privacy, and we hope to share initial results in December.
• Personalized first day: this idea will also help us learn a lot about new editors by adding some optional questions to the new editor’s registration process. We hope to share initial results in December.
• Focus on help desk: we plan to invite or redirect people to the local help desks where they can ask questions to help them make their first edits. We hope to have an initial experiment running in December.

You can read about the details of this planon our team page.

How did we get to this plan?

We have set up our plan based on the8 ideas we were considering. You can read about our analysisin our team updates, and detailed discussionon each idea.

We are looking for volunteers

Do you want to participate to our experiments? We are looking for new communities to work with us (especially a newmid-size wiki), and people to become ambassadors to help us to communicate with the different communities.Discover how you can involve yourself or your community.

Learn more about us

You can visitour team page to find out why our team was formed and how we are thinking about new editors, andour project page for detailed updates on the projects we'll work on.

Growth team updates #3

Growth team updates #4

Welcome to The Wikipedia Adventure!

Growth team updates #5

Welcome to the fifth newsletter for the newGrowth team!  

The Growth team's objective is to work on software changes that help retain new contributors inmid-size Wikimedia projects.

We began the "Personalized first day" project with thewelcome survey so that we could gather information about what newcomers are trying to accomplish. The next step is to use that information to create experiences that help the newcomers accomplish their goal – actually personalizing their first day. We asked for community thoughtsin the previous newsletter, and after discussing with community members and amongst our team, we are now planning two projects as next steps: "engagement emails" and "newcomer homepage".

• Engagement emails: this project was first discussed positively by community membershere back in September 2018, and the team how has bandwidth to pursue it. The idea is that newcomers who leave the wiki don't get encouraged to return to the wiki and edit. We can engage them through emails that send them the specific information they need to be successful – such as contact from a mentor, the impact of their edits, or task recommendations. Please read overthe project page, and comment onits discussion page with any ideas, questions, or concerns. Do you think this is a good idea? Where could we go wrong?
• Newcomer homepage: we developed the idea for this project after analyzing the data from the welcome survey andEditorJourney datasets. We saw that many newcomers seem to be looking for a place to get started – a place that collects their past work, options for future work, and ways to learn more. We can build this place, and it can connect to the engagement emails. The content of both could be guided by what newcomers say they need during their welcome survey, and contain things like contact from a mentor, impact of their edits, or task recommendations. Please read overthe project page, and comment onits discussion page with any ideas, questions, or concerns. Do you think this is a good idea? Where could we go wrong?

We have published initial reports on each of the team's first two projects. These reports give the basic numbers from each project, and there are many more questions we will continue to answer in future reports. We're excited about these initial findings. They have already helped us define and design parts of our future projects.

• Welcome survey: the initial report on welcome survey responses isavailable here. Some of the main findings:
  • Most users respond to the survey, giving it high response rates of 67% and 62% in Czech and Korean Wikipedias, respectively.
  • The survey does not cause newcomers to be less likely to edit.
  • The most common reason for creating an account in Korean Wikipedia is to read articles—not for editing—with 29% of Korean users giving that responses.
  • Large numbers of respondents said they are interested in being contacted to get help with editing: 36% in Czech and 53% in Korean.
• Understanding first day: the initial report on what newcomers do on their first day isavailable here. Some of the main findings:
  • Large numbers of users view help or policy pages on their first day: 42% in Czech and 28% in Korean.
  • Large numbers of users view their own User or User Talk page on their first day: 34% in Czech and 39% in Korean.
  • Amajority of new users open an editor on their first day – but about a quarter of them do not go on to save an edit during that time.

Thehelp panel was deployed in Czech and Korean Wikipedias on January 10. Over the past four weeks:

• About 400 newcomers in each wiki have seen the help panel button.
• About 20% of them open up the help panel.
• About 50% of those who open it up click on one of the links.
• About 5% of Czech users ask questions, and about 1% of Korean users ask questions.

We think that the 20% open rate and 50% click rate are strong numbers, showing that a lot of people are looking for help, and many want to help themselves by looking at help pages. The somewhat lower numbers of asking questions (especially in Korean Wikipedia) has caused us to consider new features to allow people to help themselves. We're going to be adding a search bar to the help panel next, which will allow users to type a search that only looks for pages in the Help and Wikipedia namespaces.

What is the way to built a good help page? What blocks you when writing an help page?Your replies will help to create better help contents to newcomers, that would be used on Help panel.

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Growth team updates #6

Growth team updates #7

Call for submissions for the Community Growth space at Wikimania 2019

Growth team updates #8

Growth team updates #9

Growth team updates #10

Growth team updates #11

Welcome to the eleventh newsletter from theGrowth team!

The Growth team's objective is to work on software changes that help retain new contributors inmid-size Wikimedia projects.

• Expanding to more wikis: the team is preparing to deploy Growth features to Ukrainian and Hungarian Wikipedias. Wikis that already have the features are Czech, Korean, Arabic, Vietnamese, and Basque Wikipedias. If your community is enthusiastic about welcoming newcomers, we encourage you tocontact us so that we can verify togetherif your wiki is eligible. Then you can go throughthe checklist to start the process of configuring the features.
• Mentor training: we tried out our firsttraining for mentors with the Czech community, so that experienced users can build skills that help them retain newcomers.
• Theguide for mentorshas been updated.Translations are welcomed!

Thehelp panel was first deployed to newcomers in January 2019, and we have now finished analyzing data to determine its impact. A brief summary is below, and more in-depth information can be foundhere (in English).

• In summary, although we have seen a good amount ofusage of the help panel, the help panel hasnot shown an increase in activation (whether a user makes their first edit) or retention (whether a user returns to edit again).
• This is a disappointing result, and our team has discussed potential reasons for the result and ideas for the future. Although we have many ideas for how to improve the help panel, we have decided to keep our attention on thenewcomer homepage andnewcomer tasks projects for the coming months.
• We'll be using the help panel as part of the newcomer tasks project: using it to guide newcomers while they complete suggested edits.
• We welcome questions and thoughts about this on theproject's talk page.

• The first version of thenewcomer tasks workflow (V1.0) will be deployed in the next weeks on our 4 priority wikis. This version will suggest articles to edit based on maintenance templates. In this first version, we expect many newcomers to initiate the workflow, but not many to select articles to edit or complete edits. We expect future versions of the feature to increase those behaviors.
• We're excited about this project because the majority of newcomers visit their newcomer homepage, and this will be the first element of the homepage that clearly asks the newcomer to start editing.
• These are the next two versions of the feature, which are already being planned:
  • V1.1 (topic matching): will allow newcomers to choose topics of interest (such as Art, Music, Sports, or Technology) to personalize their suggestions. After evaluating several approaches, we have decided to use a newORES model built by theWMF Scoring team. The model will automatically identify the topic area of each article. We expect this to increase how often newcomers select articles to edit.
  • V1.2 (guidance): once newcomers arrive on an article to edit, we will use thehelp panel to provide guidance about how to complete the editing task. We expect this to increase how many newcomers actually complete productive edits.
• The project page includeslinks to the designs of the workflow, and we welcome questions and thoughts onthe talk page.

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Growth team updates #12

Welcome to the twelfth newsletter from theGrowth team!

The Growth team's objective is to work on software changes that help retain new contributors inmid-size Wikimedia projects.

• Atraining for mentors has been published. The training was first tried with the Czech community, and went well.
• Growth team features have been deployed toHungarian, Ukrainian, and Armenian Wikipedias. If your community is enthusiastic about welcoming newcomers, we encourage you tocontact us so that we can verify together whether your wiki is eligible. Then you can go throughthe checklist to start the process of configuring the features.

We deployed the basic workflow fornewcomer tasks to our target wikis on November 20, and the early results are exciting.

• About1.5% of newcomers who visit their homepage complete the workflow and save a suggested edit. So far, this has amounted toover 450 edits, on all wikis, coming from both desktop and mobile users.
• When we look at the edits that newcomers make, we see that they are largely positive! We are pleased to see that this featuredoes not appear to encourage vandals.
  • 75% of the edits are productive and unreverted.
  • 95% of the edits appear to be in good faith.
• Most of the edits include copyedits and adding links, with some newcomers also adding content and references. Copyedits are suggested most strongly.
• Click here to learn more specifics about the results so far.

The results from our user tests showed us that newcomers are likely to do more suggested edits if they can choose articles related to a topic that they're interested in, such as "science", "music", or "sports".

• On January 21, we deployedtopic matching on ourpilot wikis. Newcomers are now using it. We expect it to cause more newcomers to try suggested edits, and to keep making more of them.
• In the coming weeks, we will be making improvements to the accuracy of the algorithm used to topic matching, which is part of theORES project.

Because we are seeing positive results from newcomer tasks, the Growth team plans to concentrate our efforts on improving the workflow and encouraging more newcomers to use it.

• Guidance: next, we will be using thehelp panel to provide guidance to newcomers as they do suggested edits, and to prompt them to do another edit after completing their first one. In user tests for this feature, demo videos were one of the favorite features, and we will think about how these might be added.
• Starting the workflow: only about 20% of newcomer who visit theirhomepage begin the newcomer tasks workflow. We are going to betrying out different layouts of the homepage to encourage more newcomers to try newcomer tasks.
• Additional task types: we are researching methods to recommend more specific tasks to newcomers, such as specific links to add, or images that could be added to articles from Commons.

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Growth team newsletter #13

Welcome to the thirteenth newsletter from theGrowth team!

The Growth team's objective is to work on software changes that help retain new contributors inmid-size Wikimedia projects.

We are looking for community input on a new project to make it easy for newcomers to make real article edits.

In ourprevious newsletter, we talked about the productive edits coming from thenewcomer tasks feature. Those good results have continued: about 900 newcomers made over 5,000 suggested edits so far. We've learned that newcomers are interested in receiving suggested edits.

Now, we are thinking about how to supply them a feed of easy edits that will help more of them be successful quickly. We have a new idea called "structured tasks". This would aim to break down edits into steps that are easy for newcomers and easy on mobile devices.

In the past, certain kinds of editing tasks have been structured. For instance, adding categories through HotCat. Now, we are thinking about how to structure the editing of articles. The goal is to allow newcomers can make large content additions, especially from their mobile devices.

Please visitthe project page and respond to the discussion questions listed onthe talk page. You are welcome to show this project to others in your community. You can help by translating the materials to your language so that more voices can join in. We will be having this conversation until June 18.

We have expanded to six new wikis, and are looking for more interested communities.

In the last two months, we deployed Growth features to six new wikis: Ukrainian, Serbian, Hungarian, Armenian, and Basque Wikipedias, and French Wiktionary. Newcomers from these wikis have already contributed over 600 edits through Growth features.

We want to expand to more wikis in the coming months, and we are looking for interested communities. French Wikipedia already agreed and will be the next one to join the experiment. We will contact several other wikis in the coming weeks to offer them to participate.

Do you think the Growth Team features would be a good addition to your wiki? Please seethis translatable summary of Growth features. You can share with your communities and start a discussion. Then, pleasecontact us to begin the process!

Work continues on improving newcomer tasks and the homepage.

• In March, we deployed an upgrade to the topic matching in newcomer tasks. The current version offers 39 different topics using newORES models.
• In April, we completed anA/B test of two homepage configurations. We learned that more newcomers will attempt suggested edits if the module is made more prominent. We are implementing those learnings in our next test. See thefull results here.
• We are currently working onguidance for newcomer tasks. It will use the help panel to guide newcomers through completing easy edits.
• Our next step is to create new configurations of the homepage. The goal is to encourage more newcomers to begin doing suggested edits.

As usual, we are still welcoming your feedback and questions about our features.Please contact us on the project talk page!

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Growth team newsletter 14

Welcome to the fourteenth newsletter from theGrowth team!

The Growth team's objective is to work on software changes that help retain new contributors inmid-size Wikimedia projects.

We deployed the"Guidance" feature on June 15.

This feature uses the help panel to explain what to do after selecting a suggested edit. For instance, if a newcomer selects a copyedit task, they are guided on what sorts of errors to look for. They can see examples of how to rewrite the text. You can try this feature ontest.wikipedia.org. First enable the homepage and the help panel in your preferences there.

Since we launched "Guidance", the data we collected show good results (see image). Now, we see more users completing suggested edits than before Guidance was deployed.

Structured tasks is a project that aims to break down editing workflows into a series of steps. We hope newcomers can accomplish these tasks easily.

In the previous newsletter,we asked for feedback from community members on the idea. We had a good discussion in six languages with 35 community members (summary here). We have now postednew design mockups. We hope community members can check the mockups out andreact to them (in any language). They are posted along with some of the main questions we are thinking about as we continue to refine our plans.

• We are currentlyworking on Variants C and D (adjacent image) of the homepage. The goal is to increase the number of newcomers who start the newcomer tasks workflow. This is the team's main project at the moment.
• We've made it easier to hide the help panel when not needed.[1]
• Thewelcome survey has a new question for people who created their account: language skills. The goal is to find out how many newcomers know multiple languages, so that we can learn whether it is a good idea to integrateContent Translation as a newcomer task. To make room for this question, we removed one that is not being used.[2]

• We continue to engage with more communities. We recently deployed the Growth features to Persian, Hebrew, and Russian Wikipedias. Learn more aboutgetting the features.
• If your community is having a remote event, and you are interested in hearing from the Growth team,please contact us! We have already participated to two community events online:
  • ThePolish Wikiconference (recording on Google Drive)
  • TheCeltic Knot 2020 (video available on Youtube).

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Growth team updates #15

Welcome to the fifteenth newsletter from theGrowth team!

The Growth team's objective is to work on software changes that help retain new contributors inmid-size Wikimedia projects.

Variants C and D are two new arrangements of the newcomer homepage.We hope they will increase the number of users using suggested edits.They both make suggested edits the clear place where newcomers should get started on the page.They have some differences in their workflows, because we want to test which design is better.We deployed these variants on October 19; half of newcomers get each variant.After about 5 weeks, we will analyze the data from the tests.The goal is to determine which variant is helping more newcomers to make more suggested edits.We will identify the better variant and then use it with all newcomers.

As we discussed inprevious newsletters, the team is working on our first "structured task":the "add a link" task.After community discussion on design ideas, we ran user tests on the mobile designs.We decided on the design concept we want to use moving forward:Concept A.We're now engineering the backend for this feature.Next, we will be running user tests for desktop designs.

Learn more about the findings.

• We recently deployed the Growth features to Polish, Portuguese, Swedish and Turkish Wikipedias.18 wikis now have Growth features. Learn more aboutgetting the features.
• Have you recently checked ifall interface messages are translated for your language?

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Growth team updates #16

Welcome to the sixteenth newsletter from theGrowth team!

The Growth team's objective is to work on software changes that help retain new contributors inmid-size Wikimedia projects.

Newcomer task experiments results

The team recently published our analysis of the impact of newcomer tasks. We are happy to announce that we found that the Growth features, and particularly newcomer tasks,lead to increased editing from newcomers.

In November 2019, theGrowth team added the "newcomer tasks" feature to thenewcomer homepage. After six months, we collected data from Arabic, Vietnamese, Czech, and Korean Wikipedias. We analyzed the overall impact of the Growth features, including newcomer tasks.

This analysis finds that the Growth features lead to increases in:

• the probability that newcomers make their first article edit (+11.6%)
• the probability that they are retained as editors
• the number of edits they make during their first couple of weeks on the wiki (+22%)

We also find that the quality of their edits, as measured by revert rate, is comparable to that of a control group.

• 
  The number of suggested edits completed by each wiki each week, going from December 2019 to November 2020, with a line for the total.
• 
  The number of distinct users completing suggested edits by each wiki each week, going from December 2019 to November 2020.

Because of these results, we think all Wikipedias should consider implementing these features.Learn more about how to get them.

You can find more details about this experiment onthe report page. Please post any feedback or questionson the talk page

General metrics

As of November 2020, across all wikis where the features have been deployed:

• more than 5,000 newcomers have made more than 40,000 edits using Newcomer tasks.
• more than 14,000 questions have been sent to volunteer mentors by more than 11,000 users.
• more than 2,000 questions have been asked on help desks by more than 1,500 users.

Learn more about Growth results here, and please post any feedback or questionson the talk page.

Variants C and D are two new arrangements of the newcomer homepage. We deployed them in October. After six weeks of these variants being deployed, we can see that they have led to increased interactions with newcomer tasks. Next, we will determine which variant is best and use that for all newcomers.

A separate list for workshops hosts

During workshops organized by education programs through the communities, workshops hosts like to mentor people they train on wiki. Several wikis requested to have a way to claim their mentees without having other newcomers being randomly being assigned to them. To address this need, a separate list can be created on wiki, for mentors that wish to claim mentees, but prefer not to have random mentees being assigned to them.Learn more about this feature.

Claiming multiple mentees at once

Mentors can useSpecial:ClaimMentee to claim a newcomer as their mentee. The feature now allows mentors to claim multiple newcomers at once.

The help panel allows people to post a message to the local help desk while editing. Previously, the tool always posted messages to the bottom of help desks. Wikis are now able to configure it to display new messages at the top of the help desk page.T261714

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Growth team newsletter #17

Welcome to the seventeenth newsletter from theGrowth team!

The Growth team's objective is to work on software changes that help retain new contributors inmid-size Wikimedia projects.

Add a link: the team is continuing to engineer on our first "structured task", which will break down the workflow of adding wikilinks to articles, and assist newcomers with an algorithm to identify words and phrases that could be made into links.

Add an image: even as we build our first structured task, we have been thinking about the next one. "Add an image" is a structured task in which newcomers would be recommended images from Wikimedia Commons to add to unillustrated articles. This is an ambitious idea with many details to consider. We have already learned a lot from community members, and we encourage everyone tolook at the project page andjoin the discussion.

Last November, our teampublished the analysis of the impact of newcomer tasks. We announced that we found that the Growth features, and particularly newcomer tasks,lead to increased editing from newcomers.Because of these results, we believe all Wikipedias should implement these features.

We have started to contact more wikis to deploy the features, including Wikipedias of all sizes. Bengali Wikipedia recently began using Growth features, and Danish, Thai, Indonesian, and Romanian Wikipedias will be coming soon. Pleasecontact us if you have questions regarding deployment.

We are looking for translators who can help by translating the interface. Translating is done onTranslatewiki.net (it requires a different account that your Wikimedia one). Communities that already have the Growth features being deployed are invited to check on the translations.Access translations here.

As mentioned inour previous newsletter, we ran a test of two variants of the newcomer homepage, meant to find a version that increases users completing suggested edits. We have completed the experiment,and learned that one of the variants leads to more edits on desktop while the other leads to more edits on mobile. Therefore,we will deploy the strongest variants for each platform to all newcomers.

Mentor dashboard: we have interviewed mentors from several communities as we plan amentor dashboard feature, which would help mentors track the progress of their mentees. We encourage all mentors toshare their thoughts on tools that would help them.

Magic word for mentors: it is now possible touse a magic word,{{#mentor}}, to display the name of a given newcomer's mentor. This can be used on welcome messages, userboxes, etc.

Help panel questions going to mentors: in most wikis, newcomers using the help panel ask questions to the help desk. On Czech Wikipedia, we have experimented with sending these questions to mentors instead. This simplifies the newcomer experience, and only led to a increase in mentorship questionsof about 30%. We tried thisin Arabic, Bengali, French and Vietnamese Wikipedias, and we are making itthe default experience.

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Growth Newsletter #18

Welcome to the eighteenth newsletter from theGrowth team!

The Growth team's objective is to work on software changes that help retain new contributors inmid-size Wikimedia projects.

"Add a link" is now being tested in production and is nearing release on our four pilot wikis (Arabic, Czech, Vietnamese, and Bengali Wikipedias). We'll be doing final tests this week and next week, and then plan to deploy to the four wikis either during May 24 week, or May 31 week. After two weeks, we will analyze the initial data to identify any problems or trends. We expect that this feature will engage new kinds of newcomers in easy and successful edits. If things are going well after four weeks, we'll progressively deploy it to the wikis with Growth features.

• We are currently working on aMentor dashboard. This special page aims to help mentors be more proactive and be more successful at their role. The first iteration will include a table that shows an overview of the mentors current mentees, a module with their own settings, and a module that will allow them to store their best replies to their mentees questions.
• We've conducted our quarterly audit on Growth's four pilot wikis to see the activity of mentors. It appears thatthe vast majority of mentors are active.

We are working on project to allow communities tomanage the configuration of the Growth features on their own. In the past, communities have needed to work directly with the Growth team to set up and alter the features. We plan to put this capability in the hands of administrators, through an easy-to-use form, so that the features can be easily tailored to fit the needs of each community. While we developed it initially for Growth features, we think this approach could have uses in other features as well. We'll be trying this on our pilot wikis in the coming weeks, and then we'll bring it to all Growth wikis soon after. We hope you check outthe project page and add any of your thoughts tothe talk page.

• Growth features are now availableon 35 wikis. Here is the list of the most recent ones: Romanian Wikipedia, Danish Wikipedia, Thai Wikipedia, Indonesian Wikipedia, Croatian Wikipedia, Albanian Wikipedia, Esperanto Wikipedia, Hindi Wikipedia, Norwegian Bokmål Wikipedia, Japanese Wikipedia, Telugu Wikipedia, Spanish Wikipedia, Simple English Wikipedia, Malay Wikipedia, Tamil Wikipedia, Greek Wikipedia, Catalan Wikipedia.
• A new group of Wikipediashas been defined for the deployment of Growth features. Pleasecontact us if you have questions about the deployment process, or if your community likes to get the features in advance.
• After discussion with the English Wikipedia community,the Growth features will be tested on a small percentage of new accounts. At the moment, registered users can test the features byturning them on in their preferences.

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Growth Newsletter #19

Welcome to the nineteenth newsletter from theGrowth team!

The Growth team's objective is to work on software changes that help retain new contributors in Wikimedia projects.

• "Add a link" is the team's first structured task. It uses machine-learning to suggest wikilinks as easy edits for newcomers. It was deployed in May 2021 on four Wikipedias and then in July on eight more Wikipedias after we evaluated theinitial results. So far, we've seen a high level of engagement from newcomers. Communities that have the feature suggested valuable ideas for improvement. We'll work on improvements and then contact more communities to deploy it.
• "Add an image" is the team's second structured task, currently in development. It is an editing task that suggests Commons images for unillustrated Wikipedia articles. We have conducted many community discussions and tests. Then, we've decided to build a first prototype. We'll first deploy it only to our pilot Wikipedias, to learn whether newcomers can be successful with the task. The project page containslinks to interactive prototypes. We are very interested to hear your thoughts on this idea as we build and test the early versions. These prototypes have already been tested by newcomers, in English and Spanish.

• TheMentor dashboard is available at our pilot wikis: Arabic, Czech, and Bengali Wikipedias. It will soon be available at a few more volunteering wikis, as a test.[3]
• At wikis where the mentor dashboard is deployed, a new filter is available for mentors. Mentors can monitor their mentees' activity in Watchlist and RecentChanges, so they can help support their mentees' work. For privacy reasons, this filter can't be accessed by someone else than the mentor itself. This filter only filters mentees assigned to the mentor. This filter is not visible for people who arenot listed as mentors[4]

• Communities now have the ability to configure how Growth features behave on their own wikis. AtSpecial:EditGrowthConfig, community members canadd a list of volunteer mentors, alter the templates used for suggested edits, update help links, and more. This special page is editable by administrators and interface admins.

• We are proud to announce that all Wikipedias now have the Growth features! Thank you to all the community members who helped the team build the features and bring them to their wikis. The only exception is Chinese Wikipedia (zh), for technical reasons.[5]
• The wikis that haveGrowth features deployed have been part of A/B testing since deployment, in which some newcomers did not receive the new features. Now, all of the newcomers on 280 of the smallest of those Wikipedias have the features.[6][7]
• A test is undergoing at English Wikipedia: 25% of newcomers receive the Growth features. The results from this test will be part of a discussion of how to proceed on that wiki.
• Now that Growth features are available at Wikipedia, the Growth team considers to extend them to other projects. Some Wikisource users have expressed some interest in getting Growth features. There is currently adiscussion about implementing them on Wikisource.

• Do you have questions about the Growth features?This translatable FAQ contains answers to the most common questions about the Growth team work.
• The Growth features were recently used in a test amongst Latin American donors to give donors the opportunity to learn to edit.You can see the results here.
• Interface translations are important for newcomers. Please help for your language, bytranslating or copyediting interface translations for the Growth features.
• Help:GettingStarted was a feature developed in 2013, which directed newcomers to articles that needed editing. We recently removed this feature from all wikis, because it has been replaced by the Growth features.

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Growth Newsletter #20

Welcome to the twentieth newsletter from theGrowth team!

The Growth team's objective is to work on software changes that help retain new contributors in Wikimedia projects.

As of February, 300,000 suggested edits have been completed since the feature was first deployed in December 2019.

Add a link is the team's first structured task, deployed in May 2021. It has improved outcomes for newcomers. The team is now working on a second iteration based on community feedback and data analysis. Improvements will include: improved algorithmic suggestions, guardrails to prevent too many similar links to be added, and clearer encouragement for users to continue making edits. After adding these improvements, we will deploy this task to more Wikipedias.

Add an image is the second structured task built by our team. It was deployed in November 2021 to four pilot Wikipedias. This is a more challenging task for newcomers. However, it adds more value to articles (so far, over 1,000 images have been added). We are currently learning from communities and from the data on what is working well and what needs improvements. The project page containslinks to interactive prototypes. We are very interested tohear your thoughts on this idea as we build and test the early versions. We will soon deploy this task to more Wikipedias as a test.

"Add a link" and "Add an image" now both have a limitation on how many of these tasks newcomers can do per day. It is meant to discourage careless newcomers from making too many problematic edits.

Over the last two years, the Growth team has focused on building suggested edits: easy tasks for newcomers to start with. We have learned with this experience that these tasks help many newcomers to make their first edits. Now, the team is starting a new project : "positive reinforcement". Its goal is to make newcomers proud of their editing and to make them want to come back for more of them. With the positive reinforcement project, we are considering three kinds of features:

• Impact stats: give newcomers the ability to see how many people read the articles they edit.
• Leveling up: encourage newcomers to progress from easier tasks to harder tasks.
• Personalized praise: encourage mentors and other editors to "thank" and award newcomers for good work.

This project is just beginning, and we hope for community thoughts on the direction. We know that things can wrong if we offer the wrong incentives to newcomers, so we want to be careful. Please visitthe talk page to help guide the project!

• Thementor dashboard is available at all wikis. It helps mentors see who their mentees are and keep track of their activity. It is automatically activatedwhere a list of mentors has been created. If you need assistance to create a list of mentors, pleasecontact us.
• The mentor dashboard has a new module: settings. It is now possible for mentors to define their status (active or away). They can specify the volume of questions they want to receive, and they can claim mentees in an easier way. It is also possible for mentors to quit, which will automatically reassign their mentees to other mentors.
• We areworking on an ability for a mentee to opt-out (and back in) to having a mentor.
• Previously, in the table that displays mentees activity, the filters displayed all mentees, even the ones with zero edits or lots of edits.We have changed this so that only mentees with between 1 and 500 edits are visible by default. Mentors can change this value in their filters.
• We are currentlyworking on a special page for mentors to sign-up.

Some wikis have created userboxes that mentors can display on the user pages. If your wiki has one, please link itto Wikidata!

Previously, at most Wikipedias, only 80% of newcomers were getting the Growth features. This was done for experimentation, to have a control group. We have changed this setting. Now 100% of new accounts at all Wikipedias get the Growth features (except a few, kept as test wikis). We invite communities to update their onboarding documentation and tutorials. Please include the Growth features in it. To help you,we have created an help page that can be translated and adapted to your wiki.

Do you have questions about the Growth features?This translatable FAQ contains answers to the most common questions about the Growth team work. We regularly update it.

Interface translations are important for newcomers. Please help for your language, bytranslating or copyediting interface translations for the Growth features.

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Growth team newsletter #21

Welcome to the twenty-first newsletter from theGrowth team!

• The Growth team started a new project:Positive reinforcement. We want newcomers to understand there is an interest in regularly editing Wikipedia, and we want to improve new editor retention.
• We asked users from Arabic, Bangla, Czech and French Wikipedia about their feedback. Some people participated at mediawiki.org as well.
• Wesummarized the initial feedback gathered from these community discussions, along with how we plan to iterate based on that feedback.
• The first Positive Reinforcement idea is a redesign of the impact module: incorporating stats, graphs, and other contribution information. This idea received the widest support, and we plan to start our work based on the design illustrated on the side.
• Please let us know what you think of this project, in any language.

• We have worked on two new features, to inform them about the mentorship:
  • In the Mentor module, we now provide more information about the public nature of the mentors/newcomer relationship and the fact that talk pages are public.
  • We now allow newcomers to opt-in and opt-out of mentorship.

• "Add a link" available at more wikis ―Add a link feature has been deployed to more wikis: Catalan Wikipedia, Hebrew Wikipedia, Hindi Wikipedia, Korean Wikipedia, Norwegian Bokmål Wikipedia, Portuguese Wikipedia, Simple English Wikipedia, Swedish Wikipedia, Ukrainian Wikipedia, Abkhazian Wikipedia, Achinese Wikipedia, Adyghe Wikipedia, Afrikaans Wikipedia, Akan Wikipedia, Alemannisch Wikipedia, Amharic Wikipedia, Aragonese Wikipedia, Old English Wikipedia, Syriac Wikipedia, Egyptian Arabic Wikipedia, Asturian Wikipedia, Atikamekw Wikipedia, Avaric Wikipedia, Aymara Wikipedia, Azerbaijani Wikipedia, South Azerbaijani Wikipedia. This is part of the progressive deployment of this tool to more Wikipedias. The communities canconfigure locally how this feature works.
• "Add an image" available at more wikis ―Add an image feature will be deployed to more wikis: Greek Wikipedia, Indonesian Wikipedia, Polish Wikipedia, Chinese Wikipedia. These communities will be able toconfigure locally how this feature works.[8]

• Selecting topics ― We have created an "AND" filter to the list of topics at Special:Homepage. This way, newcomers can decide to select very specific topics ("Transportation" AND "Asia") or to have a broader selection ("Transportation" OR "Asia"). At the moment this feature is tested atpilot wikis.
• Changes for Add a link ―We have built several improvements that came from community discussion and from data analysis. They will be available soon at the wikis.
  • Algorithm improvements ― The algorithm now avoids recommending links in sections that usually don't have links and for first names. Also, it now limits each article to only having three link suggestions by default (limited to the highest accuracy suggestions of all the available ones in the article).
  • User experience improvements ― We added a confirmation dialog when a user exits out of suggestion mode prior to making changes. We also improved post-edit dialog experience and allow newcomers to browse through task suggestions from the post-edit dialog.
  • Community configuration ― We allow communities to set a maximum number of links per article viaSpecial:EditGrowthConfig.
  • Future change for Add a link feature ― We will suggest underlinked articles in priority.[9]
• Patrolling suggested edits ― Some users at Arabic Wikipedia, Spanish Wikipedia, and Russian Wikipedia told us that "Add a link" and "Add an image" edits can be challenging to patrol. We are now brainstorming improvements to help address this challenge.We have already some ideas and we started some work to address this challenge. If you have any thoughts to add about the challenges of reviewing these tasks or how we should improve these tasks further,please let us know, in any language.

Communities can configure how the features work, usingSpecial:EditGrowthConfig.

• Communities can set the maximum number of "add an image" suggested tasks a newcomer can complete daily.[10]
• Future change: allow communities to customize the "add a link" quality gate threshold easily, usingSpecial:EditGrowthConfig.[11]

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Growth team newsletter #22

Welcome to the twenty-second newsletter from theGrowth team!

As of the last week of June 2022, the newcomers of the world have completed over 500,000newcomer tasks. In other words, newcomers have made over half a million Wikipedia edits via Growth’s “Suggested Edits” module.

• About 30% of those edits were completed on mobile devices.
• Usage continues to increase; in June 2022 almost 50,000 newcomer tasks were completed.

We have added some new data to Grafana. You can now check the number of edits and reverts by task types, or the number of questions asked to mentors. You can filter the data by wiki.

If you have any questions, or there is more data you want access to,please let us know.

We are continuing our work on our new project,Positive Reinforcement. User testing of initial Positive Reinforcement designs was just completed. Interviews were conducted in Arabic, English, and Spanish. The outcome has been published on thePositive Reinforcement page. We are now utilizing user testing feedback along with priorcommunity feedback to iterate and improve designs.

We are exploring the idea of aCopy Edit structured task. We have tested copy edits in Wikipedia articles for arwiki, bnwiki, cswiki, eswiki (Growth pilot-wikis) and enwiki with two different methods:LanguageTool andHunspell. We will share more details here and on the associatedCopy Edit page once the evaluation is complete.

Add an image was utilized at GLAM events in Argentina, Mexico, and Chile. For an overview of what was learned from these events, read:#1Pic1Article I: how Latin American heritage experts added images to Wikipedia (in English).

Add a Link Experiment Analysis has been published. The most important points are:

• Newcomers who get the Add a Link structured task aremore likely to be activated (i.e. make a constructive first article edit).
• They are alsomore likely to be retained (i.e. come back and make another constructive article edit on a different day).
• The feature alsoincreases edit volume (i.e. the number of constructive edits made across the first couple weeks), while at the same timeimproving edit quality (i.e. the likelihood that the newcomer's edits aren't reverted).

Newcomer task edit type analysis has been published.

• Communities had expressed concern that newcomers whose initial edits werestructured tasks wouldn’t go on to learn how to complete more difficult tasks. The Growth team data scientist conducted aNewcomer task edit type analysis to see if this was indeed the case.
• Results from analysis indicate that this likely isn’t a significant concern. More than 70% of users who start with the easy task "Add a link" also make another task type. Read the full analysis and methodologyhere.

A new system for the mentors list

The configuration of the mentors list will change over the next weeks. In the future, mentors will sign up, edit their mentor description and quit using Special:MentorDashboard. This new system will make the development of new features for mentors much easier.

At the moment, the mentor list is a simple page anyone can edit, unless it’s protected. With the new page, mentors will be able to edit only their own description, while administrators will be able to edit the entire mentors' list if needed.

The deployment will happen first at the pilot wikis, then at all wikis. Existing lists of mentors will be automatically converted, no action will be needed from the mentors.[12][13]

Mentors will be informed about the next steps soon, by a message posted on the talk page of existing Mentor lists.

Learn more about this new structured page on mediawiki.org.

A tip for mentors

Did you know that mentors can filter their mentees' changes at Special:MentorDashboard (and star the ones that require attention)? This feature helps to keep an eye on newcomers' edits, helping mentors to fix minor details, and encourage them if necessary.

And did you know that mentors have special filters to highlight their mentees' edits at Special:RecentChanges? Look for the following filters in RecentChanges: Your starred mentees, Your unstarred mentees.

Other improvements

Some improvements will be made to the mentor dashboard in the coming weeks:

• While we now offer some options for mentors to take a break, the option to quit mentoring was not easy to find. This will be improved.[14]
• Mentors at wikis using FlaggedRevisions will have a way to discover their mentees' pending edits.[15]
• Dashboard discovery for new mentors will be improved.[16]

• We moved to a new Image Suggestions API. This new API will allow us to deploy Add an Image to more wikis.[17]
• Starting September 19, a few more wikis now offerAdd an image to newcomers. These wikis are Greek Wikipedia, Polish Wikipedia, Chinese Wikipedia, Indonesian Wikipedia, Romanian Wikipedia.[18]
• Add an image has been disabled for a few days due to technical issue. "Add an image" added a blank line instead of an image. This has been fixed.[19]
• In order to know if Special:EditGrowthConfig is used by communities, we nowinstrument page loads and saves of configuration.[20]

Please let us know! You can alsoread our FAQ page.

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Barnstar

Growth team newsletter #23

Welcome to the twenty-third newsletter from theGrowth team!

• Mentorship: We released the newstructured mentor list to all wikis. This change makes mentorshipeasier to setup, manage and use.
• Positive reinforcement: An improved impact module is available for testing.

The goal of the Growth team is to encourage newcomers to try editing for the first time, and encourage them to keep editing.We want to increase newcomers' motivation by showing them how impactful their edits are.

Newcomers have access to an impact module; you can find yours at Special:Impact. The revised impact module provides new editors withmore context about their impact. It will display the number of edits, the number of thanks received, the last time they edited, the number of consecutive days they edited, and the number of views for the articles they edited.

This module will soon be available at ourpilot wikis starting December 1. You can already test this new moduleat Beta Wikipedia.For safety reasons, do not use your regular account and password at Beta wiki. Create a new, specific account for this wiki, with a different password.

After the deployment ofStructured tasks, we received feedback from various communities regarding how patrollers of recent changes were feeling overwhelmed by an increase in edits to check, and how some edits were poor quality or of poor relevance.

We made several improvements basedon the feedback we received. Several points of improvement have already been addressed:

• Patroller fatigue:
  • By default, newcomers can complete up to 25 "add a link" tasks and 25 "add an image" tasks per day. If patrollers are overburdened, each community can use Special:EditGrowthConfig to lower that limit.

• Quality of edits: what constitutes a "quality edit" is not a well defined concept. We initiated a discussion andsummarized our findings. We also worked on the following improvements:
  • Add a Link
    • Underlinked articles are now prioritized, so it's less likely that newcomers are adding links to articles that are already have a lot of links.
    • The confidence score was increased, so suggestions are more likely to be accurate.
    • The default number of suggested links per article has been lowered to 3. This can be changed at Special:EditGrowthConfig. Communities can also exclude articles containing certain templates or categories from being suggested.
  • Add an Image
    • Lists will no longer receive "add an image" suggestions.
    • Disambiguation pages will no longer receive "add an image" suggestions.
    • We have many further improvements we plan to make to "add an image" in early 2023.[21]

The Positive Reinforcement project will also address some of the concerns around encouraging newcomers to progress to higher value edits. The Growth team will soon work on strategies geared at "Leveling up" newcomers so they progress from easy to more difficult tasks.

• All Wikipedias now have the same onboarding experience. Previously, at a few wikis, 20% of new accounts didn't get the Growth features when they created their account. These 20% of new accounts were used as a control group, in order to know if the Growth features were changing newcomers' behavior. Experiments have shown thatGrowth features improve activation and retention, and as we want to provide the same onboarding experience at all Wikipedias, we have decided to remove the control groups. We will utilize control groups when testing new features, and German Wikipedia keeps a control group at their request.[22]
• The quality score for "add a link" suggestions will change. We will suggest less links for each article, but they will be more accurate. We will first deploy it at our pilot wikis, and then to all other wikis where this feature is available.[23][24]
• Growth's features FAQ has been updated and expanded. This page centralizes all the information about Growth features. We invite you to read it, and, if you can, to translate it.

• All Wikipedias can now setup and manage a mentorship programin an easier way.
  • We changed the process to make it more reliable, easier to improve and easier to use.
  • Wikipedias where mentorship hasn't been enabled yet can turn mentorship onfollowing a new process. When done, mentors can sign-up by visitingSpecial:MentorDashboard.
  • Wikipedias where the list of mentors already existed have been converted to the new system.
  • A new special page —Special:ManageMentors — now displays the list of mentors. This page can be transcluded on any other page. There are also new processes tosignup as a mentor or toquit mentorship, and we improvedcommunity mentorship management.
• The Mentor dashboard's "Your mentees" module will have a new footer, called "Recent changes by your mentees". This footer will include a link to Recent changes, where mentors can see only edits made by their own mentees.[25]

• Add a link has been deployed to a 5th round of wikis.[26]

We plan to have amore regular newsletter, every two months. We also want to know if the current format suits you! Let us know what you like, what you like less and your suggestions of improvements:leave us a comment, in your preferred language.

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New page reviewer granted

New Pages Patrol newsletter January 2023

Hello KHarlan (WMF),

Backlog

The October drive reduced the backlog from 9,700 to an amazing 0! Congratulations toWaddlesJP13 who led with 2084 points. Seethis page for further details. The queue is steadily rising again and is approaching 2,000. It would be great if <2,000 were the “new normal”. Please continue to help out even if it's only for a few or even one patrol a day.

2022 Awards

Onel5969 won the 2022 cup for 28,302 article reviews last year - that's an average of nearly 80/day. There was one Gold Award (5000+ reviews), 11 Silver (2000+), 28 Iron (360+) and 39 more for the 100+ barnstar.Rosguill led again for the 4th year by clearing 49,294 redirects. For the full details see theAwards page and theHall of Fame. Congratulations everyone!

Minimum deletion time: The previousWP:NPP guideline was to wait 15 minutes before tagging for deletion (including draftification andWP:BLAR). Due to complaints, a consensus decided to raise the time to 1 hour. To illustrate this, very new pages in thefeed are now highlighted in red. (As always, this is not applicable to attack pages, copyvios, vandalism, etc.)

New draftify script: In response to feedback from AFC, the The Move to Draft script now provides a choice of set messages that also link the creator to a new, friendlyexplanation page. The script also warns reviewers if the creator is probably still developing the article. The former script is no longer maintained. Please edit your edit yourcommon.js or vector.js file fromUser:Evad37/MoveToDraft.js toUser:MPGuy2824/MoveToDraft.js

Redirects: Some of our redirect reviewers have reduced their activity and the backlog is up to 9,000+ (two months deep). If you are interested in this distinctly different task and need any help, seethis guide,this checklist, and spend some time atWP:RFD.

Discussions with the WMF ThePageTriage open letter signed by 444 users is bearing fruit. The Growth Team has assigned some software engineers to work on PageTriage, the software that powers the NewPagesFeed and the Page Curation toolbar. WMF has submitteddozens of patches in the last few weeks to modernize PageTriage's code, which will make it easier to write patches in the future. This work is helpful but is not very visible to the end user. For patches visible to the end user, volunteers such asNovem Linguae andMPGuy2824 have been writing patches for bug reports and feature requests. The Growth Team alsohad a video conference with the NPP coordinators to discussrevamping the landing pages that new users see.

Growth team newsletter #24

Welcome to the twenty-fourth newsletter from theGrowth team!

The Growth team partnered with other WMF teams toconduct several experiments around increasing account creation and new editor retention.Results from four of these experiments are now available:

• Thank you pages & banners - Encourage donors to create accounts through thank you pages and banners.
• Marketing experiment - Run ads on-wiki and off-wiki to see how this impacts account activation.
• "Add an image" GLAM events - HostGLAM events that focus on using the "Add an image" tool.
• Welcome emails - Experiment sending welcome emails to newly created accounts.

• Several communities suggested improving "add a link", bysuggesting underlinked articles first. We released this change to Growth pilot wikis. We will review the data and collect feedback before considering releasing it to more wikis.[27]
• Thedeployment of the "add a link" to all Wikipedias is still in progress. Suggested links usea prediction model, which has to be trained. The deployments will resume after we finish training all models.[28]

• When someone wants to signup as a mentor, they are now informed if they don't meet thedefined criteria.[29]
• Workshop hosts asked us to have workshop attendees assigned to them. They can soon use a custom URL parameter. This way, workshop hosts will continue mentoring the event's attendees after the workshop. It will be available in February.[30]
• Have you considered to help new editors on your wiki, bysigning up to be a Mentor?
  • Please visitSpecial:MentorDashboard to check on the conditions to be a mentor, and sign up.
  • If your wiki does not have Mentorship enabled,consider setting it up. The Growth team can provideadvice and assist as needed. Please pingTrizek (WMF) for assistance.

• InSpecial:SpecialPages, Growth experiments now have their own section.[31]
• This newsletter will have anew publication period, 6 times a year: January, March, May, July, September, November.

• Newsletter translation: We are looking for translators for this newsletter. If you are interested and have the needed English language proficiency to assist, then please add your nameto this list. You will receive an invite on your talk page to translate the newsletter when it is ready.
• Interface translation: You can also help by translating the interface, or reviewing translations to make them more inclusive.Interface translations are hosted at translatewiki.net.

Growth team's newsletter prepared bythe Growth team and posted bybot •Give feedback •Subscribe or unsubscribe.•Help with translations

Growth team newsletter #25

Welcome to the twenty-fifth newsletter from theGrowth team!Help with translations

Leveling up release

• We releasedLeveling up features to ourpilot wikis on March 22 for an initialA/B test.
• In this test, we use post-edit dialogs (pop-ups shown after publishing an edit) and notifications to encourage new editors to try new types of newcomer-friendly suggested edits.
• We are closelymonitoring the short term impact of this feature as well asthe longer term effect on newcomer productivity and retention. If the experiment shows positive results, we will release this feature to more wikis.

5,000+ images added via the newcomer task in February

• In February 2023,5,035 images were added via the newcomer “add an image” feature (on all wikis where available); 155 were reverted.
• Since the feature “add an image” was launched:36,803 images have been added; 2,957 images were reverted.

• Add a link
  • Community Ambassadors completed an initial evaluation that confirmed that prioritizing underlinked articles resulted in better article suggestions. We then evaluated the change on Growth pilot wikis, and results suggest that more newcomers are successfully completing the task and experiencing fewer reverts. We have now deployed the new prioritization model to all wikis with "add a link" enabled.[32][33]
  • We continue the deployment of "add a link" to more wikis. These changes are regularly announced inTech News. To know if newcomers at your wiki have access to this feature, please visityour Homepage.
• TheImpact module was deployed on our pilot wikis, where we conducted an A/B test. We publishedinitial findings, and a data scientist is now completing experiment analysis.[34]
• Donor Thank you page experiment – Donors land on a “thank you” page after donation, and that landing page now includes a call to action to try editing:Example Thank you page in French. This promising feature is tested at several Wikipedias (French Wikipedia, Italian Wikipedia, Japanese Wikipedia, Dutch Wikipedia, Swedish Wikipedia).
• Growth features are now the default experience on bothtest.wikipedia.org andtest2.wikipedia.org. You can test our features there.

• Add an image – We plan to offersection-level image suggestions as a structured task for newcomers.
  • We are starting design work.[35]
  • Growth team Ambassadors helped with an initial evaluation of these section-level image suggestions.[36]
  • We will start a community consultation in which we share initial ideas and designs soon.[37]
• IP Editing: Privacy Enhancement and Abuse Mitigation – We will support this project for all Growth Team maintained products and extensions that may be affected by IP Masking.[38]

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New Page Patrol – May 2023 Backlog Drive

Growth team newsletter #26

Welcome to the twenty-sixth newsletter from theGrowth team!Help with translations

We passed the 1 million Suggested edits milestone in late April!

• TheSuggested edits feature (AKA Newcomer tasks) increase newcomer activation by ~12%, which flows on through to increased retention. (source)
• Suggested edits increase the number of edits newcomers complete in their first two weeks and have a relatively low revert rate. (source)
• Suggested edits are available on all Wikipedia language editions.
• Newer Suggested edits, likeAdd a link andAdd an image, aren’t yet deployed to all wikis, but these structured tasks further increase the probability that newcomers will make their first edit. (source)

Positive reinforcement aims to encourage newcomers who have visited our homepage and triedGrowth features to keep editing.

• The newImpact module was released to Growth pilot wikis in December 2022, and we are now scaling the feature to another ten wikis.[39]
• TheLeveling up features are deployed at our pilot wikis.
• ThePersonalized praise features were deployed at our pilot wikis on May 24. Mentors at pilot wikis will start to receive notifications weekly when they have “praise-worthy” mentees. Mentors can configure their notification preferences or disable these notifications.

• We are creating a newsection-level variation of the “add an image” task. We have tested the accuracy of suggestions, and the development of this new task is well-underway.[40]

• We are progressively releasingAdd a link to more wikis.[41]
• After adding Thanks to Recent Changes, Watchlist and Special:Contributions, we investigatedThanks usage on the wikis. There is no evidence that thanks increased after the feature was added on more pages.
• We helped with code review for the2023 Community Wish to addNotifications for user page edits.[42]
• We have been attending several community events, that we documented in ourGrowth’s Community events report.

• We shared an overview ofGrowth annual planning ideas, and have started community discussion about these potential projects. We would love to hear your feedback on these ideas!

Growth team's newsletter prepared bythe Growth team and posted bybot •Give feedback •Subscribe or unsubscribe.

New Pages Patrol newsletter June 2023

Hello KHarlan (WMF),

Backlog

Redirect drive: In response to an unusually high redirect backlog, we held a redirect backlog drive in May. The drive completed with23851 reviews done in total, bringing the redirect backlog to0 (momentarily). Congratulations toHey man im josh who led with a staggering 4316 points, followed byMeena andGreyzxq with 2868 and 2546 points respectively. Seethis page for more details. The redirect queue is steadily rising again and is steadily approaching 4,000. Please continue to help out, even if it's only for a few or even one review a day.

Redirect autopatrol: All administrators without autopatrol have now been added to the redirect autopatrol list. If you see any users who consistently create significant amounts of good quality redirects, consider requesting redirect autopatrol for themhere.

WMF work on PageTriage: TheWMF Moderator Tools team, consisting ofSam,Jason andSusana, and also some patches fromJon, has been hard at workupdating PageTriage. They are focusing their efforts on modernising the extension's code rather than on bug fixes or new features, though some user-facing work will be prioritised. This will help make sure that this extension is not deprecated, and is easier to work on in the future. In the next month or so, we will have an opt-inbeta test where new page patrollers can help test the rewrite ofSpecial:NewPagesFeed, to help find bugs. We will post more details atWT:NPPR when we are ready for beta testers.

Articles for Creation (AFC): All new page reviewers are nowautomatically approved for Articles for Creation draft reviewing (you do not need to apply atWT:AFCP like was required previously). To install theAFC helper script, visitSpecial:Preferences, visit the Gadgets tab, tick "Yet Another AFC Helper Script", then click "Save". To find drafts to review, visitSpecial:NewPagesFeed, and at the top left, tick "Articles for Creation". To review a draft, visit a submitted draft, click on the "More" menu, then click "Review (AFCH)". You can also comment on and submit drafts that are unsubmitted using the script.

You can review the AFC workflow atWP:AFCR. It is up to you if you also want to mark your AFC accepts as NPP reviewed (this is allowed but optional, depends if you would like a second set of eyes on your accept). Don't forget thatdraftspace is optional, so moves of drafts to mainspace (even if they are not ready) should not be reverted, except possibly if there is conflict of interest.

Pro tip: Did you know that visual artists such as painters have their ownSNG? The most common part of this "creative professionals" criteria that applies to artists isWP:ARTIST 4b (solo exhibition, not group exhibition, at a major museum) or 4d (being represented within the permanent collections of two museums).

New pages patrol needs your help!

Hello KHarlan (WMF),

TheNew Page Patrol team is sending you this impromptu message to inform you of a steeply rising backlog of articles needing review. If you have any extra time to spare, please consider reviewing one or two articles each day to help lower the backlog. You can start reviewing by visitingSpecial:NewPagesFeed. Thank you very much for your help.

Growth team newsletter #27

Welcome to the twenty-seventh newsletter from theGrowth team!Help with translations

We sharedour annual plan, for the period July 2023 - June 2024.

Our first project of the year will beCommunity configuration 2.0, which helps editors with extended rights transparently and easily configure important on-wiki functionality.

After we finish work on Community configuration 2.0, we will hope to fit in one of the following projects:

• Article creation: This project aims to provide new editors with better guidance and guardrails in the article creation process, with the intention of lightening the load of new page reviewers.
• Non-editing participation: This project aims to create low-risk ways for readers to participate in Wikipedia with the intention of funneling more readers into contributing to the Wikimedia movement.

Please let us know what you think about these projects on the related talk page, orGrowth's annual plan talk page.

We released a newSection-level “add an image” structured task to Growth pilot wikis (Arabic, Bengali, Czech, and Spanish). This task was part of theStructured Data Across Wikipedia project. We are monitoring the edits made, and we look for community feedback as well.

Suggested Edits are now receiving topic predictions via the newLanguage-Agnostic Topic Classification. This change affects non-English Wikipedia wikis. It will ensure newcomers receive a greater diversity of task recommendations. Before, as this feature was a test, English Wikipedia was used to select topics. The change is gradual as lists of topics are refreshed when they become empty. TheResearch team will evaluate the impact in a few months.[43]

Starting on August 1, a new set of Wikipedias will get "Add a link": Georgian Wikipedia, Kara-Kalpak Wikipedia, Kabyle Wikipedia, Kabardian Wikipedia, Kabiyè Wikipedia, Kikuyu Wikipedia, Kazakh Wikipedia, Khmer Wikipedia, Kannada Wikipedia, Kashmiri Wikipedia, Colognian Wikipedia, Kurdish Wikipedia, Cornish Wikipedia, Cornish Wikipedia.

The Growth team provides dedicated features to establish amentorship program for newcomers. Every newcomer gets a volunteer mentor who provides encouragement and answers questions. Communities can set up or join this mentorship system by visiting Special:ManageMentors. This mentorship system is configurable by the community at Special:EditGrowthConfig.

More communities have implemented mentorship. A Wikimedia Foundation data scientist will be looking at the impact of Mentorship. We will look at the impact on Spanish and English Wikipedia.[44]

The Growth team will also host aMentoring new editors on Wikipedia session atWikimania 2023 in Singapore. Workshop attendees will help brainstorm improvements to Growth’s mentorship features.

We will share more complete experiment analysis for all the three parts of the Positive reinforcement project soon. At the moment, the newImpact module,Leveling up, andPersonalized praise are still being A/B tested on the Growth team'spilot wikis.

In the meantime, initialleading indicators for the Personalized praise project have been published. Although this is still a relatively small sample, results seem healthy. They show that Mentors are indeed receiving notifications and clicking through to view their praise-worthy mentees.

The Growth team is currently focusing onIP Editing: Privacy Enhancement and Abuse Mitigation. It is a project that touches many different Wikimedia Foundation teams. The Growth team will focus on temporary accounts through two main points:

• the user experience of a logged-out user, that switches to a temporary account,
• change Growth-owned extensions and features, so that they work as expected with temporary accounts.[45]

We are still in the early planning stage of theCommunity Configuration 2.0 project:

• We are gathering internal Wikimedia Foundation teams' needs, so as community feedback.[46]
• We have started to investigate design improvements.[47]
• We are also reviewing similar tools that are part of other products.[48]

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New page patrol October 2023 Backlog drive

New pages patrol newsletter

Hello KHarlan (WMF),

Backlog update:At the time of this message, there are11,300 articles and15,600 redirects awaiting review. This is the highest backlog in a long time. Please help out by doing additional reviews!

October backlog elimination drive:A one-month backlog drive for October will start in one week! Barnstars will be awarded based on the number of articles and redirects patrolled. Articles will earn 4x as many points compared to redirects. You cansign up here.

PageTriage code upgrades:Upgrades to thePageTriage code, initiated by theNPP open letter in 2022 and actioned by theWMF Moderator Tools Team in 2023, are ongoing. More information can be foundhere. As part of this work, theSpecial:NewPagesFeed now has a new version in beta! The update leaves the NewPagesFeed appearance and function mostly identical to the old one, but updates the underlying code, making it easier to maintain and helping make sure the extension is not decommissioned due to maintenance issues in the future. You can try out the new Special:NewPagesFeedhere - it will replace the current version soon.

Notability tip:Professors can meetWP:PROF #1 by having their academic papers be widely cited by their peers. When reviewing professor articles, it is a good idea to find theirGoogle Scholar orScopus profile and take a look at theirh-index and number of citations. As avery rough rule of thumb, for most fields, articles on people with a h-index oftwenty or more, a first-authored paper with more than a thousand citations, or multiple papers each with more than a hundred citations are likely to be kept at AfD.

Reviewing tip:If you would like like a second opinion on your reviews or simply want another new page reviewer by your side when patrolling, we recommend pair reviewing! This is where two reviewers useDiscord voice chat and screen sharing to communicate with each other while reviewing the same article simultaneously. This is a great way to learn and transfer knowledge.

Growth team newsletter #28

Welcome to the twenty-eighth newsletter from theGrowth team!Help with translations

• Community Configuration 2.0 is a feature that will enable Wikimedia communities to easily customize and configure features to meet their unique needs. This approach provides non-technical moderators with more independence and control over enabling/disabling and customizing features for their communities.
• Technical approach and associated tasks are detailed inthis Epic task on Phabricator.
• Initial designs are drafted for two different approaches (see images). We will soon demo interactive prototypes to interested admins, stewards, and experienced editors (T346109).Please let us know if you have feedback on the design approach, or want to participate in prototype testing.

• The Growth team has been working on several updates to ensure Growth maintained features will be compatible with futureIP Masking changes. This work has included code changes to: Recent Changes (T343322), Echo notifications (T333531), the Thanks extension (T345679) and Mentorship (T341390).
• Before December, the Growth team will initiate community discussions with the goal of migrating communities from Flow to DiscussionTools. This move aims to minimize the necessity for additional engineering work to make Flow compatible withIP Masking. (T346108)

• We assembled some resources for mentors atMediawiki wiki. This resource page is translatable and will be linked from the mentor dashboard.
• We are working to resolve a bug related to mentors properly returning after being marked as "Away". (T347024)
• Half of newcomers at English Wikipedia get a mentor assigned to them. To ensure every newcomer receives mentorship,we need additional volunteer mentors at English Wikipedia to achieve a 100% coverage rate. We also encourage experienced users from other wikisto help newcomers at their own community.

• We continue the deployment of the structured task "add a link" to all Wikipedias. We plan to scale the task to all Wikipedias that have link suggestions available by the end of 2023.
• We plan to scale the new Impact Module to all Wikipedias soon, but first we are investigating a bug with the job that refreshes the Impact Module data. (T344428)
• At some wikis, newcomers have access to the "add an image" structured task. This task suggests images that may be relevant to add to unillustrated articles. Newcomers at these wikis can now add images to unillustrated articles sections. (T345940) The wikis that have this task are listed under "Images recommendations"at the Growth team deployment table.

• We disabled the “add an image” task temporarily (T345188) because there was a failure in the image suggestions pipeline (T345141). This is now fixed.
• You can read areport about the Growth team’s representation at Wikimania in Singapore here. Growth team members presented two sessions at Wikimania Singapore.
• After a 2.5 years-long collaboration with Bangala Wikipedia, we have decided to start a collaboration with another wiki. Swahili Wikipedia is now a pilot wiki for Growth experiments.

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November Articles for creation backlog drive

Hello KHarlan (WMF):

WikiProject Articles for creation is holding amonth longBacklog Drive!
The goal of this drive is toreduce the backlog of unreviewed drafts to less than 2 months outstanding reviews from the current 4+ months. Bonus points will be given for reviewing drafts that have been waiting more than 30 days. The drive is running from 1 November 2023 through 30 November 2023.

You may findCategory:AfC pending submissions by age orother categories and sorting helpful.

Barnstars will be given out as awards at the end of the drive.

Growth team newsletter #29

Welcome to the twenty-ninth newsletter from theGrowth team!Help with translations

The Growth team will host its first community conversationMonday, 4 December (19:00 - 20:30 UTC). The topic for this meeting will beMentorship.

This first meeting language will be English, but we plan to host conversations in other languages, and about other topics. Please visitthe conversation page on-wiki for the details on how to join. You can also watch the page, or suggest ideas for upcoming conversations there.

At the beginning of November 2023, the Growth team deployed theNew Impact Module to all Wikipedias. We recently released a follow up improvement to how edit data was displayed based on editor feedback.[49]

We released “add a link” to 35 more Wikipedias.[50][51]

We have a few Wikipedias remaining:

• German and English Wikipedia will be contacted at the beginning of January 2024.
• There are a few small wikis that will not receive the task until they have enough articles for the algorithm to work properly.

• We sharedCommunity Configuration 2.0 plans with technical stakeholders.[52]🖂
• InitialCommunity Configuration design ideas have been shared and discussed with community members.
• A basicCommunity Configuration 2.0 demo is released on ToolForge.
• Developers can find some initial proof of concept codeshared on gitlab.

When a mentor marked themselves as "Away", they were not getting their name assigned to new accounts when they returned. This has been fixed.[53]

We improved the message received by newcomers when their mentor quits, to reduce confusion.[54]

We worked on ensuring that all mentees are assigned to an active mentor. This required reassigning mentees with no mentors to a new mentor. We paused this as the clean-up script confused some editors. We will resume it when the identified blockers are resolved.[55]

It is now possible to create an Abuse Filter to prevent one user from signing up as a mentor.[56]

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New pages patrol January 2024 Backlog drive

New Pages Patrol newsletter April 2024

Hello KHarlan (WMF),

Backlog update: The October drive reduced the article backlog from 11,626 to 7,609 and the redirect backlog from 16,985 to 6,431! Congratulations toSchminnte, who led with over 2,300 points.

Following that, New Page Patrol organized another backlog drive for articles in January 2024. The January drive started with 13,650 articles and reduced the backlog to 7,430 articles. Congratulations toJTtheOG, who achieved first place with 1,340 points in this drive.

Looking at the graph, it seems like backlog drives are one of the only things keeping the backlog under control. Another backlog drive is being planned for May. Feel free to participate in theMay backlog drive planning discussion.

It's worth noting that both queues are gradually increasing again and are nearing 14,034 articles and 22,540 redirects. We encourage you to keep contributing, even if it's just a single patrol per day. Your support is greatly appreciated!

2023 Awards

Onel5969 won the 2023 cup with 17,761 article reviews last year - that's an average of nearly 50/day. There was one Platinum Award (10,000+ reviews), 2 Gold Awards (5000+ reviews), 6 Silver (2000+), 8 Bronze (1000+), 30 Iron (360+) and 70 more for the 100+ barnstar.Hey man im josh led on redirect reviews by clearing 36,175 of them. For the full details, see theAwards page and theHall of Fame. Congratulations everyone for their efforts in reviewing!

WMF work on PageTriage: TheWMF Moderator Tools team and volunteer software developersdeployed the rewritten NewPagesFeed in October, and thengave the NewPagesFeed a slight visual facelift in November. This concludes most major work toSpecial:NewPagesFeed, and most major work by the WMF Moderator Tools team, whowrapped up their major work on PageTriage in October. The WMF Moderator Tools team and volunteer software developers will continue small work on PageTriage as time permits.

Recruitment: A couple of the coordinators have been inviting editors to become reviewers, via mass-messages to their talk pages. If you know someone who you'd think would make a good reviewer, then a personal invitation to them would be great. Additionally, if there are Wikiprojects that you are active on, then you can add a post there asking participants to join NPP. Please be careful not to double invite folks that have already been invited.

Reviewing tip: Reviewers who prefer to patrol new pages within their most familiar subjects can use the regularly updatedNPP Browser tool.

New page patrol May 2024 Backlog drive

Growth News, April 2024

The Growth team will now send quarterly reports to keep you in the loop. Growth team weekly updatesare 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 tosubscribe to Tech News.

Growth features are currently configurable atSpecial:EditGrowthConfig. This quarter we are working on makingCommunity 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 atSpanish 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 beAutomoderator.

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

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'sPositive Reinforcement project. When A/B testing on Spanish Wikipedia, we foundno significant impact on retention, but we found asignificant 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 aunique 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)

Annual Plan

The Growth team and the Editing team will work on theWE1.2 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 atour project talk page.

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Growth News, July 2024

The Growth team releasedCommunity Configuration at all Wikipedias. You can access it atSpecial:CommunityConfiguration.

This new special page replacesSpecial:EditGrowthConfig. For now, all Growth features can be configured using Community Configuration. Configuration forAutoModerator (T365046) and other features will be available in the future.

You can help with translations. The interface translation is doneat Translatewiki.net. You can also helptranslate the documentation.

If you attendWikimania 2024, please join us for the session aboutCommunity configuration's future!

Newcomer Homepage Community Updates module

We will add a new Community Configurable module to the Newcomer Homepage that will allow communities to highlight specific events, projects, campaigns, and initiatives. We have released a simple version available to beta wikis. We will conduct an A/B test atour pilot wikis using the newMetrics Platform. We still welcome community feedback on initial designs and plans, in any language atour project talk page.

Increase constructive activation on mobile

As part of theGrowth team 2024/2025 Annual Plan, the Growth team will explore various ways to increase the percentage of newcomers who successfully start editing.

Editing a Wikipedia page requires too much context and patience. It means many trial and error for newcomers to contribute, meaning a steeper learning curve and potential discouraging reverts. To support a new generation of volunteers, we will increase the number and availability of smaller, structured, and more task-specific editing workflows (E.g.Edit Check andStructured Tasks). The Growth team will primarily focus on Structured Tasks, while working closely with theEditing team to ensure our work integrates well with Edit Check.

Growth team weekly updatesare 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 tosubscribe to Tech News.

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New pages patrol September 2024 Backlog drive

Growth News, October 2024

Newcomer Homepage Community Updates module

We will add a new module to the Newcomer Homepage that will allow communities to highlight specific events, projects, campaigns, and initiatives. We have released a simple version on beta wikis and we will soon start an A/B test onour pilot wikis. This module will only display on the Newcomer Homepage if communities decide to utilize it, so learnhow to configure the Community Updates module, or share your thoughts onthe project's talk page.

Constructive activation experimentation

After showcasingearly design ideas at Wikimania, we conducteduser testing of design prototypes. We now aim to engage communities in further discussions and plan to run a targeted experiment, presenting a structured task within the reading view to logged-in new account holders with zero edits.

Community Configuration

This Community Configuration extension was developed to help communities customize wiki features to meet their unique needs. The Growth team is now helping other Wikimedia Foundation teams make their products configurable:

• The Moderation Tools team now provides Community Configuration forAutomoderator. (T365046)
• CertainBabel extension settings will be configurable soon. (T328171)

As part of theGrowth team annual plan, we will continue to investigate ways to increase constructive activation on mobile, while also working with Data Products to move forward A/B testing functionality via theMetrics Platform.

• Growth team members presentedCommunity Configuration: Shaping On-Wiki Functionality Together at Wikimania (slides). Thesession recording is available to watch on YouTube. This session provided an update on the Community Configuration project and introduced details about the upcoming features that communities will soon be able to configure. Representatives from the Moderator Tools, Editing, Web, and Campaigns teams shared their plans for utilizing Community Configuration in the future. Following these presentations, the WMF Growth team'sBenoît Evellin andMartin Urbanec answered audience questions.
• Habib Mhenni gave a presentation of how mentorship works at WikiIndaba 2024.The recording is available.

Growth team weekly updatesare 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 tosubscribe to Tech News.

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New pages patrol January 2025 Backlog drive

Growth Newsletter #33

A quarterly update from the Growth team on our work to improve the new editor experience.

This year, the Growth team is exploring ways to help more new account holders start editing—and do so constructively, meaning their edits are not reverted. Our latest experiments include:

• Gradual rollout of "Add a Link" at English Wikipedia – We are gradually introducing the "Add a Link" structured task to newcomers at English Wikipedia (T386029). This serves as a natural A/B test to measure its impact on activation, retention, and revert rates (T382603). Previous experiments on pilot wikis showed that "Add a Link" increases newcomer participation, particularly by helping them make constructive (non-reverted) edits.
• Testing in-article suggestions for first-time editors – Many new account holders want to contribute but don’t know where to start. To help, we’re piloting a feature that surfaces structured task suggestions directly in an article’s read view for brand-new editors (T385343). These suggestions will appear for logged-in users with no edits, providing a clear, simple way to begin contributing that is surfaced while they read.

Newcomers often struggle to find their place in Wikipedia’s collaborative environment. While experienced editors easily discover events like edit-a-thons and writing campaigns, newcomers often miss out.

• To bridge this gap, we launched theCommunity Updates module for the Newcomer Homepage. This module is disabled by default, allowing Community Admins to decide how (or if) to use it.
• If your community hosts events, consider setting up a Community Update to engage and welcome newcomers!Learn more on Diff. To configure, visit Special:CommunityConfiguration.

Community Configuration is now available across all wikis, including non-Wikipedia projects (T383910). Community Configuration allows admins to customize various features like Growth features and Automoderator for their communities, and more recently the Babel extension now allows admins to modify configuration:

• Babel customization – Admins can now configure Babel settings (T374348), including category naming, automatic category creation, and more. See an example onWikimedia Commons.
• Upcoming configurable features – Projects exploring community configuration options include:Incident Reporting System (T374113) andCite backlinks (T378807).

Mentors play a key role in guiding new editors. If you’re interested in mentoring, or turning mentorship on at your wiki, check out theMentorship FAQ

• Starting February 17, 100% of new accounts at English Wikipedia will be assigned a mentor (T384505).
• At Spanish Wikipedia, on 50% of newcomers get a mentor. Experienced contributors are encouraged tojoin mentorship so that Spanish Wikipedia can provide a mentor to all new users.

In the coming months, we will continue balancing maintenance work—such as deprecating EditGrowth Config (T367574) and migrating Statslib (T359352) — with user-facing improvements that support new editors and foster the next generation of contributors.

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New pages patrol May 2025 Backlog drive

Growth News #34

A quarterly update from the Growth team on our work to improve the new editor experience.

In February,Mentorship was successfully rolled out to 100% of newcomers on English Wikipedia. Following this milestone, we collaborated with Spanish Wikipedia to expand Mentorship coverage to 70% of new accounts, with plans to reach 85% soon unless concerns are raised by mentors. (T394867)

Our efforts to improve and scale the“Add a Link” structured task continued across multiple fronts:

• Community Feedback & Model Improvements: We’ve responded to community concerns with targeted changes:
  • Restricting access to newer accounts (T393688)
  • Some links types were removed to align with recommendations written in the English Wikipedia Manual of Style (T390683)
  • Allowing communities to limit “Add a Link” to newcomers (T393771)
  • The model used to suggest the links was improved to ease its training (T388258)
• English Wikipedia rollout and A/B test: We increased the rollout to 20% of newcomers, with analysis underway. Preliminary data suggests this feature makes new account holders more likely to complete an unreverted edit. (T386029,T382603)
• Surfacing Structured Tasks: An experiment where we show “add a link” suggestions to newly registered users while they are reading an article is running on pilot wikis (French, Persian, Indonesian, Portuguese, Egyptian Arabic). Initial results are under analysis. (T386029)

• “Get Started” notification: Engineering is in progress for a new notification (Echo/email) to encourage editing among newcomers with zero edits. Early research shows this type of nudge is effective. (T392256)
• Confirmation email: We are exploring ways to simplify and improve the initial account confirmation email newly registered users receive. (T215665)

Communities can now manage which namespaces are eligible for Event Registration viaCommunity Configuration. (T385341)

The Wikimedia Foundation’s 2025–2026 Annual Plan is taking shape. The Growth and Editing teams will focus on theContributor Experiences (WE1) objective, with a focus on increasingconstructive edits by editors with fewer than 100 cumulative contributions.

We value your insights and ideas! If you would like to participate in a discussion, share feedback, or pilot new features, please reach out on the relevant Phabricator tasks orat our talk page, in any language.

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New pages patrol September 2025 Backlog drive

Growth News #35

A quarterly update from the Growth team on our work to improve the new editor experience.

Wereleased the"Add a Link" Structured Task to 100% of accounts at English Wikipedia on Tuesday, September 2nd (before then it was available to 20% of accounts).

After examining if the Growth features and Mentorship could be adapted to Wikidata, we activated the Growth features onBeta Wikidata to allow for testing and discussion (T400937).Although some features, like Suggested Edits, are Wikipedia-specific, the Growth team designed most features to be more wiki-agnostic.

The Growth team is making progress onthe technical architecture, onboarding design, and early user testing.We are targeting an A/B test before the end of this year, with constructive edits by newcomers as the primary success metric.

The machine learning team has been working on a new model that can suggest links to more languages, including Urdu, Chinese, and Japanese Wikipedias.We are starting to release the “Add a Link” feature to Wikipedias that weren’t supported by the previous model.

Add a link, which can beconfigured by the community locally, increases the chance that a new contributor will make their first edit and then continue to participate in Wikipedia.

The Growth team is involved in several research initiatives to help guide our future work:

Progression System – We havepublished initial findings from interviews with 10 English and French Wikipedia newcomers.The research examined motivations, challenges, and feedback on a prototype system intended to help editors build confidence, develop skills, and contribute more constructively over time.

Mobile Web Editing Research – This project combines quantitative and qualitative data, community feedback, and user journey analysis to identify possible ways to enhance the mobile editing experience.

Newcomers Survey – This project surveys successful newcomers on English Wikipedia to understand their early editing experiences, tool use, and community interactions.

The Growth team participated in several community events to listen, share, and collaborate on improving newcomer experiences across Wikimedia projects.

Wikimania -Organizers as key partners to support newcomers' growth in our movement

This session invited organizers to share how they introduce newcomers to Growth features and the challenges they encounter. The discussion focused on common newcomer questions and opportunities to strengthen collaboration in supporting new editors.

Wikimania -Lightning Talk: Structured Tasks

This talk demonstrated how Structured Tasks help newcomers take their first successful steps on Wikipedia. It shared impact data, community configurations, and a demo of “Add a Link,” illustrating how these tasks make editing more accessible and sustainable, particularly for mobile contributors.

Wikimania -Building a Sustainable Future for Wikimedia Contributors

With active editor numbers declining, theContributors Strategy aims to create a clearer, more engaging path for participation. This session, led by the WMF Contributors group with involvement from the Editing, Growth, Moderator Tools, and Connection (formerly Campaigns) teams, highlighted efforts to streamline contributor experiences, offer structured and mobile-friendly workflows, and foster meaningful engagement. Participants learned about ongoing initiatives and shared feedback to help shape a more inclusive and sustainable future for Wikimedia contributors.

CEE Meeting -Retaining beginners and improving content moderation: an inclusive and sustainable future for Wikipedia contributors

Many communities face a decline in volunteer engagement. Newcomers often leave soon after joining, while experienced editors struggle to manage increasingly complex workflows and overwhelming backlogs. We presented theContributors Strategy and the different features and workflows that can help communities to address these challenges. We listened to the specific needs of the CEE communities to help guide the Contributors teams' work.

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