AHollender (WMF)

A barnstar for you!

	The Teamwork Barnstar
	Thank you very much for your contributions to the new mobile design project and for creating the beautiful and re-usable Template:Exploration of the Unknown. ~ ToBeFree (talk) 22:27, 3 December 2018 (UTC)

Night mode

Hello! Found your style on the Jack talk page. Cool idea, but it seems to me that the colors are too bright on a black background. I found a chrome extension that offers softer colors - , or you can think about Discord theme, it is really cool. But I think the theme still needs to rely on the colors from our StyleGuide. Iniquity (talk) 18:00, 13 July 2019 (UTC)

You are seen.

	The Working Wikipedian's Barnstar
	Thank you, AHollender. Not only in appreciation for great work on the years-long Vector 2022, but for suffering slings, arrows, incivility, and personal attacks because of it. — Fourthords | =Λ= | 17:21, 19 January 2023 (UTC)

A barnstar for you!

	The Barnstar of Diplomacy
	Thanks for your constructive and way more informative replies! Aaron Liu (talk) 17:59, 19 January 2023 (UTC)

Talkpage template to display yellow bar for you

Hello, AHollender (WMF). You have new messages at Wikipedia talk:Vector 2022.
Message added 01:39, 20 January 2023 (UTC). You can remove this notice at any time by removing the {{Talkback}} or {{Tb}} template.

CMD (talk) 01:39, 20 January 2023 (UTC)

Growth team newsletter #24

Welcome to the twenty-fourth newsletter from the Growth team!

Newcomer experience projects

The Growth team partnered with other WMF teams to conduct 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 - Host GLAM events that focus on using the "Add an image" tool.
• Welcome emails - Experiment sending welcome emails to newly created accounts.

Newcomer tasks

• Several communities suggested improving "add a link", by suggesting 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.
• The deployment of the "add a link" to all Wikipedias is still in progress. Suggested links use a prediction model, which has to be trained. The deployments will resume after we finish training all models.

Mentorship

• When someone wants to signup as a mentor, they are now informed if they don't meet the defined criteria.
• 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.
• Have you considered to help new editors on your wiki, by signing up to be a Mentor?
  • Please visit Special: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 provide advice and assist as needed. Please ping Trizek (WMF) for assistance.

Other news

• In Special:SpecialPages, Growth experiments now have their own section.
• This newsletter will have a new publication period, 6 times a year: January, March, May, July, September, November.

Translations

• 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 name to 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 by the Growth team and posted by bot • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.• Help with translations

14:44, 31 January 2023 (UTC)

Update on the user survey

On the 14th of February, OVasileva said the WMF were looking into publishing the results of user survey in response to our request and would update us when you know more. Do you have an update for us? BilledMammal (talk) 15:47, 3 March 2023 (UTC)

Growth team newsletter #25

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

Celebrations

Leveling up release

• We released Leveling up features to our pilot wikis on March 22 for an initial A/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 closely monitoring the short term impact of this feature as well as the 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.

Recent changes

• 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.
  • We continue the deployment of "add a link" to more wikis. These changes are regularly announced in Tech News. To know if newcomers at your wiki have access to this feature, please visit your Homepage.
• The Impact module was deployed on our pilot wikis, where we conducted an A/B test. We published initial findings, and a data scientist is now completing experiment analysis.
• 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 both test.wikipedia.org and test2.wikipedia.org. You can test our features there.

Upcoming work

• Add an image – We plan to offer section-level image suggestions as a structured task for newcomers.
  • We are starting design work.
  • Growth team Ambassadors helped with an initial evaluation of these section-level image suggestions.
  • We will start a community consultation in which we share initial ideas and designs soon.
• 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.

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13:10, 1 April 2023 (UTC)

Growth team newsletter #26

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

One million Suggested Edits

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

• The Suggested 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, like Add a link and Add 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

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

• The new Impact module was released to Growth pilot wikis in December 2022, and we are now scaling the feature to another ten wikis.
• The Leveling up features are deployed at our pilot wikis.
• The Personalized 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.

Add an image

• We are creating a new section-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.

Other updates

• We are progressively releasing Add a link to more wikis.
• After adding Thanks to Recent Changes, Watchlist and Special:Contributions, we investigated Thanks 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 the 2023 Community Wish to add Notifications for user page edits.
• We have been attending several community events, that we documented in our Growth’s Community events report.

What's next for Growth?

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

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15:14, 29 May 2023 (UTC)

Growth team newsletter #27

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

Annual plan for Growth

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

Our first project of the year will be Community 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, or Growth's annual plan talk page.

Suggested edits

The new "Add an image" section-level task

We released a new Section-level “add an image” structured task to Growth pilot wikis (Arabic, Bengali, Czech, and Spanish). This task was part of the Structured 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 new Language-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. The Research team will evaluate the impact in a few months.

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.

Mentorship

The Growth team provides dedicated features to establish a mentorship 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.

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

Positive reinforcement

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

In the meantime, initial leading 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.

Growth contributes to IP Editing migration

The Growth team is currently focusing on IP 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.

Community Configuration 2.0

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

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

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

12:42, 1 August 2023 (UTC)

Growth team newsletter #28

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

Community Configuration, concept A: Accordion style

Community Configuration, concept B: Dashboard style

Community configuration 2.0

• 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 in this 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.

IP Masking

• The Growth team has been working on several updates to ensure Growth maintained features will be compatible with future IP 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 with IP Masking. (T346108)

Mentorship

• We assembled some resources for mentors at Mediawiki 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 wikis to help newcomers at their own community.

Scaling Growth features

• 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.

Other news

• 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 a report 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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Trizek_(WMF) Talk 23:16, 16 October 2023 (UTC)

Growth team newsletter #29

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

Community Conversations

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

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

Impact Module

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

Add a Link

We released “add a link” to 35 more Wikipedias.

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.

Community Configuration

• We shared Community Configuration 2.0 plans with technical stakeholders. 🖂
• Initial Community Configuration design ideas have been shared and discussed with community members.
• A basic Community Configuration 2.0 demo is released on ToolForge.
• Developers can find some initial proof of concept code shared on gitlab.

Mentorship

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

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

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.

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

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18:04, 1 December 2023 (UTC)

Growth News, April 2024

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

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

Community Configuration

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

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

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

Experiment Results

Add a Image experiment analysis results

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

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

Personalized praise experiment results

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

English donors encouraged to try editing

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

Future work

Annual Plan

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

Newcomer Homepage Community Updates module

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

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18:55, 23 April 2024 (UTC)

Growth News, July 2024

Community Configuration

The Growth team released Community Configuration at all Wikipedias. You can access it at Special:CommunityConfiguration.

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

You can help with translations. The interface translation is done at Translatewiki.net. You can also help translate the documentation.

If you attend Wikimania 2024, please join us for the session about Community configuration's future!

Current work

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 at our pilot wikis using the new Metrics Platform. We still welcome community feedback on initial designs and plans, in any language at our project talk page.

Future work

Increase constructive activation on mobile

As part of the Growth 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 and Structured Tasks). The Growth team will primarily focus on Structured Tasks, while working closely with the Editing team to ensure our work integrates well with Edit Check.

Stay informed

Growth team weekly updates are available on wiki (in English) if you want to know more about our day-to-day work. If you want to receive more general updates about technical activity happening across the Wikimedia movement (including Growth work), we encourage you to subscribe to Tech News.

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15:08, 30 July 2024 (UTC)

Growth News, October 2024

Current work

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 on our pilot wikis. This module will only display on the Newcomer Homepage if communities decide to utilize it, so learn how to configure the Community Updates module, or share your thoughts on the project's talk page.

One design concept aimed to increase constructive activation

Constructive activation experimentation

After showcasing early design ideas at Wikimania, we conducted user 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 for Automoderator. (T365046)
• Certain Babel extension settings will be configurable soon. (T328171)

Future work

As part of the Growth 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 the Metrics Platform.

Community events

• Growth team members presented Community Configuration: Shaping On-Wiki Functionality Together at Wikimania (slides). The session 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's Benoît Evellin and Martin Urbanec answered audience questions.
• Habib Mhenni gave a presentation of how mentorship works at WikiIndaba 2024. The recording is available.

Stay informed

Growth team weekly updates are available on wiki (in English) if you want to know more about our day-to-day work. If you want to receive more general updates about technical activity happening across the Wikimedia movement (including Growth work), we encourage you to subscribe to Tech News.

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

Trizek_(WMF), 15:43, 22 October 2024 (UTC)

Growth Newsletter #33

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

Constructive Activation Experiments

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.

Community Updates

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 the Community 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

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 on Wikimedia Commons.
• Upcoming configurable features – Projects exploring community configuration options include: Incident Reporting System (T374113) and Cite backlinks (T378807).

Mentorship

Mentors play a key role in guiding new editors. If you’re interested in mentoring, or turning mentorship on at your wiki, check out the Mentorship 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 to join mentorship so that Spanish Wikipedia can provide a mentor to all new users.

Looking Ahead

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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18:59, 4 March 2025 (UTC)

Growth News #34

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

Mentoring new editors

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)

“Add a Link” Task – Iteration and Experimentation

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)

Newcomer Engagement Features

• “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)

Community Configuration Enhancements

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

Annual Planning

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

Get Involved

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 or at our talk page, in any language.

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18:51, 17 June 2025 (UTC)

Growth News #35

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

New releases

English Wikipedia gets "Add a Link" Structured Task

We released 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).

Growth features for Wikidata

After examining if the Growth features and Mentorship could be adapted to Wikidata, we activated the Growth features on Beta 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.

Work in progress

Revise Tone Structured Task

The Growth team is making progress on the 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.

Add a link to more wikis

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 be configured by the community locally, increases the chance that a new contributor will make their first edit and then continue to participate in Wikipedia.

Research

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

Progression System – We have published 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.

Community events

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, the Contributors 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 the Contributors 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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10:23, 22 October 2025 (UTC)