Wikipedia talk:Growth Team features/VPR proposal draft Feb2022
Should the Growth features be given to 100% of new accounts, making them the default onboarding experience for English Wikipedia newcomers?
Introduction edit
Hi everyone – I'm Marshall Miller, the product manager for the Growth team at WMF. I last posted here in September 2021 with an RfC about giving the Growth features to 25% of new accounts, which was an increase from trialling the features with 2% of new accounts in June 2021. That RfC passed, and the resulting data indicated that the features continue to help newcomers make valuable edits with low revert rates, as well as help them connect with experienced users to get questions answered. After discussing this trial period, community members who have been following closely have agreed that the next step would be this RfC to give the Growth features to all newcomers, making it the default onboarding experience on English Wikipedia. Thank you to the many community members who have participated in discussions about the features and helped put together this proposal!
Specifically, the proposal is to give the Growth features to 100% of new accounts going forward, with a smaller portion of them receiving the mentorship feature.
The reason that the mentorship portion of the features goes to a smaller portion is because of mentorship capacity. About 60 mentors are signed up now. Going forward, as we improve the mentorship tools and more mentors sign up, we'll continue to work with community members on whether to increase or decrease how many new accounts receive mentorship.
I tried to keep this RfC brief -- please see the sections below for additional details!
Background edit
Over the past four years, the Growth team has been developing a set of features meant to improve the experience for new editors. The goal of our work is to help newcomers make successful first edits, instead of them leaving from frustration or confusion. The Growth features are now on all Wikipedias, without substantial concerns from communities, and have been shown in multiple experiments to increase the engagement of newcomers.
The Growth features include the following:
- Newcomer homepage: a special page with useful actions that newcomers are encouraged to visit immediately after account creation, which they can access by clicking their username at the top of the browser window.
- Suggested edits: a feed of articles that have maintenance templates such as {{Advert}} and {{Underlinked}}. Newcomers can choose topics of interest to filter the feed, like "Fashion", "History", or "Physics".
Help panel on English Wikipedia - Mentorship: newcomers are assigned a mentor from a list of experienced volunteers. A pop-up form helps them submit a question to their mentor's talk page using a simple interface. Whereas Adopt-a-user is meant to be an enduring connection for a newcomer, "mentorship" in the Growth features is meant for quick questions.
- Help panel: when the newcomer is editing an article, the help panel is like a collapsible mini-homepage, providing relevant help links and the ability to ask mentor questions.
Results edit
Since September 2021, 25% of new accounts on English Wikipedia have received the Growth features by default, with 5% of them receiving the "mentorship" portion of the feature (because we did not want to overwhelm the limited numbers of mentors who signed up on this page.) In looking at the data from these past months, we see similar patterns as with the original 2% test (see a data analysis focused on January 2022 here):
- Over 15,000 suggested edits have been completed by about 3,500 newcomers, with a revert rate of 13%. That's substantially lower than the 28% revert rate of newcomer edits in general. You can see these diffs by filtering to the "newcomer task" edit tag in Recent Changes.
- About 1,300 mentor questions have been asked by about 1,000 newcomers. While many of these questions are insubstantial, mentors report receiving a good amount of good faith and valuable questions that they can answer. You can see these diffs by filtering to the "mentorship module question" and "mentorship panel question" edit tags in Recent Changes.
Broader implications edit
If the Growth features become the default onboarding experience for all new accounts, it might be important for the community to think about updating the various other welcome templates, documentation, tutorials, and help content to incorporate the Growth features. For instance, a tutorial that currently says, "Find some simple edits to get started!" might be updated to, "To get started, visit your homepage by clicking on your username, where you will find some simple edits to do." I don't think that updates like these should block deployment, but could be something to discuss and adapt in an ongoing way.
There are many more details and background to this work, which can be discovered in the project page and talk page. Thank you all for weighing in. I'm looking forward to hearing everyone's opinions and answering any questions.