This is an archive of past discussions. Do not edit the contents of this page. If you wish to start a new discussion or revive an old one, please do so on the current talk page. |
Archive 1 | ← | Archive 4 | Archive 5 | Archive 6 | Archive 7 |
17:00 UTC works for me, and I like the idea of rotating the meeting schedule. Thursdays are best for me if possible. I'm happy to give you all the whole hour to share ideas with the Growth team if you prefer, but if you are interested, I think it would be interesting to bring someone from the Editing Team in to demo their current Edit Check plans. T265163. One idea the Editing team is exploring is around surfacing guidance within Visual Editor when an editor is adding text that likely needs a citation. I know the Editing team is eager to collect more community feedback about this project, and I also think a citation-related "Edit Check" could somehow integrate into new article creation eventually (which is fairly similar to some of the ideas we've been discussing). Anyway, let me know if you are interested in spending part of the meeting discussing Edit Check, and I'll arrange that. Does anyone have thoughts on when they would like to meet next? 17:00 UTC / 9AM Pacific on February 23? March 9? KStoller-WMF ( talk) 22:42, 27 January 2023 (UTC)
What should we attempt to achieve this month? What shovel-ready projects do we need to move forward now? What decision points are we approaching? Would anyone like to hear about my experiences with new page creator Elttaruuu ( talk · contribs · logs) (three weeks and almost 1000 edits in)? BusterD ( talk) 17:11, 8 February 2023 (UTC)
The Vision for a better Article Wizard is well-considered, and I can't see any specific point with which I disagree. (Kindly remember my preference for "article sherpa" as a non-magical assistant. There's nothing magical about a new contributor's tasks and I want to give no undue illusions to the eager newcomer.) It might be made out to be good fun. It occurred to me that the framework of the Wizard is not unlike a game of combat, the player required to beat each opponent in order to advance to the next stage. If we can channel a user's natural skepticism and agency in a mock contest (Did anyone besides myself just adore the tutorials in Myth: The Fallen Lords? Crickets? Okay. I'm a mature nerd.) we might make creating a new page channeling intrinsic willingness to compete into a new game you play on your phone. "Can you pass the dragon of notability? Dare you risk the final battle: deletion procedure?" BusterD ( talk) 20:31, 9 February 2023 (UTC)
(Taking a liberty to characterize this. I don't mean to derail the above discussion.) The recent failed RfA of our friend User:MB has cast a pale light on the rigor of new page patrolling. Even though MB had seemingly done nothing against policy, the many thousands of perfectly reasonable review and review-necessitated edits they had performed over the years were seen to be in friction with a vocal subset of editors who wanted even further extension of good faith and effort on the part of new page reviewers in each discrete process. If I were an admin candidate, or a newer contributor who had the calling, I'd avoid NPP like the plague after that unfortunate admin run. While it's not directly relevant to today's effort, I think it essential we note that this friction has recently (and hopefully momentarily) cost us the efforts of two vital individual editors, perhaps more. We should not shy away from this fact. For our current mission's own protection, I think it vital we keep our process fully transparent, and be seen as keeping our process fully transparent. Any VP RFC would need to be crafted artfully and narrowly, perhaps introduced in stages over time in order to mine consensus. BusterD ( talk) 20:13, 9 February 2023 (UTC)
As part of the Growth team's Positive Reinforcement project, we plan to add a new module to the MentorDashboard.
This module will surface mentees that match certain criteria. For instance, in the screenshot, you will notice a mentee who made 20 edits total and has no reverts over the last 48 hours. Some of these parameters can be changed in the module’s settings. We also display some other user metrics like thanks received and "Longest streak" of days edited in a row.
Then, Mentors are invited to “Send appreciation” to this new editor (possibly after reviewing their edits or talk page).
These messages of appreciation may be prefilled with a default message (which can be customized in settings). You can edit this message before posting, as we will redirect you to the newcomer’s talk page to post the message.
Multiple studies have found that newcomers’ editing activity is increased when they receive thanks and other positive messages about their work from an experienced editor or mentor [ 1]. We designed this module with the hope that it will improve new editor retention with a minimal time-investment from Mentors.
Our questions to you about this design are:
Settings:
We want this new module to work for everyone, so we plan to make the settings configurable by Mentors.
First, you can define the number of edits within a given time frame a newcomer needs to make to be suggested as praiseworthy.
Then you can define the default message that will be used when you send praise to the newcomer. Both the subject and the content of the message can be pre-defined.
Finally, you can decide to get a notification when a mentee matches your selection settings.
Our questions to you:
Thanks in advance to anyone willing to provide feedback! :)
KStoller-WMF (
talk)
23:29, 2 March 2023 (UTC)
Would this new module encourage you to send appreciation to your mentees?Probably yes, if I found that it was consistently surfacing mentees who deserved to be praised.
If you had to provide appreciation to this mentee, do you have all the information you need to decide to praise this user?Not really. Having lots of recent edits just means they're active. That could be good...or it could mean they're prioritizing quantity over quality, or jumping in over their head, or a returning sock. Thanks received is a little more useful, but I'd want to see what they're being thanked for. Right now, that's extremely difficult, because of T51087 (I notice you recently subscribed to it!). Lastly, a streak is again just an indication of activity, and in that case not having too many real-life obligations haha.Before praising anyone, I'd want to check out both their edit history, to see for myself what their activity is, and their user talk page, to check what others have said to them. Keep in mind that, when I choose to praise someone, I'm staking a small bit of my reputation on their work. I'm signaling to other experienced editors who might check their user talk that I approve of what they're doing, and if it turns out that they're causing tons of disruption, that'll be a mild embarrassment.
Do you think some Mentors will hesitate to “Send appreciation” because it’s not clear that there is an additional step (visit the talk page and confirm message) after clicking that button?Not really. I'd expect there to be some sort of confirmation step after clicking that button. A tool that makes an edit on your behalf without confirming first would be a huge change.
Do you have any comments or suggestions regarding this feature?I think the key factor in whether this succeeds or not is whether or not it's good at surfacing newcomers who deserve praise. I do like the concept, in that, because newcomers aren't going to know the criteria causing them to be surfaced for potential praise, it avoids some of the gamification issues we've been concerned about elsewhere.
Is the edit time frame setting enough to cover your needs to find mentees to praise?Not sure; I'd have to try it out.
Should we provide a pre-defined message you can edit later?Good question. Templated messages, especially if poorly crafted, often feel a lot less personal. Then again, it might help other experienced editors to be able to more readily see that a piece of feedback left on a newcomer's talk page came from the feature.
Would you use notifications to be informed of a new mentee to be praised?Personally, no. I see notifications as being alerts for things that actively need my attention, not for optional invitations to tasks I might want to do. This is in the latter bucket.
Is there a setting you’d like to see in the module’s settings?I can't immediately think of anything.
I was thinking about a short description task. Some advantages and disadvantages:
Pro
Con
What do you guys think? Sungodtemple ( talk • contribs) 01:02, 6 March 2023 (UTC)
Welcome to the twenty-fifth newsletter from the Growth team! Help with translations
Leveling up release
5,000+ images added via the newcomer task in February
Growth team's newsletter prepared by the Growth team and posted by bot • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.
13:10, 1 April 2023 (UTC)
Hi all, the details of the upcoming Growth team meeting got a little buried, so I wanted to remind you all that it's happening tomorrow (Thursday, March 9th). Anyone interested in newcomers, Growth features, or the Editing team's Edit check project is welcome to come! I hope to see some new faces, along with others who have attended previous meetings! @ Sage (Wiki Ed), @ TheDJ, @ Nick Moyes, @ MB, @ Clovermoss, @ Sdkb, @ SmokeyJoe, @ Atsme, @ theleekycauldron @ Enterprisey @ BusterD
KStoller-WMF ( talk) 01:14, 9 March 2023 (UTC)
Thank you, Everyone, for joining our call on March 9th, 2023. Here is the link to the recording, and below is a brief summary:
-- MShilova (WMF) ( talk) 21:44, 9 March 2023 (UTC)
@ Sage (Wiki Ed), @ TheDJ, @ Nick Moyes, @ MB, @ Clovermoss, @ Sdkb, @ SmokeyJoe, @ Atsme, @ theleekycauldron @ Enterprisey @ BusterD @ Novem Linguae
Since our last meeting, the Wikimedia Foundation's draft Annual Plan has been published and the Product and Technology's draft OKRs have been published. Both are still subject to change, as they are drafts and will be shaped further by the community discussions happening on those talk pages.
The Growth team and the Moderator Tools team hope to meet with community members to talk through some ideas related to Contributor experience and improving moderation workflows. To achieve this, we would like to gather insights and opinions from moderators regarding the challenges they face. We're particularly interested in understanding more about how you determine where your attention is needed, and how you prioritize different tasks. When we say 'moderators' we're referring to editors with advanced rights, such as patrollers, administrators, and functionaries.
If you are interested, you can see meeting details and sign up here.
I hope to see some of you there! Thanks, - KStoller-WMF ( talk) 20:07, 27 April 2023 (UTC)
Welcome to the twenty-sixth newsletter from the Growth team! Help with translations
We passed the 1 million Suggested edits milestone in late April!
Positive reinforcement aims to encourage newcomers who have visited our homepage and tried Growth features to keep editing.
Growth team's newsletter prepared by the Growth team and posted by bot • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.
15:14, 29 May 2023 (UTC)
Hasn't edited since Nov 2022. Sungodtemple ( talk • contribs) 21:53, 23 May 2023 (UTC)
Hello. Is there any option to make the big white button with a question mark of the Help Panel movable or at least move it higher? It partly overlaps with other features of the site, such as {{ Skip to top and bottom}}. This may be annoying for new editors. TadejM my talk 09:53, 23 May 2023 (UTC)
Hello, Trizek. Thank you for the reply. I have added an image to this section to make the issue clear. I have also posted the same issue on the template talk page [12] but have got no reply thus far. I don't mind who fixes the issue but in my opinion, it is pertinent (the template has 1364 transclusions) and should be fixed. The layout should be clean on as many pages as possible. The issue certainly hinders usability for new users and those experienced users that have the button turned on. I'm afraid that by pointing out who has to do what we won't solve anything. There may be other such templates in this or other projects, so the best way in my opinion to go about would be to make the Help Edit button movable or to enable it to "sense" the overlap and correct its position (if this is possible at all). -- TadejM my talk 21:50, 24 May 2023 (UTC)
I suppose it would be better to resolve the issue at the root cause, which is the placement and functionality of this button, rather than sporadically fix templates. The options would be to move the button a bit higher, make it floatable, make it adjust its position automatically, or add the option to temporarily close the button. -- TadejM my talk 23:29, 24 May 2023 (UTC)
It is actually just the opposite: the help button is considered more root than the skip button as it influences the majority of pages here and in other projects.
If you can solve the issue with {{ Skip to top and bottom}}, there are other such templates in other projects (and possibly also overlapping templates that have not even been reported) that would not get improved. By solving the issue at the level of the template, only the pages transcluding that template get improved, whereas by solving the issue at the level of the button, all pages including the button and having an overlap get immediately improved.
In addition, the template {{ Skip to top and bottom}} has existed in such a form since 2016 and has been overlapped only recently. -- TadejM my talk 00:36, 25 May 2023 (UTC)
This is much appreciated. Thank you a lot. It's a good step to define the usage of individual areas to prevent clashes. I will report these issues if I encounter more of them. -- TadejM my talk 11:56, 25 May 2023 (UTC)
@ TadejM, Trizek, and Sdkb: I found those buttons from {{ skip to top and bottom}} very annoying, and solved the issue (just for me) using the CSS recommended on the template Talk page, which is completely effective, but leaves you without the skip nav. Otoh, you can solve it for everybody by using {{ skip to bottom}} and {{ skip to top}}—the latter designed just to avoid the problems talked about here. Mathglot ( talk) 18:14, 29 June 2023 (UTC)
Hello
Following the previous topic, just above, the Growth team is exploring a project idea that aims to improve the experience of new editors by providing them with better guidance and structure in the article creation process. The hope being that by providing new editors with more structure around article creation, it will lead to newcomers creating fewer low-quality articles that create work for patrollers who check recent edits and mentors who review newcomers’ drafts.
In 2022, about 28% of newly registered users who completed the Welcome Survey indicated that they opened an account specifically to create a new article ( all stats). These newcomers don't yet understand core Wikipedia principles and guidelines around notability, verifiability, conflict of interest, neutral point of view, etc. These newcomers need additional guidance or they end up frustrated and disappointed when their articles get deleted. Because they aren't receiving the proactive guidance they need, they end up creating additional work for content moderators (patrollers, admins, watchlisters…) who need to provide reactive guidance which is rarely well-received or well-understood.
While the specifics of the project, and the Growth team’s annual planning priorities, are still under consideration, we anticipate exploring ideas related to Article creation improvements for new editors. One possibility is a community configurable "Article wizard" or helper, which could also fulfill the 2023 Community Wishlist survey Reference requirement for new article creation proposal (ranked #26 out of 182 proposals).
We're committed to shaping the overall plan based on community feedback and needs, while adhering to the following requirements:
So, we would love to hear from you:
Or do you want the Growth team to consider a totally different idea? Keep in mind that the Moderator Tools team and two other teams are also working the shared “improve the experience of editors with extended rights” key result, so there will be other teams approaching this from a less new-editor centric perspective.
Thoughts? :) Trizek (WMF) ( talk) 18:25, 15 May 2023 (UTC)
the risk of the tool nudging editors who wouldn't make an article (or could be persuaded to delay) into trying article creation out early on, creating a new article is inherently an advanced task, since it requires mastering all the different elements that go into an article, whereas other tasks often require only mastering one. That'll stay the case even if the Article Wizard is optimized to perfection.
title
, author
, and date
left invitingly empty, nothing would have to record or attempt to verify the input: the important bit is having the newcomer think through why their source is good enough, not to restrict their contributions.After two of these "best source" interface screens, then I'd display an input field for what the editor wants to name their new article. If we can convey the idea that editors shouldn't even consider what their article is going to be titled without first finding sources for it, I think it would teach a lot without requiring much reading. And while we don't want to increase the barrier of entry, embracing this sort of "fail faster" approach should allow newcomers to work on crucial skills before spending time and effort writing a bunch of prose that gets frustratingly deleted due to unsuitability.Having said all that, I don't work NPP or AFC, so my opinion should be understood as that of a partially informed outsider.
Folly Mox (
talk)
18:22, 20 May 2023 (UTC)This discussion is currently taking place in three places simultaneously, with mostly non-overlapping participants. Since the present instance of the discussion is the one linked from the mediawiki page, I'm announcing my intent to copy-paste the other two instances here using the appropriate templates, to defragment the conversation. Folly Mox ( talk) 15:46, 20 May 2023 (UTC) Done 15:59, 20 May 2023 (UTC)
IMO the fix needs to come from En Wikipedia. Sincerely, North8000 ( talk) 18:32, 15 May 2023 (UTC)
Much can be accomplished by mere education about wikipeda and guidance. The underlying structural problem preventing moving forward on this is that functionally we only have two kinds of pages:
We need two new vetted categories:
The foundation needed here is #1. We really don't give newbies guidance because the only guidance that we give is "Here's thousands of good and bad, useful and non-useful essays.....go randomly wander amongst those and try to learn". So one document under #1 would be the highly vetted official landing and navigation page for newbies which would only navigate to a short list of other #1, #2 documents and policies and guidelines. For "making a new article" it would route to another official #1 page which starts with the "should an article exist?" question and points them to read WP:Not & WP:Notability. It instructs them that step 1 of building (or deciding not to build) a new article is to find 1 or 2 GNG references and start the article with those. If it has those, chances are that the article should exist, regardless of how badly done it is. Voila, we have solved a whole bunch of new article, NPP, AFD problems and eliminate tons of drama and wasted work.
The other easy big fix is to convert AFC into just handling "should this article exist?" questions instead of the very tough article perfection gauntlet that it currently is. Then (and not until then) we need to nudge all newer editors to go through AFC. North8000 ( talk) 16:16, 16 May 2023 (UTC)
Here's the AFC problem and I'll use and extreme case for clarity. Let's say that an AFC article has 1-2 references that look like GNG references and complies with wp:not, but needs a lot of work which means it has a lot of big problems. IMO that article should be passed out of AFC into article space for further development but in reality it won't because a typical reviewer will not want to put their stamp of approval on such an article. So it's overly difficult to get an article through AFC. The solution is to make it clear that the only thing AFC reviewers are responsible for is "should this article exist" type questions. And I was arguing for a new pattern and new guidance saying in essence "Step one of creating a new article is to find 1-2 GNG type references". North8000 ( talk) 17:02, 17 May 2023 (UTC)
Regarding "How a user would know if a reference proves notability?" My answer would be to just see if it has 1-2 GNG type sources that look likely for wp:notability. Say "it's OK to pass the edge cases". Edge cases can get handled later.North8000 ( talk) 17:07, 17 May 2023 (UTC)
1) I went ahead and informed Wikipedia talk:Article wizard.
2) May I also suggest in the future that the discussion be held on one page, and then additional pages be notified with the {{subst:Please see}}
template? It seems the discussion is being scattered across a couple different pages.
3) The current article wizard ends with the new article being placed into draftspace, with a "submit" template included at the top of the draft, which I think is good. That part of the workflow should be kept.
4) The top 2 things about writing an article that give a new editor a bad experience, in my opinion, are A) writing an article on a non-notable topic that then gets declined or deleted since it is non-notable, and B) writing an article that is of borderline notability that then sits in the draftspace queue for 3 months because it is not an easy accept and not an easy decline (easy accepts and easy declines are processed quickly). This is often combined with WP:REFBOMBing. The delay in accepting/declining comes from the fact that the reviewer needs to click open all these 10, 20, 30 sources and evaluate each for GNG, which is a bit laborious and requires skill.
Both of these problems would be solved by getting newer editors to include multiple top quality, WP:GNG passing sources in their submissions, preferably at the top of the list of citations, and not drowned out by excessive other citations. But GNG is hard to teach to new editors. In my opinion, GNG is written quite vaguely, and attempts to add more detail to the guideline are declined. In my opinion, simply reading notability guideline pages will not teach a newer editor enough about notability for them to be able to determine if a topic or their article is notable.
I think there may be opportunities to insert a step into the article wizard that explains enough of WP:GNG to help out draft writers. Something like "Not all topics qualify for a Wikipedia article. The articles most likely to qualify will have citations to multiple high quality sources such as newspapers and books going into multiple paragraphs of detail about the topic. Before you spend a lot of time writing an article, do you have at least X such sources? Yes/No"
In fact I may propose this be added to the current article wizard.
5) Changing gears, I am not sure what a major overhaul of the article wizard would look like. Do we have a list of things we don't like about the current article wizard? Things that need fixing? Things we'd do differently? I think drilling down into these kinds of details, and then using them to create a detailed proposal, will be important for moving forward with any kind of article wizard overhaul. Hope this helps. – Novem Linguae ( talk) 22:08, 18 May 2023 (UTC)
{{subst:Please see}}
: we observe that users are less likely to participate of we ask them to go to a different page than the one they read. :)Agree with these posts. I think that even just giving some guidance that finding GNG sources is step 1 of making an article / deciding whether or not to make it and explaining / checklist regarding what a GNG source is. We don't need perfection here or to be overly stringent to worry about edge cases. BTW my comments were focused on making AFC more focused on notability and to ease up in the other areas. The it becomes more viable to nudge newbies to go through AFC. North8000 ( talk) 11:54, 19 May 2023 (UTC)
Can we merge this discussion to WT:AFC#Article creation hypothesis to centralize it to one place? Having separate discussions on separate pages about the same thing seems like a bad idea. (I say to take it over there because that talk page is more active, but I don't really mind which one it ends up on; we could merge the discussion from there over here as well, I don't care.) Skarmory (talk • contribs) 12:26, 20 May 2023 (UTC)
I applaud everything about Trizek's efforts and handling. I also advocate centralizing discussion in one place and here is fine even if I think that the fix needs to come more from en wikipedia than WMF. Thank you Trizek and I invite you to also jump deeper in on en Wikipedia. :-) North8000 ( talk) 23:42, 24 May 2023 (UTC)
Thank you all for your feedback. Everything has been read and taken into account. We're working on synthesizing your ideas, and those of the other wikis where the question was asked. This will take some time. The results will be published in
our next newsletter.
Trizek (WMF) (
talk)
14:34, 5 June 2023 (UTC)
We recently published the early high-level community discussion summary:
An initial community conversation was started at ar, bn, cs, es, fr and en Wikipedia. We gathered high-level feedback, as we are still early in the strategize and discover phase of this project.
Overall, this project idea received considerable attention and feedback on larger wikis. It's clear that reviewing articles from newer editors is a task that is especially challenging for larger wikis, and there are many competing ideas for how to more effectively manage this. Although better guidance in the article creation process may help improve the quality of a new editor’s articles, it would be better to encourage users to improve existing articles first.
Some new editors are only interested in creating articles with a promotional purpose, which is very time consuming for established users. A new article creation system shouldn’t help them to achieve their promotional goals.
The quality of new articles is a real problem, not only because of promotional contents, but also because it is an overwhelming process. Newcomers often struggle with unclear guidance, missing sources, citing unreliable sources, or forget to include citations entirely. As a result, some well-intentioned new editors become discouraged. For moderators, it takes a lot of time to review edge-case notability pages, or to ask for better sources. Increasing the workload of reviewers is not a viable option.
Several possible solutions have been suggested:
All this process should be customizable by each community, to fulfill their needs.
Using drafts more is suggested by many users (on larger wikis). English Wikipedia has made article creation though draft mandatory for new editors On English Wikipedia, the ability to create articles directly in mainspace is restricted to autoconfirmed users, though non-confirmed users and non-registered users can submit a proposed article through the Articles for Creation process.
It's clear we won’t totally automate this process: humans (patrollers, new page reviews, mentors, etc.) play a critical role in engaging newcomers and providing feedback about new articles. Individuals have various perspectives as to how involved experienced editors should be in new article review; some ideas were mentioned around creating a more collaborative draft-writing process, or even a review of sources prior to the article draft review. But whatever feature we consider should ensure we aren't over-burdening experienced editors, and allow for communities to customize the feature to work for their unique needs. It is important to keep the wikis as a collaborative place, where humans interact with each other, and to avoid a bureaucratic effect that would repel newcomers from participating.
The suggestions and insights shared by the community have been invaluable in identifying the challenges surrounding article review and new editor engagement. The Growth team will carefully consider all the feedback and will incorporate it into a refined project proposal for further community review soon.
Thank you again for your participation, Trizek (WMF) ( talk) 13:11, 13 June 2023 (UTC)
This is an archive of past discussions. Do not edit the contents of this page. If you wish to start a new discussion or revive an old one, please do so on the current talk page. |
Archive 1 | ← | Archive 4 | Archive 5 | Archive 6 | Archive 7 |
17:00 UTC works for me, and I like the idea of rotating the meeting schedule. Thursdays are best for me if possible. I'm happy to give you all the whole hour to share ideas with the Growth team if you prefer, but if you are interested, I think it would be interesting to bring someone from the Editing Team in to demo their current Edit Check plans. T265163. One idea the Editing team is exploring is around surfacing guidance within Visual Editor when an editor is adding text that likely needs a citation. I know the Editing team is eager to collect more community feedback about this project, and I also think a citation-related "Edit Check" could somehow integrate into new article creation eventually (which is fairly similar to some of the ideas we've been discussing). Anyway, let me know if you are interested in spending part of the meeting discussing Edit Check, and I'll arrange that. Does anyone have thoughts on when they would like to meet next? 17:00 UTC / 9AM Pacific on February 23? March 9? KStoller-WMF ( talk) 22:42, 27 January 2023 (UTC)
What should we attempt to achieve this month? What shovel-ready projects do we need to move forward now? What decision points are we approaching? Would anyone like to hear about my experiences with new page creator Elttaruuu ( talk · contribs · logs) (three weeks and almost 1000 edits in)? BusterD ( talk) 17:11, 8 February 2023 (UTC)
The Vision for a better Article Wizard is well-considered, and I can't see any specific point with which I disagree. (Kindly remember my preference for "article sherpa" as a non-magical assistant. There's nothing magical about a new contributor's tasks and I want to give no undue illusions to the eager newcomer.) It might be made out to be good fun. It occurred to me that the framework of the Wizard is not unlike a game of combat, the player required to beat each opponent in order to advance to the next stage. If we can channel a user's natural skepticism and agency in a mock contest (Did anyone besides myself just adore the tutorials in Myth: The Fallen Lords? Crickets? Okay. I'm a mature nerd.) we might make creating a new page channeling intrinsic willingness to compete into a new game you play on your phone. "Can you pass the dragon of notability? Dare you risk the final battle: deletion procedure?" BusterD ( talk) 20:31, 9 February 2023 (UTC)
(Taking a liberty to characterize this. I don't mean to derail the above discussion.) The recent failed RfA of our friend User:MB has cast a pale light on the rigor of new page patrolling. Even though MB had seemingly done nothing against policy, the many thousands of perfectly reasonable review and review-necessitated edits they had performed over the years were seen to be in friction with a vocal subset of editors who wanted even further extension of good faith and effort on the part of new page reviewers in each discrete process. If I were an admin candidate, or a newer contributor who had the calling, I'd avoid NPP like the plague after that unfortunate admin run. While it's not directly relevant to today's effort, I think it essential we note that this friction has recently (and hopefully momentarily) cost us the efforts of two vital individual editors, perhaps more. We should not shy away from this fact. For our current mission's own protection, I think it vital we keep our process fully transparent, and be seen as keeping our process fully transparent. Any VP RFC would need to be crafted artfully and narrowly, perhaps introduced in stages over time in order to mine consensus. BusterD ( talk) 20:13, 9 February 2023 (UTC)
As part of the Growth team's Positive Reinforcement project, we plan to add a new module to the MentorDashboard.
This module will surface mentees that match certain criteria. For instance, in the screenshot, you will notice a mentee who made 20 edits total and has no reverts over the last 48 hours. Some of these parameters can be changed in the module’s settings. We also display some other user metrics like thanks received and "Longest streak" of days edited in a row.
Then, Mentors are invited to “Send appreciation” to this new editor (possibly after reviewing their edits or talk page).
These messages of appreciation may be prefilled with a default message (which can be customized in settings). You can edit this message before posting, as we will redirect you to the newcomer’s talk page to post the message.
Multiple studies have found that newcomers’ editing activity is increased when they receive thanks and other positive messages about their work from an experienced editor or mentor [ 1]. We designed this module with the hope that it will improve new editor retention with a minimal time-investment from Mentors.
Our questions to you about this design are:
Settings:
We want this new module to work for everyone, so we plan to make the settings configurable by Mentors.
First, you can define the number of edits within a given time frame a newcomer needs to make to be suggested as praiseworthy.
Then you can define the default message that will be used when you send praise to the newcomer. Both the subject and the content of the message can be pre-defined.
Finally, you can decide to get a notification when a mentee matches your selection settings.
Our questions to you:
Thanks in advance to anyone willing to provide feedback! :)
KStoller-WMF (
talk)
23:29, 2 March 2023 (UTC)
Would this new module encourage you to send appreciation to your mentees?Probably yes, if I found that it was consistently surfacing mentees who deserved to be praised.
If you had to provide appreciation to this mentee, do you have all the information you need to decide to praise this user?Not really. Having lots of recent edits just means they're active. That could be good...or it could mean they're prioritizing quantity over quality, or jumping in over their head, or a returning sock. Thanks received is a little more useful, but I'd want to see what they're being thanked for. Right now, that's extremely difficult, because of T51087 (I notice you recently subscribed to it!). Lastly, a streak is again just an indication of activity, and in that case not having too many real-life obligations haha.Before praising anyone, I'd want to check out both their edit history, to see for myself what their activity is, and their user talk page, to check what others have said to them. Keep in mind that, when I choose to praise someone, I'm staking a small bit of my reputation on their work. I'm signaling to other experienced editors who might check their user talk that I approve of what they're doing, and if it turns out that they're causing tons of disruption, that'll be a mild embarrassment.
Do you think some Mentors will hesitate to “Send appreciation” because it’s not clear that there is an additional step (visit the talk page and confirm message) after clicking that button?Not really. I'd expect there to be some sort of confirmation step after clicking that button. A tool that makes an edit on your behalf without confirming first would be a huge change.
Do you have any comments or suggestions regarding this feature?I think the key factor in whether this succeeds or not is whether or not it's good at surfacing newcomers who deserve praise. I do like the concept, in that, because newcomers aren't going to know the criteria causing them to be surfaced for potential praise, it avoids some of the gamification issues we've been concerned about elsewhere.
Is the edit time frame setting enough to cover your needs to find mentees to praise?Not sure; I'd have to try it out.
Should we provide a pre-defined message you can edit later?Good question. Templated messages, especially if poorly crafted, often feel a lot less personal. Then again, it might help other experienced editors to be able to more readily see that a piece of feedback left on a newcomer's talk page came from the feature.
Would you use notifications to be informed of a new mentee to be praised?Personally, no. I see notifications as being alerts for things that actively need my attention, not for optional invitations to tasks I might want to do. This is in the latter bucket.
Is there a setting you’d like to see in the module’s settings?I can't immediately think of anything.
I was thinking about a short description task. Some advantages and disadvantages:
Pro
Con
What do you guys think? Sungodtemple ( talk • contribs) 01:02, 6 March 2023 (UTC)
Welcome to the twenty-fifth newsletter from the Growth team! Help with translations
Leveling up release
5,000+ images added via the newcomer task in February
Growth team's newsletter prepared by the Growth team and posted by bot • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.
13:10, 1 April 2023 (UTC)
Hi all, the details of the upcoming Growth team meeting got a little buried, so I wanted to remind you all that it's happening tomorrow (Thursday, March 9th). Anyone interested in newcomers, Growth features, or the Editing team's Edit check project is welcome to come! I hope to see some new faces, along with others who have attended previous meetings! @ Sage (Wiki Ed), @ TheDJ, @ Nick Moyes, @ MB, @ Clovermoss, @ Sdkb, @ SmokeyJoe, @ Atsme, @ theleekycauldron @ Enterprisey @ BusterD
KStoller-WMF ( talk) 01:14, 9 March 2023 (UTC)
Thank you, Everyone, for joining our call on March 9th, 2023. Here is the link to the recording, and below is a brief summary:
-- MShilova (WMF) ( talk) 21:44, 9 March 2023 (UTC)
@ Sage (Wiki Ed), @ TheDJ, @ Nick Moyes, @ MB, @ Clovermoss, @ Sdkb, @ SmokeyJoe, @ Atsme, @ theleekycauldron @ Enterprisey @ BusterD @ Novem Linguae
Since our last meeting, the Wikimedia Foundation's draft Annual Plan has been published and the Product and Technology's draft OKRs have been published. Both are still subject to change, as they are drafts and will be shaped further by the community discussions happening on those talk pages.
The Growth team and the Moderator Tools team hope to meet with community members to talk through some ideas related to Contributor experience and improving moderation workflows. To achieve this, we would like to gather insights and opinions from moderators regarding the challenges they face. We're particularly interested in understanding more about how you determine where your attention is needed, and how you prioritize different tasks. When we say 'moderators' we're referring to editors with advanced rights, such as patrollers, administrators, and functionaries.
If you are interested, you can see meeting details and sign up here.
I hope to see some of you there! Thanks, - KStoller-WMF ( talk) 20:07, 27 April 2023 (UTC)
Welcome to the twenty-sixth newsletter from the Growth team! Help with translations
We passed the 1 million Suggested edits milestone in late April!
Positive reinforcement aims to encourage newcomers who have visited our homepage and tried Growth features to keep editing.
Growth team's newsletter prepared by the Growth team and posted by bot • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.
15:14, 29 May 2023 (UTC)
Hasn't edited since Nov 2022. Sungodtemple ( talk • contribs) 21:53, 23 May 2023 (UTC)
Hello. Is there any option to make the big white button with a question mark of the Help Panel movable or at least move it higher? It partly overlaps with other features of the site, such as {{ Skip to top and bottom}}. This may be annoying for new editors. TadejM my talk 09:53, 23 May 2023 (UTC)
Hello, Trizek. Thank you for the reply. I have added an image to this section to make the issue clear. I have also posted the same issue on the template talk page [12] but have got no reply thus far. I don't mind who fixes the issue but in my opinion, it is pertinent (the template has 1364 transclusions) and should be fixed. The layout should be clean on as many pages as possible. The issue certainly hinders usability for new users and those experienced users that have the button turned on. I'm afraid that by pointing out who has to do what we won't solve anything. There may be other such templates in this or other projects, so the best way in my opinion to go about would be to make the Help Edit button movable or to enable it to "sense" the overlap and correct its position (if this is possible at all). -- TadejM my talk 21:50, 24 May 2023 (UTC)
I suppose it would be better to resolve the issue at the root cause, which is the placement and functionality of this button, rather than sporadically fix templates. The options would be to move the button a bit higher, make it floatable, make it adjust its position automatically, or add the option to temporarily close the button. -- TadejM my talk 23:29, 24 May 2023 (UTC)
It is actually just the opposite: the help button is considered more root than the skip button as it influences the majority of pages here and in other projects.
If you can solve the issue with {{ Skip to top and bottom}}, there are other such templates in other projects (and possibly also overlapping templates that have not even been reported) that would not get improved. By solving the issue at the level of the template, only the pages transcluding that template get improved, whereas by solving the issue at the level of the button, all pages including the button and having an overlap get immediately improved.
In addition, the template {{ Skip to top and bottom}} has existed in such a form since 2016 and has been overlapped only recently. -- TadejM my talk 00:36, 25 May 2023 (UTC)
This is much appreciated. Thank you a lot. It's a good step to define the usage of individual areas to prevent clashes. I will report these issues if I encounter more of them. -- TadejM my talk 11:56, 25 May 2023 (UTC)
@ TadejM, Trizek, and Sdkb: I found those buttons from {{ skip to top and bottom}} very annoying, and solved the issue (just for me) using the CSS recommended on the template Talk page, which is completely effective, but leaves you without the skip nav. Otoh, you can solve it for everybody by using {{ skip to bottom}} and {{ skip to top}}—the latter designed just to avoid the problems talked about here. Mathglot ( talk) 18:14, 29 June 2023 (UTC)
Hello
Following the previous topic, just above, the Growth team is exploring a project idea that aims to improve the experience of new editors by providing them with better guidance and structure in the article creation process. The hope being that by providing new editors with more structure around article creation, it will lead to newcomers creating fewer low-quality articles that create work for patrollers who check recent edits and mentors who review newcomers’ drafts.
In 2022, about 28% of newly registered users who completed the Welcome Survey indicated that they opened an account specifically to create a new article ( all stats). These newcomers don't yet understand core Wikipedia principles and guidelines around notability, verifiability, conflict of interest, neutral point of view, etc. These newcomers need additional guidance or they end up frustrated and disappointed when their articles get deleted. Because they aren't receiving the proactive guidance they need, they end up creating additional work for content moderators (patrollers, admins, watchlisters…) who need to provide reactive guidance which is rarely well-received or well-understood.
While the specifics of the project, and the Growth team’s annual planning priorities, are still under consideration, we anticipate exploring ideas related to Article creation improvements for new editors. One possibility is a community configurable "Article wizard" or helper, which could also fulfill the 2023 Community Wishlist survey Reference requirement for new article creation proposal (ranked #26 out of 182 proposals).
We're committed to shaping the overall plan based on community feedback and needs, while adhering to the following requirements:
So, we would love to hear from you:
Or do you want the Growth team to consider a totally different idea? Keep in mind that the Moderator Tools team and two other teams are also working the shared “improve the experience of editors with extended rights” key result, so there will be other teams approaching this from a less new-editor centric perspective.
Thoughts? :) Trizek (WMF) ( talk) 18:25, 15 May 2023 (UTC)
the risk of the tool nudging editors who wouldn't make an article (or could be persuaded to delay) into trying article creation out early on, creating a new article is inherently an advanced task, since it requires mastering all the different elements that go into an article, whereas other tasks often require only mastering one. That'll stay the case even if the Article Wizard is optimized to perfection.
title
, author
, and date
left invitingly empty, nothing would have to record or attempt to verify the input: the important bit is having the newcomer think through why their source is good enough, not to restrict their contributions.After two of these "best source" interface screens, then I'd display an input field for what the editor wants to name their new article. If we can convey the idea that editors shouldn't even consider what their article is going to be titled without first finding sources for it, I think it would teach a lot without requiring much reading. And while we don't want to increase the barrier of entry, embracing this sort of "fail faster" approach should allow newcomers to work on crucial skills before spending time and effort writing a bunch of prose that gets frustratingly deleted due to unsuitability.Having said all that, I don't work NPP or AFC, so my opinion should be understood as that of a partially informed outsider.
Folly Mox (
talk)
18:22, 20 May 2023 (UTC)This discussion is currently taking place in three places simultaneously, with mostly non-overlapping participants. Since the present instance of the discussion is the one linked from the mediawiki page, I'm announcing my intent to copy-paste the other two instances here using the appropriate templates, to defragment the conversation. Folly Mox ( talk) 15:46, 20 May 2023 (UTC) Done 15:59, 20 May 2023 (UTC)
IMO the fix needs to come from En Wikipedia. Sincerely, North8000 ( talk) 18:32, 15 May 2023 (UTC)
Much can be accomplished by mere education about wikipeda and guidance. The underlying structural problem preventing moving forward on this is that functionally we only have two kinds of pages:
We need two new vetted categories:
The foundation needed here is #1. We really don't give newbies guidance because the only guidance that we give is "Here's thousands of good and bad, useful and non-useful essays.....go randomly wander amongst those and try to learn". So one document under #1 would be the highly vetted official landing and navigation page for newbies which would only navigate to a short list of other #1, #2 documents and policies and guidelines. For "making a new article" it would route to another official #1 page which starts with the "should an article exist?" question and points them to read WP:Not & WP:Notability. It instructs them that step 1 of building (or deciding not to build) a new article is to find 1 or 2 GNG references and start the article with those. If it has those, chances are that the article should exist, regardless of how badly done it is. Voila, we have solved a whole bunch of new article, NPP, AFD problems and eliminate tons of drama and wasted work.
The other easy big fix is to convert AFC into just handling "should this article exist?" questions instead of the very tough article perfection gauntlet that it currently is. Then (and not until then) we need to nudge all newer editors to go through AFC. North8000 ( talk) 16:16, 16 May 2023 (UTC)
Here's the AFC problem and I'll use and extreme case for clarity. Let's say that an AFC article has 1-2 references that look like GNG references and complies with wp:not, but needs a lot of work which means it has a lot of big problems. IMO that article should be passed out of AFC into article space for further development but in reality it won't because a typical reviewer will not want to put their stamp of approval on such an article. So it's overly difficult to get an article through AFC. The solution is to make it clear that the only thing AFC reviewers are responsible for is "should this article exist" type questions. And I was arguing for a new pattern and new guidance saying in essence "Step one of creating a new article is to find 1-2 GNG type references". North8000 ( talk) 17:02, 17 May 2023 (UTC)
Regarding "How a user would know if a reference proves notability?" My answer would be to just see if it has 1-2 GNG type sources that look likely for wp:notability. Say "it's OK to pass the edge cases". Edge cases can get handled later.North8000 ( talk) 17:07, 17 May 2023 (UTC)
1) I went ahead and informed Wikipedia talk:Article wizard.
2) May I also suggest in the future that the discussion be held on one page, and then additional pages be notified with the {{subst:Please see}}
template? It seems the discussion is being scattered across a couple different pages.
3) The current article wizard ends with the new article being placed into draftspace, with a "submit" template included at the top of the draft, which I think is good. That part of the workflow should be kept.
4) The top 2 things about writing an article that give a new editor a bad experience, in my opinion, are A) writing an article on a non-notable topic that then gets declined or deleted since it is non-notable, and B) writing an article that is of borderline notability that then sits in the draftspace queue for 3 months because it is not an easy accept and not an easy decline (easy accepts and easy declines are processed quickly). This is often combined with WP:REFBOMBing. The delay in accepting/declining comes from the fact that the reviewer needs to click open all these 10, 20, 30 sources and evaluate each for GNG, which is a bit laborious and requires skill.
Both of these problems would be solved by getting newer editors to include multiple top quality, WP:GNG passing sources in their submissions, preferably at the top of the list of citations, and not drowned out by excessive other citations. But GNG is hard to teach to new editors. In my opinion, GNG is written quite vaguely, and attempts to add more detail to the guideline are declined. In my opinion, simply reading notability guideline pages will not teach a newer editor enough about notability for them to be able to determine if a topic or their article is notable.
I think there may be opportunities to insert a step into the article wizard that explains enough of WP:GNG to help out draft writers. Something like "Not all topics qualify for a Wikipedia article. The articles most likely to qualify will have citations to multiple high quality sources such as newspapers and books going into multiple paragraphs of detail about the topic. Before you spend a lot of time writing an article, do you have at least X such sources? Yes/No"
In fact I may propose this be added to the current article wizard.
5) Changing gears, I am not sure what a major overhaul of the article wizard would look like. Do we have a list of things we don't like about the current article wizard? Things that need fixing? Things we'd do differently? I think drilling down into these kinds of details, and then using them to create a detailed proposal, will be important for moving forward with any kind of article wizard overhaul. Hope this helps. – Novem Linguae ( talk) 22:08, 18 May 2023 (UTC)
{{subst:Please see}}
: we observe that users are less likely to participate of we ask them to go to a different page than the one they read. :)Agree with these posts. I think that even just giving some guidance that finding GNG sources is step 1 of making an article / deciding whether or not to make it and explaining / checklist regarding what a GNG source is. We don't need perfection here or to be overly stringent to worry about edge cases. BTW my comments were focused on making AFC more focused on notability and to ease up in the other areas. The it becomes more viable to nudge newbies to go through AFC. North8000 ( talk) 11:54, 19 May 2023 (UTC)
Can we merge this discussion to WT:AFC#Article creation hypothesis to centralize it to one place? Having separate discussions on separate pages about the same thing seems like a bad idea. (I say to take it over there because that talk page is more active, but I don't really mind which one it ends up on; we could merge the discussion from there over here as well, I don't care.) Skarmory (talk • contribs) 12:26, 20 May 2023 (UTC)
I applaud everything about Trizek's efforts and handling. I also advocate centralizing discussion in one place and here is fine even if I think that the fix needs to come more from en wikipedia than WMF. Thank you Trizek and I invite you to also jump deeper in on en Wikipedia. :-) North8000 ( talk) 23:42, 24 May 2023 (UTC)
Thank you all for your feedback. Everything has been read and taken into account. We're working on synthesizing your ideas, and those of the other wikis where the question was asked. This will take some time. The results will be published in
our next newsletter.
Trizek (WMF) (
talk)
14:34, 5 June 2023 (UTC)
We recently published the early high-level community discussion summary:
An initial community conversation was started at ar, bn, cs, es, fr and en Wikipedia. We gathered high-level feedback, as we are still early in the strategize and discover phase of this project.
Overall, this project idea received considerable attention and feedback on larger wikis. It's clear that reviewing articles from newer editors is a task that is especially challenging for larger wikis, and there are many competing ideas for how to more effectively manage this. Although better guidance in the article creation process may help improve the quality of a new editor’s articles, it would be better to encourage users to improve existing articles first.
Some new editors are only interested in creating articles with a promotional purpose, which is very time consuming for established users. A new article creation system shouldn’t help them to achieve their promotional goals.
The quality of new articles is a real problem, not only because of promotional contents, but also because it is an overwhelming process. Newcomers often struggle with unclear guidance, missing sources, citing unreliable sources, or forget to include citations entirely. As a result, some well-intentioned new editors become discouraged. For moderators, it takes a lot of time to review edge-case notability pages, or to ask for better sources. Increasing the workload of reviewers is not a viable option.
Several possible solutions have been suggested:
All this process should be customizable by each community, to fulfill their needs.
Using drafts more is suggested by many users (on larger wikis). English Wikipedia has made article creation though draft mandatory for new editors On English Wikipedia, the ability to create articles directly in mainspace is restricted to autoconfirmed users, though non-confirmed users and non-registered users can submit a proposed article through the Articles for Creation process.
It's clear we won’t totally automate this process: humans (patrollers, new page reviews, mentors, etc.) play a critical role in engaging newcomers and providing feedback about new articles. Individuals have various perspectives as to how involved experienced editors should be in new article review; some ideas were mentioned around creating a more collaborative draft-writing process, or even a review of sources prior to the article draft review. But whatever feature we consider should ensure we aren't over-burdening experienced editors, and allow for communities to customize the feature to work for their unique needs. It is important to keep the wikis as a collaborative place, where humans interact with each other, and to avoid a bureaucratic effect that would repel newcomers from participating.
The suggestions and insights shared by the community have been invaluable in identifying the challenges surrounding article review and new editor engagement. The Growth team will carefully consider all the feedback and will incorporate it into a refined project proposal for further community review soon.
Thank you again for your participation, Trizek (WMF) ( talk) 13:11, 13 June 2023 (UTC)