Wikipedia talk:Growth (team)

Suggestion: Getting started links more visible in user journey

As a new user I want better visibility and user journey for geting started and tutorials in order to know how to contribute and use complex sites such as wikisource.

If Wikimedia wants more contributors we REALLY need to beef-up the getting started pages and make them more visible during the user journey, especially for newly created users accounts. Some of the wikimedia sites such as wikisource have a steep learning curve, and anything that could reduce the curve would help. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Kerberosmansour (talk • contribs) 12:09, 8 August 2014 (UTC)

Suggestion: Allowing users to edit through anonymous proxies such as tor

As a user from an oppressive country I would like to upload and contribute to wikimedia, while protecting my identity duty personal safety issuess. If the concern with allowing edits through anonymous proxies are concerning vandalism/spam, as a security engineer I would like more granular spam filters to place soft challenges to the user communincating through anonymoous proxies such as tor instead of hard blocks. Example: 1) User must be signed in to edit through anonymous proxies 2) CAPTCHAs/soft challenges are in place for edits 3) Apply repetitional score for IP and user account 4) Require editor to approve edits on sensitive pages (historical events/political figures/company profiles etc..). — Preceding unsigned comment added by Kerberosmansour (talk • contribs) 12:27, 8 August 2014 (UTC) 3) Additionally controls such as delays between edits 4) If abuse is detected then hard blocks can be in place for the proxy exit node and user account — Preceding unsigned comment added by Kerberosmansour (talk • contribs) 12:25, 8 August 2014 (UTC)

Suggestion: Turin on SSL for every page which allows signin/signup overlay on each page securely

As a security engineer I want to be able to browse wikipedia securely, additionally to increase conversion I want to have the ability to create a user profile / login from any page (e.. creating a signin/signup overlay on each page). In order to do so securely, each page needs to be over SSL otherwise it is susceptible to man in the middle attacks. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Kerberosmansour (talk • contribs) 12:34, 8 August 2014 (UTC)

Suggestion: Live Help link

Add "Live Help" to sidebar

I think getting quick live help might keep new editors engaged. We could try adding a link to #wikipedia-en-help on the MediaWiki:Sidebar and call it something like "Live Help". Add it right at the top, above the link to the main page so that it is highly visible. Maybe try some testing on some random pages with newly registered users. I'm not familiar enough to know how to do this technically so that only a specific set of new users would see it. Maybe somebody else could chime in on that. 64.40.54.49 (talk) 11:30, 25 April 2012 (UTC)

I think it would be better to use something else other than IRC for this purpose as it is usually confusing for people. --Tow Trucker talk 22:57, 30 May 2012 (UTC)

I agree – IRC is actually a fairly specialized, niche chat client. I love the idea of live help, but if we're interested in helping people who are not tech-savvy (which, I imagine, is the profile of most new Wikipedians who need help in the first place), we'd need to go with something much more user friendly. Anyway, thanks for the brain-storming! Keep it coming :) Maryana (WMF) (talk) 19:32, 31 May 2012 (UTC)

Suggestion: Report Abuse link

Add "Report Abuse" to sidebar

Similar to the "Live Help" suggestion above. Add a "Report Abuse" to the MediaWiki:Sidebar that links to an IRC channel staffed by a WMF employee. Many new users feel abused when they violate one of our many policies they don't know about and then get templated or reverted. If they could chat live with a friendly person, they could be taught in a friendly way what they did wrong and how to proceed. Again, this link would only be seen by a random set of newly registered users. 64.40.54.49 (talk) 11:42, 25 April 2012 (UTC)

IMHO call it "report bullying"

oh boy oh boy, yes! one suggested change: call it "report bullying", as "report abuse" is usually understood in the interwebs as where to click if you see porn or copyright violations. "Bullied" is precisely how an editor feels, and it might not be so, hopefully, but, alas, too often it is. In my experience, by editors who precisely make a point on their longer service as the argument for whatever careless revert they do. In my experience, it would suffice a bit of care, not use the axe when a careful one minute edit might suffice. Is it power play? is it laziness? I mean, they are willing and ready to spend hours to beat one up, but they don't care about a couple minutes done in care and collaboration... YamaPlos talk 01:15, 23 November 2013 (UTC)

Suggestion: Unblock invalid rangeblocks

Have admins do a thorough review of their rangeblocks to see if they are still valid

• 3 years ago, NewYorkBrad asked about excessive rangeblocks at AN/I, when we were at 6.7 million blocked IPs.
• One year ago, I mentioned we had increased to 7 million blocked IPs.
• Today, we are well over 8 million blocked IPs and still climbing.

TL;DR

We have several problems with rangeblocks.

1. Rangeblocks are used too frequently
2. Rangeblocks are used inappropriately
3. Rangeblocks are forgotten

Frequent use: We use rangeblocks at the drop of a hat and without considering the collateral damage they cause. This was Brad's point when he brought the issue up at AN/I. Currently, at 8 million blocked IPs, even if only 1% are caught in the blocks, that's 80,000 people that can't edit. The true number is obviously much higher than that.

Inappropriate use for single editors: We often use rangeblocks to stop a single problematic editor and sacrificing everybody else that edits from that entire range. Rangeblocks should be a last resort and only used in a handful of situations and for the shortest possible time.

Inappropriate use for web hosts: Another improper use of rangeblocks is for hosting companies. Most web hosts have their entire range indeffed because they may host a proxy in the future.

1. We shouldn't be blocking for a problem that may happen in the future. Any IP or range could be blocked for that invalid reason.
2. IP address ranges are reassigned all the time, so indeffing is just plain wrong. I did a random check and about 20% of IP ranges had already been reassigned since being blocked.

Also, most web hosts that are rangeblocked are labeled a proxy even though they've never hosted a proxy. This is improper and should not be done. No range should rangeblocked until it has had consistently more problems than we are able to handle by normal means. We already have ProcseeBot (talk · contribs) which automatically finds and blocks proxies almost instantaneously. In addition, we have hundreds of volunteers participating in WP:OP, so there is no need to block entire ranges for some future problem that may or may not happen.

Forgotten rangeblocks: Many admins place rangeblocks and then completely forget them. Many times they leave the project with the rangeblocks left in place. When good-faith editors ask for an unblock, the reviewing admins see the invalid "proxy" label and search for any reason to deny the unblock request.

Example of the problem

I don't expect anybody to blindly accept what I've said here. So here is a real-life example from one year ago.

67.18.92.167 (talk · contribs) followed all our rules and asked to be unblocked. Three admins looked at the situation and the result was to decline the unblock. Why? Because of the invalid proxy label.

I then asked the original blocking admin and he unblocked the entire range. As one can see here, there have been no significant problems since the unblock. In fact, my quick review shows only positive contributions from that entire range and the range remains unblocked to this day.

Solution

Perhaps somebody from the WMF could review our rangeblock report and then contact all the blocking admins that have placed rangeblocks. Ask them do a thorough review of their rangeblocks and unblock all those that are not absolutely necessary, specifically stating that the blocking admins should show how Wikipedia was unable to handle the problems from the range in order to justify such a wide ranging block.

Also, rangeblocks should be capped at one year maximum. It's easy enough to set a rangeblock and only takes about 30 seconds. I don't think asking admins to spend 30 seconds per year is asking too much. This would alleviate the problems with many invalid rangeblocks especially when address ranges are reassigned. Thanks. 64.40.54.167 (talk) 15:40, 27 April 2012 (UTC)

That is an enormously high number of blocked IPs. I agree a thorough review of rangeblocks is necessary. Maybe even a rangeblock amnesty for indefinite blocks? Steven Walling (WMF) • talk 16:52, 27 April 2012 (UTC)

Thanks, Steven. Any review would be great. Amnesty for some of them would be good too, but certain ranges do need to be blocked—like anonymizer.com—becuase of the problems they cause with vandalism and WP:LTAs circumventing their blocks. The big problem is that they need to be reviewed because they change their address ranges periodically. Thanks for the reply. 64.40.54.68 (talk) 01:14, 28 April 2012 (UTC)

• Update About 2 million were added over the last couple months, so now we're at 10.7 million. Kind regards. 64.40.54.10 (talk) 09:21, 3 August 2012 (UTC)
• Support this is important, and these aren't generally random IPs. By their nature they are skewed towards ones that are likely to be used by potential editors. I'd also add that it is time we revisited a proposal I made at strategy in 2009 Strategy:Proposal:Unblock_formerly_open_IP_addresses. ϢereSpielChequers 10:01, 3 August 2012 (UTC)

Suggestion: New Editor Advocates

Have new editors team up with experienced editors who will advocate for them.

I routinely come across this situation

• New editor has been editing and feeling that they've been generous in helping the project and hoping somebody will pat them on the back
• They violate some minor point of a guideline or policy
• They get templated and instead of getting the praise they were hoping for, they feel mistreated.
• They search for somebody to help them, hoping to find a Customer Service department where the customer is always right. A sympathetic ear, if you will.
• Instead, they find a number of other editors that side with the original templating editor and the new editor feels ganged up on and bullied.
• They leave in disgust, feeling mistreated.

Oh yeah... Well I'm gonna tell my big brother... and he'll get you. That's the basic idea, to be a big brother of a new editor. New editors want to feel supported and protected from the bullies of Wikipedia while they are coming up to speed.

It could work something like this.

• New editor gets templated.
• Advocate steps in and leaves a message for the templating editor that says, "This new editor should not have been templated. You should have politely helped them instead."
• Advocate helps the new editor understand why they were templated what they should do differently so it won't happen again.
• New editor now feels protected and is much more likely to return.

We could even go as far as telling the people who template others that they are free to ignore the advocates message and this is only to help with editor retention. 64.40.54.68 (talk) 01:26, 28 April 2012 (UTC)

Suggestion: Twinkle mod

Disable the templating function in Twinkle for 1 week and see what happens

Twinkle allows for the rapid fire zapping of newbies like nothing else and there are a number of Wikipedians that play Twinkle like it's a first person shooter game. Removing the ability to zap new editors may help with their retention.

I know this idea won't be implemented, but I wanted to suggest it on behalf of all those who hate seeing new editors getting zapped. 64.40.54.68 (talk) 01:30, 28 April 2012 (UTC)

Suggestion: Replace template messages

Quickly replace templates with a helpful note

Select a random group of new editors that have been templated. Quickly replace the template with a note saying, "It looks like you could use help with ____" so that the new editor never sees the original template message. This would require a bot in order to do the replacing quickly enough. This obviously wouldn't work on certain things like CSDs and vandalism reverts, so specific situations and templates would need to be defined. Follow this random group for one month and compare them with a similar group that received the normal templates. 64.40.54.68 (talk) 01:34, 28 April 2012 (UTC)

Suggestion: Rate other users

Create a tool that allows people to rate a user from 0 to 10

This will certainly be controversial. Comment on edits not editors', that's what we say, but we violate that rule all the time. WP:WQA, WP:RFC/U, WP:ARBCOM and essentially every notice board are all about rating other users. We should allow people to rate other users WITHOUT using words, because words always end up enflaming the situation. Sure, this could be abused. People will make sockpuppets or have meat puppets help them rate, but that's not the point. The point is to allow people to vent without using words. It helps let off steam and diffuse a situation.

People only get a single vote as it were, but they can come back and change it any time. The tool could use a slider, or check boxes or radio buttons. We could have it show an average of all the ratings for a user or have it show nothing at all. But we should not show who has done a specific rating or what each specific rating is. If we decide to show an average, then users should start off with a single rating of ten issued by "the system" so that they don't start at zero. 64.40.57.9 (talk) 04:51, 2 May 2012 (UTC)

Suggestion: Use article rating to show users how much quality they write

This might cause some wrong situations as well, in some topics here you've stated problems with wrong interpretations of editors, a tool rating users will also show these mistakes, and maybe make them come across even harder. A new user starts out with some joking/wrong half wrong edits in 2007 (he's then 16), he gets rated by a few vandal fighters and gets a 2 out of 10, 5 years later when he is in university (21 now) he wants to work on Wikipedia in a good way. He starts doing some correct edits, but ends up getting reverted all the time, and rated a 0 again and again. In that situation the rating of a user would have made a problem in the past a problem the other way around now. But also problems might occure with more experienced editors simply having enemies. Or the persons blocking the vandals getting rated 0's by the vandals.

But maybe there are other sorts of ratings posibile. Why not only allow a "+" to be given? If, at all, users would be rated, I think this should only happen in the positive way, not in a scaling way. But overal I think that indeed rating users has a lot of negative side effects.

More promising might be a rating system based on edits, which is used to provide users with positive feedback. Currently all articles get rated. Why not link these ratings to the editors who edited the articles prior to the time the rating was given. So there is an article X and an article Y I did an edit on. Article X has 10 ratings prior to my edit with an average of 2.3 (it was really bad) and 10 ratings since my edit with an average of 4.3 (I wrote an entirely new article. Article Y was created by me and has an average of 3.3. Now it shows me: You've edited 2 articles, with an average pre edit rating of 2.3 and an average after edit rating of 3.8. This tells us that on average articles were better past my visit then prior. Keeping account of ratings prior and after editing for users also could be used to calculate motivational data's in other way. For example: all articles (2) you edited have a rating of 7.6 (past edit) together. The big problem here is: how big is the influence of your edit on the article. Maybe on article X there was a person 10 minutes before me who fixed a typo, he will get the same results for the article as the person (me) who wrote the totally new article. Or maybe 10 minutes before me somebody vandalized the article, getting the same ratings. So maybe this suggestion should be looked at as a suggestion/question: Is it possible to use the article ratings to help users suffering from editcountis to go suffer from qualityeditcountis (a user who wrote new articles avereging 2.0 on scale 5 could clearly write better articles. Somebody with average of 4.3 out of 5 is writing very nice articles. Mvg, Basvb (talk) 16:47, 29 June 2012 (UTC)

PS: I was mainly thinking about showing this stuff to the user only (somewhere in the preferences tabs next to the number of edits) and not in a big list, althought that second thing might also be possible, that will bring some other positive things, but possibly also a few negative. (other people counting/talking to you based on the edits, instead of only editcountis for yourself).

Suggestion: Ask for new editors

Post a banner, like the fund drives, but ask for editors instead of donations.

In general, people don't like banner ads, so this should be a text only notice. Place it at the top of pages and ask new editors to join. It could say; ""We are looking for new editors. We need your help. Click here." Have a link that points to the Teahouse or a sub-section of it. There we could help users register an account and set up a user page. We could teach them the basics of editing and let them know about our notability and verification policies. We could have their new user page include a link back to the Teahouse in case they need more help or have further questions. We could also teach them how to use talk pages and sign their posts. 64.40.57.9 (talk) 04:55, 2 May 2012 (UTC)

Suggestion: Post editor loss updates

Post a graph each month of where we are and where we should be showing how well we are doing with editor loss

Editor loss is controlled much more by the Wikipedian community than it is by the WMF. We need to keep the community informed about how well we are doing. The WMF set a goal of 150,000 active editors by 2015. We need a graph of showing editors over the last year and showing where we should be, something like strategy:File:Wikimedia Participation Goal.png. We should also present the raw numbers, perhaps something like this.

• Where we should be this month: # of editors
• Where we currently are this month: # of editors
• We are behind the goal by x number of editors
• The trend over the last year has been going: up/down/unchanged

Two years ago, the enwp community didn't care about editor loss. A year ago, a measurable but small percentage was concerned about losing editors. Today, more and more people in the community talk about editor loss. We need to keep the community informed and up-to-date on the editor loss situation. I'd suggest Maggie (or somebody) post a summary each month at WP:VPM with a link to a more detailed report at the WMF blog or whereever. I'd also let the staff at the Signpost know in case they want to report on it each month. 64.40.57.9 (talk) 05:06, 2 May 2012 (UTC)

Suggestion: Create a workspace area for new users

Create a section of Wikipedia that is safe for new editors

This idea has been titled Workspace editing as detailed here and is a possible future phase of NPT. This really isn't a quick and easy experiment, but I think it would have the biggest impact on editor retention of any possible idea as it brings Wikipedia back to its fundamentals of why it has been a sucessful project.

Workspace editing values a user's contributions, which is what new editors desire more than anything else. People don't want to volunteer if they feel their efforts are valueless and thrown away. They want to feel they've contributed something of worth that other people may find useful. That is the main reason good-faith editors contribute, because they feel they are contributing something that has value. This can be seen in the remarks made by several people in this report. There are many other benefits of Workspace editing that I might detail later. 64.40.57.9 (talk) 05:52, 2 May 2012 (UTC)

Example:

"I hate getting deleted. One morning my entire project... was gone. Some interns working with me on the project cried."

— Allison Kupietzky, Wikipedia: Meet the men and women who write the articles from a BBC news report on Wikimania 2012

This is a perfect example of why editor retention is declining. A review of this user's talk page is a perfect example of how good-faith editors are being treated. 64.40.54.83 (talk) 09:37, 18 July 2012 (UTC)

Suggestion: Referencing tool

Create a referencing tool for articles

Create a tool to find and properly format references. The basic idea is to have a searchbox to search for references. Once a reference is found, the tool would bring up a fill-in-the-blank type form that an editor could fill out. A "Save" button would format the citation and add it to the article.

TL;DR

We have lots and lots of automated tools that help us to stop bad people from contributing. We have very few tools that help good-faith editors to make helpful contributions. That seems backwards if we want to encourage new users.

Many new editors are discouraged when their articles are deleted. Most deletions happen because articles don't have references to show notability. Creating a tool to help with referencing may help solve part of this problem.

It's possible that a very basic tool could be implemented quickly. The tool could build on the {{find}} template and have searches of newspapers and books using Google and/or Yahoo. A more advanced tool could add several automated features such as automatically filling in fields. Perhaps it could use code from WP:REFLINKS and Citation bot (talk · contribs) if the authors were willing to donate their code. The tool could format the references to WP:LDR to make it easier for new users to edit the articles.

A much more advanced version could allow an editor to click a citation and drag it to a sentence, which would add the citation's ref name link to that sentence. This would make it much easier for a new editor to show an article's notability, thus making it less likely to be deleted. The tool would also allow experienced editors to improve existing articles by adding more and/or better citations. 64.40.57.9 (talk) 06:24, 2 May 2012 (UTC)

See also: Wikipedia citation tool for Google Books

64.40.54.192 (talk) 09:54, 4 May 2012 (UTC)

ProveIt is a referencing tool I helped develop. It has some of what you asked for, though not everything. I encourage you to try it out. Superm401 - Talk 06:25, 8 December 2012 (UTC)

Suggestion: Good vs Good-faith

Re-educate the community about users that are attempting to do good and how that group of new editors can help us

Have Maggie repeatedly remind the community that only editors actively trying to harm the project should be treated accordingly. And that users making mistakes are still good-faith users and should be helped and treated with respect and courtesy.

TL;DR

The Wikipedian community has become more exclusive than inclusive—because of its focus on quality—and is failing to bring in the experts that it wants help from to achieve that quality.

This study classifies new users in to four broad categories; Vandal, Bad-faith, Good-faith and Golden. The community classifies those same groups quite differently.

Report defined	Vandal	Bad-faith	Good-faith	Golden
Community defined	Vandal	Bad-faith	Worthless	Good (i.e. Good-faith)

When the community thinks about good-faith editors, they think of editors that are able to produce good results on their first edit. This is very different from an editor that is attempting to produce good results on their first edit. The community no longer understands that an editor attempting to do good—but failing—is still a good-faith editor.

They label good-faith editors as worthless and not desired by the community and they treat them the same way the treat bad-faith users and vandals. In essence, they have moved the goal post and created a new and unintended barrier to entry. That makes us less inclusive and drives our numbers down. This conversation is an example of that that mindset. Some of the comments left at this report are another blatant example.

We don't know if a new user making a mistake is a youthful editor or a seasoned professor at a distinguished university. We treat them all as undesirables. We should re-educate the community about what a good-faith editor is. We should help these good-faith editors learn from their mistakes and get past them so they can succeed at being productive members of the community

Side note: One of the best decisions the WMF has ever made was to bring Moonriddengirl on board as Community Liaison. Maggie has the respect of the community because of her many years of dedicated service to CCI. She is calm and patient and knows how to interact with the community in a very productive manner.

This is a task that only Maggie can accomplish, in my opinion. The community has become indifferent and even actively hostile towards helpful information coming from the WMF. A very sad situation that reflects poorly on the community, But that is not true in Maggie's case.

Maggie could remind the community of the difference between good-faith users and bad-faith users and that we can grow good-faith editors in to great editors. Perhaps she could leave periodic notes at WP:VPM or, if she's up to it, write a series of short articles for the Signpost using data and reports the WMF has been publishing. I hate adding to her workload, which is tremendous, as are all the workloads for WMF staff, but I think she's the only one that could accomplish this task. 64.40.54.43 (talk) 16:11, 2 May 2012 (UTC)

Suggestion: Promising new editor

Have a way to ID promising new editors to the community

This has two basic parts.

1. Provide an award that will encourage the new editor
2. Provide the community a way to know which editors should be treated gingerly.

I occasionally run across a new editor that is very promising. They've learned a great deal about how to do things properly in a short amount of time and shown no signs of ill will towards the project (i.e. not vandals or bad-faith and show no signs of COI, NPOV or any other problems).

It would benefit the community to encourage these editors with some type of award, as they show promise. It would also be good to let RCPers and NPPers know that this subset of editors should be dealt with in an encouraging way. That their edits should not be reverted without a close look at the situation. And their articles should not be tagged for deletion without a thorough application of WP:BEFORE.

We could create a new userright called Promising (like rollback & autopatrol), but it would be a flag only and not provide any additional tools. Promising users could be submitted to WP:RFPERM like any other userright. An admin would review their contributions and, if warranted, set the flag. The flag would set a color in RCP and NPP lists so that patrollers would know these are good users and they should be careful before tagging them or whatnot. 64.40.57.47 (talk) 18:48, 3 May 2012 (UTC)

Suggestion: Create Wikitainment

Create a sister project for entertainment related subjects

Note: this is one of two suggestions to improve WMF/community relations by giving the community what it wants.

Wikitainment is an old suggestion for a sister project that would host entertainment-related topics. Much of the remaining community at enwp views entertainment related subjects as unwanted or so called fancruft. These articles could be moved away from enwp to a new sister project.

TL;DR

The biggest untapped source of new editors are fans of entertainment related subjects (movies, music, TV, etc.). This group of potential editors are very often motivated to write about their favorite topics. Attracting this group of editors has the potential to dramatically increase the editor population.

The community, however, view this group of editors as completely unwanted. They feel the contributions from these fans degrade the quality of the encyclopedia. Some members of the community actively discourage contributions from fans and would like nothing more than to remove all entertainment related subjects from the encyclopedia.

By starting a new sister project, specifically for entertainment articles, it would give the community what it wants (the removal of fancruft). It would also give the fans what they want, a new place to edit and the ability to set their own rules for article inclusion and other things, such as a lower standard for notability.

If the WMF were to set up a sister project like this—to remove the so called fancruft—the community might view this as a positive step in the right direction and be willing to be less bitey towards new editors an more welcoming. 64.40.54.53 (talk) 08:25, 10 May 2012 (UTC)

I just wanted to note that I think the WMF is doing an outstanding job and that the community no longer understands the basic idea of volunter editing. But I don't think the community will ever try to improve relations between them and the WMF. That is why I'm suggesting the WMF makes the first move. Just wanted to clarify that. 64.40.54.53 (talk) 08:41, 10 May 2012 (UTC)

Thanks for your vote of confidence, but starting new projects is really outside the scope of the experiments team, or the Foundation as a whole. We generally only start new projects when there is community support to do so. I would check out Proposals for new projects on Meta for more info. Thanks again, Steven Walling (WMF) • talk 20:13, 10 May 2012 (UTC)

Oops. You're quite right. Thanks for the link to the proposal page at meta. I'll have to write something up over there. Looking back at all the suggestions, it appears that a number of them don't really fit the quick and easy part of E3. Oh well, perhaps they'll spark an idea in someone else. Once I get rolling, it's hard for me to stop. Cheers. 64.40.54.127 (talk) 03:08, 15 May 2012 (UTC)

Suggestion: "Wikipedia wants you" campaign

Start a new campaign to attract the types of editors that the community wants

Note: this is second of two suggestions to improve WMF/community relations.

Ask the community what types of new editors they want and then actively encourage that group of people to sign up and contribute.

TL;DR

Much of the community knows about the editor loss problem, but they feel attracting new editors only brings in unwanted new users so they oppose such efforts. The community feels the only new editors that should be allowed in are experts in a specific subject or expert writers to help improve our quality.

This is an opportunity for the WMF to give the community what it wants, experts. This would combine two ideas above, #Suggestion: Ask for new editors and #Suggestion: Promising new editor.

Start off by putting up a notice at the village pump about editor loss and then ask the community to give suggestions on what specific types of editors they would like to see join up. This could be in the form of a straw poll asking about professional writers, physicists, medical professionals, etc..

Then create a banner ad campaign similar to Uncle Sam's "I want you" poster.

Wikipedia Wants You
Wikipedia needs _____

The blank could be filled in with the community's suggestions, such as professional writers, engineers, or whatever. It could link to a short story like this; "I'm John Doe, an engineer. I joined Wikipedia to help improve engineering articles. I encourage other engineers to join up." The WMF could actively solicit universities and industry for experts in their field

These new editors could come in under a project, like the education projects, and could be given help creating a user page explaining that they are experts in their field. A new userright, "Expert", could be assigned to these users similar to autopatrol bit. It would show up in special:newpages and special:recentchanges to inform patrollers not to delete or revert their contributions.

This has the possibility of making the community more welcoming of new users and more sympathetic towards efforts to increase our user base. 64.40.54.53 (talk) 08:35, 10 May 2012 (UTC)

Q: Does power corrupt?

I ran across a strange situation from 2006, which lead me to dig through some old AN and RFC/U archives. I noticed a user had been creating a number of small articles and stubs that a second person was concerned about. The second person felt the first person should be spending more time expanding the articles they were creating instead of making new articles. The second person's concern snowballed and a newly promoted admin jumped in to defend the first person. As the second person kept voicing concerns, the new admin started blocking the first person, which eventually lead to the new admin indeffing the first person. This happened over a period of several months, but I was able look at the whole situation in a few hours. So It seemed very striking that the new admin, who was helpful in the beginning, ended up indeffing the person they were trying to help.

All this got me wondering about the power corrupts idea, so I plotted the number of new admins over time using the data from User:WereSpielChequers/RFA by month and it showed what appears to be a peak in admins about a year before the peak in editors that is shown File:Enwp retention vs active editors.png. Not that there's anything here to work on. I just found it curious, so I thought I'd share it. 64.40.54.127 (talk) 02:53, 15 May 2012 (UTC)

Internationalize Captchas

The likely single most obstacle for a non-English writer becoming an editor of Wikipedia is that they are unable to solve the captchas. So they would never register. Imagine, you sincerely got captchas in Arabic or Cyrillic script in the English Wikipedia. Your registerd editor base was likely way unter ten percent of what it is now.

--Purodha Blissenbach (talk) 10:49, 4 June 2012 (UTC)

Yes! We heard this from Portuguese Wikipedia editors in Brazil, too. I added it to our ideas for Account Creation redesign. Thanks for the suggestion! Maryana (WMF) (talk) 21:13, 4 June 2012 (UTC)

First experiment live :)

See Wikipedia:Village pump (technical)#New feature experiment. Steven Walling (WMF) • talk 21:00, 7 June 2012 (UTC)

For those watching this page... results are up on Meta and in a blogpost. Steven Walling (WMF) • talk 23:17, 6 July 2012 (UTC)

Suggestion: Nuke it from orbit

Start fresh from the beginning

Hardblock every registered account and their IP for one year. Oversight all policies, guidelines and essays. Oversight all tags (the negative templates used on user talk pages and articles). Remove the NPP and RCP code from the software. Keep everything else and let a new batch of users start fresh and decide how things should work.

Rant

This suggestion certainly isn't going to happen anytime soon, but it may be the only solution if things don't change. I made a prediction on meta or somewhere a year or two ago. It said that Wikipedia is going to get meaner and nastier as time goes on and that more and more people are going to leave and new users will refuse to sign up. Over the last few months, I've seen ardent deletionists accusing other ardent deletionists of being too deletionist. This is one of my predictions that has come to pass. My fear is that in 5 or so years, Wikipedia will be almost completely locked down and there will only be 100 or so highly active people. They will be the meanest and nastiest of the bunch. At that point, I think this will be a valid suggestion and I would strongly urge the WMF to nuke it from orbit when that happens. 64.40.54.60 (talk) 06:00, 2 July 2012 (UTC)

With recent events, this appears to be the only solution. The Foundation and its Board are the only entity to be able to keep Wikimedia projects vaible over the long-term. This is their duty per meta:Mission. When the community can force the Foundation do something against its best judgement—regardless of the long-term consequences—it can easily spell the death of our projects. The WMF has to take a stand. The Foundation must state that "anything that jeopadizes the inflow of volunteers" is non-negotiable. Otherwise the community—through its hostility—will surely strangle itself. If that means some of the community's long-term (and most hostile) editors leave, than so be it. The project will be better off without them. This whole Us vs, the WMF thing the community has embraced may very well be a blessing in disguise an that regard. 64.40.54.225 (talk) 06:20, 24 September 2013 (UTC)

Suggestion: bring back my favourite tool!

Until about a month ago there used to be a tool in articles' revision history pages that appeared just left of the "revision history search" tool (I can't remember its exact name, though). This tool used bar- and line- graphs to chart how frequently articles were edited, and how the size of articles had grown over time. It also listed other statistical information, including who created the article, when it was created, the average time between edits on the page, and pie charts showing the proportion of user-vs-IP edits, minor-vs-major edits, and the proportion of edits by the most-active editors.

This tool was very reinforcing for me at the time that I originally became active in editing Wikipedia: being able to visually see how articles grew and changed both historically and as a result of my own work made the experience much more enjoyable for me. If you are really serious about improving Wikipedia, please find someone to restore this tool, or have someone create another one similar to it. I would do this myself, if I had any idea how or how to learn.Ferox Seneca (talk) 21:19, 23 July 2012 (UTC)

I think you're referring to a tool created by User:X!, who's no longer active on Wikipedia. I found it really useful, too – maybe we should leave X! a nice talk page message and try to coax him or her out of retirement? :) Maryana (WMF) (talk) 18:07, 24 July 2012 (UTC)

I think it was called "revision history statistics". I'll write him something nice, but it would be cool if more could be done...Ferox Seneca (talk) 22:32, 29 July 2012 (UTC)

"I think it was called "revision history statistics"." Yes, that's what it was called. It was removed here when the replacement stopped working. A new replacement was being worked on by Cyberpower678 (talk · contribs) (the related conversation is at User talk:TParis/Archive 7#Articleinfo tool). You may want to contact Cyberpower678 and ask for an update, but I think he's still busy with college. 64.40.54.25 (talk) 15:43, 30 July 2012 (UTC)

Suggestion: take advantage of doodle at google

I'm kind of running a tiny project at pt.wikipedia to editor engagement using a template banner similar to a {{under construction}} in articles related to the doodle at google. For example, today (24th July) we have Amelia Earhart and we will notice a huge incoming of readers comming to wikipedia to read about her. I think we should take advantage of this and try to catch reader's attention to WP:Welcome or other page. I'm registering my results here if you want to take a look. So far I don't have any improvement in editor engagement but I insist we should try a bit more. For example, Alan Turing's doodle last month had 2 million visits in just one day!OTAVIO1981 ([[User talk:|talk]]) 12:16, 24 July 2012 (UTC)

Good thinking! My only concern is that "trending" articles that suddenly get millions of visits tend to get locked down by semi-protection pretty quickly (on English Wikipedia, at least), so encouraging lots of new people to edit them all at once might not be the best idea (not to mention edit conflicts, reverts, etc.). But you're right that this would be a good place to feature a prominent welcome banner/intro page to Wikipedia. I think Trizek from French Wikipedia was thinking about doing something similar. He's created a WikiProject devoted to editor engagement experiments on fr.wiki. You should get in touch with him and see if he has data to share (and share your own experiment with him, too). Maryana (WMF) (talk) 17:54, 24 July 2012 (UTC)

In fact, pt.wiki also protect doodle's article and we have a problem that's not possible two editors edit an article at same time. Basically, this banner just points to WP:Welcome and I'm monitoring how many editors follow this link. We I get a increase of interest in following this link I'll start to count how many editors are registering. I'll talk to him. Regards,OTAVIO1981 (talk) 23:17, 24 July 2012 (UTC)

Excellent! You could even add a specific call to action on the welcome page, like asking visitors to sign their name at the bottom of the page once they've created an account (this would also teach new users how to sign with four tildes) if they're interested in learning more about editing. Then you'd have a record not only of how many people visited the welcome page, but how many of them are motivated potential Wikipedians. It might be just a few, but then it would be very easy to help/mentor them all personally :) Maryana (WMF) (talk) 00:33, 25 July 2012 (UTC)

P.S., here is Trizek's new user help project, in case you know some French ;) Maryana (WMF) (talk) 00:40, 25 July 2012 (UTC)

Hi !

Thank you for telling me, OTAVIO1981 :)

The French project has an English summary, about what we do.

This doodle idea is a good idea, in order to welcome punctually new users and explain them where they are, and how Wikipedia works.

Our project on French Wikipedia concerns all pages. We will use the sitenotice in order to explain to the readers what is Wikipedia, how it works and how they can contribute. You can see this project here (full in French). We expect to launch it in October.

If you have any question, please leave us a message :) Trizek ^{from FR} 07:39, 25 July 2012 (UTC)

Thanks for your idea Maryana, I'll try to do something like that until the next doodle. In fact, it's good we don't have a doodle every day because we can be prepared for the next one and run a project with few people. I don't have a good banner yet, please take a look and any suggestion are welcome. Trizek, in portuguese wikipedia we used sitenotice onde to run such a campaign. We learned that after four day people started to ignore the banner, so it's not necessary a long period using sitenotice. We also used different banners using different redirects to the same page track which of them were more successful to atract readers attention. I'll take a look at your project aind I wish you good luck with that! :) OTAVIO1981 (talk) 14:53, 25 July 2012 (UTC)

Trizek, salut! I was just about to ping you about this, but you beat me to it!

How can I help you guys out? In addition to fr.wiki and pt.wiki, I've heard of project ideas like this starting up on Ukrainian Wikipedia, and I'm sure there are others that I don't know about. Do you think it would be useful to start a page on Meta to collect all the links and some brief summaries of the work that each wiki is doing, so you can easily share banner ideas, results, updates, etc. with each other? It should definitely be multilingual – I can take care of the Ukrainian part and maybe the French, but that's about as far as my language skills extend ;) I'm happy to be your secretary and outreach person, or whatever else you need! Having a central page would also make it easier to streamline data requests, which I want to make sure you're able to get when you run experiments. Maryana (WMF) (talk) 17:35, 25 July 2012 (UTC)

I think it would be helpful, even if just to share information.OTAVIO1981 (talk) 18:37, 25 July 2012 (UTC)

• Just created this page – please be bold and edit as necessary :) I'll keep working to find more projects to add to it, too. Maryana (WMF) (talk) 22:04, 25 July 2012 (UTC)

Thank you for this meta page. I'll try to watch it, and also this page. Maryana, yes, it will be very useful to have this central page, with regular updates. We can also share there all the tools we have, and how to use them.

Trizek ^{from FR} 12:00, 1 August 2012 (UTC)

Second experiment announcement

See: Wikipedia:Village Pump (technical)#Feature experiment for new Wikipedians. Steven Walling (WMF) • talk 18:20, 30 July 2012 (UTC)

Suggestion/Bug: Getting Started Edit Conflicts

Hi, I tried out the new Getting Started tour and ran into an edit conflict. This seems pretty undesirable for new editors and I'm wondering if there's sufficient variety, randomization in the presentation of articles to avoid that being a common occurrence. Otherwise, I really like the work that you're doing! Ocaasi ^{t | c} 18:42, 8 February 2013 (UTC)

The articles update every hour right now. In the future, the ideal case is that we present a random list of articles on every view of the page, but until we remove dependency on SuggestBot, hourly seems to be working okay so far. I measured the proportion of 'submit' events without an associated save in the past and found it to be acceptably low. That's not a perfect proxy for edit conflicts, but is one way of measuring how often people try and save or preview, but then either abandon their change or get an edit conflict. Steven Walling (WMF) • talk 21:19, 12 February 2013 (UTC)

Hey Steven, that all sounds good and on the right track. Cheers! Ocaasi ^{t | c} 00:22, 13 February 2013 (UTC)

Is it a good idea to offer up problematic BLPs to "getting started" clientele?

I just discovered this project as a result of recent edits to Caroline Hoxby, which is currently being served up by this tool. That article is on my watchlist due to a recent history of BLP issues and edit warring. Given the problems the page already has as a BLP article, I don't think it's a good idea to ask newbies to fool around with it. (Furthermore, I'm not sure why it's tagged for grammar issues, as the issues there are mostly related to content.)

Can the universe of potentially suggested articles be modified to exclude BLPs (and other articles with similar issues)? --Orlady (talk) 20:09, 13 February 2013 (UTC)

Yes, we will be removing BLPs from the next iteration of the task list, which we plan to launch on the 21st. For reference, the task list refreshes every hour, so no single article should get too much attention. In the meantime, removing the copyediting tag means that it won't appear in the list again. Thanks for the feedback. Steven Walling (WMF) • talk 22:17, 13 February 2013 (UTC)

Thanks. I'm glad to know that BLPs aren't going to be part of this feature for much longer. --Orlady (talk) 04:26, 14 February 2013 (UTC)

Hey, just a quick update: I've now confirmed that we're excluding any BLP from the list in Special:GettingStarted. Sorry for the wait, Steven Walling (WMF) • talk 21:28, 11 April 2013 (UTC)

Step 1: Identify the problem

I'm using this quote because I can't put it any better.

• Some people think Wikipedia is all the same team. A newbie passes the ball towards the goal and counts on more experienced teammates to keep it going.
• A minority see Wikipedia is as a battleground of two teams-- Visitors vs the Home Team. They don't want to help "keep the ball going", they want to "spike the ball back towards the opponents".
  — User:HectorMoffet 08:06, 8 March 2012 (UTC)

The full discussion at Wikipedia:Village pump (idea lab)/Archive 7#Civility, Editor Retention, Hostility, and Burnout-- summed up had only 6 replies, the first of which justitfied the battleground actions and nobody suggested solutions.

The discussion highlights the basic issues with editor retention.

• The project's Us vs. Them attitude
• The project's indifference to the Us vs. Them problem

It is my belief that this will need to be addressed in order to solve the editor retention problem. I'll post more later. 64.40.54.78 (talk) 09:08, 6 April 2013 (UTC)

Here is one example of a person trying to be helpful, but views good-faith new users as a problem. A problem that needs to be eliminated. A very typical Us vs. Them situation on enwp.

Obviously the biggest hurdle initially is the learning curve to contribute. The VisualEditor should take care of that. But a more systemic problem is the community itself that views new volunteers as a problem rather than resource. Once new users get past the initial learning curve, they are confronted with the community and its rejection of new volunteers. This is the most difficult problem we face.

My biggest fear is that the VisualEditor will provide a steady influx of inexperienced users that the community will pounce upon. The community has a history of pouncing on these new users as was the case with the WP:IEP. These were good-faith new users that were seen as an enemy that needed to be eliminated as opposed to inexperienced users that needed help and training. If the VisualEditor proves popular, it could mean the community chases away new users at a faster and faster pace until the supply is gone. This could have a disasterous effect on the project, with Wikipedia earning a reputation for extreme hostility that it could never recover from.

I would like to see the E3 project team up with the various education projects, something similar to the Education Program's new user traning. The education projects have new volunteers that make it past the initial learning curve and then get to the "community interface" issues. The students in the different education projects are often new and face the same issues that the general public faces. These students could be a ready source of information on what difficulties new users face and they could offer suggestions to improve the project. Teachers could offer extra credit to students that are willing to fill out questionaires about Wikipedia and their experience editing. Perhaps a brief questionaire could be filled out each week to see how an editor's experience changes over time. What they found difficult at the beginning of the class versus what they found difficult at the end.

This probably doesn't fit with the E3 criteria for a quick easy test to increase editor retention, but I think it could provide valuable data on what improvements should be made to the project from a new user's perspective. New users are the life blood of the project and we need to be focusing on their needs if we want the project to have a long-term future. 64.40.54.180 (talk) 07:43, 11 April 2013 (UTC)

Suggestion: Fourth "Get started" option - Translate

@Steven (WMF): A new user has made an interesting proposal at Wikipedia:Village_pump_(idea_lab)/Archive_11#Fourth "Get started" option - Translate, regarding the WP:Getting started feature. I've left some basic feedback there, but I was wondering if this might actually be an ingenious possibility... If a new user has SUL accounts on another language project, perhaps the translation option could be added as a suggestion for them? –Quiddity (talk) 16:09, 25 June 2013 (UTC)

Special:GettingStarted doesn't yet appear optimal. How to improve it?

New accounts are ushered into Special:GettingStarted, which says fixing spelling and grammar errors is the easiest. Then if one tries to do this, one is taken to a random article tagged with {{Copy edit}}, with this as an example. But a big problem here is that there is a contradiction between the instructions and what the template actually says. Getting started instructions of "This aritcle has spelling and grammar errors you can fix" contradicts the tag, which says "This article may require copy editing for grammar, style, cohesion, tone, or spelling". How to fix/modify/improve this feature? There is an option for "help" but I also think there should be a way to find a human being, for example at the Teahouse. Biosthmors (talk) 19:54, 5 August 2013 (UTC)

Yeah, you're absolutely right on the task description. We actually have a patch waiting to be merged and deployed which changes the instructions to say "may" have errors, rather than "has errors". :) In terms of finding help from a human... I think Teahouse is a good option, but the truth is it's way too slow. Of all the accounts that ever edit Wikipedia (as a proportion of signups) around 70% of them do so in the first 24 hours. Out of that group, 90% do so in the first hour. If someone has gotten so confused in that first hour as to be seeking person-to-person explanations of how to do basic things like fix grammar, we've lost already. Teahouse has a really fast average response rate after a newbie posts a question, but it's not yet contextual enough to solve someone's issue immediately after signup I think. And it's still overwhelming to new people who just signed up and hardly know where the edit button is, much less how discussion systems work. We really need to hook people with an easy first task immediately, and not depend on any asynchronous communication methods to teach editing, if we can avoid it. Steven Walling (WMF) • talk 09:07, 6 August 2013 (UTC)

Great. I'm glad there's a patch coming. =) I'm thinking beyond grammar, though. Sorry I didn't communicate that well. As a professor in the Education Program said in email to me yesterday, they felt their first foray into Wikipedia was like falling into a rabbit hole. I imagine this is the feeling many newbies get, once they start peering in. The use of the word "asynchronous communication" got me thinking. This recent article focuses on the importance of the original synchronous communication (talking):

But technology and incentive programs are not enough. 'Diffusion is essentially a social process through which people talking to people spread an innovation,' wrote Everett Rogers, the great scholar of how new ideas are communicated and spread. Mass media can introduce a new idea to people. But, Rogers showed, people follow the lead of other people they know and trust when they decide whether to take it up. Every change requires effort, and the decision to make that effort is a social process.

It was talking over the phone and Skype several times with a professor that led to this course page. I'd say the synchronous communication also helped the general satisfaction of the professor about the classroom experience. I think it would be wonderful for confused newbies to have an opportunity to talk to knowledgeable people. Kind of like a 1(800)help line. Perhaps willing Wikipedians, similar to the WP:Otrs team, could be the volunteer basis for this, though I'm not sure how the tech side would work.

What could be more engaging for a new editor who is interested in Wikipedia than talking to an experienced Wikipedia editor? Biosthmors (talk) 09:34, 7 August 2013 (UTC)

Let's emphasise talking. I try to do this, but I try not to use IRC, which I find liable to excessive misunderstandings--it's in my experience even worse than talk page. But within reasonable limits of time I'll gladly talk to anyone--and I see Biosthmors mentioned Skype. I'd never thought of it in this context, although I use it routinely with people I know here -- There are privacy questions, but it can of course be used without video for privacy with new editors. Perhaps we can try to integrate something like this. DGG ( talk ) 06:02, 13 September 2013 (UTC)

Agreeed. Steven? Or someone else with Growth? Biosthmors (talk) pls notify me (i.e. {{U}}) while signing a reply, thx 12:55, 22 September 2013 (UTC)

And after clicking "show me how" it said "Ideas on what to do These banners identify problems with this article. You don't need to address them all..." But there was only one tag. So saying "them all" looks awkward. Can we replace "them all" with "everything"? Thanks. Biosthmors (talk) pls notify me (i.e. {{U}}) while signing a reply, thx 12:55, 22 September 2013 (UTC)

Ah, good catch. It was worded that way because many articles have multiple issues. "Everything" works for both cases, I think. Steven Walling (WMF) • talk 17:48, 23 September 2013 (UTC)

New team name

For the curious, check out Eloquence's announcement about the name change and more. :) Steven Walling (WMF) • talk 00:31, 19 September 2013 (UTC)

A/B testing new version of GettingStarted

Hey all,

Today we deployed a new version of the onboarding UX we've been working on for some time, using GettingStarted and GuidedTour. This is in "silent" mode right now, and on Monday we'll be flipping the switch to deliver it for 50% of new signups on English Wikipedia, as part of an A/B test.

To see what this looks like, just add ?gettingStartedReturn=true to any link on enwiki, like editable pages or non-editable pages.

As our specification describes, this test version with calls to action will be delivered to new users when they are redirected back to where they were prior to signup. The control in our A/B test will be sending all new users through Special:GettingStarted. Our main hypotheses are listed on our research documentation.

Any ideas for improvement you might have are welcome. You can see what I'm currently thinking about updating on our public project management tool, Trello. Many thanks, Steven Walling (WMF) • talk 02:18, 4 October 2013 (UTC)

BTW, this test is live now. Steven Walling (WMF) • talk 00:23, 9 October 2013 (UTC)

The Wikipedia Adventure, alpha-testers needed

Hi folks, I've been working for the past 7 months on an interactive guided tour for new editors called The Wikipedia Adventure, as part of a WMF Individual Engagement Grant. The game is an experiment in teaching our aspiring future editors in an education but playful way.

• This week I need some alpha-testers to kick the tires and basically try to break it. I'm interested in general impressions and suggestions of course, but I'm really looking for gnarly, unexpected browser issues, layout problems, workflow bugs, and other sundry errors that would prevent people from playing through and having a positive experience.

• If you're able to spend 1-3 hours doing some quality assurance work this week, you would have: a) my sincere gratitude b), a sparkly TWA barnstar, c) special thanks in the game credits, and d) left your mark on Wikipedia's outreach puzzle and new editor engagement efforts

• Please note that the game automatically sends edits to your own userspace and it lets you know when that will happen. If you want, you can register a new testing account just for the game, but it won't work properly unless you're logged-in by step 8 of mission 1 when it lets you register on the fly.

If you're interested, please add your name below and have at it. You can post feedback to WP:TWA/Feedback. Thanks and cheers! Ocaasi ^{t | c} 20:51, 16 October 2013 (UTC)

Try out The Wikipedia Adventure

I'm interested and on the bug-hunt. Will report back this week

1. Add your name here
2. Or here
3. Or here...

Smart watchlists for WikiProjects would make people happy and productive—which would naturally faclitate growth

See my idea here. Is this something the team is working on? Biosthmors (talk) pls notify me (i.e. {{U}}) while signing a reply, thx 13:02, 7 November 2013 (UTC)

Not at the moment, but I can comment on the general feature area. Steven Walling (WMF) • talk 22:26, 8 November 2013 (UTC)

@Biosthmors: and Steven. Please let me know of any watchlist improvements discussions.

I left a comment at Wikipedia talk:Notifications#Merge watchlist into Notifications recently (tl;dr the 2 links I added at the end of that thread, are the best compendiums of related links and old proposals, that I know of), but I'm not sure where current discussion is being centralized. (It's an old and unsolved problem, because it's so complex. Much like the other communication overload&dispersal issues.). Ta. –Quiddity (talk) 20:40, 9 November 2013 (UTC)

Helping WikiProjects know about all cleanup templates within their area

I think this is a growth-based idea, as it supports collaboration. See this thread, please. Thanks. Biosthmors (talk) pls notify me (i.e. {{U}}) while signing a reply, thx 16:10, 27 November 2013 (UTC)

Suggestions... lots of them

Hello, I'm interested in the work your team is doing on engaging new users, as this is the area I primarily contribute to on Wikipedia. I first joined Wikipedia 4 and a half years ago, aged 11, and my first contribution was reverted automatically by a bot because I added a reference to an informative website that happened to be hosted by Yahoo GeoCities during a complete re-hauling an article. I was left with the cold, superior-sounding message: although everyone is welcome to contribute constructively to the encyclopedia, your addition of one or more external links has been reverted. After panicking for a bit I gathered up the courage to undo the bot's revision and no-one went and stopped me. In fact the link that the bot wrongly blocked is still in the external links section of the article today. I've come a long way since and (aside from being stupid and forgetting my old password), nothing has ever brought me close to leaving. I have a few suggestions that I think would help prevent new editors going through a first experience like mine, and also help soften the steep learning curve on Wikipedia.

One of the biggest problems, in my opinion, is the sheer volume of duplicating and overlapping welcoming pages that only serves to confuse new users (Help:Getting started, Wikipedia:Tutorial, Wikipedia:Introduction, Wikipedia:Welcoming committee/Welcome to Wikipedia and the special page 'getting started' that you recently set up). This problem stems from the very nature of Wikipedia - the lack of central control - and other areas such as article quality assessment are also in a similar shambles. There are loads of great projects like the Teahouse, but unless an invite is manually placed on a new user's talk page it's likely that they won't find out about it until after they've passed the stage where it's useful to them. What I feel new users need is a brief introduction that automatically appears when they first log and can be returned to easily (so they don't have to search it out) which clearly explains what they can do on Wikipedia, provides easy links and isn't too dumbed down. The new getting started special page and guided tours are great, but they just throw new users straight in without explanation - there needs to be a brief introduction beforehand (I personally don't like the fact that they don't have any mention of what to do if new users want to add new content, articles or facts, either). The standard welcome template has the same problem, it just contains a few links to various help pages without giving a clear and concise introduction to what Wikipedia is all about and explaining what each of its links contain.

I've gone ahead and written my own brief introduction to Wikipedia, the kind of thing that I would have found useful when I first joined. I'm not a programmer or HTML-savvy, but I've also made a mock-up of what it would look like when formatted in a way similar to the current special:gettingstarted page. I hope you consider implementing a similar introduction, as at the moment there's nothing to explain to new users key ideas behind Wikipedia (unless they happen to be be pointed to the five pillars by luck). I expect most new users leave because they don't realise that reverted edits aren't personal, that they don't have to know all the guidelines before starting and that they have just as much power to influence Wikipedia as the admins and editors who make hundreds and thousands of edits.

To follow this up I think that users should have their talk pages automatically created and a message left when they sign up so that they get the 'you have a new message' notification after leaving the welcome screen, familiarising them with their talk page. The message could be something along the lines of 'Welcome to your user talk page, this is where you can communicate with other Wikipedians, work together, discuss ideas and become acquainted with fellow editors', plus an explanation of how to sign posts and indent replies. This, coupled with the welcome splash screen would effectively replace the unreliable method of manually leaving welcome templates for new users, which often misses out many editors.

I had a look at your planned projects, and I really like the sound of your plan to revamp the new article creation system. However, I think it is probably more important - and probably easier to implement as well - to first add a good welcoming screen to Wikipedia as new users more often start by making contributions to existing articles than by creating their own (plus my proposed introduction page already includes a short section on creating your first article). As for your plans to improve the rate of anonymous users signing up, why not add a similar message when they click edit on an article? A splash screen that welcomes them to Wikipedia, suggests they familiarise themselves with the five pillars of Wikipedia and informs them on the benefits of signing up, giving them the option to continue editing anonymously or create an account. I've drafted my own idea of how this would appear as well. I don't know what is technically feasible within Wikipedia's structure, but maybe this could be set up to only appear the first time an anonymous user clicks edit (or maybe after X edits if you're looking to retain frequent editors), and not again if they choose not to sign up.

One last suggestion, (completely unrelated to my proposals to add welcoming screens, I promise)! I feel that the messages that are left by bots that revert contributions (such as the one I received after my first edit) are way too harsh on new editors. Perhaps their messages could be rewritten, or the bots' codes could be changed to avoid very reverting new editors straight away.

I look forward to hearing what you think of my suggestions and discussing them further if you're interested. Cheers, Jr8825 • Talk 09:48, 11 January 2014 (UTC)

P.S. If you ever what another member of your team for new ideas and writing help explanations (not paid obviously) I'm always willing! ;)

P.P.S. I've already gone ahead and discussed with the user who maintains XLinkBot the possibility of altering the message it leaves. He's provided links to the appropriate bot settings and I plan to have a look at them over the weekend. If I have time to draft a change I probably will, but I wondered if anyone else would like any input. Jr8825 • Talk 09:02, 17 January 2014 (UTC)

Helloooo! Any one home? (It's a funny feeling talking to yourself) Jr8825 • Talk 10:37, 25 January 2014 (UTC)

Hi Jr8825, I happened to see this comment by chance and I'm replying just because it's you and because nobody did yet, but this is a rather isolated page and even on the wrong wiki: you'd probably have better luck posting your general thoughts on Meta: where more people are interested in this kind of stuff.

As for your specific proposal on welcome messages, that's something many wikis do, using bots or the mw:Extension:NewUserMessage: you could propose to do the same, using your introduction, on the appropriate talk page here on en.wiki. I'll note however that your introduction would need to be shortened a bit to fit a welcome message: I understand that part of the length is produced by the big font, but it also tends towards the information overload. No harm done, it's often good to start a bit wordy and then cut. --Nemo 22:28, 27 January 2014 (UTC)

Ping @Steven (WMF): Interesting ideas above. :) –Quiddity (talk) 21:45, 2 February 2014 (UTC)

Query

I was looking at the Meta page and all of the great studies that this team has been working on. It was just unclear to me how you will go about implementing what you learned to the various Wiki Projects. I subscribe to the Wiki Research newsletter, am on several Wikipedia email lists and some of your work is still unfamiliar to me. How are you going about putting the insights you've gained into practice or, at least, circulate your findings to the larger Wikipedias community? Thanks. Liz ^{Read! Talk!} 03:03, 3 June 2014 (UTC)

Hi Liz, nice to hear from you. I think it depends on precisely which part you're talking about. Some of the projects have lead to permanent site-wide software changes while others have not, but overall we most definitely view ourselves not as an R&D department, but as a software development team. Our default cycle functions something like this: we identify a promising area, experiment with solutions, and then we implement solutions that test well. So far that's meant we have things like guided tours and task suggestions delivered to almost all new editors on the largest Wikipedias. We also just wrapped up our first test around asking anonymous editors to sign up. If that works well (it's looking promising so far) then that will get implemented for all unregistered editors as well. Steven Walling (WMF) • talk 05:51, 4 June 2014 (UTC)

Well, Steven, that sounds very practical! I visit a lot of new editor pages and I'd say less than half of them have welcome messages or Teahouse messages...for one thing, it seems like those steps aren't being done for IP editors and that's how a lot of people start their editing.

Do you issue reports on your findings or do you use your testing more as an internal guide when you are developing new features and programs? Liz ^{Read! Talk!} 15:49, 4 June 2014 (UTC)

All of our findings get documented in the Research namespace on Meta. We've got a list of in progress/complete stuff at this landing page. :) We also do posts on blog.wikimedia.org to try and summarize things. Steven Walling (WMF) • talk 20:00, 4 June 2014 (UTC)