Sujet sur Discussion utilisateur:Trizek/Archives/2015 - 2023

Hi Trizek; I attended your and Samat's presentation Onboarding and Retention: Hungarian and French Wikipedias in Stockholm and found it very interesting. I'm trying to find out what, maybe, German-language Wikipedia could learn from your approaches to improve retention of newbies and the number of active editors. One thing I learned is that in French Wikipedia, you use Flow for the "Forum des nouveaux" (German Wikipedia on the other hand uses, as everywhere, the classic approach for "Fragen von Neulingen".) Another thing seems to be a somewhat different approach to newbie welcoming messages and mentoring, though I'm not yet quite sure where the key differences are. Did I get this right:

• French Wikipedia uses uniformly Modèle:Bienvenue nouveau to welcome new users, all new users (or only new users with edits?) are welcomed using this template, it is distributed by a bot, but always signed by a specific human editor.
  • Is the user who signed the message then seen as in some way "responsible" for the newbie and being their designated contact person?
• German Wikipedia uses a variety of welcoming templates, people are free to choose one from de:Kategorie:Vorlage:Begrüßung (particulary frequently used are de:Vorlage:Hallo, de:Vorlage:Willkommen, and de:Vorlage:Begrüßungsbox.) These are distributed at the discretion of people welcoming new editors (not by a bot). They contain pointers to the mentoring programme where people can, if they want, choose a specific mentor or place a wish for mentoring (a mentor will then respond).
• It seems that you have some kind of new mentorship programme which replaced your old one. In your presentation on page 8, you say that "the opt-in Mentorship program is not used anymore". How is it different from your current Mentorship programme, that is, I particularly don't quite understand how the new programme is no longer "opt-in"? Is it mandatory? How would you describe how it differs from the German system?

Hello Gestumblindi, and thank you for your message!

We use Modèle:Bienvenue nouveau to welcome every new account created on French Wikipedia. The template is distributed by a bot, but it can also be manually distributed of needed. The message is signed by someone from a list, and that person is the point of contact on the wiki for the newcomer. They are not responsible for their edits, though (welcomers don't review what their assigned newcomers do).

We also have more welcome messages, mostly for IPs to encourage them to create an account.

Concerning the mentorship program, I meant by "opt-in" that newcomers had to go there and find someone, contact that person and more or less commit to edit. I guess that's the way it works on German Wikipedia?

We have discovered that this mentorship system is not efficient. The signed welcome message, with a clear call to action ("please contact me if you have any question") is what people are looking for. If they want to edit an article about sports, they don't need to find someone who is interested about sport to know how to ad a citation or use a template. If people have specific questions about sport, they can be redirected to the matching wikiproject. Wikiprojects can also contact newcomers that are working on their field.

This is why the mentorship program is not used much anymore and has been progressively removed from the welcome message. And now, new mentorship relations are based on the welcome message.

I hope that I've replied to your questions. If not, please ask! I'll be very happy to provide you more information. :)

Thanks for the reply, Trizek! In response to your question:

Concerning the mentorship program, I meant by "opt-in" that newcomers had to go there and find someone, contact that person and more or less commit to edit. I guess that's the way it works on German Wikipedia?

Well, more or less. German Wikipedia's approach to welcoming newcomers is muss less methodical. If users are welcomed, then manually by those who like doing this job, choosing one of the several available templates at their discretion. The messages then are individually signed, which however doesn't mean that the "welcomers" necessarily view themselves as the point of contact. Not all new accounts are greeted/welcomed at all, there is an element of randomness to it, I'd say (has someone of the dedicated "welcomers" seen the account? have they deemed them worthy of being welcomed? etc.) Usually, these messages contain a pointer to de:Wikipedia:Mentorenprogramm, where users are encouraged to place a wish for a mentor on their user page with the big, blue button; alternatively, they can choose a specific mentor from the list. So they do have to "go there", but (if welcomed with such a template), at least they have received a pointer. But obviously, your approach seems to work better.

I plan to write an article for German Wikipedia's Signpost equivalent (Kurier) where I will try to present some thoughts on possible ways we could learn from the French and Hungarian approaches.

So not everyone is welcomed on your wiki? I don't know how people can feel when they discover this.

I don't think we thought about welcoming bad people, or people that "don't worth" to be welcomed. I think we have just assumed good faith and decided to welcome everyone, because we can't guess if they are doing to do some bad changes or not (or show redemption after "testing the system". :)

Feel free to ask me more questions if you need. I'm happy to help.

There are opinions in German-language Wikipedia's community that it would seem silly to welcome obvious spammers or self-promoters, or that this would devaluate the welcoming of actually well-intentioned newcomers. So I think it will be hard to propose a system where absolutely *everyone* is welcomed (that's what you do? Even spammers?), I suppose that people still want some kind of checking before issuing a welcome message. But on the other hand, as said before, your approach seems to work (better). I have been away for a few days and will continue researching this matter a bit later.

We welcome absolutely everyone, assuming that anyone is a future good faith editor.

How can we know if someone is a spammer? Spammers may make a couple of good edits (and be welcomed) before having a bad behavior. Some spammers are not real spammers, but good faith users who think that they are doing the right thing.

For the latter, have a point of contact may help them: they can question an experienced editor about what they want to do. It happen to me once, when a public institution wanted to manually add thousand of Authorities links to Wikipedia articles: I redirected them to some Wikidata gurus, and everyone was happy.

Welcoming everyone is a zero-cost effort, since it is a bot work, and mentors don't have any responsibility on people they welcome actions. Spammers and vandals are still blocked: they were welcomed by a human person to act nicely but they didn't took the opportunity to do so. The real benefit is that good faith people and users who doubt about their actions or have questions about their edits are sure to have a point of contact. 100% benefit for the wiki! :)

The Growth team^[1] works on a Homepage system, a sort of a basecamp for newcomers. This Homepage is given to every newcomer^[2] with a mentor that would help them. So far, the link to the mentor seems to be used, which seems to prove that giving to newcomers a point of contact is important!

Thank you! I've now posted some thoughts on possible ways of learning from Hungarian and French Wikipedia in German-language's Wikipedia "Kurier": de:Wikipedia:Kurier.

Thank you!

I've run Google translate on it and it is a pleasant text. I like a lot the fact that you encourage your community to think about improving newcomers' first steps. This is something every Wikipedia should do!

Another quick question, if I may: You say "We welcome absolutely everyone". Is this including accounts that are automatically created through SUL (when people from other projects visit French Wikipedia), or only accounts newly created here, in French Wikipedia?

Only accounts newly created on French Wikipedia. Otherwise, it would spam everyone, which is not the goal. :)

We "manually" welcome accounts that haven't been welcomed yet, because they've been created on another wiki (or because the bot was on strike).

Thanks for the quick reply! I'm currently in the process of preparing a first informal poll with the intention of finding out whether there would be enough support for a similar system in German-language Wikipedia: de:Wikipedia:Umfragen/Begrüssung von Neulingen. Yet another question: How many accounts per day are welcomed on average, and how many people are available as "welcomers"?

I haven't recently checked how many edits Loveless (the welcome bot) makes. Yesterday, it posted 457 welcome messages. It seems to be consistant with the stats provided.

Concerning the number of "welcomers", it varies depending on the activity, but we have a core of about 20 active users always around.

Any reactions to your article in the Kurier?

Thanks again. Yes, there were encouraging reactions to my article on the Kurier discussion page (maybe you want to have a look at it using Google Translate, too). That was the reason for me to proceed with creating the poll.

By the way: I noticed that there are also more new accounts created in French Wikipedia than in German. Comparing the number of newly created accounts from 1 May to 1 September 2019, there were 52K in French and only 35K in German Wikipedia. So you have a larger number of people who make the very first step of creating an account, before newcomer welcoming actions kick in. That's not surprising, as there are, I think, two to three times more French than German speakers in the world (depending on how you count). But even when considering this, we have of course a much greater decline in active editors.

You have a lot of reactions. I'll read them later.

About accounts, I agree with your analysis, which seems to be much more realistic than the one recently published in the Signpost.

I really wish you to succeed in your efforts to improve editor retention! Remember that you can get the Growth team prototypes on your wiki.

The informal survey (not yet a formal "Meinungsbild" vote) on whether German-language Wikipedia should adopt the French system, or a similar system, has now started and people are giving their opinions at de:Wikipedia:Umfragen/Begrüssung von Neulingen. It will be open until 31 October.

Great!

I note that you already have 15 people ready to welcome newcomers. This is already a victory it itself.

Also it appears that a majority of people are for adopting the French system.

Concerning people who are against a bot and who think that it would confuse newcomers, I have something like one newbie who ping me per year, asking me who is Loveless. And Loveless user page is clear: it is a bot that picks a real human name and distribute messages. So there is no particular worries to have from this perspective.

Hi Trizek; I thought you might find it interesting to know where we're now standing. The result of the informal survey was very encouraging. Most participants support an approach based on French Wikipedia's welcoming system. As a next step, we're planning a test run: During a limited period (maybe 4 weeks), half of the newly created accounts in German-language Wikipedia will receive an automated welcoming message, then the result will be evaluated. To prevent the welcoming of obvious spammers and vandals, the welcoming messages will be distributed with a certain time delay (to be determined, maybe 6 hours) and only accounts that are not blocked by then will receive it.

If it can be shown that the welcoming message has a measurable effect on user activity (compared to the "control group" which will not receive a message), the next step will be a formal Meinungsbild poll proposing the adoption of the welcoming system. There's now a coordination page for the project where already 42 people have declared that they would like to be part of the "welcoming team". That's considerably more welcomers than you have listed at Projet:Aide et accueil/Signatures :-) - so I'm very optimistic. But the thorough and highly formalized processes at German-language Wikipedia take their time. If we're lucky, we will be ready to present our freshly introduced welcoming system at next Wikimania, I think ;-)

Hello Gestumblindi

Thank you for the update! This is amazing.

Like on your wiki, we also had a lot of people involved in the efforts concerning improving newcomers first steps. Many of them worked or supported on all the tools and processes we've created since 2011. Our project is not as active anymore as it used to be (maybe we have finished a first phase of work?) and now we have indeed less people involved. I wish you a great success like we had during years, working on welcoming newcomers!

The list of mentors on French Wikipedia is different from the list of people involved in welcoming newcomers. Since working directly with newcomers takes time and resources, the list of people signing the messages can vary over time.

If you create a mentor list page, don't forget to link it to Q14339834. :)

Keep me posted about the results of your experiment concerning the welcome message. I'm really curious about it.

I wish you a great success (and not much pain in all the processes) for this experiment!

Hi Trizek; unfortunately, the results of the test run were not encouraging. There was no measurable positive effect of the automated welcoming message on the activity of welcomed users in comparison to those in the control group who didn't receive a message. Translating the statistics after two months (December and January):

Group	Total	With edits	With edits in article namespace	With sighted edits	Locally or globally blocked
Welcomed people	7209	683	512	241	55
Control group	7329	699	560	273	54

We then discussed for a while possible approaches to improve the welcoming system (visually more appealing message? automated message specifically for new accounts without edits? only welcome "promising" users with edits? ...) - but now it seems that the whole project is slowly petering out - well, after we invested quite a lot of effort in the test run, and it seems it was more or less a failure, I personally haven't a lot of energy for such projects left, and it seems others feel similarly.

Hello Gestumblindi

Thank you for sharing these results.

People aiming to come to Wikipedia and vandalize will do it no matter if they are welcomed or not. this is what I read from your statistics. People who come willing to improve the encyclopedia seem to find their way too.

But the ones who aren't helped will certainly leave if they miss a point of contact. So if I can leave you some advice, it would be to keep the welcome message active, and, why not, think about deploying the Growth experiments.

Concerning the message itself, I don't know if there is a good design to use. A lot of designed have bee tried, but never tested. We are currently having a test to know if a button is better than a simple link to contact the mentor.

I understand how difficult it is to keep your mood high. However, you've been able to gather some people to run this test, and that's already a success. And I don't think that your test is a failure since we've learnt interesting things there! Keep me posted if you have a new project around newcomers in mind. :)

Stay safe!