On the topic of Wikiprojects and retention, have there been any attempts at directing newcomers to Wikiprojects? Sent from my iPhone

I'm not convinced that the first three of those tell you much about the health of a wikiproject. For example when I first reviewed the word staring I replaced most of them in Bollywood related articles with "starring", or I felt jaundiced "appearing". That would have boosted the first two stats, but I'd dispute that it said anything about the health of the wikiproject. A few years ago during the cleanup exercise of unreferenced BLPs, I was involved in an exercise where we used bots to notify about 700 wiki projects of unreferenced BLPs in their areas. It was an interesting test of the health of wikiprojects, and hopefully some day an Internet historian will find it a suitable topic for a thesis. I've since dabbled in the idea of testing a welcome to newbies that steers them to a relevant wikiproject based on the area of their first edits, but I haven't done enough or in a sufficiently organised way to generate useful data. If I were trying to judge the health of a wikiproject in terms of whether they are a good thing to direct newbies to I would be more interested in questions such as: How many active editors are watchlisting that wikiproject? Is there a collaborative exercise going on there that newbies can join? If a newbie asks a question there how likely are they to get a worthwhile reply and how quickly do they get that reply? Does the wikiproject have some useful information in terms of sources that one can trust or that are outdated or otherwise flawed? More broadly it would be good to know if wikiprojects are good for editor recruitment and retention. My hypothesis is that if someone if someone tries out editing Wikipedia and is steered to an active and relevant wikiproject then they will be more likely to continue after that first trial edit. I simply don't know whether introducing people to inactive wikiprojects is worthwhile or what the cutoff is on activity. As for retention I am pretty sure that being involved in an active wikiproject is a positive for editor retention. I suspect that being involved in multiple wikiprojects is also a positive, I would be fascinated to know whether being involved in smaller wikiprojects and especially being the sole champion of a wikiproject makes active editors more or less likely to stay on the project. If I'm at least partially right in that editors in active wikiprojects are more likely to stay active longer than other editors then we could have a phenomenon here that will over time exacerbate wikipedia's problem of patchy coverage with the better covered topics improving faster than the gaps. Conversely if each topic has a founder effect then over time Wikipedia will become less uneven as more and more topics go through the phase of having an active editor or editors making their mark on the topic by radically improving articles. Regards Jonathan