Hi everyone,
Earlier today, Editor Engagement Experiments deployed some updates to our Getting Started onboarding experiment, updates that move us in to a a new phase of development that is pretty important.
In addition to some changes in the text of the page and interface design, we deployed a new EventLogging schema which will let us know which of the three tasks in the page are more popular with new users. We also enabled a split test, where half of users get the old landing page with no tasks, to be able to figure out whether we're overall helping or hurting new editor engagement with this version.
Perhaps most importantly, we switched from relying on User:SuggestBot to generate the tasks, to doing it in the GettingStarted extension itself. The backend for doing this is still very new and somewhat fragile, but now we have the ability to draw from whatever number and type of categories we want, to create a task list. You can see in Special:GettingStarted now on English Wikipedia that we can already generate a new list of articles for every viewer, though imperfectly.
*TL;DR *This is a big step forward, for two reasons:
1. it means that we can experiment more easily with what kind of tasks to deliver, and how to present them best 2. we're much closer to being able to roll out GettingStarted to Wikipedias other than English. The main requirement still is that you have to-do items in categories, like Wikipedia:Backlog on English Wikipedia.