On Tue, Aug 26, 2014 at 7:34 AM, Edward Saperia <ed@wikimanialondon.org> wrote:
While I am a great supporter of your team's work, I'd just like to comment on the above;

Wiser community members are aware that they are part of a powerful ecosystem, and that taming this ecosystem is a far more leveraged pursuit than doing the work yourself. Creating additional endpoints for onboarding processes that you're exposing to new users should be something that all projects are excited to take part in, so hopefully you'd want to poll the community for the valuable "Yes, and..." responses you'll get.

If you find you don't get responses like this, perhaps you might want to consider re-framing your new functionality as open infrastructure that the rest of the community is invited to build on, for example maybe wikiprojects themselves could specify the suggestions that are shown to new editors who edit in their subject areas?

Given appropriate tools to track effectiveness, this could create a huge, open environment for experimentation that could find interesting solutions faster than any engineering department ever could on their own.

Edward Saperia

Hi Ed, 

Thanks for your thoughtful comments. What Oliver said about "appropriate tools to track effectiveness" is correct. Additionally though, I should note that what we're building in Growth is already an open platform. Just a very experimental and not particularly well-documented one. ;-)

The very simple recommendations engine we've built is a part of the public MediaWiki API.[1] If there are WikiProject members or others in the community with the technical chops and will to extend what we're doing for different use cases, we'd be happy to help with advice and code review. 

In the meantime, however, our team's goal is to find the right kind of editor for Wikipedia, get them contributing, and get them to stick around.[2] We're going to do whatever it takes to make that happen. 

1. See the 'gettingstartedgetpages' portion of https://en.wikipedia.org/w/api.php 

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Steven Walling,
Product Manager