On Thu, Mar 14, 2013 at 10:45 PM, Steven Walling <swalling(a)wikimedia.org>wrote;wrote:
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.
Hey all,
Just a quick update (as opposed to my usual separate email), but today we
deployed no major design updates, but did some fixes that I'm glad to see
happen, especially...
- The RecentChanges tag for 'gettingstarted
edit<https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special:RecentChanges&am…
was not updating last week, but that's fixed now. some qualitative
analysis of the
edits<https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Research:Onboarding_new_Wikipedian…gt;too,
similar to what we did for the previous version of GettingStarted.
- We made some improvements to the reliability of the task generation,
so now you're pretty much always going to get the desired number of tasks
in each category.
- We're continuing the split test, since the data should be more
valuable with the above improvements and others, but we'll also be
starting quantitative analysis of the impact of the new
Special:GettingStarted.
Keep an eye out for an announcement next week, talking about our next ideas
for testing different task flows in GettingStarted, as well as addition of
helpers such as Echo notifications.
--
Steven Walling
https://wikimediafoundation.org/