Looking at the list of WikiProjects you pointed at, they seem to be a mixture of what I would call "process" projects (e.g. Articles for Creation, Deletion Sorting) vs "content" projects (e.g. Military History, Television) vs a third group like "Women in Red" (which is part process, part content).
Generally the "content" projects will tag Talk pages with their WikiProject Banner. But "process" projects don't seem to always do this. For example, I don't think Women in Red has a project banner generally, although I think they do tag articles that arise from specific Edit-a-thons. Some of the process projects seem to use hidden categories for their work.
I would suggest only working with content projects initially. Content projects are more similar to one another in how they operate compared to process projects, and I think it is easier to judge if a user is showing an interest in a content project than in the process project because of standard use of content project banners on articles. So I think you can probably get a better understanding if the referral mechanism is working or not with content projects, whereas I think process projects have a lot of variability in them that may make it difficult to work out if you are seeing success or not.
And at the end of the day, as an encyclopedia, we live or die on our content. Processes are (or at least should be) supportive of good content development but are a second-order effect.
I can certainly see some issues arising from pointing newcomers at process projects as they are unlikely to be aware of the processes at that stage. And indeed some process project do not accept new editors (think of Articles for Creation and new page patrolling). I'd see this as a second project if the content project referral mechanism seems to be working.
Anyhow, that my 10cc!
Kerry
----Original Message----- From: Wiki-research-l [mailto:wiki-research-l-bounces@lists.wikimedia.org] On Behalf Of Bowen Yu Sent: Tuesday, 20 June 2017 4:35 PM To: Research into Wikimedia content and communities wiki-research-l@lists.wikimedia.org Subject: [Wiki-research-l] Research about WikiProject Recommendation
Hi all,
We are preparing to conduct a study about WikiProject recommendations. The goals of our study are (1) to understand the effectiveness of different recommendation algorithms on recruiting new members to WikiProjects, and (2) to evaluate the effectiveness of this intervention on engaging and retaining Wikipedia newcomers.
In this study, we will recommend related editors to the organizers of WikiProjects, and request them to approach and recruit the editors. We will measure the actions and reactions of the organizers and editors for evaluation. More details about our study can be found here on this meta-page https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Research:WikiProject_Recommendation.
While planning the experimental design, we thought to gather more thoughts and suggestions from the community since this study would involve the efforts of some Wikipedians, so we wanted to open it up. Also, if you know of existing work or study in this area, please let us know. Thanks!
Sincerely, Bowen _______________________________________________ Wiki-research-l mailing list Wiki-research-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wiki-research-l