Thanks for mentioning the WMF Growth team [1], Pine. This is a really interesting thread that has touched on much of what the team has been working on alongside the Czech, Korean, Arabic, and Vietnamese Wikipedia communities (and with the advice of people from many different communities along the way).
We've tried to base our approach in research on newcomers, which taught us that newcomers face three main types of challenges: technical, conceptual, and cultural [2]. For instance, the research tells us that the rules of the wiki are hard to learn, and that a negative first interaction can cause a newcomer to leave the wiki and not return -- but that a positive interaction, such as getting advice from a friendly editor, can cause them to stay.
Over the last year and a half, we have experimented on mid-size Wikipedias with features that promote good communication between new and experienced users [3], that help newcomers teach themselves [4], and that give newcomers easy tasks to do [5]. The goal is to build an experience for newcomers that helps them get on a positive track in their first days on the wiki, and want to stick around to join their communities. It's possible that what we've learned and built so far will apply differently to the largest Wikipedias.
I hope that anyone who is interested in newcomers can tell us about their own experiences and ideas on our team's discussion page [6], or on the discussion pages of any of our projects. It's very important to us that the things we build fit in with how communities work today. Over the next year, we're planning to expand the Growth features to more wikis, so we definitely want to talk to people who think the features might be a good fit for their wikis.
To keep informed about the Growth team, please subscribe to our newsletter [7].
[1] https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Growth [2] https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/New_Editor_Experiences [3] https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Growth/Personalized_first_day/Newcomer_homepa... [4] https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Growth/Focus_on_help_desk [5] https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Growth/Personalized_first_day/Newcomer_tasks [6] https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Talk:Growth [7] https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Growth/Newsletters
On Wed, Feb 26, 2020 at 3:07 AM Vi to vituzzu.wiki@gmail.com wrote:
Not really, drawing practical advices/lessons (e.g. "differentiate among kinds of COIs") is the only sensible path towards solving issues. "Let's be kind" is close to a tautology.
Vito
Il giorno mer 26 feb 2020 alle ore 09:59 Andy Mabbett < andy@pigsonthewing.org.uk> ha scritto:
On Tue, 25 Feb 2020 at 20:36, Vi to vituzzu.wiki@gmail.com wrote:
Hard to tell anything without the relevant link(s).
For you, maybe. Others have already given helpful replies.
My question was generic, and not about the specific case I gave as an example.
I chose not to post links to to the example, both in order to avoid a pile-on, and to avoid us being distracted by the minutiae of the incident concerned.
-- Andy Mabbett @pigsonthewing http://pigsonthewing.org.uk
Wikimedia-l mailing list, guidelines at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines and https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia-l New messages to: Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, mailto:wikimedia-l-request@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe
Wikimedia-l mailing list, guidelines at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines and https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia-l New messages to: Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, mailto:wikimedia-l-request@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe