[Foundation-l] [Wikimedia Announcements] Fwd: Announcement: New editor engagement experiments team!

[Steven Walling]

On Sat, Mar 24, 2012 at 4:16 PM, Sarah <slimvirgin at gmail.com> wrote:

> Does anyone know what kind of experiments we're talking about?


I can partially clarify here...

- These will not be "pilot projects" resembling the Global Education
Program in any particular country. (Which is why it's very strange to be
using it as an example in the context of this announcement and the ensuing
discussion.) We won't be doing offline outreach to thousands of students or
any other particular group.
- These will not be large-scale new features that move quickly to permanent
deployment, such as the Article Feedback Tool or PendingChanges.

The best example I can give now is the A/B testing of user talk templates
that Maryana and I have done. Since we'll have design and developer
resources for these new experiments however, they will be different in
regards to how quickly the tests happen and how tech-heavy they are.
Another decent example was the Account Creation Improvement Project which
happened last year, though that was another example which took longer than
the timeframe we want to work on.

We're still in the beginning of working on our list of experiments (we
don't actually officially start until April ~16th), but by then we'll have
a list of possibilities to share. Since these won't be English Wikipedia
only, the documentation will be on a wiki like MediaWiki.org and Meta. If
you have any strong feelings about how you'd like updates to happen or have
experiment ideas, we'd be happy to hear them.

Steven