Community Wishlist Survey 2019/Editing/Flag edits by new editors (editor retention tool)

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Flag edits by new editors (editor retention tool)

• Problem: Wikipedia is steadily losing editors. If a new editor has all their edits reverted, they are much less likely to become a long-term editor (survival drops from three-in-five to one-in-five). Even one revert discourages newbies. Revising or tagging new editors' edits does not have the same discouraging effect. It can even be taken as praise[1]; personalized constructive criticism is especially helpful.[2]

  In other words, every time I help two to three new editors make their first retainable, productive edits, I win Wikipedia a long-term editor and multiply my contribution; and to do this I need to treat the new editor with additional care. Problem is, I don't know who they are, and the user interface makes it difficult for me to not auto-bite newbies.

Experienced editors can deal with a bold revert and a line of jargon, and it's efficient, but it scares new editors off. I want to know when I am interacting with a new editor, so it's easier for me, as an editor, to behave in ways that promote editor retention. For instance:

1. leaving edit summaries which are educational and comprehensible to a newbie (e.g. link all jargon), so the newbie can learn community norms
2. tagging edits with Inline cleanup tags, so the newbie can learn what is wrong with their edits
3. fixing edits (rephrasing copyvio or bias, sourcing, etc.), so the newbie can learn how to make good edits

• Who would benefit: Increasing retention is critical to the long-term survival of our community.

• Proposed solution: An icon-style flag on edits, saying this edit was made by a new editor, would be nice. It would also let me rescue edits others have reverted. A list of edits by new editors can already be generated by using filters in Recent changes, but I'd like to see the information in the article history, so I see it in my regular editing practice (that is, without going to a dedicated page, like Recent changes, or using specialized tools such as Snuggle or STiki). Others may prefer a similar flag in watchlists.

While I hope it would prompt help, such a newbie flag might also stigmatize new editors, and thus hurt their integration into the community. This should be tested. One alternative might be to flag only reverted edits by good-faith new editors, and have an edit notice prompting anyone reverting a new editor (especially using a tool) to be aware that this is a new editor, so they can react appropriately.

As I need to mention in the edit summary if I am fixing an edit of a declared-COI editor, a (different, obviously) COI flag for COI edits would also be useful. Flagging edits by vandals reverted with "rvv" with yet another flag might also be an easy extension.

Since helpful advice when reverting good-faith newbies almost always includes a referral to the Teahouse, it might be nice to have that added to the revert notice automatically for the first 2 months/100 edits (or empirically-determined thresholds).

Old list of suggestions

Let's try a variety of simple changes and see what works. I do not have the knowledge to judge how hard it would be to implement these suggestions; I'd favour leaving those who do the latitude to pick out the easiest, testing the effects any changes made. For clarity, the proposal is not to implement all these suggestions, just one or more of them. Vandals reverted with "rvv" should be excluded; I don't want to retain those editors!

1. If I'm reverting an edit by a new editor, I'd like an edit notice that tells me that I am doing so, prompting me to behave accordingly (say, by fixing the edit if possible, or at least giving a less jargon-filled edit summary and wikilinking any necessary jargon to the official policy). An explicit prompt could be as simple as a link to a how-to on helping new editors become productive.
2. New editors rarely spontaneously use anything except the article pages, and may not be aware of edit histories. So if they got even a generic "you may be able to modify and restore your reverted edit[s] to X, the Teahouse can explain" notification, rather than the standard "your edit on X has been reverted, [jargon-filled revert comment]", that might help. Being referred to the Teahouse increases retention.[3] This would fit with the existing Phab Focus on help desk.
3. Be honest with newbies. Warn them that the first two months are a steep learning curve, but it then gets easier, and they will face less hostility. See if it helps to add this info to welcome messages and milestone notifications (those "You just made your Xth edit!" things, but maybe more "All your edits have been reverted! We get a lot of vandalism and tend to be a bit over-zealous about policing new edits, sorry if that's what's happened here. The Teahouse can tell you how to fix.").
4. An icon-style flag in edit histories, saying this edit was made by a new editor, would be nice. This will let me quickly fix up the odd fixable edit. It will also let me know when a new editor has had their edits reverted. Any tool to do this should be arranged so that I see it in my regular editing practice (that is, without using specialized tools such as Snuggle or STiki). As I need to mention in the edit summary if I am fixing an edit of a declared-COI editor, a flag for those would also be useful.
5. If I don't have the time to rescue the edit and fix it, a thanks-like button to mark an edit as good-faith would be nice. It could then be added to a per-article list; this would be really useful for seeing where content needs to be expanded, as even unusable good-faith edits may indicate an omission in the article.
6. A bot that told me when content I've added was quoted in a talk page without a ping would help me respond to new editors and IPs.
7. I'd quite like some feedback on how many editors my editing behaviour has helped retain or sent packing. It would be encouraging, especially if the algorithm was transparent enough to tell me what I did right or wrong. This might be integrated into userboxes (allowing one to show off one's Wikiotter or Wikigryphon-like nurturing of new editors) or other editor tools.
8. Personalized messages increase editor retention more than boilerplate ones, which may actually be demotivating.[4] Anything that helps established editors provide more personalized messages would be a plus (of instance, an optional comment attached to thanks, or automated assistance in adjusting the level of my criticism to the editor's experience by linking to policies etc.). If it's easier for me to grasp what another editor has been doing, I can make a more relevant message with less effort. As constructive criticism is valuable, a list of the edit comments of all the reverts of their edits would be useful (if they keep having copyvio problems, for instance, I might give them a more detailed explanation of copyvio). A list of what they've been thanked for (especially thanks comments) would give me a quick overview of their strengths, allowing me to praise and request edits more appropriately. For experienced editors, I can often find this information on their talk pages, but a newbie's talk page may be a redlink. It would also be nice to get an automated warning before posting a newbie-discouraging template on a newbie's talk page (or a template starting "Welcome to Wikipedia!" on the page of someone who's been editing 15 years).
9. If an experienced editor gets a notification of an edit due to a page being on their watchlist, the notification could mention the person making making the edit is a new editor and prompt appropriate responses as in point number 1
10. Making positive actions and interactions more prominent and legible. The intention here being to make it intuitively obvious to new editors what behaviors are celebrated within the community. For instance, a thanks counter in the top link bar next to the notifications. In some ways Wikipedia was the prototype social media, and other, later platforms have done a lot of research into promoting engagement. While some of the tactics they developed seem unethical and unlikely to be accepted by a democratic community, this one seems fairly harmless.
11. Encourage new editors to physically meet experienced ones. For instance, run banner ads saying something like "The Somewheretown Wikimedia Meetup will meet [this Tuesday the 7th/the first Tuesday of every month] at 6:30 in the Main Library. Editors and readers are invited to attend!". Geolocation is already used for banner ads, so technically this should be easy if the meetups want it (has it been done already?).
12. Point it out to new editors when they are contributing content that few others can. This seems to encourage effort.[5] Telling them that they are one of few editors in [specific specialized subject area] or are valued for specific rare expertise may help. Some projects do this formally, but generally not until the editor has been highly productive for a year or so. Helping experienced editors give recognition of rare skills and interests earlier and in a more personalized way may help.
13. We have bots that detect and revert vandalism. Could we have a mentor bot to go over the edits (or edit suggestions, or reversion comments) of new editors and give targeted advice? Automated, but personalized criticism, with an opt-out and a final message that says that the editor has progressed so far that it is unlikely the bot can help further. The bot could detect and advise on copyvio (using Earwig), a lack of sourcing, and formatting errors, for starters.

I'm very much open to suggestions here, as I am aware that many others have more knowledge and experience than I in this area.

• More comments:

• Phabricator tickets:

• Proposer: HLHJ (talk) 04:15, 30 October 2018 (UTC)

Discussion

Discussion of old list of suggestions

• I agree that retaining editors is a critical problem but I’m not sure this will do much to help. First, I think it’s rare for someone to have all their edits reverted. Second, the few times in my years of editing that I can think of that happening it was a case where someone deserved to have all their edits reverted because they were blatantly promoting a POV or otherwise ignoring basic policies. IMO, one of the most important things we could do, I know this will rub some people the wrong way, is to make more of a distinction between recruiting new editors and retaining existing ones. Too many policies such as allowing people to edit without logging in are based on the early days of Wikipedia when access to the Internet was mostly restricted to academics, techies, and other people who were mostly responsible and serious. A good part of my time is spent reverting edits by people who just think it’s a laugh to mess with Wikipedia or who start editing without bothering to learn even the basic policies. Two changes I would make are 1) you can’t edit unless you have an account and are logged in and 2) you can’t even try to create a new page until you have some small number of constructive unreverted edits. I may suggest those below. I also think we need a better process to escalate disagreements. The reason I don’t edit nearly as much as I used to is that I got so tired of the drudgery of trying to “reach a consensus” with someone who didn’t have a clue about the topic and/or basic Wikipedia policies. I would always eventually get the correct resolution but it takes so long to finally get an admin. Note I’m not talking about legitimate debates, I actually think it’s something we do very well but cases where it’s obvious one editor is clearly ignoring basic policies or promoting a POV. --MadScientistX11 (talk) 19:16, 30 October 2018 (UTC)

I agree almost 100 percent with this post. Everyone who wants to edit should have an account. Perhaps the problem is not too few editors. Perhaps the problem is that Wikipedia is too big and indiscriminate. There are many obvious ways to address that.
Vmavanti (talk) 18:16, 4 November 2018 (UTC)

It's not so rare - if you try to edit one of the TV show article (ex. Halcyon) - you probably get your edits reverted because of "promotion" rule (but it may be that I probably don't fully grasp the concept of promotion). Result: after a couple of discussions I lost the will to edit any kind of articles related to TV shows :)

1) you can’t edit unless you have an account and are logged in I do not really see how it could help. What will stop these people from creating a fake / temporary account? It will stop only those less motivated, but at the same time will limit people who only want to make a small correction/addition. (unsigned comment added by Special:Contributions/89.25.210.104)

• I see a solution in inviting people to wikiprojects and helping them grow - then newcomers may receive more personalized attention. Perhaps a user who received an invite to a wikiproject could be added to a particular category (ie Category:invited to a wikiproject/Project name here) which the wikiproject members have on their watchlist. Gryllida 22:21, 30 October 2018 (UTC)
• User:EpochFail, can you tell us what proportion of new editors had all their edits rejected in your sample? The editors where I've hunted down all their edits and made sure they were reverted were doing things like randomly adding a commercial URL in the middle of articles. I rarely notice the ones who've been totally reverted for non-egregious stuff, like they've just not quite followed sourcing rules, or come up against the POV of an established editor. I've only noticed any such editors since I began looking for them, and it's time-consuming to look for them (hence the proposal to make flagging them automatic; I'd also like to be auto-notified if I revert their last surviving edit). There are some pleasant things about our Eternal August, like working with more experienced editors. On the downside, on current trends, eventually the noobs (and paid editors) will outnumber the experienced editors and the editing culture will change drastically. I'm very much in favour of inviting new editors to join Wikiprojects, as a separate issue (tho this proposal would make them easier to find). I believe the German-language Wikipedia has ~such rules around the permissions of new editors, MadScientistX11, but this seems a separate issue. HLHJ (talk) 01:58, 31 October 2018 (UTC)
  • The models I have built suggested that it's more about even experiencing one rejection -- not necessarily having all edits rejected -- as it is the more clear predictor of retention (or rather against retention). Snuggle is a good way to find such editors, but as you suggest, it's not optimal to have to use some sort of external tool to identify these editors.
  • One modeling problem that my team is looking at right now is the fundamental prediction that Snuggle makes: is this editor at least trying to contribute productively? We're in the process of deploying new strategies for doing this that could be used to inform the behavior bots that interact with newcomers. E.g. en:User:HostBot could use this to more quickly route good-faith new editors to the en:WP:Teahouse. It might be worthwhile to include these predictions in MediaWiki's user interface.
  • A more long term goal that I have is to model which newcomers are in the most dire need of support. My goal is to combine two questions: 1. how likely is it that this user will leave (as predicted by the retention model), and 2. if they were to stay, how much would they likely contribute (using a model based on initial motivation measures)? Essentially, that would allow us to produce a list of high potential, high risk editors to reach out to. You might even imagine registering to receiving a high potential/high risk notification for an editor who is working within a subject area that you are interested in.
  • With all of that said, I think the biggest hurtle to getting this incorporated into your workflows (in Wikipedia/MediaWiki) is getting a prediction model into production Wikimedia servers. We have policy against having UI components rely on external services and implementing modeling workflows in MediaWiki is preventatively difficult. So it'll probably come down to getting these predictions into mw:ORES and building UI components that harvest the predictions. I'm excited that you have filed this wishlist proposal. If this proposal gets substantial support that will help me prioritize the work (with my User:Halfak (WMF) hat on) and partner with CommTech to get some useful UI components together. Either way, I'd love to continue to think about and work on ideas that move in this direction. Thanks for pinging me :) --EpochFail (talk) 20:31, 1 November 2018 (UTC)
    • A belated thank you for the information, EpochFail. I modified the proposal accordingly, and I suspect that an implementation might make use of mw:ORES. HLHJ (talk) 02:11, 15 November 2018 (UTC)
• I've made a proposal under anti-harassment where newbies who lack wiki skills are suggested to go to Wikisource for a low-stress introduction to WS. At WS, content is provided so a newbie can learn protocol and develop confidence. It could tie in with this where newbies are identified and appropriate support provided. It would reduce individualised shepherding and free up moderators. My proposal Zoeannl (talk) 06:05, 5 November 2018 (UTC)
• @HLHJ: I'm Marshall Miller; I'm the product manager for WMF's Growth team. Our work is all about retaining new editors, especially on their first day. I'm really glad you're thinking about retention, and it's great that you recognize the potential for experienced editors to multiply their impact by nurturing newcomers. We hope that more editors in more projects think that way in the future. Since you're assembling a proposal around editor retention, I wanted to make sure you had a chance to check out our team's page, and the list of features we've considered this year. We're currently in the process of building three of those features. Your proposal gets at something we've talked a lot about: there are many experienced editors who want to help newcomers, but it's hard to find those newcomers. We know that some editors do things like filter their watchlists or recent changes to just newcomers so that they can spot good-faith contributions. I would be happy to discuss your proposal to help focus it. It sounds like the main problem is how to discover newcomers that could use some help or encouragement during their very first session. Is that right? -- MMiller (WMF) (talk) 01:33, 6 November 2018 (UTC)
• MMiller (WMF), EpochFail, thank you very much for your detailed replies. I am really glad that you are working on this problem. What I am asking for is, I think, a bit different from some of what I think you are working on.

Epochfail seems to be working for an algorithm that models future editor behaviour and picks out the best editors to help. This seems to me to involve several AI problems, and I'm worried that it is a superiority solution, but I may have misunderstood. As his (as I recall) research also shows that existing editors often disagree as to the quality of editors they agree are good-faith, I'm also worried about algorithmic bias.

MMiller and the Growth Team seem to be focussing on the experiences of new editors. This is a useful approach. This suggestion focusses on the experiences of experienced editors (which influence whether they unintentionally bite the newbies), but I've now added a bit more focus on interface changes for new editors. Some of the Growth Team's draft ideas, such as an optional "suggest edit" function, would also be useful for experienced editors (I'd love to link to such a thing from an RfC, for instance, and it would be great to be able to template-tag talk page comments as edit suggestions). I'd also appreciate some more feedback on my edits.

I have occasionally used new-user-specific pages to make edits devoted to discovering and helping new editors, but I soon went back to editing content I find interesting and useful. Similarly, mentoring new editors is not something I want to spend much time doing (though kudos to those who do). I don't want to make a separate activity out of editor retention, as that will make it a chore.

What I'm wanting are fairly simple nudge-like interventions that make it easier for me, as an editor, to behave in ways that promote editor retention. I want unobtrusive notices that I could do some little thing (like fixing an edit) that would help editor retention here, or here... appearing as I go about my day-to-day editing. Fixing edits would also help the newbies learn inductively ("So that's what I should have written... let me look up that syntax"). HLHJ (talk) 04:17, 8 November 2018 (UTC)

• On the social-changes side, Bluerasberry has suggested changing the Grants:Metrics#Three shared metrics metric of new editor participation to new editor retention. If this was done, there would be demand (and substantial funding) for tools to measure new editor retention. This could be done simply, by measuring retention at some watershed empirically shown to correlate with editor retention (e.g. two months after the intervention ends). But in the long term we'd want to know what sort of retention the projects fostered; EpochFail's model to estimate new editor's future productivity could be very useful here, and it would be continually tested and updated. HLHJ (talk) 05:45, 8 November 2018 (UTC)
• One of the issues I see is how processes like articles for creation can be slow and hostile to new editors trying to do the right thing, its also there that many of the editors lose all their work as its concentrated one article. The other scenario is when they try to add content that doent have a citation or has previous been removed as trivial by regular edits. For editors who arent auto confirmed maybe like when prompting for captcha, or an edit summary the question could be asked if over an arbitrary length they could be prompted to identify the source. While there we could just edit summaries compulsory for all Gnangarra (talk) 01:12, 9 November 2018 (UTC)

That's a neat idea, Gnangarra. An automatically-tailored common-problems edit notice for newbies (we might all want to use it, so that it gets debugged). If editors editing many articles have higher retention rates than those concentrating on one article, we might offer both as a sort of survival-tips message under point three ("be honest with newbies"). We might combine this with the suggested-edit function, too, so they could park edits which were automatically rated as likely to be rejected until they were passed by the Teahouse. HLHJ (talk) 03:06, 9 November 2018 (UTC)

Sort of an interactive and personalized version of the edit-page boilerplate "Content that violates any copyrights will be deleted. Encyclopedic content must be verifiable. Work submitted to Wikipedia can be edited, used, and redistributed—by anyone—subject to certain terms and conditions". HLHJ (talk) 07:35, 11 November 2018 (UTC)

Something similar to this is proposed at Community Wishlist Survey 2019/Bots and gadgets/User Script to Guide Students. HLHJ (talk) 01:43, 15 November 2018 (UTC)

• @HLHJ, your mention of nudge-like interventions that mesh with existing editor workflows resonates. Specifically, Proposed solution #4: making new editors more visible in the edit history UI. Riffing on this underlying hypothesis, that positive interactions between experienced editors and newcomers predicts higher retention, what do you think about experimenting with the email notifications triggered by changes to pages on your Watchlist? In particular, making explicit mention in the email's subject if a new editor is responsible for the change "you," the notification recipient, are being notified about. And perhaps in the body of the email, including a call to action inviting the recipient to leave a message on the new editor's talk page. This would be an effort to make new editors more visible (@MMiller (WMF)'s point) and I like how you phrased this piece: to make it, "...easier for me, as an editor, to behave in ways that promote editor retention." I mention this as a relatively new editor myself, who's found my social interactions with more tenured editors to be surprisingly impactful in encouraging me to continue editing. I also thought the Research Team's findings around the "Thanks" interaction and this study of the impacts of different socialization tactics (programmatic vs. personalized) to be informative. Stussll (talk) 08:11, 10 November 2018 (UTC)

That study looks fascinating, Stussll, I will have to go over it carefully. I found your comment very helpful. I've made some quick changes to the proposal, as the deadline is approaching. I'm afraid I've never used watchlists at all, so I am clueless there, but your proposal to modify watchlist notifications to prompt new editor care seems good to me. HLHJ (talk) 17:02, 10 November 2018 (UTC)

Great call bringing into question how widely used watchlists are. Your changes look great. And btw, I think you've done a really good job offering tangible solutions while also inviting additional input and facilitating the resulting conversation...I certainly felt eager to participate. Stussll (talk) 23:35, 10 November 2018 (UTC)

I have heard from people who use watchlists a lot (I suspect it's a matter of editing style), and I've included a suggestion on them. Thank you very much for the charming and usefully specific feedback, Stussll. HLHJ (talk) 07:37, 11 November 2018 (UTC)

• Oh and, @HLHJ! I just wanted to add emphasis to your point above RE the value in newcomers learning inductively, through direct feedback or even through observation of others' social interactions. Thinking about the latter leads me to wonder if there are opportunities to make existing social interactions within Wikipedia more legible to new editors thereby helping them independently arrive at an understanding for the kinds of behaviors that are celebrated within the community and those which are not. This might breach the scope of this particular proposal, but I wanted to make a mention of it because I think you raised an important point. Stussll (talk) 00:10, 11 November 2018 (UTC)

That was some interesting reading, and more to chase up on. Thank you, Stussll. You also have a point on visibility of community, and I do think that is in-scope (I've tried to add something on that to the proposal, do feel free to edit it for clarity or content). According to a source in the paper you shared, new editors pre-2007 seemed to initially not see the Wikipedia community;[6] I suspect that nowadays they may mostly see it only as a hostile force. They do not see role models, although they do see model article content. This mirrors my experience. However, you describe yourself as a new editor, and here you are discussing editor retention. This isn't a one-off, either; you started editing just after the ides of March of this year, and your first edits were to a city meetup page, your fifth edit was to a talk page, your sixth was to your own user page, and your 11th was to someone else's talk page (I just checked, hope you don't mind). You clearly saw, and were active in, the community from the start. If you don't mind my asking, what was different for you? How did and do you see our common community? HLHJ (talk) 07:35, 11 November 2018 (UTC)

This paper looks interesting, @HLHJ. I’m especially keen to read the interviews more closely…thank you for bringing this to my attention. The language you've added to the proposal looks great. I made a few small tweaks. I think it relates in so far as it's an effort to Please do let me know if they at all conflict with what you were intending. RE my experience with and perceptions of the community, I'm thinking on this, but I wanted to make sure I responded about the proposal before the team begins to go through them. In the meantime, I don’t at all mind that you checked my edit history. In fact, I appreciate it^_^ I read your effort as genuine curiosity in my experience and the perspective from which I’m speaking. Stussll (talk) 08:20, 12 November 2018 (UTC)

I like your modification "Making positive actions and interactions more prominent and legible. The intention here being to make it intuitively obvious to new editors what behaviors are celebrated within the community" (sorry for the slow response, Stussll, I only just saw it). Inductive learning and positive reinforcement in one. Reverts are very prominent in the current interface, but there is no prominent channel for detailed praise. New editors do not read other editor's talk pages (I've come across non-editors who had found out that such pages existed, but felt that reading them was an invasion of privacy). So they are unlikely to see WikiLove messages. I've never seen thanks for other people's edits, because the interface only pushes thanks directly aimed at me. And I mostly take my models from direct interactions of others with me, which limits my ability to learn from the mistakes of others rather than repeating them. Editor demand has tended to be for tools that make bad behaviour like vandalism more obvious so it can be fixed. While interface redesign to make good behaviour more conspicuous is now outside the scope of the proposal, maybe "Encourage new editors to look for models of excellent work" would be a good guideline for how to help new editors. Shall we follow DannyH's suggestion and move the broader discussion on retention aids to en:Wikipedia talk:Encourage the newcomers? Or would somewhere else be better? HLHJ (talk) 19:53, 17 November 2018 (UTC)

"I mostly take my models from direct interactions of others with me, which limits my ability to learn from the mistakes of others rather than repeating them." and "Editor demand has tended to be for tools that make bad behaviour like vandalism more obvious so it can be fixed." <-- mmm, well put, HLHJ. Moving this discussion elsewhere per DannyH's suggestion sounds great. I am planning to look around a bit more myself so I can answer your question RE whether en:Wikipedia talk:Encourage the newcomers is the best place for us to continue with more confidence. Does that sound good? In the meantime, for continuity's sake, I answered the questions you posed about my experience in the community on your talk page. Stussll (talk) 00:41, 19 November 2018 (UTC)

Great, thank you, Stussll. See you elsewhere. HLHJ (talk) 05:38, 20 November 2018 (UTC)

• This proposal to tag fixable edits with automated tools hits number eight on the old list, but it's even better. It makes constructive criticism as easy as reverting vandalism. HLHJ (talk) 22:44, 17 November 2018 (UTC)

Re-scope

Re-scoping discussion

Hi HLHJ: Unfortunately, this proposal is too large for the Community Tech team to take on. As MMiller (WMF) and EpochFail said, we've got a product team working full-time in this area, and the Scoring team is also actively engaged in these concerns. I'm going to archive your proposal; I think the discussions that you're having are probably best held somewhere outside of the survey. Let me know if you have any questions. -- DannyH (WMF) (talk) 02:03, 14 November 2018 (UTC)

Sorry, DannyH (WMF), I think I was unclear. The list is intended to contain fairly quick and simple fixes, and I had no expectation that they would all be implemented. The idea is to let the people who really understand the implementation pick one or more of the numbered suggestions. I will happily remove from the list any item which is individually too large. Some are small, such as #11 (a banner ad like those used for fundraising), and might need to be removed on those grounds. If the idea of a "pick one" proposal is not acceptable, may I strip the list down to one favoured idea? Both the Growth Team and the Wikimedia Foundation Scoring Platform team are working on slightly different things, and are not focussed on tools that will help established editors to retain new ones; I think Community Tech's editor-centered focus could be really valuable here. HLHJ (talk) 03:41, 14 November 2018 (UTC)

Hi HLHJ: Sure, which idea do you think is the most important? -- DannyH (WMF) (talk) 04:12, 14 November 2018 (UTC)

Four seems to have the most support; 13 is duplicated here. So I think I'd go with four, but I'm ignorant. What would you think would be best for the purpose? Community Wishlist Survey 2019/Editing/Make Wikipedia more accessible to the visually impaired is currently about as vague as "do something to help us with new editor retention and check it's effective", which is basically my request; I can make the proposal vague and move the list of suggestions to the discussion, if that fits better with the structure. HLHJ (talk) 08:10, 14 November 2018 (UTC)

HLHJ: You may have been looking at the wrong page for the Growth team; you linked to the defunct team's page on Meta. This is the current Growth team's work. I totally agree that there should be work done along the lines of "do something to help us with new editor retention and check it's effective" -- that's the thing that the Growth team is working on now. One of the most important pieces is giving new editors a "help" button inside the editing window that will link them to a help desk, so that more experienced people can help the new people. There's a lot of prototyping and experimenting to do before we know exactly how it works, and that's what they're working on now. If you want to turn this catch-all proposal into a proposal for #4, that would be totally appropriate for the Wishlist Survey. The larger concern already has a team. -- DannyH (WMF) (talk) 17:31, 14 November 2018 (UTC)

Sorry, I copied the link from the text above; I had seen that page. Thank you. I see what you mean about an existing team, but they seem to be focussed on shaping the behaviour of new editors, not old ones, which is probably politically easier but I want my behaviour shaped :). I've shortened the proposal, though I've sort of shoehorned a second suggestion in at the end. Is this good? HLHJ (talk) 20:23, 14 November 2018 (UTC)

Yes, this works! Thanks for talking, and editing the proposal. I changed the title to "Flag edits by new editors" -- you can edit that title if you have a better one. -- DannyH (WMF) (talk) 21:26, 14 November 2018 (UTC)

Great, thank you for your patience. I collapsed the old list so that the old comments still refer to something and make sense, but be clear the proposal has changed. I'm also putting in a couple of subheadings in the discussion, which should also help ease of editing. HLHJ (talk) 01:40, 15 November 2018 (UTC)

Discussion of rescoped proposal

The proposal has been changed as above; comments on the new proposal are welcome here. MMiller (WMF), do you have views on how the modified proposal might interact with the Growth Team's work? As DannyH said, the proposal had morphed into a bit of a "have a Growth Team" proposal, but it's smaller now. HLHJ (talk) 01:40, 15 November 2018 (UTC)

Voting

•  Support Stussll (talk) 00:51, 17 November 2018 (UTC)
•  Support Liuxinyu970226 (talk) 04:25, 17 November 2018 (UTC)
•  Support Gnangarra (talk) 09:37, 17 November 2018 (UTC)
•  Support Barcelona (talk) 18:56, 17 November 2018 (UTC)
•  Oppose Old serious editors now dislike Wiki because any newcomers can wreck well done pages, which requested hours of effort. Once the time all stubs were welcome, now this phase is ended: all main subjects are covered, quality of articles is now needed. Too much indulgence with newcomers has the only effect that old serious editors will leave Wiki. A ntv (talk) 08:23, 18 November 2018 (UTC)
  • This is an interesting hypothesis, A ntv, that wiki maturity caused the abrupt transition from exponential growth in editor numbers to a slow decline. However, the same transition occurred at the the same time on many, but not all, other wikis, which mostly have far fewer articles than the English Wikipedia.[7] It seems that old editors are leaving at the same rate as they did before the transition, but we are getting fewer new editors, leading to a steady net loss of editors.[8] Possible causes are discussed on Research:The Rise and Decline. HLHJ (talk) 23:24, 18 November 2018 (UTC)
    • IMHO the abrupt transition occurs, in any Wikis, when the easy-to-find-sources (i.e. mainly online other encyclopedia or similar) have been fully used to create new articles (fun and rewarding job). After that the number of contributions depends from two items: a) the easiness to find sources (google book / libraries), and b) the need to defend the articles from troll/newcomers. In the future, to improve an article or create an interesting new article of true encyclopedic interest, it will be more and more difficult to find sources (libraries or scientific papers) and off-line work it will take more and more time. Editors who use now most of the time in selecting sources, are less and less interested in taking care of the newcomers who write trivial articles on not-encyclopedic people or make edits without even having read all the article they modify. Please protect the old editors.A ntv (talk) 07:52, 20 November 2018 (UTC)
      • Research:The Rise and Decline and its associated paper discuss this theory, citing it as having been proposed by Suh et al. in 2009. There is limited evidence to support it; in a sample of human-rated newbie edits, good-faith newbies dropped moderately from 92.2% to 79.8% of all new editors during 2005 (total editor numbers were rising sharply and Wikipedia was much in the news, so this probably represents more vandals), and newbie edits to longer articles are more likely to be rejected, for instance.

        The transition occurred at the same time on de-wiki, tho, and they not only have fewer articles, they have much less well-developed articles (and a lower requirement for sourcing). A substantial proportion of the editors can read English at a near-native level, too. If writing useful new work had become more difficult because de-wiki editors had exhausted the easy sources and easy article topics, one would expect that the monoglot German-speakers might be less productive, while the people with good English would still be just as productive (as comparison with en-wiki clearly shows that there are plenty more usable English-language sources, and article topics). I have not seen any evidence of this.

        You are, however, now very likely to get an edit on either wiki rejected if it isn't initially perfect. If it has grammatical errors, formatting errors, or is unclear to the reviewer, it will probably get reverted, and it probably won't get fixed by someone else. The learning curve for new editors has become precipitously steep, and anyone who does not scale this learning cliff does not become a regular editor. The effects of learning-curve steepness on retention are known from video games. Most people won't climb cliffs. To keep going, they need a hike, not too steep, not too flat, continually challenging. As you say, the old editors need care; if we lose old editors faster than we train new ones, our community will dwindle and die. But we will lose old editors, if only to death, and we must train new editors fast enough to replace them. Currently we don't; editor number are falling, and areas of the wiki are falling silent. It's starting to feel like a ghost town. HLHJ (talk) 04:52, 21 November 2018 (UTC)

  • I think that the best prophylactic against wrecking answer is the edit-approval (Sichten) system used on German Wikipedia PJTraill (talk) 23:14, 26 November 2018 (UTC)
    • The edit approval system of the German wikipedia marks edits by newbies (less than 30 edits). It is positive feedback to get an edit approved. Minoo (talk) 21:36, 27 November 2018 (UTC)
      • I think it's 50 confirmed edits or 150 edits, and 30 days of registration (policy). I don't know what proportion of edits by good-faith new editors are rejected under this system, and I'm not sure if anyone has tested what effect this has on recruitment and retention. HLHJ (talk) 03:46, 28 November 2018 (UTC)
•  Support NMaia (talk) 10:29, 18 November 2018 (UTC)
•  Support Timeshifter (talk) 15:15, 18 November 2018 (UTC)
•  Oppose reminds me of the StackExchange New Contributor Indicator --Frozen Hippopotamus (talk) 11:22, 19 November 2018 (UTC)
  • That sounds like a useful experience, Frozen Hippopotamus. Thank you for the link. Do you know how it worked out long-term? Are there stats? The page you linked to has some comments which seem pertinent; one I liked was "Build the new user experience so that it explains how to use the site instead of relying on users to "be nice" by explaining it to them"; taking this view, this tool suggestion (which I frankly think is better than mine here) might be preferred to the help desk focus, though in practice they are probably complementary. The StackExchange comments also ~contain the ones I made here: testing the effects and making the new-user notice invisible unless the interaction is going to be negative. HLHJ (talk) 05:31, 20 November 2018 (UTC)
    • I've since quit SO/SE, not because of this feature but because of the general low quality of the user contributions, especially the questions on SO (different story). Having been a simple user of these sites, I have no insight into how the feature was received once implemented. SE (the company) is not very keen to share raw data or stats about the success of such features. It may be difficult to measure, especially if there is no A/B test (half with, half without a feature) done. --Frozen Hippopotamus (talk) 08:01, 20 November 2018 (UTC)
      • That's unfortunate, to say the least, but thank you for the info. I would strongly oppose making any changes that might significantly affect the editor community without good A/B testing. HLHJ (talk) 04:52, 21 November 2018 (UTC)
  • It sounds as though you dislike the SE New Contributor Indicator, but I think it a quite reasonable (in spite of the flak in the answers on the linked page), though more important there than here. PJTraill (talk) 23:14, 26 November 2018 (UTC)
•  Support Zeromonk (talk) 08:25, 19 November 2018 (UTC)
•  Support Benjamin (talk) 10:29, 19 November 2018 (UTC)
•  Support BugWarp (talk) 01:15, 20 November 2018 (UTC)
•  Support Novak Watchmen (talk) 01:13, 21 November 2018 (UTC)
•  Support RIT RAJARSHI (talk) 19:38, 21 November 2018 (UTC)
•  Support I often look how many edits a contributor has when reviewing changes, but this would help too. PJTraill (talk) 23:01, 26 November 2018 (UTC)
•  Support WeegaweeK ❀  t  c  08:46, 24 November 2018 (UTC)
•  Support It will be of benefit for newbies. I know that some experienced Wikipedians dislike newbies' inexperience, but it's not the reason why we choose to discourage them. It is a way to balance newbies and the experienced, although it may not be the best. Mariogoods (talk) 13:35, 25 November 2018 (UTC)
•  Support — AfroThundr ^{(u · t · c)} 02:10, 26 November 2018 (UTC)
•  Support Dvorapa (talk) 13:17, 27 November 2018 (UTC)
•  Support Reminds me of the way rookie drivers on motorsports circuits have special identifiers on their cars (and how rookie firefighters also have markings on their helmets) Though I think new contributors should be informed of this and allowed to opt out ... some may not wish to be so singled out. Daniel Case (talk) 04:20, 28 November 2018 (UTC)
•  Support Tgr (talk) 08:12, 30 November 2018 (UTC)