North Carolina Wikipedians/2025 Understanding Organizers Impact on Newcomer Growth
In November 2025, we were approached by the organizers of Research:Understanding Organizers' Impact on Newcomer Growth to answer some questions about how the North Carolina Wikipedians works to bring in new editors to Wikipedia.
Questions to organizers
[edit]Do you consent to publish the (summary) of your responses on the research Meta page? If so, how would you like to be attributed or cited? (Note: Anbar can send the draft summary for your review/approval before publishing it on Meta)
[edit]Yes. We would like a link back to a particular version of this page. You can also say that these answers were contributed by:
- Gaurav (talk) 09:43, 11 December 2025 (UTC)
- Please add your username here if you contribute to this document! You can add four tildes -- "~~~~" -- to add your username.
What methods or strategies do you use to attract newcomer editors to on-wiki participation? (You can share about the ways you teach, train, mentor or generally onboard newcomers on how to edit. If you can specify whether it is a web/computer/laptop or mobile web/mobile phone onboarding, that would be helpful!)
[edit]The NC Wikipedians generally organizes three types of meetups:
- Casual events, where we're mostly gathering to hang out, socialize, and chat about Wikipedia and other topics. We usually bring laptops but don't bring them out.
- If newcomers come to such events, we try to encourage them to try editing Wikipedia, and point them to our mailing list if they have any questions or run into any problems.
- Editathons, where we encourage attendees to bring laptops, to sign up through the Outreach Dashboard, and ensure that facilitators are available to answer any questions. For large groups, we may use Software Carpentries techniques like having red sticky notes that participants can stick on their laptop to ask a facilitator to come over for one-to-one assistance and to ensure that we have long "working periods" where people are encouraged to try things themselves, and to bring up any questions they have -- our hope is that other editors may be running into similar issues and will want to listen in as we help participants through their issues.
- Introduction to Wikipedia presentations/workshops, where we encourage attendees to bring laptops and will usually walk them through an editing process as part of our presentation (either as a live demo or as a series of screenshots in a presentation). At a minimum, even if people don't want to participate, they will see what the editing interface look like and what a successful edit looks like, as well as learning about Wikipedia's history, philosophy, rules and community. As with the other sessions, we will encourage people who want to learn to sign up to the mailing list to learn more.
What do you do to support newcomer editors to transition from small and easy contributions (e.g., uploading images to Commons) to more advanced contributions (e.g., creating an article or a section of an article)?
[edit]We don't currently have specific guidance or experience of doing this.
One thing we do is to try to organize a variety of editathons, some of which are focused on a particular topic that needs improvements, while others might focus on reorganizing files in the Commons and using images in their files.
We considered having "office hours" in place of our regular monthly meetings, where we would all edit Wikipedia together and be available for answering questions. Perhaps something like that would help in this case.
Once newcomer editors are engaged, do you have any strategies to retain them on-wiki or in your community? (If yes: How well do you think those retention strategies are working? If you measure retention, we'd love to hear about it! Otherwise we are interested in your impression of how well newcomers are retained)
[edit]We don't currently have specific plans or experience of doing this. As with most user groups, our active member population varies quite widely depending on how busy everybody is, with students moving in and out of the area, and other constraints, so we can't really track how often our past members are contributing to Wikipedia.
The Wikimedia Foundation has been experimenting with on-wiki approaches to better retain newcomers to our projects (see: Growth features summary), and we are interested in whether these approaches might be useful to organizers like you. Would you be interested in partnering with us to test these new approaches? (Saying "yes" doesn't commit you to anything, but we will follow up to discuss! The tentative timeline for this partnership is between February and May of 2026).
[edit]Yes, we're interested in anything that could bring in more members as long as it doesn't put too much of an organizational strain on our existing core members.