Several WMF teams are working together to improve newcomer experiences and new editor retention. Involved teams are Growth, Advancement, Communications, & GLAM.

Goal

In order for everyone in the world to have access to all knowledge, we need people around the world to be able to participate in building that knowledge. No matter someone’s location, language, gender, device, income, technical skills, personality, or time constraints, we want them to be able to join in and find a way to be the best Wikimedian they can be.

Problems

• Readers of Wikipedia don’t know that they can and should participate and share knowledge on Wikipedia by becoming newcomers.
• Newcomers to Wikipedia lack ways to start participating in building open knowledge.  They try to participate, but are blocked by our single, complicated, open-ended experience -- barriers of entry that especially affect underserved populations.
• Even when newcomers do succeed at first, they are not nurtured into taking the next steps to becoming part of our communities.

Hypothesis

If we direct newcomers to quickly make simple contributions in an onboarding experience that makes them proud of their impact and encourages their progress, then more readers, and more diverse kinds of readers, will become contributors -- especially amongst mobile users in emerging communities.

Objectives

• Account creation: Internet users learn that they can contribute and are prompted to create an account.
• Activation: Newcomers have fast, easy, and mobile-friendly ways to make their first edits.
• Retention: Newcomers are proud of their impact, leading them to come back.

Projects

Account creation

• Thank you pages & banners: Encourage donors to create accounts through thank you pages and banners.
• Marketing experiment: Run ads on-wiki and off-wiki to see how this impacts account activation.

Activation

• "Add an image" GLAM events: Host GLAM events that focus on using the "Add an image" tool.

Retention

• Welcome emails: Experiment sending welcome emails to newly created accounts.

Current Status

• 2021 - 2022 fiscal year:
  • Launch "add an image"
  • Conduct several experimental projects:
    • Thank you pages & banners
    • Newcomer experience marketing experiment
    • "Add an image" GLAM events
    • Welcome emails experiment
• 2022 - 2022 fiscal year:
  • Pursue ideas that show promise:
    • Scaling the Thank you page work to Swedish, Italian, Japanese, French, and Dutch Wikipedias is now complete (T318975).
    • Expanding the Welcome email experiment is in discussion
    • Improvements to "add an image" are planned (T293711), scaling has continued (T304110)
    • Work on a section-level "add an image" task has started (T321754)

Donor Thank you page

In 2022, the Growth team and Fundraising teams completed an initial Thank you pages & banners experiment. The Thank you page work was especially promising, and required minimal engineering effort to scale further, so in 2023 we have scaled this work to Swedish, Italian, Japanese, French, and Dutch Wikipedias (T318975).

Essentially a call to action to Edit has been added to the standard donor Thank you page on Swedish, Italian, Japanese, French, and Dutch Wikipedias (T318975). Donors land on a “thank you” page after donation, and that landing page now also includes a call to action to try editing: Example Thank you page in French.

Initial analysis shows that this flow from donation to creating an account continues to be healthy and a low-effort way to encourage new types of people to edit Wikipedia (T331495). The following is a small sample from 2023-03-07 to 2023-03-26, but you can see that the call to action to try editing resulted in over 2,600 new accounts (Registrations) and over 150 of these new accounts completed an initial edit within 24 hours of creating their account (Activations).

Methodological notes:

• Data collected spans 2023-03-07 to 2023-03-26.
• "Unique visitors" is counted using a combination of IP address and User-Agent to get more correct counts in situations where users share IP addresses. Previous analysis only used IP addresses as a shortcut. This affects some wikis more than others (e.g. Japanese sees a 2–3% increase in unique visitors).
• The count of registrations excludes known test accounts and Wikipedia app registrations, which is consistent with our previous analyses. "Constructive activation" means making at least one non-reverted edit within 24 hours of registration.