A mentor in fawiki complained that questions newbies ask are repetitive and basically can have the same answer. He suggested we can just use a FAQ for newbies before letting them ask a free-form question. Does that make sense?
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- Mentioned In
- T335013: Help panel: Add support to interact with LLM chatbot based on Wikipedia help pages
T272404: [Scaling] Find ways to prevent repetitive questions coming from newcomers
T272007: Create a special page with a list of questions from newcomers - Mentioned Here
- T279135: Mentor dashboard: M4 Answer bank to FAQ's
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The help links module (below the mentor module on desktop) is basically an FAQ, with 5 links going to most important help pages.
Are the repetitive questions covered by these links? If not, maybe you should consider to edit them as a first try.
If after a while it appears that the questions are still repetitive, maybe we could consider to swap the mentorship module with the help links module to have the FAQ first. But we maybe newbies prefer to ask a human instead of getting lost in the maze of help pages.
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I haven't made that suggestion so I can't say for sure but I have a feeling that having lots of documentation is one big reason people ask these questions, we know noone reads "Terms and Conditions", this one might be similar too.
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Well, if people don't read T&C-s, would they read an FAQ? :)
My suggestion is to check for the possible causes leading to the repetitive questions.
- are the links listed on the Homepage covering the issue? (To see if people may have checked them.)
- have the links listed on the Homepage covering the right label? (To know if the description is appealing enough.)
- Is the help page in itself providing the answer to the question, at a very visible place? (To check if people could read it.)
If the questions can all be replied with a firm yes, then we have to think about the module's placement.
And also, I forgot the obvious, but do you have examples of these repetitive questions?
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We can add a couple of links to the main topics (How to create an article or smth else) in the question form. We have the same problem, newcomers asking the same questions.
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@Ladsgroup @Iniquity -- thank you for bringing this up. This question touches on a balance that we've talked about: on the one hand, it might be best for newcomers if they can find some answer to their question quickly (like via an FAQ). On the other hand, it might be best for newcomers to make a connection with a real community member, giving them a personalized answer and helping them start to understand our community.
I've noticed many other website with similar "help panels" have a hybrid approach. You open up the panel and it says, "What do you need help with today?" and then lists several options, like "Billing", "Connecting my device", "Changing my address". If you click one of those, it sends you to some documentation. And then at the bottom, it says, "Something else". And if you click that, you go to the live chat with a real person.
I wonder if an idea like that would work here. What do you think?
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I also like the idea that the user can immediately ask the mentor a question. If we add additional items, then we must analyze and understand why we are adding them. If it turns out that there are few "repetitive" questions, or there is only one, then there will be no point in the "stairs".
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One of the problems, in my opinion, is strange decision in the new design, which lowered the help box too low. I associate a large number of similar questions with this.
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I'm not sure: can you scroll down to check the last links? If not, it is a bug. Otherwise, it is the current design.
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So there is nothing wrong there. :D
A possible suggestion would be to switch the position of the mentorship module and the FAQ module.
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Yes, I already understood that this is a design move :)
A possible suggestion would be to switch the position of the mentorship module and the FAQ module.
Maybe better over "Your impact"? And remove the line break after the "?" sign?
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The main idea is:
- Initially, help pages are more important than impact, since the user has not yet edit anything and has nothing to impact
- If we remove the mentor to the lower right corner, then I suppose the amount of interactivity will decrease, since it is less noticeable, and part of this block will also disappear
- After the user already edit something, we need to understand how much the block of impact holds him and how much the emphasis changes if we lower him down
- Not for this task: I want a tiled interface with the ability to drag and drop objects, possibly through a visual editor
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Hi @Iniquity -- thank you for brainstorming ideas for how to make newcomer questions more efficient. I think there is a way to improve this, but I'm not sure the answer is to make the mentorship module less obvious -- I think it's good that newcomers are trying to interact with their mentors. I would prefer to spend the effort looking for a longer-term solution, rather than rearranging the page. This is especially true because we are currently working on improvements to the impact module, and we want newcomers to see it.
Speaking more broadly about the effort we're putting towards mentorship: most of our team's time goes toward suggested edits, because this is the feature that has had the most impact on newcomers. But we're now able to spend a little bit of time on mentorship, and we're decided to put that toward the mentor dashboard, which most communities have requested (and that you have commented on). After that, we can figure out what the next improvement for mentorship can be.
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@Zapipedia-WMF reported that some mentors find some questions repetitive and identical. At the moment, we have two ways to address this: this task or T279135: Mentor dashboard: M4 Answer bank to FAQ's.