Background

The Growth team newcomer homepage project includes a mentor module where an experienced editor is assigned as a "mentor" to newcomers. Mentors participating across wikis have suggested different tools and features that may help with their mentoring activities, notably a Mentor dashboard as documented on this Mediawiki project page and in task T239234.

Research goal

The Growth team wants to gain a deeper understanding of experienced editors who mentor newcomers on Wikipedia, in order to create a mentorship dashboard (and potentially other tools) that can make the mentoring experience better.

Research Questions

• Understanding motivations and attitudes regarding mentoring
  • Why did they become a mentor?
  • How have their experiences as a mentor shaped their motivation/attitudes regarding mentoring?
• Understanding processes & behaviours
  • What are common pain points encountered in mentoring?
  • What improvements could be made or potential features that would entice them/provide sufficient value to motivate them past those hurdles?
  • What do they consider best practices or exemplary qualities of mentoring?
• [tertiary] Provide a general profile of a mentor
  • Tenure as an editor?
  • Languages and other sister projects?
  • Editing areas of interest?

Approach

Conduct 13 video interviews and collected 6 more written responses with a cross-section of editors who have participated as mentors on the Growth experiments.

Findings

Generally, the suggestions fell under 3 main categories:

• Suggestions that allow mentors to be more proactive when mentoring.
• Improve the general way mentorship is done (eg. providing better mentor support).
• Improving mentor-mentee communication.

And the frustrations fell under 3 broader themes:

• Revolving around the mentees.
• About other mentors and their behavior.
• Frustrations about the website and existing features.

There were trends seen across some wikis:

• Arabic mentors suggested having personalizable template answers for FAQs.
• Czech mentors wanted to improve the mentee-based notification system and match mentors and mentees by interest.
• The Russian mentor was interested in creating a modular dashboard with badges and a mentor feedback feature.

A more detailed summary of findings can be found in this slide deck.