Noting that the current Mentorship partial rollout on English Wikipedia caused some confusion, as discussed here:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_talk:Adopt-a-user#New_to_Wikipedia,_strong_learner,_looking_for_a_mentor

My current thinking is that we will focus on this task after we have completed the Mentor dashboard improvements that are part of the (Positive Reinforcement project). But feel free to chime in if anyone thinks we should consider this task sooner.

@KStoller-WMF, with 83 mentors (this number is quite stable), we can't deploy to 100% But we can work on alternative solutions.

For instance, we can prioritize T269847: Automatically enable the Homepage when a logged-in user visits [[Special:Homepage]] so that newcomers won't be lost when someone tell them about the Homepage.

In any case, in order to deploy Positive reinforcement, we will need to recruit more mentors.

At the moment, 100,000 new accounts are created at English Wikipedia each month. If we follow the rule of one mentor for each batch of 500 new accounts, then 200 mentors are needed.

Perhaps this has been discussed before, but per @Clovermoss' comment in the on-wiki discussion ("It's well-known that the vast majority of people who create accounts don't actually edit at all, at least on en-wiki."), maybe we should revise our formula. Of the 100,000 accounts, how many are visiting Special:Homepage or attempting to edit? If it's substantially lower than the total, maybe it's safe to adjust the ratio for this wiki?

We could adjust the ratio by checking the data we have. We can also discover that we need much more mentors, as English Wikipedia is bigger. :) So far, the rule of 500 new accounts¹ per mentor has worked everywhere else, this is why I keep it as my golden rule.

¹ 500 new accounts, not 500 newcomers.

In T323048#8498323, @Trizek-WMF wrote:

We could adjust the ratio by checking the data we have. We can also discover that we need much more mentors, as English Wikipedia is bigger. :) So far, the rule of 500 new accounts¹ per mentor has worked everywhere else, this is why I keep it as my golden rule.

¹ 500 new accounts, not 500 newcomers.

I see. I suspect because enwiki is the biggest wiki and has the most traffic, it would also have a higher proportion of spam/"just curious" accounts that don't actually require any sort of mentorship, since the accounts don't do anything, compared to smaller language wikis where if a person is creating an account there, it is most likely because they want to contribute. (Citation needed for all of the above 😛)

In T323048#8498391, @kostajh wrote:

I suspect because enwiki is the biggest wiki and has the most traffic, it would also have a higher proportion of spam/"just curious" accounts that don't actually require any sort of mentorship, since the accounts don't do anything, compared to smaller language wikis where if a person is creating an account there, it is most likely because they want to contribute. (Citation needed for all of the above 😛)

I have the same suspicions, but I haven't looked into that data yet.

In T323048#8498097, @Trizek-WMF wrote:

with 83 mentors (this number is quite stable), we can't deploy to 100% But we can work on alternative solutions.

Agreed. I wasn't suggesting we deploy to 100%, just start that discussion after we wrap up Positive Reinforcement work. My reasoning for waiting: it will be easier to have this discussion and recruit more mentors once we have more definitive data on the impact of mentorship. @nettrom_WMF and I have discussed various ways to measure the Personalized Praise aspect of the Positive Reinforcement project and along with doing a pre/post analysis of the Personalized Praise work, we discussed possibly using Spanish Wikipedia as a way to conduct a true A/B test of Mentorship. (Since Mentorship on Spanish Wikipedia also isn't released at 100% and it's a Growth Pilot wiki, it might be a perfect opportunity to test).

I just asked the community how can we increase the number of mentors, and if we can increase the percentage of newcomers who get a mentor.

I checked on the list of mentors today. 92 users added their names to be assigned to newcomers.

Regarding their involvement,

• Average number of questions:
  • 58 are active
  • 4 are away
• "twice the average"
  • 25 are active
  • 1 is away
• "half the average",
  • 8 are active
  • 2 are away

Not counting people away, we have 27,2% of users who are ready to get more questions, 8,7% who reduced their number of questions, and 63% in status quo.

Regarding the marked as 7 away, they plan to return in:

• Early April (2 of them)
• Early May
• November (2 of them)
• December
• March 2024

It might be more interesting to have users being away for more than 2 months to sign off.

Following this new conversation, xaosflux requested a watchlist notice. As I write this message, we have 157 mentors Automatically assigned mentors (10 of them are away).

The current increase is covered by T341399: Increase percentage of newcomers who receive Growth mentorship at English Wikipedia.

The next increase is blocked by T347024: Returning back from the "Away" status, I don't get newcomers assigned to me. Plus, we are short of 100 mentors. We need to encourage the community to recruit more of them.

Once our Personalized praise analysis is complete T341387: Mentorship + Personalized Praise: Analysis, then we should consider writing a Diff post to share more about Mentorship and Personalize praise. Hopefully that could increase interest in being a Mentor. We might want to consider having a Growth + Community meeting focused on Mentorship?