User story & summary:
As a new account holder, I want to receive a personal greeting from my Mentor, because then I'll feel more comfortable asking them questions and I'll start to feel part of the Wikimedia community.
Background & research:
This task is important because most wikis send new account holders a Welcome message, but that Welcome message is often a daunting list of links and rules. It would be interesting to test if sending a more "human" welcome message helped increase new editor activation and retention.
At the Wikimania session about Mentorship, several attendees highlighted the importance of Welcome templates as a way of welcoming and onboarding newcomers. Yet some prior research suggests that Welcome messages aren't very impactful (1 ,2, 3). While other research finds that new editors invited to the Teahouse are retained at a higher rate than editors who do not receive an invite (4). More recent research finds that experimental Welcome messages help significantly increased the likelihood that users return to the wiki and make one or more article edits (5).
Attendees at the Wikimania session also highlighted the importance of human interaction and providing mentorship that goes beyond providing a Q&A service:
- We need to "create community", increase "communication", connect in-person event attendees with on-wiki Mentors.
The Growth team discussed this and all of the Wikimania feedback the following hypothesis was raised:
The Teahouse invite is likely more impactful because it is written in a very human way. It doesn’t look like a bot message or something that comes out of the Wikipedia interface, which is the case of most welcome messages.
This task would help test that hypothesis.
This experiment wouldn't replace whatever Welcome message is already in place at a given wiki, but rather provide a more human greeting from Mentors to their Mentee.
This feature should be Community configurable. So local admins can decide:
- If this feature is enabled or disabled.
- The text of the generic mentor welcome message.
- When the message is delivered
Mentors should be able to update their settings so that they can:
- Personalize the message. When the message is personalized, it should display on Special:ManageMentors in a new "Welcome Talk Page message" column.
- TBD: If admins have this feature enabled, do we still want to allow individual mentors to "opt out"? Or would this need to be "opt in" by each mentor since we would be automating a welcome message / edit from their account?
Copy:
TBD:
This should be a friendly and casual welcome message that isn't primarily about sharing links or information.
Experiment:
- Experiment group (receives Mentor and Mentor welcome message): Measure activation, retention, productivity, and revert rates.
- Control group (does not receive a Mentor or Mentor welcome message): Measure activation, retention, productivity, and revert rates.
Acceptance Criteria:
Given I'm a new account holder,
When I'm editing on a wiki that has Mentorship enabled and the Mentor Welcome message feature enabled,
Then I receive a personal welcome on my Talk page from my mentor.
Given I'm an Admin,
When I'm viewing Community configuration,
Then I have the ability to enable/disable and personalize the Mentor Welcome message feature.
Given I'm an Mentor,
When I'm a Mentor on a wiki that has the Mentor Welcome message feature enabled
Then I have the ability to personalize the message that is sent to my mentees.
See also: