User story

Newcomer Homepage: As a newcomer, I want to be able to discover many potential events and communities, so that I can find opportunities to connect, collaborate, and receive mentorship from other editors.

Background

The Collaboration List is currently viewable via Special:AllEvents on any wiki that has the CampaignEvents extension enabled. This means that is viewable on a maximum of one page per wiki. This page is not easily discoverable or stumbled upon in many wiki workflows. While we can encourage more people to check it out (and we have some done some work in this area - see T377861), we would also like the events/groups advertised in the Collaboration List to be discoverable within common wiki workflows. This is for a few reasons:

• The Collaboration List is generally useful to many different types of people, since it is focused on finding many different types of collaboration, such as: meetups, campaigns, edit-a-thons, office hours, and WikiProjects.
• The Collaboration List can be filtered for different types of users and needs
• We have repeatedly learned through research and discussion that it is hard for many people to find meaningful opportunities to collaborate on the tasks and topics that they care about, and one of the challenges is discoverability

Meanwhile, the Newcomer Homepage has the Community Update module. This module works by allowing admins to input information related to an event to be highlighted on the Newcomer Homepage. This is similar to the Collaboration List in terms of goals, since it allows more people to discover events and opportunities for collaboration. It is different because it is on the Newcomer Homepage rather than on Special:AllEvents and functions as a smaller module that coexists with other modules.

For these reasons we are proposing the following: We expand the capabilities of the Community Update module. Specifically, we make it a way to flip through many events (like how you can flip through many tasks in Structured Tasks, though with a smaller number of events). The first event will be the Community Update module, if there is any. This is like being the top of search results — in other words, it still makes the community update take precedence by being what people see first. But users can flip through more events to find what may interest them. There’s some potential trickiness to this (since the Community Update is submitted via admins, whereas the rest of the events come via the Collaboration List), but the idea makes sense to me from a user perspective.

Resources:

• https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Growth/Feature_summary
• https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Growth/Community_Updates/en
• https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:GrowthExperiments
• Visual example of Community Update module in Diff post: https://diff.wikimedia.org/2025/02/12/community-updates-module-connecting-newcomers-to-your-initiatives/

Past relevant work:

• Design work: T387793 - we came up with some design concepts that we can potentially use/revisit if we take up this project in the future
• Engineering work: T386958 - specifically, see T386958#10589585 & follow-up comments

Considerations:

• Who can use this from the organizer side?
  • Do we only allow events to be added to the module if one of the organizers has the event organizer right? This way, there is a bit more prevention against abuse, potentially. Or maybe, if you have the right, your event can show automatically, but if you do not, maybe admins need to approve it or just be informed in some way?
• The importance of being able to curate/remove bad events
  • How can we include admins, so they don't necessarily need to approve of every event but they can remove events that are seen as not beneficial/abusive/vandalism?
• The importance of ensuring that a bunch of useless events are shown to people
  • Do we want a limit on how many wikis that can be posted for an event, so there isn't over-promotion of the event on too many wikis?
  • We should ask for supported languages and require translated event descriptions to avoid false claims for support for too many wikis?
  • Do we want to allow users to report to admins if events should be removed from the module because they are abusive/not for the wiki/spam?
• Data consistency
  • If we have events also featured in the Community Update module, we may want to collect some more data points for consistency, especially: event image and event description. These are already a part of what admins enter when they submit an event for the module.
  • We need to have event descriptions translated into different languages - but how do we ensure that the sentences are truly translated? Are there any tools that we can use to ensure validation?
  • There is also data that we could collect on which audiences the event is for, such as newcomers, moderators, etc.
• What we may want to measure/track
  • Overall click rate for community update module & changes over time
  • Click rate per events
  • Can we see if editors are clicking on events and then registering for events?