User story & summary:
As a new editor, I need guidance and structure when completing my first edit on wiki, because then I'm more likely to constructively activate (complete my first edit that isn't reverted) and continue to edit.
Background & research:
- Growth team project page: Constructive activation experimentation
The "Add a link" experiment shows this Structured task leads to increases in newcomer participation, particularly by making constructive (non-reverted) article edits:
- an increase in the probability that newcomers make their first article edit (+16.6% over baseline, +10.1% over the unstructured add links task)
- And increase in the probability that they are retained as newcomers (+16.2% over baseline, +5.7% over the unstructured link task)
Decision:
Currently, "Add a Link" suggestions are not available for high-traffic pages, limiting the number of newcomers exposed to these suggestions. To gather sufficient data for statistically significant results, we aim to expand the experiment audience.
- Instead of restricting the experiment to logged-in accounts with 0 edits, we propose aligning it with the Edit Check audience, meaning it would include logged-in users with fewer than 100 edits.
- This change also aligns with WE1.1 in the 25/26 WMF annual plan:
Key result WE1.1: Increase constructive edits [i] by X% for editors with less than 100 cumulative edits, as measured by experiments by the end of Q2.
i. "Constructive edits" = edits that are not reverted within 48 hours of being published
Acceptance Criteria:
- Add instrumentation for edit count
- Engineering: Update experiment targeting to expand the audience from <1 edit to <100 edits.
Related work for Growth's PM:
- Product: Discuss this proposal with Growth Ambassadors and Movement Communications
- Product: Discuss the proposal with Product Analytics