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Qualitative design research to support and complement A/B testing of Guided Article Creation Initiative
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Description

Please provide all the following information:

  • Context. Provide a short paragraph with some background context for your request, please include links to relevant material.

As part of the article guidance initiative, there is currently an A/B experiment planned. It is expected that the experiment will launch in Q4, lasting the duration of 1-2mo (current estimate).

  • Description.What is your request about?

The experiment mentioned above should give the team an understanding of how the guided article support impacts deletion/survival rates of new articles (potentially also abandon rates for new articles started) compared to the current baseline (no support). However, this quant experiment will not be able to reveal why deletion/survival rates are higher/lower/the same as for the current baseline. Thus, the team is requesting qualitative research support that can complement the A/B test in order to give a fuller picture of the impact and results of the guided article support.

  • Expected Deliverable. What is the ideal outcome or result of your request?

Report and presentation/discussion of the results from the qualitative research sessions.

  • Estimated Effort. Please provide an estimate of the amount of work needed to complete this task, if known.

Should be timed in coordination with A/B test, currently expected to launch in roughly mid-Q4. Can possibly be designed as a lightweight project.

  • Priority Please indicate a priority of your task and a small description of what it would unlock for you. We ask you to leave this task as “needs triage” since your request will go through a Backlog refinement process where our team will prioritize the work.

I need this task resolved in:

  • 1 month.
  • 3 months.
  • 6 months.
  • Whenever you get to it :-)
  • Other. Do you have any other questions or comments ?

For use by WMF Research team; please leave everything below as it is:

  1. Does the request serve one of the existing Research team's audiences? If yes, choose the primary audience. (1 of 4)
  2. What is the type of work requested?
  3. What is the impact of responding to this request?
    • Support a technology or policy need of one or more WM projects
    • Advance the understanding of the WM projects.
    • Something else. If you choose this option, please explain briefly the impact below.

Event Timeline

Hi @Pginer-WMF , I've written this task request based on our recent conversations. Please feel free to edit the task description directly with any additional details or context you think would be helpful (and, of course, with any corrections or clarifications), thanks

A brief update on timing of the A/B test mentioned in this task description (relevant for purposes of coordination): launch date may be as soon as next week for Simple English Wikipedia, with other wikis to follow once localization coordination is complete. In order to shorten the experiment run time, the decision was made to expand the number of pilot wikis.

Thanks Eli - let me know when and for how long you want Sandra (contractor) for doing this work, when you're able - she is available now.

Easikingarmager renamed this task from [Request] Qualitative design research to support and complement A/B testing of Guided Article Creation Initiative to Qualitative design research to support and complement A/B testing of Guided Article Creation Initiative.Apr 29 2026, 3:35 PM
Easikingarmager triaged this task as Medium priority.

Update: assigning the task to myself for now, but Sandra and I have set up a meeting for next week to get started with planning for this work.

Update: Started work on research brief and plan. Meeting with Pau next Tuesday to go over some logistics and get input on coordination details.

I don't believe Sandra is currently on phabricator, so I've reassigned the last to Debra for purposes of tracking and support. I've already helped connect Sandra to the various stakeholders relevant for this project and the brief and plan are well underway.

Thanks, Eli, for doing an initial planning for this task and your work on it so far. Thanks, Sandra, for the work on the task so far.

After considering the UX Research team capacity in consultation with Debra and a brief conversation with Sonja about the high priority UX research support needs for the contributor space at this moment, I have decided to pause this task for 3 weeks and moved it to the Backlog for us to consider reprioritization after that. I have notified Bethany and Sandra who were working on the task, as well as Gerard (thanks, Sonja), Pau, Sonja. If you have questions about this decision, please do not hesitate to reach out to me directly. Thank you.

DKumar-WMF claimed this task.

I'm going to close this task, as the A/B testing has happened and the request to do this complementary qual work did not come up again. Gerard or Pau, please reach out to Daisy for future research needs around Guided Article Creation, and we'll create new tasks for that. Thank you!

Hi @DKumar-WMF I think we'd still benefit from this support, I was discussing with @Pginer-WMF today. But I haven't go to continue with this request. I'll discuss with Daisy how we could approach this based on the experiment learnings so far and see if a new requests fits.