Only about 3% of newcomers who have been assigned a mentor via the Newcomer Homepage ask their mentor a question. Among those who have asked a question, about a third ask a question as their first edit, and [[ https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Growth/Positive_reinforcement/Mentorship_preliminary_analysis,_August_2023 | preliminary research ]] has found no significant effect of having a mentor on early activation and retention of newcomers. However, we don’t know why newcomers largely don’t ask questions – is it that they’re finding the information on their own? Is it that they have other spaces where they feel more comfortable asking questions (including external search or asking ChatGPT?)? Are they aware they have a mentor?
To better understand the experiences of newcomers on Wikipedia, we should survey newly active editors (those who have made over 50 edits and registered their accounts or made their first edit in the past 6 months) about their onboarding experiences. This survey can help us to broadly understand successful newcomers’ knowledge of different components of editing (e.g. mentor access, talk pages, village pumps / tea houses, WikiProjects, watchlists, userpages), which editing experiences they have found rewarding, and those which they have found to be demotivating to their editing. This work can help to inform proposed interventions such as a structured progression system for editors, as well as helping us to understand the broad experiences of newcomers and where they most feel (or don’t feel) a sense of autonomy, competence, and relatedness in their onboarding journey.
After the survey, we can likewise conduct further research with editors who opt in to be contacted about their experiences to better understand mechanisms and sentiments which the survey data cannot address.
== Steps
[x] Develop a survey specific to newcomers which asks questions related to onboarding, discovery, knowledge of tools, and sentiments about different components in collaboration with stakeholder teams which work with newcomer experience
[x] Determine which projects to survey newcomers on (for simplicity, this project could start on English Wikipedia and iterate on the questions asked by adding new projects)
[x] Determine the population size and coverage needed for deploying QuickSurvey sampling and link-out to a longer survey
[x] Set up QuickSurvey messages
[x] Deploy and un-deploy the survey
[x] Pull eventlogging data for weighting and metadata
[x] Clean survey data
[x] Conduct analyses
[x] Share findings with hypothesis stakeholders
[] Report findings on metawiki
== Background
In Q4, we broadly explored contributor motivations (T391499) and identified three core theoretical underpinnings: competence, autonomy, and relatedness. Of these, relatedness was identified as the most under-explored facet of editor motivation. Based on the 2024 Community Insights data, we know that editors who take on advanced roles like adminship and organizing are [[ https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Community_Insights/Community_Insights_2024_Report#Motivations_for_contributing_to_the_Wikimedia_projects | more likely to find the social aspects of editing to be a motivator for contributing ]], but we don’t know whether editors in general are not interested in social interactions or they just haven’t had opportunities to positively engage other editors. Mentorship is the most structured means by which relatedness is currently supported on the Wikipedia projects; while mentorship happens incidentally through spaces like the [[ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Teahouse | WP:Teahouse ]], the Newcomer Homepage provides a mentorship module that directly connects newcomers with mentors.