Growth/Community Updates

Wikimedia Foundation projects Community Updates A new module on the Newcomer homepage for communities to showcase campaigns, projects, and events. Group: Growth Start: 2024-02-23 Backlog: Growth backlog Lead: Tech Lead: Sergio Gimeno Product Manager: Kirsten Stoller Updates: Most updates posted here .

This page describes the Growth team’s work adding a new module to the Newcomer homepage. This new module can be used by communities to share important community news, campaigns, events, or WikiProjects. This module will be Community Configurable to allow for easy customization.

How to use the Community Updates module.

• 2024-02-23: Initial project page created
• 2024-06-28: Initial version testable on Beta wikis
• Up next: Growth Pilot wiki community discussion

The Growth team will create a new module on the Newcomer homepage that can be used by communities to highlight important community events and initiatives.  This Community Updates module will be Community Configurable, so communities can decide to highlight specific events, projects, campaigns, and initiatives, that are set by admins using Community Configuration.  

As newer editors progress in their involvement on the wikis, the Newcomer homepage should evolve and offer more complex tasks and opportunities that encourage new editors to engage in more meaningful ways. By exposing newer editors to important community events and initiatives, newer editors will hopefully get more invested and involved in the wikis and connect with other Wikimedians.

Furthermore, this new module can be used to help bring attention to content gaps on high-impact topics, which aligns with the 2030 Movement strategy’s “Topics for Impact” recommendation.

If we implement a Newcomer homepage module with community configurable text, icon, call to action, and target audience settings, then the banner can be used to highlight knowledge gaps, and more editors will improve articles related to high-impact topics.

To evaluate this hypothesis, we'll examine several key questions and track corresponding metrics:

1. Do Communities utilize this new module?
   • Metric: The number of wikis that utilize the new Community Updates module within 2 months after the launch.
2. Is this module relevant to Newcomer homepage visitors?
   • Metric: The percentage of Newcomer homepage visitors who click through to learn more.
3. Does this module help communities highlight important events, campaigns, and projects?
   • Metric: The number of Newcomer homepage visitors who sign up for the tested community event/campaign/project compared to the control group (who do not see the new module).
4. Does this module help fill knowledge gaps?
   • Metric to be measured separate from this experiment: An increase in the portion of newly created or improved articles on high-impact topics with acceptable quality, per the “global quality score”, that are created or edited on Wikipedia, starting with underrepresented geographic regions and gender. (This is the 2023-2024 WikiExperiences 1.3 Key Result from the WMF Product & Technology department's Objectives and Key Results.)

This project will primarily target Learners: registered editors whose experience falls between Newcomers (fewer than 10 edits or 4 days of activity) and Experienced Editors (500+ edits, >30 days of activity).

We will target both mobile and desktop Newcomer homepage visitors.

Our primary wiki audience is mid-sized Wikipedias, but the feature will be Community Configurable so that it can be adjusted to work well for all Wikipedia language editions.

The project is guided by many previous research projects and experiments:

• Research:Wikipedia Knowledge Graph with DeepDive (2015)
• Research:Wikipedia Knowledge Integrity Risk observatory (2021)
• Research:Prioritization of Wikipedia Articles (2020)
• Research:Automatically labeling low quality content (2020)
• Research:Knowledge Gaps Index/Taxonomy (2020)
• Research:Cross-lingual article quality assessment (2022)
• Thinking about the impact of the Wikimedia movement
• Wikimap: A map of Wikipedia

The Growth team will initiate a discussion on our current Pilot wikis (Arabic Wikipedia and Spanish Wikipedia), along with a conversation in English on the associated MediaWiki talk page. Questions for Community Discussion:

1. Do you have any feedback or concerns about this project idea?
2. Do you have any suggestions for making this feature more impactful or meaningful to your community?
3. This feature will be designed to be Community Configurable by  Admins.  Do you think this feature will be used on your wiki?

The following are initial design mockups of the mobile layout of the Newcomer homepage, including two new modules: the Community Updates module and the Content Translation task.

• 
  English mockup
• 
  Spanish mockup
• 
  Arabic mockup

The Community Updates module will be Community Configurable. Admins will be able to enable or disable the new module and decide how experienced an editor should be in order to see this module (based on edit count). The content of this module is entirely configurable as well, including the module's title, image, text, and call to action.

What we will measure as part of the A/B test (T365889):

Instrumentation: No new schemas will be created for this as we’re using the Metrics Platform Instrumentation and will be relying on the core schema. We will use the HomepageVisit schema to track pageviews of the Newcomer Homepage. We also plan to mirror the Community Updates module instrumentation using the existing HomepageModule schema, as that enables us to learn about possible differences between the two approaches.

Data retention plan: We do not plan to retain any data for longer than the standard 90 day data retention policy.

The Growth team aims to release experiments quickly, so the first version of this feature may have more limited functionality. After initial experimentation, if this feature proves valuable, then we should consider adding many further improvements which are detailed in: Community updates module - second iteration improvement ideas.