Jdforrester (WMF)

Growth News #35

A quarterly update from the Growth team on our work to improve the new editor experience.

New releases

English Wikipedia gets "Add a Link" Structured Task

We released the "Add a Link" Structured Task to 100% of accounts at English Wikipedia on Tuesday, September 2nd (before then it was available to 20% of accounts).

Growth features for Wikidata

After examining if the Growth features and Mentorship could be adapted to Wikidata, we activated the Growth features on Beta Wikidata to allow for testing and discussion (T400937). Although some features, like Suggested Edits, are Wikipedia-specific, the Growth team designed most features to be more wiki-agnostic.

Work in progress

Revise Tone Structured Task

The Growth team is making progress on the technical architecture, onboarding design, and early user testing. We are targeting an A/B test before the end of this year, with constructive edits by newcomers as the primary success metric.

Add a link to more wikis

The machine learning team has been working on a new model that can suggest links to more languages, including Urdu, Chinese, and Japanese Wikipedias. We are starting to release the “Add a Link” feature to Wikipedias that weren’t supported by the previous model.

Add a link, which can be configured by the community locally, increases the chance that a new contributor will make their first edit and then continue to participate in Wikipedia.

Research

The Growth team is involved in several research initiatives to help guide our future work:

Progression System – We have published initial findings from interviews with 10 English and French Wikipedia newcomers. The research examined motivations, challenges, and feedback on a prototype system intended to help editors build confidence, develop skills, and contribute more constructively over time.

Mobile Web Editing Research – This project combines quantitative and qualitative data, community feedback, and user journey analysis to identify possible ways to enhance the mobile editing experience.

Newcomers Survey – This project surveys successful newcomers on English Wikipedia to understand their early editing experiences, tool use, and community interactions.

Community events

The Growth team participated in several community events to listen, share, and collaborate on improving newcomer experiences across Wikimedia projects.

Wikimania - Organizers as key partners to support newcomers' growth in our movement

This session invited organizers to share how they introduce newcomers to Growth features and the challenges they encounter. The discussion focused on common newcomer questions and opportunities to strengthen collaboration in supporting new editors.

Wikimania - Lightning Talk: Structured Tasks

This talk demonstrated how Structured Tasks help newcomers take their first successful steps on Wikipedia. It shared impact data, community configurations, and a demo of “Add a Link,” illustrating how these tasks make editing more accessible and sustainable, particularly for mobile contributors.

Wikimania - Building a Sustainable Future for Wikimedia Contributors

With active editor numbers declining, the Contributors Strategy aims to create a clearer, more engaging path for participation. This session, led by the WMF Contributors group with involvement from the Editing, Growth, Moderator Tools, and Connection (formerly Campaigns) teams, highlighted efforts to streamline contributor experiences, offer structured and mobile-friendly workflows, and foster meaningful engagement. Participants learned about ongoing initiatives and shared feedback to help shape a more inclusive and sustainable future for Wikimedia contributors.

CEE Meeting - Retaining beginners and improving content moderation: an inclusive and sustainable future for Wikipedia contributors

Many communities face a decline in volunteer engagement. Newcomers often leave soon after joining, while experienced editors struggle to manage increasingly complex workflows and overwhelming backlogs. We presented the Contributors Strategy and the different features and workflows that can help communities to address these challenges. We listened to the specific needs of the CEE communities to help guide the Contributors teams' work.

Growth team's newsletter prepared by the Growth team and posted by bot • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.

10:23, 22 October 2025 (UTC)

Growth/Newsletters/36

Updates from the Growth team on our work to improve the new editor experience.

Recent releases

Account creation experiments

Several experiments to increase successful account creation have delivered significant results.

An updated message shown to logged-out mobile users who try to edit produced a 27% relative increase in account creation and is being scaled to all wikis. (T424595)
A new account menu button in the mobile web header, A/B tested across five Wikipedias with nearly 8 million participants, made logged-out mobile users 25% more likely to create an account, with no significant difference in constructive editing behavior. (T428220)
A simpler post-edit dialog for temporary account holders increased permanent account creation by 87% (relative), converting more temp editors into registered ones. (T416418)

The redesigned account creation form increases registration by a relative 24.4%
We also redesigned the account creation form itself (T409236): adding real-time username validation, a concise summary of the username policy, a "reveal password" option, and a simplified design aligned with Codex guidelines. In an A/B test on English Wikipedia mobile, users who saw the redesigned form created permanent accounts at a rate of 20.4%, compared to 16.4% for the control group (a 24.4% relative increase).

Revise Tone structured task

Revise Tone helps newcomers identify passages that may contain non-encyclopedic language and guides them through revising the tone. In A/B testing on Arabic, English, French, and Portuguese Wikipedias, newcomer task completion rates were 38.7% higher than the default Copyedit task, with no decrease in edit quality. The test ended July 9, and the feature is now available to everyone on these wikis, configurable via Community Configuration. We plan to release Revise Tone to more wikis.

Automated mentor list cleanup

Communities can now automatically mark inactive mentors as away or remove them from mentorship entirely (which automatically reassigns their mentees). Inactivity is based on edits, and talk page responses count, so mentors answering mentee questions remain active. We recommend enabling both options together; administrators can enable them via Special:CommunityConfiguration and review the mentor list at Special:ManageMentors.

Growth features for Wikidata

Growth features are now available at Wikidata, including a simplified Newcomer Homepage, Mentorship, the Impact module, Community Updates and the Help Panel.

Work in progress

Early concepts for evolving the Newcomer Homepage into a personalized 'Home' that grows with contributors.

Home

The Growth and Moderator Tools teams are developing Home (T419358): a unified, personalized landing page intended to replace the Newcomer Homepage. Rather than remaining a newcomer-only feature, Home will evolve with users as they gain experience, surfacing Suggested Edits, edits to review, and moderation workflows at the right moment.

Research

The Wikimedia Research team, in partnership with the Growth Team, published findings from two projects on how new editors learn and integrate into the community:

Growth team's newsletter prepared by the Growth team and posted by bot • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.

13:17, 18 August 2026 (UTC)

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