User talk:Jdforrester (WMF)/Archive 2/Flow export

Pre-Flow discussion is on User talk:Jdforrester (WMF)/Archive.

Engineering report

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This is a dead project, the last finished report with a proper summary was published in August. September is a draft without summary, October doesn't exist (also redirected, if you want it as red link delete that also.) See also Project:Village Pump/Flow/2014#c-Be..anyone-2014-10-13T07:43:00.000Z-Wikimedia_Engineering_reports. –Be..anyone 💩 21:37, 27 October 2014 (UTC)

"Delayed" doesn't mean "dead". I've responded in more length in the other thread you started. Guillaume (WMF) (talk) 19:16, 28 October 2014 (UTC)

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Pic

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Gummi bear saying "thank you" for the VE tables. Elitre (WMF) (talk) 17:57, 6 November 2014 (UTC)

You're welcome. :-) Jdforrester (WMF) (talk) 18:44, 6 November 2014 (UTC)

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Block vandal

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Please, block this vandal: User:S-e-x f-u-c-k-i-n-g-i-d-i-o-t Syum90 (talk) 17:25, 17 November 2014 (UTC)

Hey, I see that it's already been done. Thanks for the alert, though. Jdforrester (WMF) (talk) 17:38, 17 November 2014 (UTC)

Okay, greetings. Syum90 (talk) 17:58, 17 November 2014 (UTC)

Mas porque Eu sou queria copar os jogos do Sonic 78.29.154.146 (talk) 20:08, 23 January 2015 (UTC)

41emJQ I've read a few good stuff here. Definitely worth bookmarking for revisiting. I surprise how much effort you put to make such a wonderful informative site. 37.233.27.142 (talk) 23:22, 4 February 2015 (UTC)

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All WMF Projects should follow VisualEditor's Lead

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I'm really liking the idea of the triage meetings for VisualEditor. I sat in on the last one and look forward to the next. As a third-party user/admin it's a great way to be involved and provide insight into the decision making process. Are there plans for the other WMF-led projects to do the same? Echo, MobileFrontend, CirrusSearch, Flow, etc?

If not, how could someone outside, such as myself, propose such a thing? Ckoerner (talk) 17:14, 2 March 2015 (UTC)

Thanks for the feedback.

I don't know about other teams' plans, but yes, I think that could be a good move. I worry a bit that it'd be over-whelming to have e.g. ten weekly public meetings, though – if I'm a volunteer and interested in a bunch of different things, do I just have to pick the ones I can do? If they're rotating the times at which they're occurring, who gets to go first, etc.?

Echo, MobileFrontend per se (it's complicated) and CirrusSearch aren't active under development currently (just maintenance), but Flow certainly is – for that, you should ask User:DHorn (WMF).

Other user-facing projects underway which might want to do this are:

• Mobile Apps led by User:DGarry (WMF),
• Gather led by User:Jkatz (WMF),
• WikiGrok led by User:Maryana (WMF),
• Content Translation led by User:Runab WMF.

There's also Wikidata itself, led by User:Lydia Pintscher (WMDE), and several less user-facing projects – the Wikidata Query Service, front-end standardisation work, the continuous integration workstream, the general Platform backlog and several others. Jdforrester (WMF) (talk) 17:43, 2 March 2015 (UTC)

I am always happy to have help with triaging Wikidata bugs :) I currently do not have the time however to do regular triage sessions on IRC myself. If you want to talk more and help please do reach out. Lydia Pintscher (WMDE) (talk) 17:45, 2 March 2015 (UTC)

Hello, we stopped with the IRC triage sessions due to a lack of time and audience. Its an ongoing process for us so triages do happen all the time. We'd be happy to hold similar sessions in future (not immediate). Until that time, if there is enough interest we can make it a part of the office hour that happens every month. Thanks for the suggestion. Runa Bhattacharjee (WMF) (talk) 11:35, 3 March 2015 (UTC)

Runa, that's good to know! Rdicerb (WMF) (talk) 19:28, 3 March 2015 (UTC)

Ckoerner, thank you for that feedback - we are considering building meetings like this or similar into the product development lifecycle and need to look into ways of making it scalable in terms of the technology used (Webex vs. GHangout vs. Hangout on Air). Certainly, checking with other teams to see where they're at and whether they're able to accommodate these meetings are a great idea - I can imagine it might not always be useful to do so, but there are other mechanisms that can be used to give more insight into the decision making and development process :) Rdicerb (WMF) (talk) 21:11, 2 March 2015 (UTC)

I appreciate you taking the time. You're all doing good work and I think you all have done a commendable job for communicating the complex work you do. I'll dig in with some of the suggestions and see where I can not only learn more but help too! Ckoerner (talk) 21:24, 4 March 2015 (UTC)

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Starting conversion of LiquidThreads to Flow at mediawiki.org

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Hello. I'm sending this to you, because you've been one of the top 50 users of LQT on mediawiki.org over the last 360 days,[1] and I wanted to make sure that you'd seen the announcement at Starting conversion of LiquidThreads to Flow at mediawiki.org. There are links in the topic-summary at the top, for other discussions (wikitech-l and Project:Current_issues), and a link to the planned process and timeline (scheduled to begin April 6, with smaller conversions at first). Please do test Flow out at Talk:Sandbox if you haven't tried it recently, and give any feedback/suggestions/requests at that main discussion location. Much thanks. Quiddity (WMF) (talk) 23:57, 27 March 2015 (UTC)

Great to hear. :-) Jdforrester (WMF) (talk) 22:24, 29 March 2015 (UTC)

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mr and hi still not enabled

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We received message through . ‎MediaWiki message delivery to test IME at https://wikimedia.github.io/VisualEditor/demos/ve/desktop-dist.html#!pages/simple.html. I wanted to test mr and hi devnagari script, Alas both the scripts IME could not be activated, may be still not enabled. So as of now test failed before we begin :(

Rgds Mahitgar (talk) 10:55, 22 April 2015 (UTC)

Thank you for responding! Could you tell me what browser and what IME you are using for these? Jdforrester (WMF) (talk) 15:33, 22 April 2015 (UTC)

https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/37.0.1/releasenotes/

About IME , the test page only displayed language names and did not display any of usual IME options available under ULS (UniversalLanguageSelector Extension)

Or is it that it that still ULS is not enabled but we can use external IMEs . 30 % of Marathi language users use Google input tools I will ask more people to test with diferent IMEs step by step Thanks and rgds Mahitgar (talk) 05:33, 23 April 2015 (UTC)

ULS testing is going to be worked on by the Language Engineering team, but right now it's not enabled, that's right. Did you try out the Google input tools or an external IME for these? Jdforrester (WMF) (talk) 15:09, 23 April 2015 (UTC)

>>Did you try out the Google input tools or an external IME for these?<<

I wanted to know which user types to be diverted for testing, I will start diverting the users now, thanks. Mahitgar (talk) 07:23, 25 April 2015 (UTC)

Thank you.

If you (or other community members) have an IME that is active in VisualEditor, it would be particularly great if you could use this logger to create a trace of exactly what happens when you use one or two of the IMEs so that we can definitively work out what causes the issues and how we can solve them? If so, please copy the log it outputs and e-mail it to me (or post on-wiki).

Many thanks! Jdforrester (WMF) (talk) 19:06, 27 April 2015 (UTC)

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VisualEditor (Japanese) MS Office IME glitches

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I tested the Visual Editor and found problems inputting while using MS Office IME 2010 (Windows 7, Internet Explorer). Acts as if it randomly accepts an "enter" key input, even whenI have not yet pressed "enter", having only manipulated arrow keys and space bar.

This either results in rendering unconverted pure-hiragana text ("ありがとう" instead of "有難う") or at other times when I try to convert the entire "ありがとう" it gets split the word up and starts converting just the "あり" part.

I think Visual Editor would be great for new users who find it overtaxing to use markup. But currently, the input is too glitchy so I can only recommend that Japanese-speakers create a draft using their own favorite editor and copy&paste the texts, footnotes, etc. --~ Kiyoweap (talk) 23:13, 22 April 2015 (UTC)

Hello!

Thank you for this information.

If you have the time, would it be possible for you to use this logger to create a trace of exactly what happens when you use the IME so that we can definitively work out what causes the issues and how we can solve them? If so, please copy the log it outputs and e-mail it to me (or post on-wiki).

Thanks! Jdforrester (WMF) (talk) 20:32, 27 April 2015 (UTC)

I'm usually active in En and Ja Wikipedia, don't usually haunt the MediaWiki so I didn't notice this request till now.

I tried operating IME (MS Office IME 2010 (14.0.7003.100) SP2) using this logger .

When I tried "ありがとう"⇒"有難う"the conversion worked like a charm.

But this is a case where the first conversion candidate offered is the correct result.

It seems to still not work in the case where I need to scroll down to second or third candidates and select.

So it converted「げてん」⇒「ゲ店」without allowing me to scroll down to pick my choice which was「げてん」⇒「下天」.

I think result will vary depending on user, because IME is memory-based, and will offer as first candidate whatever choice you used recently or repeatedly.

Hope that helps. --~ Kiyoweap (talk) 03:24, 3 September 2015 (UTC)

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VisualEditor on kkwiki

Please turn on Visual Editor as default for all user on kk.wikipedia.org. Discussion is here Arystanbek (talk) 14:00, 25 April 2015 (UTC)

Tracked in Phabricator
Task T97315

I have posted this as phab:T97315. Kazakh is a complicated language system, and our support for it is weak at the moment. It might be better to encourage more extensive testing first. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 18:01, 27 April 2015 (UTC)

Single edit tab is close, but I still have a problem. I have fresh installation MW 1.27 with Visual Editor, I'm logged in as Admnistrator but I can not see option Editing mode: in Preferences. How can I enable this option? I would like to get Visual Editor as a default editor. Thanks. Rozpalacz (talk) 21:00, 20 October 2016 (UTC)

VisualEditor on Bhojpuri wiki (bh.wiki)

Hello Sir ! I use Chrome browser and VE is working fine for me on hindi wikipedia (hi.wiki) but is not working properly on bh.wiki! My problem is that when I make some edit and the press the save button, next window in which we give summary does not appear. But still if I try to type summary, its text appears hanging at the middle of the screen and then I press "Shift+tab" (this would have highlighted the save button on summay window) and then 'Enter', my edits get saved.

That means summary window just does not appear on screen but still its works.

I asked another user Sanjeev Kumar and he told me that this VE works fine for him! Please help! --SM7^--talk-- 15:13, 9 May 2015 (UTC)

Hi there! Would you please try to edit this page while logged out (or in an incognito window)? It could be a gadget/script is interfering, because using VE seems possible at that wiki. Best, Elitre (WMF) (talk) 16:43, 9 May 2015 (UTC)

Yes, it was gadget - defaultsummaries. Thanks for the help!--~ --SM7^--talk-- 23:45, 9 May 2015 (UTC)

Thank you for your interest! You can use this page to provide any feedback in the future. Elitre (WMF) (talk) 06:28, 10 May 2015 (UTC)

"Minority of users"

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I strong disagree on your edit in Template:ExtensionInstall.

Please, provide a valid reason, or else I'd have to revert, because the minority of users are actually who could use the new wfLoadExtension function. See quantity of wikis using MediaWiki 1.25 vs others Ciencia Al Poder (talk) 09:25, 30 May 2015 (UTC)

If you want to update the template properly, that's great – go ahead. That means:

1. If registration = yes, show the MW 1.25+ documentation in one block of description and a distinct block for MW 1.24- with very clear warning signs that this is the deprecated method that should only be used if people know the previous method doesn't work.
2. If registration = no, show the MW 1.24- documentation block with a note that it's still using the old method and will be replaced in the next few weeks (if they're using master) or in the next release (if not).

In the next couple of weeks, we're going to switch the template over to assume that registration = yes by default, so… Remember that using a mixture of wfLoadExtension and the old, slow method is inefficient for users' servers, so we need to encourage people to switch over comprehensively.

Also, please do not threaten to revert people, and in general it's expected that you discuss the merits of edits on the discussion page of the relevant page, rather than hounding the individual who made it on their talk page. Jdforrester (WMF) (talk) 20:10, 30 May 2015 (UTC)

You are right that my message isn't as polite as one would expect. Still, if you see the edit history of Template:ExtensionInstall, you'll notice the reason for it to be included, which was totally ignored by your edit, so I don't think opening a discussion would make any difference in this case.

Will do my best in editing that template to provide a clear idea that this new method is what needs to be used since MediaWiki 1.25, but older installations need to use the old version. The current situation is simply wrong and will generate lots of complains for users using MediaWiki 1.24 and before that will get a WSOD page. Ciencia Al Poder (talk) 09:35, 31 May 2015 (UTC)

I think you underestimate people. People using out-of-date code (like an MW 1.24.* branch) are generally aware that they shouldn't try adding or configuring anything new as the world has moved on. Jdforrester (WMF) (talk) 16:53, 1 June 2015 (UTC)

People can just install MediaWiki 1.24, or 1.23 (that's LTS) instead of 1.25 for whatever reason (some specific extensions still not compatible with 1.25, system requirements or just because 1.25 is still too recent) and install extensions for them. You can't negate them the right to do so by obscuring documentation for them Ciencia Al Poder (talk) 17:31, 1 June 2015 (UTC)

LTS is a laughable lie – the 'S' in 'LTS' means support, and no-one supports them except WMF staff doing security patch releases from time to time. We need to stop pretending to people that they're likely to get much or any community support when they're using anything other than the latest release or so. Jdforrester (WMF) (talk) 20:30, 1 June 2015 (UTC)

Talk to yourself, but thankfully, MediaWiki is not only Wikipedia and WMF staff, and there's a community -in which I'm part of it- supporting them in Project:Support desk. Pretending to drop that support is like pretending to ignore that MediaWiki is running in more than 25000 sites. And that's a disrespectful statement for a lot of developers that probably won't be contributing to MediaWiki if it were close-minded enough to only support WMF wikis Ciencia Al Poder (talk) 09:28, 2 June 2015 (UTC)

I think you two are talking about different types of support.

You're doing "tech support" at Project:Support desk—answering questions that people have about (for example) how to install it or troubleshoot it. That awesome community provides support for all versions, regardless of how old, so long as someone there knows the answer or is interested in finding out what it is.

The "S" in "Long-term support" isn't about tech support; it's about dev support. It's about things like porting new security patches back to older versions. There are very few people doing that, and I would not be surprised at all to learn that most (or even all) of them are employed by the WMF.

Or, to give an analogy, I have an old Mac Plus (with a whole megabyte of RAM!) in the basement, and I can certainly find a community online that would cheerfully provide "tech support" on how to set it up again. But it's no longer "supported" in the sense of new software or updates to old software being created for it. It is unsupported hardware, even if it's possible to get answers to my questions about it. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 09:53, 3 June 2015 (UTC)

I don't see what's the point of your message to the whole conversation here, sorry.

There are a lot of MediaWiki installations out there that need longer terms for upgrading, because they rely on extensions that usually are broken on every new MediaWiki release and need some time for devs to fix them. Often because of problems with the release team (see phab:T66157).

Security fixes are not hard to backport, so I don't see what's the problem of maintaining LTS. If you ever remove LTS releases, I imagine the next step is to remove support for stable MediaWiki releases, only supporting current master or WMF branches. Who would put the limit, here? Ciencia Al Poder (talk) 20:10, 3 June 2015 (UTC)

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Bots

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You are receiving this message because a technical change may affect a bot, gadget, or user script you have been using. The breaking change involves API calls. This change has been planned for two years. The WMF will start making this change on 30 June 2015. A partial list of affected bots can be seen here: https://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikitech-l/2015-June/081931.html This includes all bots that are using pywikibot compat. Some of these bots have already been fixed. However, if you write user scripts or operate a bot that uses the API, then you should check your code, to make sure that it will not break.

What, exactly, is breaking? The "default continuation mode" for action=query requests to api.php will be changing to be easier for new coders to use correctly. To find out whether your script or bot may be affected, then search the source code (including any frameworks or libraries) for the string "query-continue". If that is not present, then the script or bot is not affected. In a few cases, the code will be present but not used. In that case, the script or bot will continue working.

This change will be part of 1.26wmf12. It will be deployed to test wikis (including mediawiki.org) on 30 June, to non-Wikipedias (such as Wiktionary) on 1 July, and to all Wikipedias on 2 July 2015.

If your bot or script is receiving the warning about this upcoming change (as seen at https://www.mediawiki.org/w/api.php?action=query&list=allpages ), it's time to fix your code!

• The simple solution is to simply include the "rawcontinue" parameter with your request to continue receiving the raw continuation data (example <https://www.mediawiki.org/w/api.php?action=query&list=allpages&rawcontinue=1>). No other code changes should be necessary.
• Or you could update your code to use the simplified continuation documented at https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/API:Query#Continuing_queries (example <https://www.mediawiki.org/w/api.php?action=query&list=allpages&continue=>), which is much easier for clients to implement correctly.

Either of the above solutions may be tested immediately, you'll know it works because you stop seeing the warning.

Do you need help with your own bot or script? Ask questions in e-mail on the mediawiki-api or wikitech-l mailing lists. Volunteers at m:Tech or w:en:WP:Village pump (technical) or w:en:Wikipedia:Bot owners' noticeboard may also be able to help you.

Are you using someone else's gadgets or user scripts? Most scripts are not affected. To find out if a script you use needs to be updated, then post a note at the discussion page for the gadget or the talk page of the user who originally made the script. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) ~~~~~

MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 19:03, 17 June 2015 (UTC)

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Portal vs Main Page

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Hello,

I think, that portals could allure users with some topic, they could help them with navigation in that topic and they could offer them also some news and interesting facts about that topic. But so many users still don't even know, what is their purpose. Therefore I've got an idea, which would be worth realizing. Users could check (in Settings/Beta) not to see the Main Page, but to be redirected to their selected portal. I.e. if that user then clicks at Wikipedia logo, or types e.g. en.wikipedia.org in their browser (logged in of course), their selected portal will be openned instead of standard Main Page. This function could help not only with portal and its article of the month (etc.) propagation but also portal topic propagation itself across users. Portal is so called main page of its topic, in which are some users interested, isn't it? Of course it would be a function just for experienced users, which check it in the Settings/Beta and select their preferred portal there. Everybody else would see standard Main Page as usual. I don't know, how to code for MediaWiki, I'm just experienced web programmer and template editor on Czech Wikipedia (cswiki). Therefore I ask for your opinion and for your help and effort to make this idea happen. Dvorapa (talk) 09:19, 4 September 2015 (UTC)

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Updating Citoid with latest translators

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How often does the MW codebase sync with Zotero's official translator repo? I wrote a translator that was accepted today on Github but it's not working with Citoid right now. czar 21:57, 6 December 2015 (UTC)

Arbitrarily. Our fork was last updated in August but I think our last upstream merge was sometime before that... definitely not ideal. I'll make sure it gets done again soon (mobrovac is another person to bug about that- he does deploy for citoid).

Also- thanks for writing a translator! That's awesome! Mvolz (WMF) (talk) 20:29, 7 December 2015 (UTC)

Hey @Czar, I agree with Mvolz, it's awesome that you did that.

Would you mind telling us whether you followed any guides in particular? Do you have tips, recommendations, advice that you can share with others willing to do the same? That would be so appreciated. Thank you again. Elitre (WMF) (talk) 14:34, 9 December 2015 (UTC)

Oy, this could be a long post... I love Zotero and use it for academic articles but it needs more website translators and better citation export for Wikipedians, so I'm trying to help where I can with that. I was excited about Citoid and posted at W:WT:VG about making translators for our project's common sites but the translator coding barrier to entry is quite high—particularly its tutorial materials, which are partly what kept me from contributing for so long.

I used the "HWZT" tutorial (by Crymble and with additions on the Zotero wiki) but, frankly, it was needlessly complicated. The best route right now is to get set up with Firefox and Scaffold, learn how to get XPaths with Firebug, and use the "Framework" template (which is supported in Scaffold). But if you could screencast Sebastian's potential training, it surely would be much more efficient than the day I poured into figuring this out. I also think there are some easy fixes I can target to improve integration with Wikipedia (update embedded metadata translator, create Chrome extension like CiteGen that matches {{Cite web }} standard formatting and uses Citoid? but allows for customization so editors can create citations with one click even outside VE). Have a lot more thoughts on this, if I can be useful czar 17:40, 18 December 2015 (UTC)

We're all ears. :) Also, let us know what you think about our suggestion about whether Sebastian could be interested in turning the "webinar" into a Tech talk in February or later. Can you get in touch with him, perhaps? Elitre (WMF) (talk) 17:47, 18 December 2015 (UTC)

(I did find Talk:Citoid/2015#h-Potential_webinar_on_Zotero_translator_coding-2015-12-06T16:58:00.000Z after I left my message.) Elitre (WMF) (talk) 15:33, 9 December 2015 (UTC)

Maybe @Mvolz will know the answer. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 18:57, 7 December 2015 (UTC)

@Mvolz (WMF) @Mobrovac-WMF Requesting another upstream merge for the translators repo (I wrote a few more translators with a few more in the pipeline. I'm also mostly done with a hideous automatic citation expander that uses the Citoid API to automate the majority of online material that I cite in my workflow.)

(1) Would it be better to request future merges on Phrabricator? (2) Is there a reason for merging manually instead of automatically? czar 04:24, 22 June 2016 (UTC)

@Czar unfortunately merging automatically doesn't work :(. For some reason git has a really hard time merging files with "last updated" strings inside the translators and every time we merge we have to manually fix up a lot of the files, which is pretty error prone and time consuming. Mvolz (WMF) (talk) 13:50, 23 June 2016 (UTC)

(1) Yes, it'd be easier to track progress that way.

(2) Enabling translators in the stand-alone zotero service is done by setting a flag in each translator (so as to indicate that it can be used in the service, and some are known not to work), so we have an extra patch with which we do that. Alternatively, we should try to upstream our fork and use the upstream repo directly. @Mvolz (WMF) already filed a patch for that.

When you say you're almost done, does it mean you have more work to do on the translators? Would it be worth waiting for the work to be complete before doing an upstream merge? Mobrovac-WMF (talk) 10:05, 22 June 2016 (UTC)

@Mobrovac-WMF Unfortunately there's a hiccup with that change, which is that the google books fix we put in place to anonymize google books urls isn't accepted, because they only fill out the url field if the full text is available.

So we are back to having our own fork or putting that change in citoid itself specifically for google books links. Not sure which road to go down really. Mvolz (WMF) (talk) 13:47, 23 June 2016 (UTC)

@Mvolz (WMF), hm, how about we just upstream the activation part of the patch? That would at least help us merge upstream changes more easily. It's not glorious, but it's a start. Mobrovac-WMF (talk) 12:25, 24 June 2016 (UTC)

@Mobrovac-WMF Everything that has been pulled upstream is good to go—I just meant that I will be making more in the future and I didn't know how often I should request a merge (since I'd like to use the translators with Citoid)

@Mvolz (WMF), if you would like a hand with the Zotero end of that pull request (so that Citoid can use the upstream repo directly), let me know and I can give it a try czar 15:29, 22 June 2016 (UTC)

Awesome, @Czar, thank you on your efforts! I will do my best to bring the update to our fork ASAP (I'm on Wikimania currently, so this probably won't happen before next week). Mobrovac-WMF (talk) 12:26, 24 June 2016 (UTC)

The latest changes from upstream have been merged and are now live. Mobrovac-WMF (talk) 09:21, 30 June 2016 (UTC)

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Single edit tab

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The WMF's discussion of single edit tab has been, at least to me, very confusing and unclear. I've gotten a few responses that the WMF isn't going to be doing X, isn't doing Y, and isn't doing Z. But I'm having trouble finding a positive answer on how single edit tab is planned to work when someone signs up for a new account.

After ruling out all of the X Y and Z that aren't going to happen, the process of elimination seems to indicate:

• New users will not get a menu
• A new user will get a single edit button
• The first time that button is clicked it will go directly into the site default editor
• The EnWiki site default editor is currently wikitext
• The EnWiki site default editor won't be changed to VE without asking the community first

Can you either confirm that the plan is to default new users directly into wikitext mode, or clarify how it is planned to work for new accounts? Thanx. Alsee (talk) 09:38, 20 January 2016 (UTC)

Sure:

There will be only one edit tab. When you click on it, an editor will be loaded. Depending on user and system preferences, which editor loads will differ. For users who have no preferences beyond the default, which includes anonymous users, they will get the editor they used last; for logged-in users who've never edited, or logged-out editors who've not edited since their cookies were cleared or expired, they will get the "default" editor.

On "VE primary" wikis (like the Spanish Wikipedia, along with >200 others), the first editor that loads will be the visual editor. As always, first-time editors on opening the visual editor get some educational material welcoming them to the wiki, and about how to use links and references appropriately. Returning editors will get their most recent editor. Returning logged-in editors with a one-time welcome dialog that offers the ability to change their preferences in case they don't like the default settings (e.g. they never want to load the visual editor on clicking 'edit', or they want both tabs). This is hopefully going to go well, but as hope doesn't make a promise we're doing it gradually, starting with one smaller wiki and verifying it works for users there before proceeding.

On "VE secondary" wikis (like the English Wikipedia), the first editor that loads will still be the wikitext editor (if they have JavaScript, like now). Once this is in place, we will be able to run on the English Wikipedia our first ever A/B test with anonymous users (as before offering VE changed the read interface, which isn't permitted for performance reasons), where we will experiment with what the impact of making the wiki "VE primary" will be, and once we have data, discussing what that means for users with the existing editors.

I hope we'll be able to run the A/B test for the English Wikipedia in the next couple of months, but our first duty is to ensure these changes work well on the bigger wikis by VE edit volume. Jdforrester (WMF) (talk) 15:44, 20 January 2016 (UTC)

It has been a week. I see you have been editing on the 13th, the 18th, the 19th, and today.

Is T132806 being ignored? Alsee (talk) 08:40, 20 April 2016 (UTC)

Tracked in Phabricator
Task T132806

I hope this was simply a bug, but VE was just imposed as Primary editor on EnWiki. Alsee (talk) 21:39, 12 April 2016 (UTC)

Hi there, sorry for the delayed response; I didn't see this until just now (the perils of having dozens of notifications)…

Thanks for your remarks: it appears something is indeed not working as I had expected it to. T133304 for example seems to suggest the cookie system is not behaving in the way described in documentation. We'll address all the issues in due course: CLs will collect more specific details from users who have reported them. Apologies for the inconvenience.

Yours, Jdforrester (WMF) (talk) 17:50, 25 April 2016 (UTC)

Could you triage Phab T132806 as accepted? Thanx. Alsee (talk) 15:18, 26 April 2016 (UTC)

They will presumably do the paperwork for that Phab ticket at the next bug triage meeting.

At least with this team, it is not unusual for bugs to be resolved before the paperwork gets done. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 16:42, 27 April 2016 (UTC)

Not resolved. See Village Pump discussion.

I just saw you replied there. Thanx. Reclosing this thread. Alsee (talk) 21:40, 12 May 2016 (UTC)

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HBD

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And many years.

Ad Huikeshoven (talk) 13:25, 31 March 2016 (UTC)

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Urdu Wikipedia (Latin numbers & Short URL for pages)

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Hi James,

It was a pleasure meeting you at Wikimania 2016.

As discussed with you, please ensure that Urdu Wikipedia pages get short URL codes in English similar to what is available for Hindi Wikipedia.

Also, please make latin numbers (1,2,3) default for Urdu Wikipedia.

In case if you would like to further discuss this, please post a message on my Urdu Wikipedia talkpage.

Umpteen thanks in advance. Hindustanilanguage (talk) 15:02, 5 July 2016 (UTC)

Hey there.

The first request was filed during the conference as T138507. I'll get it done soon.

For the second request, I'm not sure I understand. Numbers in references are already Latin, as are the ones on e.g. Special:Statistics. Am I missing something? Jdforrester (WMF) (talk) 20:37, 11 July 2016 (UTC)

And it's now done! :-) Jdforrester (WMF) (talk) 00:22, 22 July 2016 (UTC)

As probably you might remember during our meeting at Wikimania, for the phonetic font, when I type 1,2,3, I am getring ۱،۲،۳. We don't want this. We prefer 1,2,3 numerals. Hindustanilanguage (talk) 19:28, 18 July 2016 (UTC)

Aha, yes, that was T138399. I will talk to the Language team about that one too. Jdforrester (WMF) (talk) 20:05, 18 July 2016 (UTC)

Thank you. If there is anything urgent, please post the message on my Urdu Wikipedia talk page. Hindustanilanguage (talk) 14:03, 24 July 2016 (UTC)

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Translate extension

Hi Jdforrester, could you explain me a bit why did you remove the translation tags on VisualEditor. You wrote it is because a bug of the Translate extension. What bug is it? Thanks in advance. Pamputt (talk) 16:49, 13 September 2016 (UTC)

Hey there. The superb Translate extension is sadly incompatible with the visual editor. It is inappropriate to try to make such pages translatable, as it just makes the wiki terrible for everyone. Switching Translate over to not be based on strings but instead DOM is a huge piece of work. https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T131516 is the top-level task for this. Jdforrester (WMF) (talk) 18:03, 13 September 2016 (UTC)

I disagree that "superb" is an appropriate descriptor for Extension:Translate. "Brittle" and "strange" seem like much more appropriate words. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 12:03, 15 September 2016 (UTC)

Hmmm, so if I understand correctly, it just means that since people are using Visual Editor, translation tags should not be used because there are troubles with it. Right? Pamputt (talk) 18:10, 13 September 2016 (UTC)

Basically, what you described is just a problem for English version, mainly for users who use visual editor. For all others languages, it is not a problem at all since users of such languages have only access to the translation interface. So should we stop to translate pages just because there are some issue with visual editor? I guess most of people who write on mediawiki do not use VE but I may be wrong. Pamputt (talk) 16:21, 16 September 2016 (UTC)

No, it is a problem for the "master" version whatever language it is written in. We have been manually translating pages for 16 years. Doing so is not that onerous. Jdforrester (WMF) (talk) 20:56, 20 September 2016 (UTC)

So, if I understand correctly your point, Translate extension should not be used on any wiki, right? Because I guess there are the same issues whatever the wiki the extension is used on. Sorry if I ask naive question but it is because I am a bit surprised because I never met someone that shows me these issues before. For example, on Wikidata, translate extension is widely used and I never met someone that talk to me about such problem so far. Pamputt (talk) 21:56, 3 October 2016 (UTC)

Extension:Translate is "safe" to use on pages that you do not expect to edit again. It's used for m:Tech/News, for example: the 'master' copy is finalized, and then all of the translations are made. And we (to our sorrow) use it on some Help: pages, including Help:VisualEditor/User guide, which needs to be changed frequently. However, the use of the translate extension there deters people from updating the help page. Even experienced editors avoid editing that page. So it is continually out of date. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 08:12, 11 October 2016 (UTC)

[Moved] Enabling "Single Edit Tab" mode on a third party installation

Originally posted elsewhere by @Rozpalacz:

Single edit tab is close, but I still have a problem. I have fresh installation MW 1.27 with Visual Editor, I'm logged in as Admnistrator but I can not see option Editing mode: in Preferences. How can I enable this option? I would like to get Visual Editor as a default editor. Thanks. Jdforrester (WMF) (talk) 20:49, 28 October 2016 (UTC)

Hey. That feature was added about a year ago in 748db015 to fix T58337, and made it into MW 1.27; the option you mention sets the visualeditor-tabs preference and should be available, as long as you set $wgVisualEditorUseSingleEditTab to true in your LocalSettings.php file. If that's the case, did you also set visualeditor-enable to 1 there too? Jdforrester (WMF) (talk) 20:55, 28 October 2016 (UTC)

Engaging with and understood by the community

It would cost you nothing to respond to sensible suggestions and requests from the community with helpful and informative responses, rather than amusing yourself with unhelpful flippancies. You are clearly capable of understanding and responding in a positive and constructive fashion if you so choose – please try to do so regularly in future, you might even find that you come to enjoy it. Rogol Domedonfors (talk) 09:58, 29 October 2016 (UTC)

Non-binary current edit

Interesting idea; let's follow-up on Phabricator!

Instead of a user edit being either current or not current, what if there was an indicator on the contribution page that indicated how many bytes have changed since an edit? Would that have an effect on performance? That would be very useful, and interesting to see the numbers get larger as you scroll back! Kjerish (talk) 15:35, 17 December 2016 (UTC)

Thanks for the picture. You're not looking for the number of bytes changed by that edit; you're looking for the net number of bytes changed since that edit – which could mean processing a very short list of subsequent edits, or, in some cases, could mean processing thousands of edits. There is some potential for significant performance issues in the latter.

Jdforrester might have different advice, but my suggestion to you is to write up a description of what you want to see on phab:. How to report a bug explains how to do it. You might additionally make a note on your calendar to look for the next m:Community wishlist survey, which should start in ~10 months. You could suggest this idea there, too. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 18:05, 17 December 2016 (UTC)

Request

Hello, happy New year ))) I have 2 accounts. I scored a password - user:Bari srtik, one of the stewards said that can help system administrators. On the personal page of Bari srtik, it is written that this is my page. Please help me...Ankax Hayastan (talk) 10:10, 5 January 2017 (UTC)

What is the practical problem? If you don't want to use two accounts, then simply stop using the second account. (Some people want two accounts. For example, they use one account on their own computers, and another when they visit an internet café.) WhatamIdoing (talk) 17:15, 5 January 2017 (UTC)

You did not understand me Ankax Hayastan (talk) 17:44, 5 January 2017 (UTC)

I want to use my second account. But I don't remember the password. I want to get a new password, but I haven't used email. Ankax Hayastan (talk) 17:47, 5 January 2017 (UTC)

I want to use my two accounts Ankax Hayastan (talk) 17:49, 5 January 2017 (UTC)

I am don't good speak English. Ankax Hayastan (talk) 17:51, 5 January 2017 (UTC)

Without an e-mail address, password resets are almost impossible. Unless a system administrator has met you in person, or knew that you had both accounts before the password is lost, then it cannot be done.

User:Yurik could probably explain this. WhatamIdoing (talk) 18:57, 5 January 2017 (UTC)

I noticed this thread because I had this page watchlisted from an old discussion.

Userpage m:User:Bari_srtik has not been edited by anyone except the owner (history link). The account has no contributions outside it's own userpage and usertalk page (contrib link). The user page says:

Hello, I am Bari srtik (nickname), and I am volunteer in wiki projects. My first user's page - Ankax Hayastan (6AND5).

The grammar is odd, but the meaning is clear. I have no idea what the (6AND5) part is about, but assuming there are no other accounts resembling "Ankax Hayastan" then it seems reasonable to reset Bari_srtik to it's asserted owner. However I couldn't find an explicit policy on reset requests. Alsee (talk) 22:05, 5 January 2017 (UTC)

My first name 6AND5 - https://ru.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=%D0%9E%D0%B1%D1%81%D1%83%D0%B6%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BD%D0%B8%D0%B5_%D1%83%D1%87%D0%B0%D1%81%D1%82%D0%BD%D0%B8%D0%BA%D0%B0%3AAnkax_Hayastan&action=historysubmit&type=revision&diff=77493200&oldid=77280156 Ankax Hayastan (talk) 09:08, 6 January 2017 (UTC)

https://ru.wikiquote.org/wiki/%D0%A1%D0%BB%D1%83%D0%B6%D0%B5%D0%B1%D0%BD%D0%B0%D1%8F:%D0%A3%D0%BF%D1%80%D0%B0%D0%B2%D0%BB%D0%B5%D0%BD%D0%B8%D0%B5_%D0%BF%D1%80%D0%B0%D0%B2%D0%B0%D0%BC%D0%B8/Bari_srtik Ankax Hayastan (talk) 09:15, 6 January 2017 (UTC)

On the personal page of the second account says that my account. Ankax Hayastan (talk) 19:49, 5 January 2017 (UTC)

https://meta.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=User:Bari_srtik&oldid=15515863 Ankax Hayastan (talk) 19:52, 5 January 2017 (UTC)

@Jdforrester (WMF), you will help me? Ankax Hayastan (talk) 10:24, 7 January 2017 (UTC)

how to sign on wikimedia foundation

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I try sign on wikimedia foundation but it not working Ghetto Gal (talk) 14:56, 17 January 2017 (UTC)

Do you mean www.wikimediafoundation.org/? That wiki is locked so that only authorised accounts can edit there. You can ask for an account at https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Request_for_an_account_on_the_Foundation_wiki on meta, if you have a reason to need one. Jdforrester (WMF) (talk) 17:56, 17 January 2017 (UTC)

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GCI

The following discussion is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.

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Can you accept my task for flow to I can do next what I want or I have to wait for prtksxna or Yana Kizule (talk) 20:21, 10 January 2018 (UTC)

I don't have GCI access, sorry, I think you have to wait for them. :-( Jdforrester (WMF) (talk) 20:22, 10 January 2018 (UTC)

Ok, no problem. They will deploy 100% because is merged.

Thank you! Kizule (talk) 20:24, 10 January 2018 (UTC)

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Extension Registration

Sir, Some Stubs waiting for Merge

These are some very easy stubs, which you can test in an hour. So please try to merge. So that I move forward.

https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/#/c/406330/

https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/#/c/406290/

https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/#/c/406390/

https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/#/c/406053/

https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/#/c/406392/

https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/#/c/405903/ Jayprakash12345 (talk) 19:30, 27 January 2018 (UTC)

Please block this user

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Hi James,

User:Usapcsupport (Special:Contributions/Usapcsupport) is a spam bot and I am getting tired to manually delete his junk. Please block the user.

Thank you very much! 2001:16B8:10B9:200:79E5:9A3:F432:3D89 (talk) 00:27, 24 March 2018 (UTC)

Done! Jdforrester (WMF) (talk) 00:30, 24 March 2018 (UTC)

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Reorganizing the 2017 WikiEditor Workboard at the Phabricator

Hello again. Should I create a task requesting reorganization of the 2017 WikiEditor Workboard at the Phabricator? There are 100+ tasks in the Backlog column and no other columns at the moment. George Ho (talk) 15:03, 28 March 2018 (UTC)

Hi @George Ho. That workboard isn't actually used for anything; all the work for the 2017 Wikitext Editor workboard is tracked inside the VisualEditor and VisualEditor (Current work) projects. I should probably turn the workboard off. Dan Garry, Wikimedia Foundation (talk) 15:38, 28 March 2018 (UTC)

What do you mean "turn the workboard off", @Deskana (WMF): ? Do you mean merging the tasks into the "VisualEditor" project? If so, the VisualEditor Workboard is filled with too many tasks. Merging two Projects into one would need more reorganization; otherwise, how else can the 2017 WE be tracked? If not, what else do you mean? George Ho (talk) 15:43, 28 March 2018 (UTC)

Marking "MediaWiki 1.31" for translation

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Hello. Could you please mark the recent revision of MediaWiki 1.31 for translation? I'm translating it into Japanese, but I can translate only a small part of the page because translate tags in the marked revision don't contain the whole text. ocha (talk) 05:57, 24 June 2018 (UTC)

Done, though it's quite messy. :-( Jdforrester (WMF) (talk) 16:05, 25 June 2018 (UTC)

Hello. Could you please do this again? This page seemed to be stable, so I added translate tags to all list items. ocha (talk) 06:13, 7 July 2018 (UTC)

Done! Jdforrester (WMF) (talk) 15:43, 9 July 2018 (UTC)

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Consequences of a move

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Hello. Today I noticed that one year ago you have moved the page Multimedia/Media Viewer to Reading/Multimedia/Media Viewer. The same action hasn't happened for the translated subpages like Multimedia/Media Viewer/it or Multimedia/Media Viewer/es and all the others languages. Now they don't appear in the box at the top of the page Reading/Multimedia/Media Viewer and somebody could think that no translation exists and start a new one in his language. Furthermore, I think that the old subpages aren't linked any more to the primary page and can't follow its updates.

I'm worried that this situation could has happed to other pages: talking about Media Viewer, I noticed the same thing (in Meta-Wiki) with the page Community Engagement (Product)/Media Viewer consultation, moved to Community Liaisons/Media Viewer consultation. Aquatech (talk) 09:58, 16 August 2018 (UTC)

Hmm, yes, it looks like Translate's special page move handler didn't kick in? That feels like a bug. Will investigate. Jdforrester (WMF) (talk) 15:43, 16 August 2018 (UTC)

OK, so, thanks to a colleague we've identified a few things:

• This is a known bug, T114592
• It's very irritating.
• There's no sane fix. I can't move the page back (because it's translatable), so clashes with the subpages; I can't move the subpages over (because I'd be moving them into the translatable world).

Sorry. :-( Jdforrester (WMF) (talk) 18:23, 16 August 2018 (UTC)

OK, I've now re-made Reading/Multimedia/Media Viewer/it via the Translation tool (the "memory" feature already had the text fully). I'll do the same for de, ru, es, fr, ja and pt-br. Fun. :-( Jdforrester (WMF) (talk) 18:34, 16 August 2018 (UTC)

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Growth team updates #1

Welcome to the first newsletter for the new Growth team!  

The Growth Team's objective is to work on software changes that help retain new contributors in mid-size Wikimedia projects. We will be starting with Wikipedias, but we hope these changes will benefit every community.

8 ideas we consider: tell us what you think about them!

We are considering new features to build, that could retain new editors in mid-size Wikipedias. We will be testing new ideas in Czech and Korean Wikipedias, and then we'll talk to more communities (yours!) about adopting the ideas that work well.

We have posted the 8 ideas we are considering. We would really appreciate your thoughts and the thoughts from your community. Please share the ideas, and tell us what do you and your community think of those ideas before September 9.

Share your experiences with newcomers

We want to hear about what is working and what is not working for new contributors in your wiki. We also want to hear any reactions, questions, or opinions on our work. Please post on the team’s talk page, in any language!

Learn more about us

You can visit our team page to find out why our team was formed and how we are thinking about new editors, and our project page for detailed updates on the first project we'll work on.

Growth team's newsletter prepared by the Growth team and posted by bot • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe. MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 13:11, 24 August 2018 (UTC)

Growth team updates #2

Welcome to the second newsletter for the new Growth team!  

The Growth Team's objective is to work on software changes that help retain new contributors in mid-size Wikimedia projects.

Our plan for the next quarter is ready

After consulting with many communities on the best ways to increase retention, we will focus during the next 3 months on these projects:

• Understanding first day: to see what new editors do right after creating their accounts. We will be careful with user privacy, and we hope to share initial results in December.
• Personalized first day: this idea will also help us learn a lot about new editors by adding some optional questions to the new editor’s registration process. We hope to share initial results in December.
• Focus on help desk: we plan to invite or redirect people to the local help desks where they can ask questions to help them make their first edits. We hope to have an initial experiment running in December.

You can read about the details of this plan on our team page.

How did we get to this plan?

We have set up our plan based on the 8 ideas we were considering. You can read about our analysis in our team updates, and detailed discussion on each idea.

We are looking for volunteers

Do you want to participate to our experiments? We are looking for new communities to work with us (especially a new mid-size wiki), and people to become ambassadors to help us to communicate with the different communities. Discover how you can involve yourself or your community.

Learn more about us

You can visit our team page to find out why our team was formed and how we are thinking about new editors, and our project page for detailed updates on the projects we'll work on.

Growth team's newsletter prepared by the Growth team and posted by bot, 13:31, 4 October 2018 (UTC) • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.

MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 13:31, 4 October 2018 (UTC)

Growth team updates #3

Welcome to the third newsletter for the new Growth team!  

The Growth team's objective is to work on software changes that help retain new contributors in mid-size Wikimedia projects.

Two Growth team projects to be deployed in next two weeks

We will be deploying the "Understanding first day" and "Personalized first day" projects on Czech and Korean Wikipedias in the coming weeks. See the new project pages below for full details on the projects, and our project updates page for their progress.

• Understanding first day: learn about the actions new editors take right after creating their accounts. We will be careful with user privacy, and we hope to share initial results in December.
• Personalized first day: learn about new editors' objectives by adding some optional questions to the new editor’s registration process, and personalizing their onboarding. We hope to share initial results in December.

Third Growth team project begins

• Focus on help desk: direct newcomers to the local help desks where they can ask questions to help them make their first edits. We hope to have an initial experiment running in December.

Best practices for helping newcomers

We are going to direct newcomers to help desks. But what's the best way to reply to a newcomer there? We have gathered some best practices for successful interactions, based on community experiences and some external documentation. The page has also been reviewed by some experienced community members who suggested some changes. That page is now open for translations. Comments and suggestions are still welcome!

We are still looking for volunteers

Do you want to participate to our experiments? We are looking for new communities to work with us (especially a new mid-size wiki), and people to become ambassadors to help us to communicate with the different communities. Discover how you can involve yourself or your community.

Also, please share this update with your community and interested people!

Learn more about us

You can visit our team page to find out why our team was formed and how we are thinking about new editors, and our project page for detailed updates on the projects we'll work on.

Growth team's newsletter prepared by the Growth team and posted by bot, 13:30, 7 November 2018 (UTC) • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe. MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 13:30, 7 November 2018 (UTC)

Growth team updates #4

Welcome to the fourth newsletter for the new Growth team!  

The Growth team's objective is to work on software changes that help retain new contributors in mid-size Wikimedia projects.

We need your feedback!

We have two requests for community members:

1. Now that data is coming in for the welcome survey, we are planning how to use that data to personalize the newcomer's first day. See our current thoughts here, and join the conversation here.
2. Try out the help panel's interactive prototype, and read about how we're planning to roll it out, and post any thoughts or reactions here.

Two Growth team projects have been deployed (detailed updates here)

• Personalized first day (welcome survey) was deployed on November 20 on both Czech and Korean Wikipedias.
  • The survey is now being shown to half of new users (A/B test). Responses are being recorded in the database. We'll report on initial results during December.
  • We are planning to test a second version of the survey, called "Variation C", which we think will maximize the number of users who complete the survey and stay on the wiki.
  • The original objective of this project was to give newcomers the materials they need to achieve their goals, and so now we are currently planning how we will use the information collected in the welcome survey to personalize the newcomer's experience. We hope community members will read our current thinking and join the conversation here. Some of the plans we are considering include:
    • Making it easy for newcomers to see editing activity around the topic areas in which they indicated that they're interested.
    • Connecting interested newcomers to experienced editors.
    • Surfacing the help content most relevant to the reason for which the newcomers created their accounts.

• Understanding first day (EditorJourney) was deployed on November 15 on both Czech and Korean Wikipedias. It has been done after a longer security review and final testing than expected. Data is now being recorded for all new users on those wikis, and we've been auditing the data and preparing to make initial reports during December. Stay tuned for the next newsletter!

Help panel is under construction

• Focus on help desk (help panel) is planned to be deployed during the week of January 7 on both Czech and Korean Wikipedias.
• This interactive prototype is the best way to see the design and wording in the feature.
• We ran live user tests on the prototype, with results posted here.
• In addition to giving the ability to ask a question, the help panel will also contain a set of links to existing help content. Our ambassadors on Czech and Korean Wikipedias are determining the right initial set of most helpful links in this task.
• We encourage community members to try out the prototype and read about the rules for who will get the feature, and add any thoughts to this discussion.

We are still looking for volunteers

Do you want to participate to our experiments? We are looking for new communities to work with us (especially a new mid-size wiki), and people to become ambassadors to help us to communicate with the different communities. Discover how you can involve yourself or your community.

Also, please share this update with your community and interested people!

Learn more about us

You can visit our team page to find out why our team was formed and how we are thinking about new editors, and our project updates page for detailed updates on the projects we work on.

Growth team's newsletter prepared by the Growth team and posted by bot, 09:31, 7 December 2018 (UTC) • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe. MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 09:31, 7 December 2018 (UTC)

Growth team updates #5

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Welcome to the fifth newsletter for the new Growth team!  

The Growth team's objective is to work on software changes that help retain new contributors in mid-size Wikimedia projects.

New projects for discussion

We began the "Personalized first day" project with the welcome survey so that we could gather information about what newcomers are trying to accomplish. The next step is to use that information to create experiences that help the newcomers accomplish their goal – actually personalizing their first day. We asked for community thoughts in the previous newsletter, and after discussing with community members and amongst our team, we are now planning two projects as next steps: "engagement emails" and "newcomer homepage".

• Engagement emails: this project was first discussed positively by community members here back in September 2018, and the team how has bandwidth to pursue it. The idea is that newcomers who leave the wiki don't get encouraged to return to the wiki and edit. We can engage them through emails that send them the specific information they need to be successful – such as contact from a mentor, the impact of their edits, or task recommendations. Please read over the project page, and comment on its discussion page with any ideas, questions, or concerns. Do you think this is a good idea? Where could we go wrong?
• Newcomer homepage: we developed the idea for this project after analyzing the data from the welcome survey and EditorJourney datasets. We saw that many newcomers seem to be looking for a place to get started – a place that collects their past work, options for future work, and ways to learn more. We can build this place, and it can connect to the engagement emails. The content of both could be guided by what newcomers say they need during their welcome survey, and contain things like contact from a mentor, impact of their edits, or task recommendations. Please read over the project page, and comment on its discussion page with any ideas, questions, or concerns. Do you think this is a good idea? Where could we go wrong?

Initial reports on newcomer activity

We have published initial reports on each of the team's first two projects. These reports give the basic numbers from each project, and there are many more questions we will continue to answer in future reports. We're excited about these initial findings. They have already helped us define and design parts of our future projects.

• Welcome survey: the initial report on welcome survey responses is available here. Some of the main findings:
  • Most users respond to the survey, giving it high response rates of 67% and 62% in Czech and Korean Wikipedias, respectively.
  • The survey does not cause newcomers to be less likely to edit.
  • The most common reason for creating an account in Korean Wikipedia is to read articles—not for editing—with 29% of Korean users giving that responses.
  • Large numbers of respondents said they are interested in being contacted to get help with editing: 36% in Czech and 53% in Korean.
• Understanding first day: the initial report on what newcomers do on their first day is available here. Some of the main findings:
  • Large numbers of users view help or policy pages on their first day: 42% in Czech and 28% in Korean.
  • Large numbers of users view their own User or User Talk page on their first day: 34% in Czech and 39% in Korean.
  • A majority of new users open an editor on their first day – but about a quarter of them do not go on to save an edit during that time.

Help panel deployment

The help panel was deployed in Czech and Korean Wikipedias on January 10. Over the past four weeks:

• About 400 newcomers in each wiki have seen the help panel button.
• About 20% of them open up the help panel.
• About 50% of those who open it up click on one of the links.
• About 5% of Czech users ask questions, and about 1% of Korean users ask questions.

We think that the 20% open rate and 50% click rate are strong numbers, showing that a lot of people are looking for help, and many want to help themselves by looking at help pages. The somewhat lower numbers of asking questions (especially in Korean Wikipedia) has caused us to consider new features to allow people to help themselves. We're going to be adding a search bar to the help panel next, which will allow users to type a search that only looks for pages in the Help and Wikipedia namespaces.

How to create a good feedback page?

What is the way to built a good help page? What blocks you when writing an help page? Your replies will help to create better help contents to newcomers, that would be used on Help panel.

Growth team's newsletter prepared by the Growth team and posted by bot, 14:15, 13 February 2019 (UTC) • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.

MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 14:15, 13 February 2019 (UTC)

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Growth team updates #6

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Welcome to the sixth newsletter from the Growth team!

The Growth team's objective is to work on software changes that help retain new contributors in mid-size Wikimedia projects.

Plans for the next three months

The Growth team has been working on features to increase new editor retention for the last seven months. We have made a lot of progress and learned a lot, and we've just finished planning for our next three months. During the next three months, we're going to focus on iterations of the help panel and the newcomer homepage. We have decided not to start the engagement emails project, because we think that we will be able to do better work by improving the projects we have already started. Specifically, these are our team goals:

• Deploy and iterate on newcomer homepage
• Continued iteration on help panel
• Make the help panel available to more wikis
• Add a fourth Wikipedia to our set of target wikis
• Publish in-depth quantitative reporting on the data from this year
• Assemble a report on what our team has learned so far about newcomers

Newcomer homepage

The newcomer homepage is our current major project. We hope that community members can read over the project page, and comment on its discussion page with any ideas, questions, or concerns. You can see in the accompanying mockup how we are thinking about the homepage.

We have recently decided on the specifications for an initial version that we can deploy and iterate on:

• Shown in the User space
• Desktop only (mobile comes next)
• Four modules
  • Help module: help links and ability to ask help desk questions
  • Mentorship module: all newcomers assigned a mentor to whom they can ask questions
  • Impact module: shows the number of pageviews for pages the newcomer edited
  • Account completion module: gives some very simple recommendations of how to get started (add an email, start your user page)
• Layout not yet personalized for each user

We're currently running live user tests on this configuration. Future work will include adapting the homepage for mobile, working on a task recommendation module, and considering how to encourage newcomers to visit their homepage.

Help panel

During the last month, the help panel was deployed on Vietnamese Wikipedia, adding it to Czech and Korean Wikipedias.As of 2019-03-14:

• 2,425 newcomers have seen the help panel
• 422 of them have opened it
• 175 have clicked links
• 27 have run searches
• 40 have asked questions

We have been analyzing the data around usage, and we'll be publishing numbers in the coming weeks. At a high level, we see at least some users are being helped by the panel, with many clicking on links, running searches, and asking questions. We do not yet see any problems that have arisen from the help panel. Therefore, we think that the help panel is generally a positive feature – though data is still coming that will allow us to see its numerical impact. If other wikis are interested in using the help panel, please contact us on our team's talk page, in the language of your choice.

Over the past month, we have iterated on the help panel to take into account the usage patterns we are seeing. You can see in the accompanying image how the help panel currently looks.

• We added a search capability, in which users can search the Help and Wikipedia namespaces.
• The help panel was previously available whenever a newcomer was in "edit" mode. We are now also showing the help panel when a newcomer is in "read" mode on a page in the Help, Wikipedia, or User namespaces.

We want to see whether users find the "search" useful. If so, we may spend time on improving search results. We're also looking forward to learning whether exposing the help panel in "read" mode in more namespaces will increase usage.

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

18:19, 18 March 2019 (UTC)

MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 18:19, 18 March 2019 (UTC)

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Une étoile pour vous !

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<figure-inline></figure-inline>	L’étoile d’actes de gentillesse divers
	good help hints ! Christian Wia (talk) 23:35, 22 March 2019 (UTC)

Merci, Monsieur. Mon plaisir. Jdforrester (WMF) (talk) 18:24, 23 March 2019 (UTC)

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False accusations

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First, my apologies if you found profanity where I wrote none. I used no profane words at Talk:Reading/Web/PDF Functionality. In UK law, any such implications of my actual phrasing are in the mind of the reader. On the other hand, overtly explicit words are often allowed in Wikipedia discussions. If I have broken any mores of the perahps distinct MediaWiki community, then I must apologise unreservedly for my ignorance. But "spread profanity" I did not.

But you made other accusations which I find disturbing and puzzling.

I have been contributing to Talk:Reading/Web/PDF Functionality for a time measured in years. To characterise me in perjorative manner as just "showing up" there is absurd, especially when it was you who did so.

I did indeed explain my concern, it was you who lacked the knowledge to understand what I was saying, as you later explained.

You claimed to be "interested", asked for a link, and found it "curious". Forgive me, but how am I supposed to know from such a response that our Lead Product Manager, Contributors, can nevertheless disclaim all involvement in a contributor tool such as book creation?

I reply to you here because it has nothing to do with the topic in question, yet it seems wrong that such bizarre accusations as yours go unanswered. Steelpillow (talk) 19:49, 12 April 2019 (UTC)

I'm confused. Given that you bring up UK law, what do you think is heard in the mind of your audience when you repeatedly scream "WTF" online? Are you aware of the Public Order Act 1986 and how section 5 has been interpreted?

My review of your comments was to solely to determine whether to block your account for violation of the Code of Conduct, which is binding on all participants on this wiki. Your aggressive tone on following me to my talk page is going a long way towards convincing me I was wrong to hold back.

I am not LPM for Contributors, and haven't been for over a year, sorry. Jdforrester (WMF) (talk) 20:48, 12 April 2019 (UTC)

Please note the Code of Conduct, reproduced below, with respect to personal attacks, deliberate intimidation and derogatory comments. I would ask you to be more respectful of your volunteer colleagues in the future, and to ensure that information about your paid position remains up-to-date. Thank you. I shall not be watching for your reply. Steelpillow (talk) 08:26, 13 April 2019 (UTC)

"Unacceptable behavior

"Harassment and other types of inappropriate behavior are unacceptable in all public and private Wikimedia technical spaces. Examples include but are not limited to:

"* Personal attacks, violence, threats of violence, or deliberate intimidation.

"* Offensive, derogatory, or discriminatory comments." Steelpillow (talk) 08:26, 13 April 2019 (UTC)

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increasing abuse of installations of wikimedia application

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Hi James. I wished to leave an observation for the developer community, and not exactly sure of the best place to leave it with regard to the default installation of mediawiki.

In a role of looking at spam activity at WMF wikis, I am now seeing that there are many mediawiki-installed wikis across the web that are becoming spambot-infested eg. planet-nomads-wiki.com, and they are either purposefully setup to be targets for spambots, or they are set up and left by whomever installed them. Either way, their abuse is being leveraged to spam, and proliferate spam. I am guessing that they are just default installations of mediawiki, and that the spambots are just able to work their "magic" without much difficulty.

It would seem to me though that our default configuration of mediawiki that is packaged is allowing for this easy abuse of wikis. I would like to see the developer community have a conversation about whether such an open and abusable/misusable configuration is truly in the best interests of wikis, and the secure web. Might there be a better default configuration that could be packaged/utilised to enable less abuse of mediawiki application?

I have started to blacklist numbers of these wikis after investigation that they are abused and that they are otherwise unmanaged. Predominantly these wikis have just been set up with a default administrator account (admin/crat) and these accounts have next to no activity. — billinghurst sDrewth 23:56, 28 April 2019 (UTC)

Hey @Billinghurst, that's an interesting point; thank you for highlighting it. I'm not sure who would be best-placed to run such a conversation, but @CCicalese (WMF) as product owner of MediaWiki itself likely has a few ideas. Jdforrester (WMF) (talk) 15:36, 29 April 2019 (UTC)

Tracked in Phabricator
Task T222536

— billinghurst sDrewth 13:08, 5 May 2019 (UTC)

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Growth team updates #7

Welcome to the seventh newsletter from the Growth team!

The Growth team's objective is to work on software changes that help retain new contributors in mid-size Wikimedia projects.

Newcomer homepage release this week

The main feature that the team has been working on over the last month is the newcomer homepage. This feature gives newcomers a place on the wiki to get oriented, learn about editing, and see their impact (see the accompanying screenshot from Test Wikipedia). We intend to release this feature to Czech, Korean, and Vietnamese Wikipedias on May 2nd.

Like the other Growth team features, this will be deployed in a controlled experiment, in which half of newcomers will have access to their homepage and half will not. Users with the feature will be able to access it by clicking their username at the top of their browser, and it will only be available on desktop -- not mobile. Experienced users who want to see their homepage will be able to turn it on in their preferences.

Wikis receiving the newcomer homepage can expect these things:

• Additional questions will come to the help desk from the "help module" on the homepage.
• Mentors who have signed up for the "mentorship module" will start to receive questions on their user talk pages.
• More users may create and edit user pages through the "start module".

Recent and future homepage development

The most important piece developed for the homepage over the last month is the "start module", which gives newcomers clear actions to take when they are new: add/confirm their email, go through a tutorial, start their user page. We learned about the need for this module from user tests last month. The next priorities for the newcomer homepage are:

• Mobile design: to work well in mobile browsers, the homepage needs a separate design and engineering. See the accompanying mockups for potential mobile designs.
• Features for discovery: only about 15% - 30% of newcomers will discover their homepage by clicking their username at the top of their browser. We are going to be designing additional ways for newcomers to find out about it.
• Additional modules: the initial version contains some of the simpler modules. Potential upcoming modules include task recommendations and a feed of activity on the wiki.

Other updates

• Help panel leading indicators: our team published data on the help panel's initial performance. The evaluation exposes some areas for improvement, but we think the help panel's behavior so far is healthy and that it is not having a negative impact on the wikis. We will be publishing additional data, making plans, and asking for community thoughts around the future of the help panel over the course of the next two weeks. If you are interested in trying out the help panel on your wiki, please let us know on our team's talk page.
• Long term plans: the team had a week of planning meetings, in which we talked about some longer-term ideas for Growth work. Some of the top ideas are: to extend the newcomer homepage to help user's build their identity through a user profile, and to revisit the "engagement emails" project that the team put on hold. Over the next month, we will be asking for community conversation around how the team can spend our time in the next fiscal year, that starts in July.

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

16:19, 29 April 2019 (UTC)

MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 16:19, 29 April 2019 (UTC)

Une étoile pour vous !

<figure-inline></figure-inline>	L’étoile du travail d’équipe
	Thanks for your immediate help. Christian Wia (talk) 18:19, 6 May 2019 (UTC)

Je vous en prie. :-) Jdforrester (WMF) (talk) 00:32, 7 May 2019 (UTC)

Call for submissions for the Community Growth space at Wikimania 2019

Welcome to a special newsletter from the Growth team! This special newsletter is not about Wikimedia Foundation Growth team projects. Instead, it is a call for submissions for the Community Growth space at Wikimania 2019. We think that many people who receive this newsletter may have something valuable to contribute to this space at Wikimania. We haven't translated the newsletter, because Wikimania's language is English.

Please see below for the message from the organizers of the Community Growth space at Wikimania.

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Wikimania 2019 is organized into 19 “spaces”, which are all accepting proposals for sessions. This message comes from the team organizing the Community Growth space.

Since you are interested b Growth team projects, and potentially involved in welcoming newcomers initiatives on your wiki, we would like to invite you to submit a proposal to the Community Growth space because of the actions you’ve done around newcomers on wikis. The deadline for submission is June 1. See below for Community Growth submission topics and session formats. Topics and sessions have to be in English.

In the Community Growth space, we will come together for discussions, presentations, and workshops that address these questions:

• What is and is not working around attracting and retaining newcomers?
• How should Wikimedia activities evolve to help communities grow and flourish?
• How should our technology and culture evolve to help new populations to come online, participate and become community members?

Recommended topics: please see this link for the list for the list of recommended topics. If you do not plan to submit a proposal, you can also suggest additional topics here. If your topic does not fit into our space, remember that there are 18 other spaces that could welcome you sharing your knowledge and perspective.

Types of session. We prefer sessions that are participatory, interactive, promote conversations, and give a voice to parts of our movement that are heard less often. Please see this link for the list of recommended session formats.

Poster submissions. Posters are also a good way to introduce a topic, or show some results of an action. Please consider submitting one!

More information about the Community Growth space, topics, and submission formats is available on the proposal page.

Please submit your proposal. The reviews will happen at the beginning of June.

If you have questions about Wikimania in general, please ask them on the Wikimania wiki.

On behalf of the Community Growth leadership team, Trizek (WMF), 11:44, 16 May 2019 (UTC) MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 11:44, 16 May 2019 (UTC)

Translations

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Hi. I just went to start translating Manual:Page content models, but it won't let me save, saying that "Saving the translation failed: This namespace is reserved for content page translations. The page you are trying to edit does not seem to correspond any page marked for translation." - can you help? Thanks, --DannyS712 (talk) 01:25, 31 May 2019 (UTC)

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Growth team updates #8

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Welcome to the eighth newsletter from the Growth team!

The Growth team's objective is to work on software changes that help retain new contributors in mid-size Wikimedia projects.

May was a busy month, and we apologize for a slightly late newsletter.

General news

• The Growth team will begin to work with the Arabic Wikipedia community as a new target wiki. This is in addition to Korean, Czech, and Vietnamese Wikipedias.
• Several members of the Growth team attended Wikimedia Hackathon. To see what we worked on and learned, read this update (in English).
• Wikimania 2019 is coming up in August. The conference will include a "Community Growth" space, for sessions about how our communities expand through software and programs.

Early results from newcomer homepage release

• The newcomer homepage was deployed in Czech and Korean Wikipedias on May 6 for desktop users. It is deployed in an A/B test, so that half of newcomers have access to the homepage and half do not. They access it by clicking on their username in their personal tools along the top of the window.
• After about a month of usage, we see a few interesting trends. We think that the usage is going well so far, as we continue to work on the feature
  • About half of users who visit the homepage click on a link or button.
  • About half of users visit the homepage more than once, with about a fifth of users visiting on multiple days.
  • Users are interacting with all the different modules on the page -- there is no clear favorite.
  • Users have been asking questions to their mentors -- but not on the help desk.

Next steps for homepage

• Because we are seeing good reactions to the homepage from the first users, we are prioritizing work that helps more users find their homepage:
  • Mobile homepage: the team is currently building the mobile version of the homepage. We tested this design with five users, giving us confidence that the design is strong.
  • Features to aid discovery: only a minority of newcomers who have a homepage will find their homepage on their own. The team is designing features that help newcomers learn where to find their homepage. The most important feature will point to the homepage link using a GuidedTour.
• User tests showed that the most important thing to add to the homepage are clear task recommendations to help newcomers get started with editing right away. This is the module that we will be working on next.

Future of team in the next year

• The Growth team has been working since September 2018, and we're now planning for the work we'll be doing for the next fiscal year, which begins in July.
• Though we have not yet developed a feature that clearly increases growth in our target wikis, we believe that the features we have been developing have high potential to increase growth if we continue to work on them.
• Therefore, the team will continue to work on the features we have started, and we will develop related features that improve the overall newcomer experience. These features may include:
  • Improvements to how newcomers can build their user pages and develop their on-wiki identity. See initial notes here.
  • Improvements to how newcomers receive notifications on-wiki and through email, so that they quickly find out if other users are contacting them.
  • Processes that help newcomers get awards or recognition for good work.
  • Ways for newcomers to see the activity on the wiki and find others who share their interests.
• We will start discussions with communities to help us define these ideas before we work on them.

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

09:02, 13 June 2019 (UTC)

MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 09:02, 13 June 2019 (UTC)

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Une étoile pour vous !

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<figure-inline></figure-inline>	L’étoile d’actes de gentillesse divers
	fast and positive collaboration, we continue! Christian Wia (talk) 21:11, 2 July 2019 (UTC)

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Marquer MediaWiki 1.33 à traduire

Hi James, Ive completed FR version and added some corrections on EN page, can you resend please for translation to be synchronized ? Thank you.

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5 juillet 2019 à 19:26 Jdforrester (WMF) discussion contributions a marqué MediaWiki 1.33 à traduire

Christian Wia (talk) 15:02, 6 July 2019 (UTC)

Growth team updates #9

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Welcome to the ninth newsletter from the Growth team!

The Growth team's objective is to work on software changes that help retain new contributors in mid-size Wikimedia projects.

Opening Growth features to more wikis

The Growth team has existed for about one year. During that time, we have developed several features that we think can help increase retention. Though we are still gathering data to detect scientifically whether the features increase retention, we think that some of the features are ready to be deployed on more wikis that want to experiment with them. If your community is enthusiastic about welcoming newcomers, we encourage you to contact us so that we can verify together if your wiki is eligible.

Then, go through the checklist to start the process of getting these features:

• Help panel: allow newcomers to find help and ask questions while they edit.
• Welcome survey: learn what topics and types of edits newcomers are interested in.
• EditorJourney: learn what workflows newcomers go through on their first day.

General news

• A new quarter of the year has started, and the team has set our goals for the next three months. The most important goals are:
  • Newcomer homepage: increase activity through a task recommendations module. Now that we have seen several weeks of positive activity on the newcomer homepage, we think that the most important thing to add is a way for newcomers to find tasks to work on. The challenge will be recommending the right kind of tasks at the right point of their journey.
  • Newcomer homepage: increase feature discovery rate by 100%. Right now, only 20% - 30% of newcomers ever visit their homepage. We want to double that number by making sure all newcomers know how to find it.
  • Help panel: increase usefulness through improvements to affordance, search, and UX flow. We have looked closely at data and anecdotes from the usage of the help panel, and we plan to pursue specific improvements to increase its effectiveness (see accompanying image of a feature that helps newcomers find responses to their questions).
• Wikimania is coming up next month, which includes a "Community Growth" space. We hope to see people from all communities there to talk about how to bring newcomers into our movement.
• We have started to deploy features to our team's fourth target wiki: Arabic Wikipedia. That wiki is the biggest one we target, it has a high percentage of mobile users, and also is our first right-to-left language. This will help us make sure that our features are valuable for as many types of users as possible.

Mobile homepage and early analysis

• The mobile version of the newcomer homepage was deployed to Czech, Korean, and Vietnamese Wikipedias. Now, newcomers can access their homepage from both desktop and mobile devices.
• We have published our first set of data about the performance of the newcomer homepage. In summary, we are happy with the homepage's performance so far. We see about half of visitors clicking on something, and the majority of them returning to the homepage multiple times.
• Because we see positive usage of the homepage, we will deploy several small features in the next two weeks that help more newcomers discover their homepage (see accompanying image of a feature that helps newcomers discover their homepage from their empty Contributions page).
• As listed in our goals above, we'll be starting to focus on adding task recommendations to the newcomer homepage. We'll be publishing early thoughts on this feature so that community members can give their thoughts and advice.

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

14:26, 23 July 2019 (UTC)

MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 14:26, 23 July 2019 (UTC)

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Growth team updates #10

Welcome to the tenth newsletter from the Growth team!

The Growth team's objective is to work on software changes that help retain new contributors in mid-size Wikimedia projects.

General news

• Growth team features are now fully deployed in Arabic Wikipedia and Basque Wikipedia (along with Czech, Korean, and Vietnamese Wikipedias). If your community is enthusiastic about welcoming newcomers, we encourage you to contact us so that we can verify together if your wiki is eligible. Then, go through the checklist to start the process of configuring the features.
• We have deployed features that help newcomers find their newcomer homepage. These features were successful, and more than doubled the number of newcomers who find their homepage. In Czech Wikipedia, 72% of newcomers visit their homepage and in Korean Wikipedia, 49% of newcomers visit their homepage.
• You can now join the Growth discussion space on the Wikimedia Space. This space has been created during Wikimania, to coordinate initiatives around welcoming newcomers. Please come and say hello!

Growth at Wikimania

• Several members of the Growth team attended Wikimania in Stockholm. We helped organize a conference track around Community Growth, presented about our team's work, and had many conversations with community members from around the world.
• Here are the most important links:
  • Notes and learnings from Wikimania
  • Video of Growth team presentation about our work and learnings from the past year
  • Slides from Growth team presentation
• These are some of our topline notes:
  • Alignment on newcomer retention: It seems like Wikimania attendees generally believe that newcomer retention is an important problem.
  • Connecting offline to online: Enthusiasm for ideas that connect our features better to offline events, such as making homepage mentors correspond to offline mentors.
  • Mentor dashboard: Experienced users requested a dashboard with which they could monitor newcomers who may need help.

Newcomer tasks -- feedback needed!

• The Growth team's main project right now is newcomer tasks, which will suggest easy edits for newcomers. It will be built as a new module for the newcomer homepage.
• We hope that this project will help newcomers build their skills before attempting more difficult edits, such as creating new articles or adding images.
• These are the three main challenges we've been working on:
  • Where to find the tasks? After considering many different sources for tasks, we've decided to start by using maintenance templates, which are applied by editors on most wikis, and including tasks like copy editing, adding links, and adding references.
  • How to match to interests? Research shows that users are more likely to work on articles that are related to their interests. We are currently prototyping methods to ask newcomers their interests and then find articles that match.
  • How to guide the newcomer? Once a newcomer has selected a recommended article, they will need guidance on how to complete the edit. We have decided to use the help panel to provide that guidance while the newcomer edits.
• We are currently engineering on this feature, and we recently published notes from user tests that give mostly positive feedback.
• You can explore the design for newcomer tasks in these interactive mockups. We hope to hear from you about your thoughts on the project talk page. Do you think this could be helpful for newcomers? What are we missing?

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

18:49, 2 October 2019 (UTC)

MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 18:49, 2 October 2019 (UTC)

Growth team updates #11

Welcome to the eleventh newsletter from the Growth team!

The Growth team's objective is to work on software changes that help retain new contributors in mid-size Wikimedia projects.

General news

• Expanding to more wikis: the team is preparing to deploy Growth features to Ukrainian and Hungarian Wikipedias. Wikis that already have the features are Czech, Korean, Arabic, Vietnamese, and Basque Wikipedias. If your community is enthusiastic about welcoming newcomers, we encourage you to contact us so that we can verify together if your wiki is eligible. Then you can go through the checklist to start the process of configuring the features.
• Mentor training: we tried out our first training for mentors with the Czech community, so that experienced users can build skills that help them retain newcomers.
• The guide for mentors has been updated. Translations are welcomed!

Help panel results

The help panel was first deployed to newcomers in January 2019, and we have now finished analyzing data to determine its impact. A brief summary is below, and more in-depth information can be found here (in English).

• In summary, although we have seen a good amount of usage of the help panel, the help panel has not shown an increase in activation (whether a user makes their first edit) or retention (whether a user returns to edit again).
• This is a disappointing result, and our team has discussed potential reasons for the result and ideas for the future. Although we have many ideas for how to improve the help panel, we have decided to keep our attention on the newcomer homepage and newcomer tasks projects for the coming months.
• We'll be using the help panel as part of the newcomer tasks project: using it to guide newcomers while they complete suggested edits.
• We welcome questions and thoughts about this on the project's talk page.

Newcomer tasks deployment

• The first version of the newcomer tasks workflow (V1.0) will be deployed in the next weeks on our 4 priority wikis. This version will suggest articles to edit based on maintenance templates. In this first version, we expect many newcomers to initiate the workflow, but not many to select articles to edit or complete edits. We expect future versions of the feature to increase those behaviors.
• We're excited about this project because the majority of newcomers visit their newcomer homepage, and this will be the first element of the homepage that clearly asks the newcomer to start editing.
• These are the next two versions of the feature, which are already being planned:
  • V1.1 (topic matching): will allow newcomers to choose topics of interest (such as Art, Music, Sports, or Technology) to personalize their suggestions. After evaluating several approaches, we have decided to use a new ORES model built by the WMF Scoring team. The model will automatically identify the topic area of each article. We expect this to increase how often newcomers select articles to edit.
  • V1.2 (guidance): once newcomers arrive on an article to edit, we will use the help panel to provide guidance about how to complete the editing task. We expect this to increase how many newcomers actually complete productive edits.
• The project page includes links to the designs of the workflow, and we welcome questions and thoughts on the talk page.

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

15:02, 18 November 2019 (UTC)

MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 15:02, 18 November 2019 (UTC)

Continuous Integration problem

The following discussion is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.

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Hi James,

Thanks for merging in the layout.yaml change for Extension:ChessBrowser. I uploaded a new patch set to gerrit:554214 but the unit tests did not run. Do you have any ideas what could be wrong? Best, ~ Wugapodes (talk) 20:44, 10 December 2019 (UTC)

Hey there, that's because you were not in the CI system as a trusted user. Fixed now. Jdforrester (WMF) (talk) 21:27, 10 December 2019 (UTC)

The discussion above is closed. Please do not modify it. No further edits should be made to this discussion.

Log In

The following discussion is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.

---

Hi User:Jdforrester (WMF) [[2 years of Wikipedia access restrictions were lifted in Turkey on 15 January. After this news, I wanted to log into my account. However, I couldn't log in for more than 2 years and I forgot the email address and password. I talked to Administrator User:Vikiçizer, Bureaucrat User:Xeno and Steward User:HakanIst about this. If I learn my e-mail address, I can set a new password. I can learn my e-mail only from someone who can access the database. Can you help me? User:Abecesel. 176.88.47.89 (talk) 17:21, 19 January 2020 (UTC)

I think you should contact m:Trust and safety and ask for their help. Ainz Ooal Gown (talk) 17:25, 19 January 2020 (UTC)

The discussion above is closed. Please do not modify it. No further edits should be made to this discussion.

Growth team updates #12

Welcome to the twelfth newsletter from the Growth team!

The Growth team's objective is to work on software changes that help retain new contributors in mid-size Wikimedia projects.

General news

• A training for mentors has been published. The training was first tried with the Czech community, and went well.
• Growth team features have been deployed to Hungarian, Ukrainian, and Armenian Wikipedias. If your community is enthusiastic about welcoming newcomers, we encourage you to contact us so that we can verify together whether your wiki is eligible. Then you can go through the checklist to start the process of configuring the features.

Productive edits from newcomer tasks

We deployed the basic workflow for newcomer tasks to our target wikis on November 20, and the early results are exciting.

• About 1.5% of newcomers who visit their homepage complete the workflow and save a suggested edit. So far, this has amounted to over 450 edits, on all wikis, coming from both desktop and mobile users.
• When we look at the edits that newcomers make, we see that they are largely positive! We are pleased to see that this feature does not appear to encourage vandals.
  • 75% of the edits are productive and unreverted.
  • 95% of the edits appear to be in good faith.
• Most of the edits include copyedits and adding links, with some newcomers also adding content and references. Copyedits are suggested most strongly.
• Click here to learn more specifics about the results so far.

Topic matching deployed

The results from our user tests showed us that newcomers are likely to do more suggested edits if they can choose articles related to a topic that they're interested in, such as "science", "music", or "sports".

• On January 21, we deployed topic matching on our pilot wikis. Newcomers are now using it. We expect it to cause more newcomers to try suggested edits, and to keep making more of them.
• In the coming weeks, we will be making improvements to the accuracy of the algorithm used to topic matching, which is part of the ORES project.

Next steps for newcomer tasks

Because we are seeing positive results from newcomer tasks, the Growth team plans to concentrate our efforts on improving the workflow and encouraging more newcomers to use it.

• Guidance: next, we will be using the help panel to provide guidance to newcomers as they do suggested edits, and to prompt them to do another edit after completing their first one. In user tests for this feature, demo videos were one of the favorite features, and we will think about how these might be added.
• Starting the workflow: only about 20% of newcomer who visit their homepage begin the newcomer tasks workflow. We are going to be trying out different layouts of the homepage to encourage more newcomers to try newcomer tasks.
• Additional task types: we are researching methods to recommend more specific tasks to newcomers, such as specific links to add, or images that could be added to articles from Commons.

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

17:39, 4 February 2020 (UTC)

MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 17:39, 4 February 2020 (UTC)

please cancel your action on topic Project:Village Pump/Flow/2020/02#h-Manual:$wgSpamRegex_dead_link_http://wiki.chongqed.org-2020-02-17T22:51:00.000Z to release the workflow

The following discussion is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.

---

Hi you have recently closed the following subject (???) while it was still under investigation https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Project%3AVillage%20Pump/Flow/2020/02#h-Manual%3A%24wgSpamRegex_dead_link_http%3A//wiki.chongqed.org-2020-02-17T22%3A51%3A00.000Z concerning "Manual:$wgSpamRegex dead link http://wiki.chongqed.org" .I am the originator and have now validated the correction made by Shirayuki. I can add comments but I can no longer close the subject although the option mark as resolved is available. Can you please cancel your action for me to close the topic properly ? Thank you. Christian 🇫🇷 FR 🚨 (talk) 20:55, 20 February 2020 (UTC)

You've already marked it as unresolved. What do you think I can do that you cannot? Jdforrester (WMF) (talk) 21:06, 20 February 2020 (UTC)

may be try to close it by yourself now, because this option is without effect on my browser. Christian 🇫🇷 FR 🚨 (talk) 21:31, 20 February 2020 (UTC)

The discussion above is closed. Please do not modify it. No further edits should be made to this discussion.

Bots

The following discussion is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.

---

Hello, James!

This information would be lost in gerrit, so continuing the discussion here:
What bug bot is sensitive to "Bug: Tnnnnnn<not \n>"? Gerritbot handles non-\n fine. —Aron Man.🍂 edits🌾 00:30, 29 February 2020 (UTC)

ReleaseTaggerBot. Jdforrester (WMF) (talk) 19:23, 2 March 2020 (UTC)

The discussion above is closed. Please do not modify it. No further edits should be made to this discussion.

Jenkins

The following discussion is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.

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Hi! Sorry for the CI slowdown. Pull requests are missed, dearly. I've abandoned most of the patch chain and will be more gentle with the tooling. Please re-enable Jenkins, so I can continue work.

This use-case of uploading long chains could use some more work. Tell me if you need an extra hand to implement some measures to limit test runs on long chains, for example those I've suggested on gerrit.

Btw, what did you mean by "predictive branch explosion"? I only know about processors' branch prediction, but what is this in the context of CI? —Aron Man.🍂 edits🌾 20:56, 11 March 2020 (UTC)

The discussion above is closed. Please do not modify it. No further edits should be made to this discussion.

CI screenshot

The following discussion is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.

---

Is it possible to get ahold of a CI browser test screenshot? This one:

https://integration.wikimedia.org/ci/job/wmf-quibble-selenium-php72-docker/25867/console

20:48:50 Screenshot location: /workspace/log/User-should-be-able-to-log-in-%40daily.png —Aron Man.🍂 edits🌾 23:52, 12 March 2020 (UTC)

https://integration.wikimedia.org/ci/job/wmf-quibble-selenium-php72-docker/25867/artifact/log/User-should-be-able-to-log-in-%2540daily.png DannyS712 (talk) 23:54, 12 March 2020 (UTC)

That's awesome, thank you very much! —Aron Man.🍂 edits🌾 01:51, 13 March 2020 (UTC)

This is my talk page and not a good venue for support. You should try #wikimedia-tech in IRC. Jdforrester (WMF) (talk) 00:32, 13 March 2020 (UTC)

K,thx. —Aron Man.🍂 edits🌾 01:50, 13 March 2020 (UTC)

The discussion above is closed. Please do not modify it. No further edits should be made to this discussion.

A barnstar for you!

<figure-inline></figure-inline>	The Random Acts of Kindness Barnstar
	Thank you for Wikimedia response. https://www.mediawiki.org/w/index.php?title=2017%20wikitext%20editor/Feedback/2020#h-Kindly_add_these_Wikicode_buttons-2020-04-06T05%3A45%3A00.000Z

RIT RAJARSHI (talk) 17:06, 6 April 2020 (UTC)

Haha love it! LTZ

The following discussion is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.

---

Love it LTZ1111 (talk) 10:43, 8 April 2020 (UTC)

Welcome. Jdforrester (WMF) (talk) 19:07, 8 April 2020 (UTC)

The discussion above is closed. Please do not modify it. No further edits should be made to this discussion.

Extension:ParsoidBatchAPI

You archived this extension on MediaWiki.org without doing any of the other steps of archiving an extension hosted on Gerrit (emptying the repo, removing the tests from integration/config, etc.) * Pppery * _{it has begun} 02:36, 14 May 2020 (UTC)

Correct. I'm working though it. Jdforrester (WMF) (talk) 20:38, 14 May 2020 (UTC)

Growth team newsletter #13

Welcome to the thirteenth newsletter from the Growth team!

The Growth team's objective is to work on software changes that help retain new contributors in mid-size Wikimedia projects.

Join the conversation: structured tasks

We are looking for community input on a new project to make it easy for newcomers to make real article edits.

In our previous newsletter, we talked about the productive edits coming from the newcomer tasks feature. Those good results have continued: about 900 newcomers made over 5,000 suggested edits so far. We've learned that newcomers are interested in receiving suggested edits.

Now, we are thinking about how to supply them a feed of easy edits that will help more of them be successful quickly. We have a new idea called "structured tasks". This would aim to break down edits into steps that are easy for newcomers and easy on mobile devices.

In the past, certain kinds of editing tasks have been structured. For instance, adding categories through HotCat. Now, we are thinking about how to structure the editing of articles. The goal is to allow newcomers can make large content additions, especially from their mobile devices.

Please visit the project page and respond to the discussion questions listed on the talk page. You are welcome to show this project to others in your community. You can help by translating the materials to your language so that more voices can join in. We will be having this conversation until June 18.

Expanding to more wikis

We have expanded to six new wikis, and are looking for more interested communities.

In the last two months, we deployed Growth features to six new wikis: Ukrainian, Serbian, Hungarian, Armenian, and Basque Wikipedias, and French Wiktionary. Newcomers from these wikis have already contributed over 600 edits through Growth features.

We want to expand to more wikis in the coming months, and we are looking for interested communities. French Wikipedia already agreed and will be the next one to join the experiment. We will contact several other wikis in the coming weeks to offer them to participate.

Do you think the Growth Team features would be a good addition to your wiki? Please see this translatable summary of Growth features. You can share with your communities and start a discussion. Then, please contact us to begin the process!

Other updates

Work continues on improving newcomer tasks and the homepage.

• In March, we deployed an upgrade to the topic matching in newcomer tasks. The current version offers 39 different topics using new ORES models.
• In April, we completed an A/B test of two homepage configurations. We learned that more newcomers will attempt suggested edits if the module is made more prominent. We are implementing those learnings in our next test. See the full results here.
• We are currently working on guidance for newcomer tasks. It will use the help panel to guide newcomers through completing easy edits.
• Our next step is to create new configurations of the homepage. The goal is to encourage more newcomers to begin doing suggested edits.

As usual, we are still welcoming your feedback and questions about our features. Please contact us on the project talk page!

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

14:29, 18 May 2020 (UTC)

MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 14:29, 18 May 2020 (UTC)

Do not invalidate valid translations

Use "⧼tpt-action-nofuzzy⧽" checkboxes in Special:PageTranslation.

By your action, the existing translations were invalidated. See [2] and [3] Shirayuki (talk) 10:37, 11 August 2020 (UTC)

I did? Jdforrester (WMF) (talk) 10:38, 11 August 2020 (UTC)

Yes. I did not invalidate. Shirayuki (talk) 10:41, 11 August 2020 (UTC)

Huh. Maybe it didn't take the checkbox? Jdforrester (WMF) (talk) 11:00, 11 August 2020 (UTC)

The last time I marked something, I couldn't find the box (which I wish was checked automatically). Maybe it only appears sometimes? Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 04:56, 13 August 2020 (UTC)

The ways of Translate are dark and mysterious, indeed. Jdforrester (WMF) (talk) 09:48, 13 August 2020 (UTC)

See "Invalidation" paragraph in Help:Extension:Translate/Page translation administration . Shirayuki (talk) 11:09, 13 August 2020 (UTC)

… yes? I know what invalidation skipping is. I applied it in these cases. Apparently it didn't take on that page. Jdforrester (WMF) (talk) 13:43, 13 August 2020 (UTC)

Growth team newsletter 14

Welcome to the fourteenth newsletter from the Growth team!

The Growth team's objective is to work on software changes that help retain new contributors in mid-size Wikimedia projects.

Success with guidance

We deployed the "Guidance" feature on June 15.

This feature uses the help panel to explain what to do after selecting a suggested edit. For instance, if a newcomer selects a copyedit task, they are guided on what sorts of errors to look for. They can see examples of how to rewrite the text. You can try this feature on test.wikipedia.org. First enable the homepage and the help panel in your preferences there.

Since we launched "Guidance", the data we collected show good results (see image). Now, we see more users completing suggested edits than before Guidance was deployed.

Structured tasks

Structured tasks is a project that aims to break down editing workflows into a series of steps. We hope newcomers can accomplish these tasks easily.

In the previous newsletter, we asked for feedback from community members on the idea. We had a good discussion in six languages with 35 community members (summary here). We have now posted new design mockups. We hope community members can check the mockups out and react to them (in any language). They are posted along with some of the main questions we are thinking about as we continue to refine our plans.

Other technical updates

• We are currently working on Variants C and D (adjacent image) of the homepage. The goal is to increase the number of newcomers who start the newcomer tasks workflow. This is the team's main project at the moment.
• We've made it easier to hide the help panel when not needed. [4]
• The welcome survey has a new question for people who created their account: language skills. The goal is to find out how many newcomers know multiple languages, so that we can learn whether it is a good idea to integrate Content Translation as a newcomer task. To make room for this question, we removed one that is not being used. [5]

Community outreach

• We continue to engage with more communities. We recently deployed the Growth features to Persian, Hebrew, and Russian Wikipedias. Learn more about getting the features.
• If your community is having a remote event, and you are interested in hearing from the Growth team, please contact us! We have already participated to two community events online:
  • The Polish Wikiconference (recording on Google Drive)
  • The Celtic Knot 2020 (video available on Youtube).

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

09:33, 7 September 2020 (UTC)

MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 09:33, 7 September 2020 (UTC)

MediaWiki Docker Hub status

Hi! I noticed you undid my edit to the Docker page. My edit was because of some info I read that was apparently incorrect. Could you maybe weigh in on https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T266186? Thanks! Lonaowna (talk) 11:37, 25 October 2020 (UTC)

Sure. Unfortunately I have no idea how to edit the Docker Hub system. Jdforrester (WMF) (talk) 17:14, 25 October 2020 (UTC)

Growth team updates #15

Welcome to the fifteenth newsletter from the Growth team!

The Growth team's objective is to work on software changes that help retain new contributors in mid-size Wikimedia projects.

Variants C and D deployed

Variants C and D are two new arrangements of the newcomer homepage. We hope they will increase the number of users using suggested edits. They both make suggested edits the clear place where newcomers should get started on the page. They have some differences in their workflows, because we want to test which design is better. We deployed these variants on October 19; half of newcomers get each variant. After about 5 weeks, we will analyze the data from the tests. The goal is to determine which variant is helping more newcomers to make more suggested edits. We will identify the better variant and then use it with all newcomers.

Structured tasks: add a link

As we discussed in previous newsletters, the team is working on our first "structured task": the "add a link" task. After community discussion on design ideas, we ran user tests on the mobile designs. We decided on the design concept we want to use moving forward: Concept A. We're now engineering the backend for this feature. Next, we will be running user tests for desktop designs.

Learn more about the findings.

Community news

• We recently deployed the Growth features to Polish, Portuguese, Swedish and Turkish Wikipedias. 18 wikis now have Growth features. Learn more about getting the features.
• Have you recently checked if all interface messages are translated for your language?

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

10:09, 1 November 2020 (UTC)

MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 10:09, 1 November 2020 (UTC)

Growth team updates #16

Welcome to the sixteenth newsletter from the Growth team!

The Growth team's objective is to work on software changes that help retain new contributors in mid-size Wikimedia projects.

Growth features show impact

Newcomer task experiments results

The team recently published our analysis of the impact of newcomer tasks. We are happy to announce that we found that the Growth features, and particularly newcomer tasks, lead to increased editing from newcomers.

In November 2019, the Growth team added the "newcomer tasks" feature to the newcomer homepage. After six months, we collected data from Arabic, Vietnamese, Czech, and Korean Wikipedias. We analyzed the overall impact of the Growth features, including newcomer tasks.

This analysis finds that the Growth features lead to increases in:

• the probability that newcomers make their first article edit (+11.6%)
• the probability that they are retained as editors
• the number of edits they make during their first couple of weeks on the wiki (+22%)

We also find that the quality of their edits, as measured by revert rate, is comparable to that of a control group.

Because of these results, we think all Wikipedias should consider implementing these features. Learn more about how to get them.

You can find more details about this experiment on the report page. Please post any feedback or questions on the talk page

General metrics

As of November 2020, across all wikis where the features have been deployed:

• more than 5,000 newcomers have made more than 40,000 edits using Newcomer tasks.
• more than 14,000 questions have been sent to volunteer mentors by more than 11,000 users.
• more than 2,000 questions have been asked on help desks by more than 1,500 users.

Learn more about Growth results here, and please post any feedback or questions on the talk page.

Variants C and D

Variants C and D are two new arrangements of the newcomer homepage. We deployed them in October. After six weeks of these variants being deployed, we can see that they have led to increased interactions with newcomer tasks. Next, we will determine which variant is best and use that for all newcomers.

News for mentors

Mentors are volunteers ready to help newcomers in their first steps. Newcomers can contact them using the mentorship module on their homepage.

A separate list for workshops hosts

During workshops organized by education programs through the communities, workshops hosts like to mentor people they train on wiki. Several wikis requested to have a way to claim their mentees without having other newcomers being randomly being assigned to them. To address this need, a separate list can be created on wiki, for mentors that wish to claim mentees, but prefer not to have random mentees being assigned to them. Learn more about this feature.

Claiming multiple mentees at once

Mentors can use Special:ClaimMentee to claim a newcomer as their mentee. The feature now allows mentors to claim multiple newcomers at once.

Community news

The help panel allows people to post a message to the local help desk while editing. Previously, the tool always posted messages to the bottom of help desks. Wikis are now able to configure it to display new messages at the top of the help desk page. T261714

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

14:22, 7 December 2020 (UTC)

MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 14:22, 7 December 2020 (UTC)

Growth team newsletter #17

Welcome to the seventeenth newsletter from the Growth team!

The Growth team's objective is to work on software changes that help retain new contributors in mid-size Wikimedia projects.

Structured tasks

Add a link: the team is continuing to engineer on our first "structured task", which will break down the workflow of adding wikilinks to articles, and assist newcomers with an algorithm to identify words and phrases that could be made into links.

Add an image: even as we build our first structured task, we have been thinking about the next one. "Add an image" is a structured task in which newcomers would be recommended images from Wikimedia Commons to add to unillustrated articles. This is an ambitious idea with many details to consider. We have already learned a lot from community members, and we encourage everyone to look at the project page and join the discussion.

Moving forward: more wikis to get the features

Last November, our team published the analysis of the impact of newcomer tasks. We announced that we found that the Growth features, and particularly newcomer tasks, lead to increased editing from newcomers. Because of these results, we believe all Wikipedias should implement these features.

We have started to contact more wikis to deploy the features, including Wikipedias of all sizes. Bengali Wikipedia recently began using Growth features, and Danish, Thai, Indonesian, and Romanian Wikipedias will be coming soon. Please contact us if you have questions regarding deployment.

We are looking for translators who can help by translating the interface. Translating is done on Translatewiki.net (it requires a different account that your Wikimedia one). Communities that already have the Growth features being deployed are invited to check on the translations. Access translations here.

Variant testing

As mentioned in our previous newsletter, we ran a test of two variants of the newcomer homepage, meant to find a version that increases users completing suggested edits. We have completed the experiment, and learned that one of the variants leads to more edits on desktop while the other leads to more edits on mobile. Therefore, we will deploy the strongest variants for each platform to all newcomers.

News for mentors

Mentor dashboard: we have interviewed mentors from several communities as we plan a mentor dashboard feature, which would help mentors track the progress of their mentees. We encourage all mentors to share their thoughts on tools that would help them.

Magic word for mentors: it is now possible to use a magic word, {{#mentor}}, to display the name of a given newcomer's mentor. This can be used on welcome messages, userboxes, etc.

Help panel questions going to mentors: in most wikis, newcomers using the help panel ask questions to the help desk. On Czech Wikipedia, we have experimented with sending these questions to mentors instead. This simplifies the newcomer experience, and only led to a increase in mentorship questions of about 30%. We tried this in Arabic, Bengali, French and Vietnamese Wikipedias, and we are making it the default experience.

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

16:02, 3 March 2021 (UTC)

MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 16:02, 3 March 2021 (UTC)

¡Una barnstar para ti!

	El Barnstar original
	WikiLambda contribution. BoldLuis (talk) 12:44, 13 April 2021 (UTC)

Thank you, this is very kind. Jdforrester (WMF) (talk) 14:53, 13 April 2021 (UTC)

Growth Newsletter #18

Welcome to the eighteenth newsletter from the Growth team!

The Growth team's objective is to work on software changes that help retain new contributors in mid-size Wikimedia projects.

Structured tasks

"Add a link" is now being tested in production and is nearing release on our four pilot wikis (Arabic, Czech, Vietnamese, and Bengali Wikipedias). We'll be doing final tests this week and next week, and then plan to deploy to the four wikis either during May 24 week, or May 31 week. After two weeks, we will analyze the initial data to identify any problems or trends. We expect that this feature will engage new kinds of newcomers in easy and successful edits. If things are going well after four weeks, we'll progressively deploy it to the wikis with Growth features.

News for mentors

• We are currently working on a Mentor dashboard. This special page aims to help mentors be more proactive and be more successful at their role. The first iteration will include a table that shows an overview of the mentors current mentees, a module with their own settings, and a module that will allow them to store their best replies to their mentees questions.
• We've conducted our quarterly audit on Growth's four pilot wikis to see the activity of mentors. It appears that the vast majority of mentors are active.

Community configuration

We are working on project to allow communities to manage the configuration of the Growth features on their own. In the past, communities have needed to work directly with the Growth team to set up and alter the features. We plan to put this capability in the hands of administrators, through an easy-to-use form, so that the features can be easily tailored to fit the needs of each community. While we developed it initially for Growth features, we think this approach could have uses in other features as well. We'll be trying this on our pilot wikis in the coming weeks, and then we'll bring it to all Growth wikis soon after. We hope you check out the project page and add any of your thoughts to the talk page.

Scaling

• Growth features are now available on 35 wikis. Here is the list of the most recent ones: Romanian Wikipedia, Danish Wikipedia, Thai Wikipedia, Indonesian Wikipedia, Croatian Wikipedia, Albanian Wikipedia, Esperanto Wikipedia, Hindi Wikipedia, Norwegian Bokmål Wikipedia, Japanese Wikipedia, Telugu Wikipedia, Spanish Wikipedia, Simple English Wikipedia, Malay Wikipedia, Tamil Wikipedia, Greek Wikipedia, Catalan Wikipedia.
• A new group of Wikipedias has been defined for the deployment of Growth features. Please contact us if you have questions about the deployment process, or if your community likes to get the features in advance.
• After discussion with the English Wikipedia community, the Growth features will be tested on a small percentage of new accounts. At the moment, registered users can test the features by turning them on in their preferences.

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

15:23, 17 May 2021 (UTC)

MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 15:23, 17 May 2021 (UTC)

Growth Newsletter #19

Welcome to the nineteenth newsletter from the Growth team!

The Growth team's objective is to work on software changes that help retain new contributors in Wikimedia projects.

Structured tasks

• "Add a link" is the team's first structured task. It uses machine-learning to suggest wikilinks as easy edits for newcomers. It was deployed in May 2021 on four Wikipedias and then in July on eight more Wikipedias after we evaluated the initial results. So far, we've seen a high level of engagement from newcomers. Communities that have the feature suggested valuable ideas for improvement. We'll work on improvements and then contact more communities to deploy it.
• "Add an image" is the team's second structured task, currently in development. It is an editing task that suggests Commons images for unillustrated Wikipedia articles. We have conducted many community discussions and tests. Then, we've decided to build a first prototype. We'll first deploy it only to our pilot Wikipedias, to learn whether newcomers can be successful with the task. The project page contains links to interactive prototypes. We are very interested to hear your thoughts on this idea as we build and test the early versions. These prototypes have already been tested by newcomers, in English and Spanish.

News for mentors

• The Mentor dashboard is available at our pilot wikis: Arabic, Czech, and Bengali Wikipedias. It will soon be available at a few more volunteering wikis, as a test. [6]
• At wikis where the mentor dashboard is deployed, a new filter is available for mentors. Mentors can monitor their mentees' activity in Watchlist and RecentChanges, so they can help support their mentees' work. For privacy reasons, this filter can't be accessed by someone else than the mentor itself. This filter only filters mentees assigned to the mentor. This filter is not visible for people who are not listed as mentors [7]

Community configuration

• Communities now have the ability to configure how Growth features behave on their own wikis. At Special:EditGrowthConfig, community members can add a list of volunteer mentors, alter the templates used for suggested edits, update help links, and more. This special page is editable by administrators and interface admins.

Scaling

• We are proud to announce that all Wikipedias now have the Growth features! Thank you to all the community members who helped the team build the features and bring them to their wikis. The only exception is Chinese Wikipedia (zh), for technical reasons. [8]
• The wikis that have Growth features deployed have been part of A/B testing since deployment, in which some newcomers did not receive the new features. Now, all of the newcomers on 280 of the smallest of those Wikipedias have the features. [9][10]
• A test is undergoing at English Wikipedia: 25% of newcomers receive the Growth features. The results from this test will be part of a discussion of how to proceed on that wiki.
• Now that Growth features are available at Wikipedia, the Growth team considers to extend them to other projects. Some Wikisource users have expressed some interest in getting Growth features. There is currently a discussion about implementing them on Wikisource.

News for communities

• Do you have questions about the Growth features? This translatable FAQ contains answers to the most common questions about the Growth team work.
• The Growth features were recently used in a test amongst Latin American donors to give donors the opportunity to learn to edit. You can see the results here.
• Interface translations are important for newcomers. Please help for your language, by translating or copyediting interface translations for the Growth features.
• Help:GettingStarted was a feature developed in 2013, which directed newcomers to articles that needed editing. We recently removed this feature from all wikis, because it has been replaced by the Growth features.

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

18:36, 26 October 2021 (UTC)

MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 18:36, 26 October 2021 (UTC)

Apology

The following discussion is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.

---

https://www.mediawiki.org/w/index.php?title=MediaWiki_1.38/Roadmap&oldid=prev&diff=4941894&diffmode=source

Sorry for not noticing your edit. Thanks for letting me know. Firestar464 (talk) 01:24, 1 December 2021 (UTC)

No worries. :-) Jdforrester (WMF) (talk) 14:35, 1 December 2021 (UTC)

The discussion above is closed. Please do not modify it. No further edits should be made to this discussion.

Thanks for thanking my edits

Just want to say: as a new staff member who is still pretty insecure about making edits and having my work and mistakes be visible to the whole world, it's nice when a comrade you've never met thanks you for your edits. So, thanks for taking time to thank me for my edits on various wikis -- even when they are potentially causing chaos as I learn :-) TBurmeister (WMF) (talk) 15:24, 10 December 2021 (UTC)

Thank you for making them. It's such great work you're doing, and it's so important that we're investing in this area now. :-) Jdforrester (WMF) (talk) 17:37, 13 December 2021 (UTC)

If only I had learned I could hand out kittens before I posted this boring text-only message :-) TBurmeister (WMF) (talk) 18:49, 10 December 2021 (UTC)

Oh yes, the kitten feature is under-advertised, clearly. :-D Jdforrester (WMF) (talk) 17:37, 13 December 2021 (UTC)

How we will see unregistered users

Hi!

You get this message because you are an admin on a Wikimedia wiki.

When someone edits a Wikimedia wiki without being logged in today, we show their IP address. As you may already know, we will not be able to do this in the future. This is a decision by the Wikimedia Foundation Legal department, because norms and regulations for privacy online have changed.

Instead of the IP we will show a masked identity. You as an admin will still be able to access the IP. There will also be a new user right for those who need to see the full IPs of unregistered users to fight vandalism, harassment and spam without being admins. Patrollers will also see part of the IP even without this user right. We are also working on better tools to help.

If you have not seen it before, you can read more on Meta. If you want to make sure you don’t miss technical changes on the Wikimedia wikis, you can subscribe to the weekly technical newsletter.

We have two suggested ways this identity could work. We would appreciate your feedback on which way you think would work best for you and your wiki, now and in the future. You can let us know on the talk page. You can write in your language. The suggestions were posted in October and we will decide after 17 January.

Thank you. /Johan (WMF)

18:17, 4 January 2022 (UTC) MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 18:17, 4 January 2022 (UTC)

When was Vue.js officially chosen?

I'm not surprised that I got some information wrong about this, but something about your revert seems incorrect as well. The announcement email was sent in August 2021; did it really take a year and a half between when the decision was made and when it was announced? The email makes it sound like a recent decision. The wording there is a little unclear, but it seems to suggest that the decision in March 2020 was just to go forward with a pilot project for Vue.js, to determine if it really did make sense to use as MediaWiki's standard JS framework; and that in August 2021 it was decided that the pilot project was enough of a success to make the official decision. Is that incorrect? Yaron Koren (talk) 17:56, 4 February 2022 (UTC)

I'm not surprised that I got some information wrong about this, but something about your revert seems incorrect as well. The announcement email was sent in August 2021; did it really take a year and a half between when the decision was made and when it was announced?

Sadly, it did. No-one could agree who was allowed to announce it, until finally we just did it anyway.

The email makes it sound like a recent decision. The wording there is a little unclear, but it seems to suggest that the decision in March 2020 was just to go forward with a pilot project for Vue.js, to determine if it really did make sense to use as MediaWiki's standard JS framework; and that in August 2021 it was decided that the pilot project was enough of a success to make the official decision. Is that incorrect?

No, the working group to decide on Vue.JS reported in September 2019, hence the RfC launched at that point just as the RfC system was being dismantled. Jdforrester (WMF) (talk) 13:52, 7 February 2022 (UTC)

Okay, strange but true! Thanks for the explanation. I just modified the wording of the history somewhat; hopefully it's still accurate. Yaron Koren (talk) 14:33, 7 February 2022 (UTC)

Growth Newsletter #20

Welcome to the twentieth newsletter from the Growth team!

The Growth team's objective is to work on software changes that help retain new contributors in Wikimedia projects.

Suggested edits

As of February, 300,000 suggested edits have been completed since the feature was first deployed in December 2019.

Add a link is the team's first structured task, deployed in May 2021. It has improved outcomes for newcomers. The team is now working on a second iteration based on community feedback and data analysis. Improvements will include: improved algorithmic suggestions, guardrails to prevent too many similar links to be added, and clearer encouragement for users to continue making edits. After adding these improvements, we will deploy this task to more Wikipedias.

Add an image is the second structured task built by our team. It was deployed in November 2021 to four pilot Wikipedias. This is a more challenging task for newcomers. However, it adds more value to articles (so far, over 1,000 images have been added). We are currently learning from communities and from the data on what is working well and what needs improvements. The project page contains links to interactive prototypes. We are very interested to hear your thoughts on this idea as we build and test the early versions. We will soon deploy this task to more Wikipedias as a test.

"Add a link" and "Add an image" now both have a limitation on how many of these tasks newcomers can do per day. It is meant to discourage careless newcomers from making too many problematic edits.

Positive reinforcement

Over the last two years, the Growth team has focused on building suggested edits: easy tasks for newcomers to start with. We have learned with this experience that these tasks help many newcomers to make their first edits. Now, the team is starting a new project : "positive reinforcement". Its goal is to make newcomers proud of their editing and to make them want to come back for more of them. With the positive reinforcement project, we are considering three kinds of features:

• Impact stats: give newcomers the ability to see how many people read the articles they edit.
• Leveling up: encourage newcomers to progress from easier tasks to harder tasks.
• Personalized praise: encourage mentors and other editors to "thank" and award newcomers for good work.

This project is just beginning, and we hope for community thoughts on the direction. We know that things can wrong if we offer the wrong incentives to newcomers, so we want to be careful. Please visit the talk page to help guide the project!

News for mentors

• The mentor dashboard is available at all wikis. It helps mentors see who their mentees are and keep track of their activity. It is automatically activated where a list of mentors has been created. If you need assistance to create a list of mentors, please contact us.
• The mentor dashboard has a new module: settings. It is now possible for mentors to define their status (active or away). They can specify the volume of questions they want to receive, and they can claim mentees in an easier way. It is also possible for mentors to quit, which will automatically reassign their mentees to other mentors.
• We are working on an ability for a mentee to opt-out (and back in) to having a mentor.
• Previously, in the table that displays mentees activity, the filters displayed all mentees, even the ones with zero edits or lots of edits. We have changed this so that only mentees with between 1 and 500 edits are visible by default. Mentors can change this value in their filters.
• We are currently working on a special page for mentors to sign-up.

Some wikis have created userboxes that mentors can display on the user pages. If your wiki has one, please link it to Wikidata!

Scaling

Previously, at most Wikipedias, only 80% of newcomers were getting the Growth features. This was done for experimentation, to have a control group. We have changed this setting. Now 100% of new accounts at all Wikipedias get the Growth features (except a few, kept as test wikis). We invite communities to update their onboarding documentation and tutorials. Please include the Growth features in it. To help you, we have created an help page that can be translated and adapted to your wiki.

How to help

Do you have questions about the Growth features? This translatable FAQ contains answers to the most common questions about the Growth team work. We regularly update it.

Interface translations are important for newcomers. Please help for your language, by translating or copyediting interface translations for the Growth features.

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

17:12, 16 March 2022 (UTC)

MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 17:12, 16 March 2022 (UTC)

Growth Newsletter #20

Welcome to the twentieth newsletter from the Growth team!

The Growth team's objective is to work on software changes that help retain new contributors in Wikimedia projects.

Suggested edits

As of February, 300,000 suggested edits have been completed since the feature was first deployed in December 2019.

Add a link is the team's first structured task, deployed in May 2021. It has improved outcomes for newcomers. The team is now working on a second iteration based on community feedback and data analysis. Improvements will include: improved algorithmic suggestions, guardrails to prevent too many similar links to be added, and clearer encouragement for users to continue making edits. After adding these improvements, we will deploy this task to more Wikipedias.

Add an image is the second structured task built by our team. It was deployed in November 2021 to four pilot Wikipedias. This is a more challenging task for newcomers. However, it adds more value to articles (so far, over 1,000 images have been added). We are currently learning from communities and from the data on what is working well and what needs improvements. The project page contains links to interactive prototypes. We are very interested to hear your thoughts on this idea as we build and test the early versions. We will soon deploy this task to more Wikipedias as a test.

"Add a link" and "Add an image" now both have a limitation on how many of these tasks newcomers can do per day. It is meant to discourage careless newcomers from making too many problematic edits.

Positive reinforcement

Over the last two years, the Growth team has focused on building suggested edits: easy tasks for newcomers to start with. We have learned with this experience that these tasks help many newcomers to make their first edits. Now, the team is starting a new project : "positive reinforcement". Its goal is to make newcomers proud of their editing and to make them want to come back for more of them. With the positive reinforcement project, we are considering three kinds of features:

• Impact stats: give newcomers the ability to see how many people read the articles they edit.
• Leveling up: encourage newcomers to progress from easier tasks to harder tasks.
• Personalized praise: encourage mentors and other editors to "thank" and award newcomers for good work.

This project is just beginning, and we hope for community thoughts on the direction. We know that things can wrong if we offer the wrong incentives to newcomers, so we want to be careful. Please visit the talk page to help guide the project!

News for mentors

• The mentor dashboard is available at all wikis. It helps mentors see who their mentees are and keep track of their activity. It is automatically activated where a list of mentors has been created. If you need assistance to create a list of mentors, please contact us.
• The mentor dashboard has a new module: settings. It is now possible for mentors to define their status (active or away). They can specify the volume of questions they want to receive, and they can claim mentees in an easier way. It is also possible for mentors to quit, which will automatically reassign their mentees to other mentors.
• We are working on an ability for a mentee to opt-out (and back in) to having a mentor.
• Previously, in the table that displays mentees activity, the filters displayed all mentees, even the ones with zero edits or lots of edits. We have changed this so that only mentees with between 1 and 500 edits are visible by default. Mentors can change this value in their filters.
• We are currently working on a special page for mentors to sign-up.

Some wikis have created userboxes that mentors can display on the user pages. If your wiki has one, please link it to Wikidata!

Scaling

Previously, at most Wikipedias, only 80% of newcomers were getting the Growth features. This was done for experimentation, to have a control group. We have changed this setting. Now 100% of new accounts at all Wikipedias get the Growth features (except a few, kept as test wikis). We invite communities to update their onboarding documentation and tutorials. Please include the Growth features in it. To help you, we have created an help page that can be translated and adapted to your wiki.

How to help

Do you have questions about the Growth features? This translatable FAQ contains answers to the most common questions about the Growth team work. We regularly update it.

Interface translations are important for newcomers. Please help for your language, by translating or copyediting interface translations for the Growth features.

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

17:13, 16 March 2022 (UTC)

MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 17:13, 16 March 2022 (UTC)

Growth Newsletter #20

Welcome to the twentieth newsletter from the Growth team!

The Growth team's objective is to work on software changes that help retain new contributors in Wikimedia projects.

Suggested edits

As of February, 300,000 suggested edits have been completed since the feature was first deployed in December 2019.

Add a link is the team's first structured task, deployed in May 2021. It has improved outcomes for newcomers. The team is now working on a second iteration based on community feedback and data analysis. Improvements will include: improved algorithmic suggestions, guardrails to prevent too many similar links to be added, and clearer encouragement for users to continue making edits. After adding these improvements, we will deploy this task to more Wikipedias.

Add an image is the second structured task built by our team. It was deployed in November 2021 to four pilot Wikipedias. This is a more challenging task for newcomers. However, it adds more value to articles (so far, over 1,000 images have been added). We are currently learning from communities and from the data on what is working well and what needs improvements. The project page contains links to interactive prototypes. We are very interested to hear your thoughts on this idea as we build and test the early versions. We will soon deploy this task to more Wikipedias as a test.

"Add a link" and "Add an image" now both have a limitation on how many of these tasks newcomers can do per day. It is meant to discourage careless newcomers from making too many problematic edits.

Positive reinforcement

Over the last two years, the Growth team has focused on building suggested edits: easy tasks for newcomers to start with. We have learned with this experience that these tasks help many newcomers to make their first edits. Now, the team is starting a new project : "positive reinforcement". Its goal is to make newcomers proud of their editing and to make them want to come back for more of them. With the positive reinforcement project, we are considering three kinds of features:

• Impact stats: give newcomers the ability to see how many people read the articles they edit.
• Leveling up: encourage newcomers to progress from easier tasks to harder tasks.
• Personalized praise: encourage mentors and other editors to "thank" and award newcomers for good work.

This project is just beginning, and we hope for community thoughts on the direction. We know that things can wrong if we offer the wrong incentives to newcomers, so we want to be careful. Please visit the talk page to help guide the project!

News for mentors

• The mentor dashboard is available at all wikis. It helps mentors see who their mentees are and keep track of their activity. It is automatically activated where a list of mentors has been created. If you need assistance to create a list of mentors, please contact us.
• The mentor dashboard has a new module: settings. It is now possible for mentors to define their status (active or away). They can specify the volume of questions they want to receive, and they can claim mentees in an easier way. It is also possible for mentors to quit, which will automatically reassign their mentees to other mentors.
• We are working on an ability for a mentee to opt-out (and back in) to having a mentor.
• Previously, in the table that displays mentees activity, the filters displayed all mentees, even the ones with zero edits or lots of edits. We have changed this so that only mentees with between 1 and 500 edits are visible by default. Mentors can change this value in their filters.
• We are currently working on a special page for mentors to sign-up.

Some wikis have created userboxes that mentors can display on the user pages. If your wiki has one, please link it to Wikidata!

Scaling

Previously, at most Wikipedias, only 80% of newcomers were getting the Growth features. This was done for experimentation, to have a control group. We have changed this setting. Now 100% of new accounts at all Wikipedias get the Growth features (except a few, kept as test wikis). We invite communities to update their onboarding documentation and tutorials. Please include the Growth features in it. To help you, we have created an help page that can be translated and adapted to your wiki.

How to help

Do you have questions about the Growth features? This translatable FAQ contains answers to the most common questions about the Growth team work. We regularly update it.

Interface translations are important for newcomers. Please help for your language, by translating or copyediting interface translations for the Growth features.

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

17:19, 16 March 2022 (UTC)

MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 17:19, 16 March 2022 (UTC)

Growth team newsletter #21

Welcome to the twenty-first newsletter from the Growth team!

New project: Positive reinforcement

Mockup of the Impact module, redesigned to add Positive reinforcement.

• The Growth team started a new project: Positive reinforcement. We want newcomers to understand there is an interest in regularly editing Wikipedia, and we want to improve new editor retention.
• We asked users from Arabic, Bangla, Czech and French Wikipedia about their feedback. Some people participated at mediawiki.org as well.
• We summarized the initial feedback gathered from these community discussions, along with how we plan to iterate based on that feedback.
• The first Positive Reinforcement idea is a redesign of the impact module: incorporating stats, graphs, and other contribution information. This idea received the widest support, and we plan to start our work based on the design illustrated on the side.
• Please let us know what you think of this project, in any language.

For mentors

• We have worked on two new features, to inform them about the mentorship:
  • In the Mentor module, we now provide more information about the public nature of the mentors/newcomer relationship and the fact that talk pages are public.
  • We now allow newcomers to opt-in and opt-out of mentorship.

Scaling

• "Add a link" available at more wikis ― Add a link feature has been deployed to more wikis: Catalan Wikipedia, Hebrew Wikipedia, Hindi Wikipedia, Korean Wikipedia, Norwegian Bokmål Wikipedia, Portuguese Wikipedia, Simple English Wikipedia, Swedish Wikipedia, Ukrainian Wikipedia, Abkhazian Wikipedia, Achinese Wikipedia, Adyghe Wikipedia, Afrikaans Wikipedia, Akan Wikipedia, Alemannisch Wikipedia, Amharic Wikipedia, Aragonese Wikipedia, Old English Wikipedia, Syriac Wikipedia, Egyptian Arabic Wikipedia, Asturian Wikipedia, Atikamekw Wikipedia, Avaric Wikipedia, Aymara Wikipedia, Azerbaijani Wikipedia, South Azerbaijani Wikipedia. This is part of the progressive deployment of this tool to more Wikipedias. The communities can configure locally how this feature works.
• "Add an image" available at more wikis ― Add an image feature will be deployed to more wikis: Greek Wikipedia, Indonesian Wikipedia, Polish Wikipedia, Chinese Wikipedia. These communities will be able to configure locally how this feature works. [11]

Suggested edits

• Selecting topics ― We have created an "AND" filter to the list of topics at Special:Homepage. This way, newcomers can decide to select very specific topics ("Transportation" AND "Asia") or to have a broader selection ("Transportation" OR "Asia"). At the moment this feature is tested at pilot wikis.
• Changes for Add a link ― We have built several improvements that came from community discussion and from data analysis. They will be available soon at the wikis.
  • Algorithm improvements ― The algorithm now avoids recommending links in sections that usually don't have links and for first names. Also, it now limits each article to only having three link suggestions by default (limited to the highest accuracy suggestions of all the available ones in the article).
  • User experience improvements ― We added a confirmation dialog when a user exits out of suggestion mode prior to making changes. We also improved post-edit dialog experience and allow newcomers to browse through task suggestions from the post-edit dialog.
  • Community configuration ― We allow communities to set a maximum number of links per article via Special:EditGrowthConfig.
  • Future change for Add a link feature ― We will suggest underlinked articles in priority. [12]
• Patrolling suggested edits ― Some users at Arabic Wikipedia, Spanish Wikipedia, and Russian Wikipedia told us that "Add a link" and "Add an image" edits can be challenging to patrol. We are now brainstorming improvements to help address this challenge. We have already some ideas and we started some work to address this challenge. If you have any thoughts to add about the challenges of reviewing these tasks or how we should improve these tasks further, please let us know, in any language.

Community configuration

Communities can configure how the features work, using Special:EditGrowthConfig.

• Communities can set the maximum number of "add an image" suggested tasks a newcomer can complete daily. [13]
• Future change: allow communities to customize the "add a link" quality gate threshold easily, using Special:EditGrowthConfig. [14]

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

13:03, 5 July 2022 (UTC)

MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 13:03, 5 July 2022 (UTC)

Growth team newsletter #22

Welcome to the twenty-second newsletter from the Growth team!

Newcomers tasks reach the 500,000 edits milestone — more data publicly available

As of the last week of June 2022, the newcomers of the world have completed over 500,000 newcomer tasks. In other words, newcomers have made over half a million Wikipedia edits via Growth’s “Suggested Edits” module.

• About 30% of those edits were completed on mobile devices.
• Usage continues to increase; in June 2022 almost 50,000 newcomer tasks were completed.

We have added some new data to Grafana. You can now check the number of edits and reverts by task types, or the number of questions asked to mentors. You can filter the data by wiki.

If you have any questions, or there is more data you want access to, please let us know.

Ongoing projects and explorations

The new impact module is part of the Positive Reinforcement project. The image displays the mockup for mobile we used for user testing.

We are continuing our work on our new project, Positive Reinforcement. User testing of initial Positive Reinforcement designs was just completed. Interviews were conducted in Arabic, English, and Spanish. The outcome has been published on the Positive Reinforcement page. We are now utilizing user testing feedback along with prior community feedback to iterate and improve designs.

We are exploring the idea of a Copy Edit structured task. We have tested copy edits in Wikipedia articles for arwiki, bnwiki, cswiki, eswiki (Growth pilot-wikis) and enwiki with two different methods: LanguageTool and Hunspell. We will share more details here and on the associated Copy Edit page once the evaluation is complete.

Add an image was utilized at GLAM events in Argentina, Mexico, and Chile. For an overview of what was learned from these events, read: #1Pic1Article I: how Latin American heritage experts added images to Wikipedia (in English).

Experiments analysis

Add a Link Experiment Analysis has been published. The most important points are:

• Newcomers who get the Add a Link structured task are more likely to be activated (i.e. make a constructive first article edit).
• They are also more likely to be retained (i.e. come back and make another constructive article edit on a different day).
• The feature also increases edit volume (i.e. the number of constructive edits made across the first couple weeks), while at the same time improving edit quality (i.e. the likelihood that the newcomer's edits aren't reverted).

Newcomer task edit type analysis has been published.

• Communities had expressed concern that newcomers whose initial edits were structured tasks wouldn’t go on to learn how to complete more difficult tasks. The Growth team data scientist conducted a Newcomer task edit type analysis to see if this was indeed the case.
• Results from analysis indicate that this likely isn’t a significant concern. More than 70% of users who start with the easy task "Add a link" also make another task type. Read the full analysis and methodology here.

News for mentors

A new system for the mentors list

The configuration of the mentors list will change over the next weeks. In the future, mentors will sign up, edit their mentor description and quit using Special:MentorDashboard. This new system will make the development of new features for mentors much easier.

At the moment, the mentor list is a simple page anyone can edit, unless it’s protected. With the new page, mentors will be able to edit only their own description, while administrators will be able to edit the entire mentors' list if needed.

The deployment will happen first at the pilot wikis, then at all wikis. Existing lists of mentors will be automatically converted, no action will be needed from the mentors. [15][16]

Mentors will be informed about the next steps soon, by a message posted on the talk page of existing Mentor lists.

Learn more about this new structured page on mediawiki.org.

A tip for mentors

Did you know that mentors can filter their mentees' changes at Special:MentorDashboard (and star the ones that require attention)? This feature helps to keep an eye on newcomers' edits, helping mentors to fix minor details, and encourage them if necessary.

And did you know that mentors have special filters to highlight their mentees' edits at Special:RecentChanges? Look for the following filters in RecentChanges: Your starred mentees, Your unstarred mentees.

Other improvements

Some improvements will be made to the mentor dashboard in the coming weeks:

• While we now offer some options for mentors to take a break, the option to quit mentoring was not easy to find. This will be improved. [17]
• Mentors at wikis using FlaggedRevisions will have a way to discover their mentees' pending edits. [18]
• Dashboard discovery for new mentors will be improved. [19]

Recent changes and fixed bugs

• We moved to a new Image Suggestions API. This new API will allow us to deploy Add an Image to more wikis. [20]
• Starting September 19, a few more wikis now offer Add an image to newcomers. These wikis are Greek Wikipedia, Polish Wikipedia, Chinese Wikipedia, Indonesian Wikipedia, Romanian Wikipedia. [21]
• Add an image has been disabled for a few days due to technical issue. "Add an image" added a blank line instead of an image. This has been fixed. [22]
• In order to know if Special:EditGrowthConfig is used by communities, we now instrument page loads and saves of configuration. [23]

Have a question? A suggestion?

Please let us know! You can also read our FAQ page.

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

17:18, 21 September 2022 (UTC)

MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 17:18, 21 September 2022 (UTC)

Growth team newsletter #23

Welcome to the twenty-third newsletter from the Growth team!

Highlights

• Mentorship: We released the new structured mentor list to all wikis. This change makes mentorship easier to setup, manage and use.
• Positive reinforcement: An improved impact module is available for testing.

Screenshot of the positive reinforcement module improvements.

Positive reinforcement: an improved impact module to test

The goal of the Growth team is to encourage newcomers to try editing for the first time, and encourage them to keep editing. We want to increase newcomers' motivation by showing them how impactful their edits are.

Newcomers have access to an impact module; you can find yours at Special:Impact. The revised impact module provides new editors with more context about their impact. It will display the number of edits, the number of thanks received, the last time they edited, the number of consecutive days they edited, and the number of views for the articles they edited.

This module will soon be available at our pilot wikis starting December 1. You can already test this new module at Beta Wikipedia. For safety reasons, do not use your regular account and password at Beta wiki. Create a new, specific account for this wiki, with a different password.

Structured tasks: improvements based on patroller feedback

After the deployment of Structured tasks, we received feedback from various communities regarding how patrollers of recent changes were feeling overwhelmed by an increase in edits to check, and how some edits were poor quality or of poor relevance.

We made several improvements based on the feedback we received. Several points of improvement have already been addressed:

• Patroller fatigue:
  • By default, newcomers can complete up to 25 "add a link" tasks and 25 "add an image" tasks per day. If patrollers are overburdened, each community can use Special:EditGrowthConfig to lower that limit.

• Quality of edits: what constitutes a "quality edit" is not a well defined concept. We initiated a discussion and summarized our findings. We also worked on the following improvements:
  • Add a Link
    • Underlinked articles are now prioritized, so it's less likely that newcomers are adding links to articles that are already have a lot of links.
    • The confidence score was increased, so suggestions are more likely to be accurate.
    • The default number of suggested links per article has been lowered to 3. This can be changed at Special:EditGrowthConfig. Communities can also exclude articles containing certain templates or categories from being suggested.
  • Add an Image
    • Lists will no longer receive "add an image" suggestions.
    • Disambiguation pages will no longer receive "add an image" suggestions.
    • We have many further improvements we plan to make to "add an image" in early 2023. [24]

The Positive Reinforcement project will also address some of the concerns around encouraging newcomers to progress to higher value edits. The Growth team will soon work on strategies geared at "Leveling up" newcomers so they progress from easy to more difficult tasks.

Recent changes

• All Wikipedias now have the same onboarding experience. Previously, at a few wikis, 20% of new accounts didn't get the Growth features when they created their account. These 20% of new accounts were used as a control group, in order to know if the Growth features were changing newcomers' behavior. Experiments have shown that Growth features improve activation and retention, and as we want to provide the same onboarding experience at all Wikipedias, we have decided to remove the control groups. We will utilize control groups when testing new features, and German Wikipedia keeps a control group at their request. [25]
• The quality score for "add a link" suggestions will change. We will suggest less links for each article, but they will be more accurate. We will first deploy it at our pilot wikis, and then to all other wikis where this feature is available. [26][27]
• Growth's features FAQ has been updated and expanded. This page centralizes all the information about Growth features. We invite you to read it, and, if you can, to translate it.

News for mentors

• All Wikipedias can now setup and manage a mentorship program in an easier way.
  • We changed the process to make it more reliable, easier to improve and easier to use.
  • Wikipedias where mentorship hasn't been enabled yet can turn mentorship on following a new process. When done, mentors can sign-up by visiting Special:MentorDashboard.
  • Wikipedias where the list of mentors already existed have been converted to the new system.
  • A new special page — Special:ManageMentors — now displays the list of mentors. This page can be transcluded on any other page. There are also new processes to signup as a mentor or to quit mentorship, and we improved community mentorship management.
• The Mentor dashboard's "Your mentees" module will have a new footer, called "Recent changes by your mentees". This footer will include a link to Recent changes, where mentors can see only edits made by their own mentees. [28]

Deployments

• Add a link has been deployed to a 5th round of wikis. [29]

Improving this newsletter

We plan to have a more regular newsletter, every two months. We also want to know if the current format suits you! Let us know what you like, what you like less and your suggestions of improvements: leave us a comment, in your preferred language.

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

20:57, 29 November 2022 (UTC)

MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 20:57, 29 November 2022 (UTC)

Growth team newsletter #24

Welcome to the twenty-fourth newsletter from the Growth team!

Newcomer experience projects

The Growth team partnered with other WMF teams to conduct several experiments around increasing account creation and new editor retention. Results from four of these experiments are now available:

• Thank you pages & banners - Encourage donors to create accounts through thank you pages and banners.
• Marketing experiment - Run ads on-wiki and off-wiki to see how this impacts account activation.
• "Add an image" GLAM events - Host GLAM events that focus on using the "Add an image" tool.
• Welcome emails - Experiment sending welcome emails to newly created accounts.

Newcomer tasks

• Several communities suggested improving "add a link", by suggesting underlinked articles first. We released this change to Growth pilot wikis. We will review the data and collect feedback before considering releasing it to more wikis. [30]
• The deployment of the "add a link" to all Wikipedias is still in progress. Suggested links use a prediction model, which has to be trained. The deployments will resume after we finish training all models. [31]

Mentorship

• When someone wants to signup as a mentor, they are now informed if they don't meet the defined criteria. [32]
• Workshop hosts asked us to have workshop attendees assigned to them. They can soon use a custom URL parameter. This way, workshop hosts will continue mentoring the event's attendees after the workshop. It will be available in February. [33]
• Have you considered to help new editors on your wiki, by signing up to be a Mentor?
  • Please visit Special:MentorDashboard to check on the conditions to be a mentor, and sign up.
  • If your wiki does not have Mentorship enabled, consider setting it up. The Growth team can provide advice and assist as needed. Please ping Trizek (WMF) for assistance.

Other news

• In Special:SpecialPages, Growth experiments now have their own section. [34]
• This newsletter will have a new publication period, 6 times a year: January, March, May, July, September, November.

Translations

• Newsletter translation: We are looking for translators for this newsletter. If you are interested and have the needed English language proficiency to assist, then please add your name to this list. You will receive an invite on your talk page to translate the newsletter when it is ready.
• Interface translation: You can also help by translating the interface, or reviewing translations to make them more inclusive. Interface translations are hosted at translatewiki.net.

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

14:44, 31 January 2023 (UTC)

MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 14:44, 31 January 2023 (UTC)