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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.
Mockup of guidance while doing a suggested edit, using the
help panel
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.
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.
Panandâ, a mobile app powered by Wikidata (and Wikimedia Commons),
won the top prize in the App for Social Good category in the Android Masters 2019 competition organized by Google Developer Group Philippines.
Eugene, the app's developer, recently gave a
lightning talk about the app at WikidataCon 2019.
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you.
Translations are available.
Problems
You will be able to read but not to edit some wikis for up to 30 minutes
on 26 November at 06:00 (UTC). You can
see which wikis. It will probably last much shorter than 30 minutes. This will also affect the centralauth database. This could for example affect changing passwords, logging in to new wikis, changing emails or
global renames.
[1]
Changes later this week
You can soon vote on proposals for the
Community Wishlist Survey. The survey decides what the
Community Tech team will work on. You can vote on proposals from 20 November to 2 December. This year the wishlist will focus on Wikibooks, Wiktionary, Wikiquote, Wikisource, Wikiversity, Wikispecies, Wikivoyage and Wikinews. You can
read more about the format for this year.
There is no new MediaWiki version this week.
Meetings
You can join the technical advice meeting on IRC. During the meeting, volunteer developers can ask for advice. The meeting will be on
20 November at 16:00 (UTC). See
how to join.
The
Arbitration Committee is the panel of editors responsible for conducting the
Wikipedia arbitration process. It has the authority to impose binding solutions to disputes between editors, primarily for serious conduct disputes the community has been unable to resolve. This includes the authority to impose
site bans,
topic bans, editing restrictions, and other measures needed to maintain our editing environment. The
arbitration policy describes the Committee's roles and responsibilities in greater detail.
If you wish to participate in the 2019 election, please review
the candidates and submit your choices on the voting page. If you no longer wish to receive these messages, you may add {{
NoACEMM}} to your user talk page.
MediaWiki message delivery (
talk) 00:23, 19 November 2019 (UTC)
Google Code-In 2019 is coming - please mentor some documentation tasks!
Hello,
Google Code-In, Google-organized contest in which the Wikimedia Foundation participates, starts in a few weeks. This contest is about taking high school students into the world of opensource. I'm sending you this message because you recently edited a documentation page at the English Wikipedia.
I would like to ask you to take part in Google Code-In as a mentor. That would mean to prepare at least one task (it can be documentation related, or something else - the other categories are Code, Design, Quality Assurance and Outreach) for the participants, and help the student to complete it. Please sign up at
the contest page and send us your Google account address to [email protected], so we can invite you in!
From my own experience, Google Code-In can be fun, you can make several new friends, attract new people to your wiki and make them part of your community.
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you.
Translations are available.
Parsoid is software we use for the visual editor, content translation, Flow and the Android app. This has been rewritten. It will come to the wikis gradually over the next two weeks. It has been tested, but there could be some diffs or previews that don't look right. If you see any you can
report them.
[3]
The
new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 26 November. It will be on the other wikis next week (
calendar). This is because of holidays.
Meetings
You can join the technical advice meeting on IRC. During the meeting, volunteer developers can ask for advice. The meeting will be on
27 November at 16:00 (UTC). See
how to join.
Future changes
You will switch between the article and the talk page in a new way in the mobile view in the future. It will use tabs. This is more like in the desktop view.
[4]
Join the global
m:WikiForHumanRights Campaign by participating with
WikiProject Human rights. The campaigns is focused on increasing coverage of human rights topics on Wikimedia projects through January 30.
Cradle enables editors to create a new item by completing a form. You can create a new form on the
Cradle help page. Cradle forms can be used as templates to ensure that similar new items are structured the same way. This can be especially helpful for specific WikiProjects or datathons, and is a great timesaver if you are creating many similar items by hand.
Other Noteworthy Stuff
570k
VIAF identifiers have been added to Wikidata items in an effort of synchronisation between the two databases, thanks to Bargioni. In order to report errors in VIAF an
apposite page has been created. More information
here.
Query Service lag now affects maxlag. You may need to retry/reset error multiple times when you run QuickStatement or OpenRefine in busy hours.
Wikidata now documented
more than six million people, more than the number of articles in English Wikipedia
An
RfC on the administrator resysop criteria was closed. 18 proposals have been summarised with a variety of supported and opposed statements. The inactivity grace period within which a new
request for adminship is not required has been reduced from three years to two. Additionally,
Bureaucrats are permitted to use their discretion when returning administrator rights.
Alt Labels displays item labels in other languages when there is no label in your default language. You may click a label to add it as the label for your language. This tool is very helpful for labels for people, books, articles, or films that do not need their labels to be translated.
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you.
Translations are available.
Recent changes
Mix'n'match is a tool to connect Wikidata items to information in other databases. It can be used to find subjects that are missing in a Wikipedia. It now has more than 3000 datasets. Before it was closer to 2000.
Changes later this week
The
new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 3 December. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 4 December. It will be on all wikis from 5 December (
calendar).
Meetings
You can join the technical advice meeting on IRC. During the meeting, volunteer developers can ask for advice. The meeting will be on
4 December at 16:00 (UTC). See
how to join.
Future changes
There will be a new schema for
XML dumps. Scripts and apps that use them will need to be updated. If they are not updated they will no longer work.
[5]
The {{REVISIONID}} magic word will no longer work in the content namespaces. This is for performance reasons. When you preview a page it returns "" (empty string). When you read a page it returns "-" (dash). In the future this will also affect other namespaces. The next ones are file and category namespaces.
[6]
Hello and welcome to the December 2019 GOCE newsletter, an update of Guild happenings since the
September edition. Our Annual Report should be ready in late January.
Election time: Nominations for the election of a new tranche of Guild coordinators to serve for the first half of 2020 will be open from 1 to 15 December. Voting will then take place and the election will close on 31 December at 23:59 UTC. Positions for Guild coordinators, who perform the important behind-the-scenes tasks that keep our project running smoothly, are open to all Wikipedians in good standing. We welcome self-nominations so please consider nominating yourself if you've ever thought about helping out; it's your Guild and it doesn't run itself!
September Drive: Of the thirty-two editors who signed up, twenty-three editors copy edited at least one article; they completed 39 requests and removed 138 articles from the backlog, bringing the backlog to a low of 519 articles.
October Blitz: This event ran from 13 to 19 October, with themes of science, technology and transport articles tagged for copy edit, and Requests. Sixteen editors helped remove 29 articles from the backlog and completed 23 requests.
November Drive: Of the twenty-eight editors who signed up for this event, twenty editors completed at least one copy edit; they completed 29 requests and removed 133 articles from the backlog.
Our December Blitz will run from 15 to 21 December. Sign up now!
Progress report: From September to November 2019, GOCE copy editors processed 154 requests. Over the same period, the backlog of articles tagged for copy editing was reduced by 41% to an all-time low of 479 articles.
Request archiving: The archiving of completed requests has now been automated. Thanks to Zhuyifei1999 and Bobbychan193, YiFeiBot is now archiving the
Requests page. Archiving occurs around 24 hours after a user's signature and one of the templates {{Done}}, {{Withdrawn}} or {{Declined}} are placed below the request. The bot uses the Guild's standard "purpose codes" to determine the way it should archive each request so it's important to use the
correct codes and templates.