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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.
The number of suggested edits completed by each wiki each week, going from December 2019 to November 2020, with a line for the total.
The number of distinct users completing suggested edits by each wiki each week, going from December 2019 to November 2020.
Because of these results, we think all Wikipedias should consider implementing these features. Learn more about how to get them.
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
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
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
You can now put pages on your watchlist for a limited period of time. Some wikis already had this function. [1][2]
Changes later this week
Information from Wikidata that is used on a wiki page can be shown in recent changes and watchlists on a Wikimedia wiki. To see this you need to turn on showing Wikidata edits in your watchlist in the preferences. Changes to the Wikidata description in the language of a Wikimedia wiki will then be shown in recent changes and watchlists. This will not show edits to languages that are not relevant to your wiki. [3][4]
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 8 December. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 9 December. It will be on all wikis from 10 December (calendar).
User:Zvpunry/EntitySchemaHighlighter.js user script highlights the entities in the content of a Schema and shows information when hovering the link. (2020-12-07)
Other Noteworthy Stuff
We now have a central repository for wikibase-cli templates, with the aim to document best practices, offer general purpose request/create/edit templates, but also offer more niche templates as examples of what's possible: contributions and template requests welcome!
Simple Query Builder development continues. We worked on combining different query conditions as well as internationalisation.
Making the precision translatable in geocoordinate and date inputs (phab:T269102)
Changes to descriptions in a specific language now show up on watchlist and recent changes on the Wikipedia and co for that language (phab:T191831)
Finished working on the problem of incorrectly-escaped label being included in a link to Special:NewItem if there are no search results (phab:T263258)
Investigating why we're currently skipping a significant number of Item IDs (phab:T268625)
Wikibase Release Strategy/Infrastructure: We have decided where to host future Docker and tarball releases of Wikibase. You can read about the details and the reasoning in the following ADRs: Docker Image Repository, Tarball Repository
Template:Notebook Given name is a new template which gives for each given name a list of useful SPARQL queries. The template can be used on the talk page of given names. See Alexandre (Q16002466) for an example. Comments are Contributions are welcome.
The next Wikibase live session is 16:00 UTC on Thursday 17 December 2020 (Add to calendar). We will have a few people share out about their project in the first half of the call and then continue our conversation from the last session about what will be a better platform for community discussions. Everyone is welcome to attend!
We spend the week doing some exploratory work for the next year. Among other things we looked into how to measure the number of constraint violations on an average Item and what we can learn from it.
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
There is a Wikipedia app for KaiOS phones. It was released in India in September. It can now be downloaded in other countries too. [5]
Changes later this week
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 15 December. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 16 December. It will be on all wikis from 17 December (calendar).
Continuing to work on the query builder. It can now have more than one query conditions. One of the next steps is making it possible to query for Item values. You can follow along on the demo system.
Finished working on the problem of values of Statements that link to Forms and Senses not having language attributes associated with them in the HTML code (phab:T267023)
Fixed language selectors covering other input fields when using keyboard navigation for Special:NewItem and Special:NewLexeme (phab:T266638)
Fixed language fallback indicators sometimes still shown for variant fallbacks (phab:T267502)
Working on whitespace stripped while typing when editing lexemes (phab:T250550)
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Tech News
Because of the holidays the next issue of Tech News will be sent out on 11 January 2021.
Recent changes
The {{citation needed}} template shows when a statement in a Wikipedia article needs a source. If you click on it when you edit with the visual editor there is a popup that explains this. Now it can also show the reason and when it was added. [6]
Changes later this week
There is no new MediaWiki version this week or next week.
Future changes
You can propose and discuss what technical improvements should be done for geographic information. This could be coordinates, maps or other related things.
Some wikis use LanguageConverter to switch between writing systems or variants of a language. This can only be done for the entire page. There will be a <langconvert> tag that can convert a piece of text on a page. [7]
Oversighters and stewards can hide entries in Special:AbuseLog. They can soon hide multiple entries at once using checkboxes. This works like hiding normal edits. It will happen in early January. [8]
Ongoing: rC3 (remote Chaos Communication Congress). Several Wikidata-related talks and meetups happening on December 27th, 28th and 29th: introduction to Wikidata, Wikidata for datajournalists, Wikidata meetups in German and English, and a Query Service workshop. (see Wikipaka schedule for more details)
Project Grants open call for proposals in 2021. Changes in the review process for Project Grants in 2021; the open call for community organizing proposals will be from January 11 to February 10 and the open call for software and research proposals will be from February 15 to March 16.