Grants talk:Project/WM HU/Editor retention program/Midpoint

Comments from I JethroBT (WMF)

@Samat, Bdamokos, Nyiffi, and Hirannor: Hello everyone. Samat, thanks for your work in preparing this thorough midpoint report and to everyone for their work so far in your editor retention efforts on Hungarian Wikipedia. Tgr, thanks as well for your helpful copyediting work. I am accepting this midpoint report with the following questions and comments:

• I appreciate the context on some of the more complex histories related to the scope of this project, such as with Flow and Flagged Revisions. I hope the statistical evaluation will help the community come to resolution on the value of the Flagged Revisisons extension and how best to apply it to the project.
• Activity statistics and toplists of users are very popular among editors; a set of such pages (like monthly, yearly or all-time activity counters, or editors ordered by their first edit) was generated using software developed by one of our community members, and these pages are updated regularly. Some of these pages are useful for monitoring as well, for example list of new editors or list of inactive editors.
  • Personally, I like checking these sorts of lists every once in a while as a volunteer on English Wikipedia. I'm interested in hearing more about this popularity amongst Hungarian editors-- do you know how editors, especially newer and active ones, generally find or locate these pages? What sort of feedback or data suggests how they are being used or that these pages are popular in your community?
• One of the most important factors in retaining active contributors is a friendly community. Therefore, we would like to put a great emphasis on improving community health, and reaching a more welcoming, helpful and friendly community. As a first step, a community consultation took place, and it resulted in a set of behavioral recommendations and best practices in online communication.
  • This is excellent news, and congratulations on completing this important step. Thanks for providing clear links to the policy and guideline pages and community discussion page evaluating them. Working together as a community to develop expectations and practices around conduct is difficult, time-consuming, and important work when it comes to editor retention. I'm also glad to see that you have adapted and began to enforce the event ban policy as well as a means to prevent harassment at in-person events.
• On the events side of things, it's great to see that you have created opportunities that allow for deeper community engagement (such as the WikiCamp) and ones that are lighter with the monthly meetups since May. Thanks for providing individual pages for these events
• Around editor motivation, I know you had planned to devise ways to recognize volunteer achievements around a numbers of roles, such as OTRS agents, bot operators, other advanced rights holders. Are the community service awards planned to recongize these and other kinds of volunteer work?
• Relatedly, I'm surprised to hear that the discussion around community service awards has been ongoing for ten years! Do you have any insight as to why these were not developed before, even when there has been sufficient community interest and support for them?
• Thanks for provide an update on your interactions with the Growth, Research, and Community Relations teams in supporting your work. Please let me know if you'd like to meet to discuss any other staff support or conversations that would be helpful.

Overall, your midpoint report shows that your team has been doing excellent work in preparing and balancing editor retention efforts using several different and thoughtful approaches. These approaches include technical solutions that have been tested and improved upon, mentorship models, efforts to recognize individual achievements and productivity, and community consultations. It will be exciting to see what results you find with your analyses of event feedback, from the Growth prototype, the community services awards, updated ORES models, and much more. With thanks, I JethroBT (WMF) (talk) 21:59, 23 September 2019 (UTC)

Replies from Samat

Dear @I JethroBT (WMF): thank you for your careful review and thoughtful comments. I try to reply to your questions in the order you mentioned them.

• We do not have accurate statistics or measurements who and how often uses these pages. Based on the reactions I receive about these pages, mainly the active editors (especially ones who are active in the community as well) follow these pages. Newcomers probably do not even aware of them (which can be a mistake of us). As a feedback, I receive several messages if updates of the statistics is delayed, and many thanks in case of an update (new set of pages and statistics). Editors often mention to each other how many edits (or other metrics) they already have. Some other editors ask why the values differ from values in other statistics. This means, the typical usage of these statistics is that editors check their own achievements, maybe compare their numbers with others. Personally, I use these statistics as a bureaucrat to check the rights and activities of the editors (bot activity without bot flag, long-time active editors without patroller right, new editors with many edits, monitoring the community members' (in)activity etc.).
• Editor motivation: The community service awards will acknowledge the general editor activity, but not in particular the different user roles. For this purpose, we plan to use the statistical portal, which is not yet developed (see the report for details).
• Service awards: well, this is a good question :) I think, this is the typical case, when everybody expects, that 'somebody' else will do the work for it. The enthusiasm came in waves: after some discussions, we had years of breaks when most of the editors forget about it. On the other hand, without software support it was a significant (and monthly repeated) work to generate the lists for the overview, and that was a narrow neck here (nobody could or wanted to do the development).

Thank you for your help and support. We continue our work in the next period, and we will report about our results next time again. Kind regards, Samat (talk) 20:24, 3 October 2019 (UTC)