Talk:Community Capacity Development/New contributor engagement and growth

Wikipedians born, not made

(moved from main page)

Having conducted a number of edit training sessions, I am not convinced that the approach creates new contributors beyond the contributions at the event itself. This appears to be a common experience worldwide. I think the people who wait until an opportunity to attend a training session presents itself are not people with a burning desire to contribute; they are interested in "just in case" learning not "just in time" learning, or as someone put it "wikipedians are born, not made". Also the logistics of edit training and the scale to which it can occur make it difficult to see it as the major/preferred entry point for new contributors.

I think realistically the group we need to focus on are those with the burning desire to edit who simply start contributing. I think it's a better investment to try to retain the new contributors than to recruit more of them. I think the visual editor should be "pushed" onto new contributors (opt-out available) to minimise their technical learning curve (already happening to varying degrees). With the visual editor in widespread use, on-boarding programs can be focussed on policy as newcomers get into trouble over policies very quickly. And Articles for Creation needs to lower the bar as it seems many viable drafts are rejected then abandoned. I note that it is difficult to communicate with new contributors because of the use of Talk pages which they may not understand conceptually or how to communicate via them. New users would benefit from being able to communicate with screenshots but it is not possible to just paste them into a Talk page. Indeed, the process to communicate via Wikipedia screenshots is quite complex - read the "Quick Guide" to see that it requires a level of skill beyond a new contributor.

For these reasons, I would suggest email addresses should be mandated on signup so new contributors can be communicated with via email which is likely to be more familiar to them. Kerry Raymond (talk) 04:14, 26 August 2015 (UTC)

Editor retention program

Wikimedia Hungary submitted a project grant application to the Wikimedia Foundation in order to request support for an editor retention program. If you are interested, visit this page. Your advice and input is warmly welcomed. Samat (talk) 22:37, 29 November 2018 (UTC)