Editor engagement
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Growing Wikipedia and its community
Editor engagement at the Wikimedia Foundation is split into two cross-functional teams: The Growth team, which takes a data-driven approach, piloting experimental features to engage new contributors to participate in Wikipedia; and the Core Features team, which focuses on building better infrastructure for new and existing users to participate in peer-to-peer collaboration, consensus, and community building.
Here are some of our most recent reports and milestones.
We’re happy to announce the release of the Notifications tool on dozens of Wikipedias in many languages! Notifications inform users about new activity that affects them on Wikipedia and other Wikimedia projects, such as talk page messages, page links, mentions, thanks or edit reverts.
We've unveiled an experimental interface, provided to newly registered Wikipedians immediately after they sign up. By encouraging users who otherwise don't have an idea where to get started to try simple editing tasks like fixing spelling and grammar, we hope to grow the community.
We call this the "oh shit" graph.
In early 2007, the number of active editors plateaued and then started decreasing. The rate at which new editors stick around plateaued even earlier, in early 2005, and then dropped sharply. These numbers haven't improved.
Please get involved: look at the data and research, join our active projects, help us make our technology and our processes better. Be bold and do the unexpected - everyone is a leader. March 2011 Update
—Sue Gardner, Executive Director of the Wikimedia Foundation, in an appeal to engage more editors on Wikipedia.
Join us! Participate in our discussions and activities, and learn about new features and experiments. You can subscribe to our mailing list, and/or sign up for our on-wiki newsletters.
Product managers, community organizers, developers, designers, and analysts.
I'm administrative overhead. If I'm doing work, it means the others here aren't doing theirs. We don't want that.
—Terry Chay, Director of Features EngineeringHere's a short list of our current projects aimed at improving editor engagement. Check out each talk page for comments or questions!
A new notifications system to help inform users about new activity that relates to them on Wikipedia, as well as invite them to take quick action to respond to these events.