Future of Language Incubation/Implementation

Hypothesis statement: If we provide production wiki access to 5 new languages, with or without Incubator, we will learn whether access to a full-fledged wiki with modern features such as those available on English Wikipedia (including ContentTranslation and Wikidata support, advanced editing and search results) aids in faster editing. Ultimately, this will inform us if this approach can be a viable direction for language incubation for new or existing languages, justifying further investigation.

Implementation Plan

The implementation proposal will need participation from some other WMF teams and the project team is in active consultation with them. At this stage the implementation proposal aims to facilitate the following changes:

Identify a set of test wikis in Incubator (maximum 5 as per selection criteria suggested above) subject to approval by the Language Committee.
With the help of the WMF SRE team, create the wiki in production infrastructure (along with transfer of content from the incubator) so that the community can quickly move on to editing on the production wiki.
Monitor content growth progress of these prioritized wikis on a production wiki vs. Incubator.
Clearly mark these wikis as new to distinguish them from other production wikis for the pilot period.
Review status at the end of a pilot period to ascertain whether any change is needed for the wiki.

To ensure there is no disruption to the ongoing wiki approval process, and to uphold transparency and fairness, this proposal for a one time acceleration of project graduation will be clearly communicated to the other communities for their awareness.

Selection

The goal is to replicate a controlled experiment as closely as possible. For wikis that meet the minimum selection criteria (detailed later), the wikis will be categorized into various similar clusters, based on following variables:

Edits in content namespace in the past 3 months
New pages created in content namespace in the past 3 months
Average number of monthly active editors in the past 3 months
Time spent by language on incubator (until 30 June 2024)

The number of clusters will be equal to the number treatment units (which is 5 in this case i.e. languages will be given production wiki access). From each cluster, a language will be randomly selected to receive the treatment (i.e. receiving a production wiki).

Ideally, we would want to get confirmation of the language before sampling them, but given the practical considerations, the languages will be confirmed post sampling. If any of the selected languages decline to participate, we will re-run the sampling for that group, without replacement.

Post sampling, the KR steering committee and the Language Committee should give their final approval for the list of languages. During this phase, it is required to ensure at least following:

Is a valid language that could potentially graduate some day.
The set represents a good mix of various regions across the world.
No other major concerns with the language having a production wiki.

Minimum inclusion criteria

For an incubating project to be included in the sampling, the following minimum criteria must be met:

is a Wikipedia
at least 2 active editors in the last 3 months
- apart from the project maintainers & members of LangCom
at least 30 edits in the last 3 months
either RTL or LTR language
- excludes: sign languages, vertically written etc.