Choosing a mentor: It may make sense to make it possible for a newcomer to select a mentor from the list of suggested mentors himself. I started enabling experiments on sr.wiki, and one user suggested this idea to me, so here's it.
Topic on Talk:Growth/2023
Hi, I'm a Growth ambassador at Czech Wikipedia. Thanks for suggesting this feature! I'm currently working on a new feature that allows mentors to claim a newbie, if they know them off-wiki, for instance. See (draft) help page at Growth/Personalized first day/Newcomer homepage/How to claim a mentee. Maybe that's something you would like? Feel free to give comments on that!
I'm honestly not sure if displaying a list of usernames to the newbie is worth it? How would be a newbie supposed to thoughtfully choose their mentor? It would be nice if you could explain how would you like the newbies to use the proposed feature, so we can make a better image of it.
Hi, and thank you for this message, Acamicamacaraca!
I think that a newcomer can claim a mentor only after a few interactions with Wikipedia. When I work with newcomers as a volunteer on French Wikipedia, I very rarely have someone who asks for a specialist about a particular topic. Newcomers very often need help about basic things, like adding a source or an image, or understanding some rules. So I don't think that they need to pick a mentor from a list.
If they want to change their mentir, than can do so by simply agreeing with the new mentor who could claim the newcomer. :)
The idea was that e.g. the newcomer can choose the mentor himself based on his description. For example, if a newcomer wants to deal with football topics, he would prefer to choose a mentor who also deals with football topics instead of historical ones.