Wikipedia talk:Wikipedia Signpost/2021-10-31/Recent research

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• As a fairly frequent sender of talk page welcomes (probably 75+), I've gotten maybe 1-2 responses total. It's interesting to read that research seems to back up their limited impact on editor retention. On the other hand, the growth team features seem to be making a difference and are expanding, so I've signed up as a mentor there. Ganesha811 (talk) 20:30, 31 October 2021 (UTC)

Indeed, the new Growth features are important context there - I had meant to cover that in the review (now amended). Regards, HaeB (talk) 20:34, 31 October 2021 (UTC)

@HaeB: That growth team looks amazing! Clovermoss (talk) 02:36, 1 November 2021 (UTC)

• I don't think I've received a double digit number of responses to talk page welcomes I've given, bespoke or template. I'd estimate that I've given 200 bespoke welcomes and 1000 template welcomes. Certainly no welcomes will be well-received when most recipients can't hear us, by design of the WMF. Unfortunately, such superficial projects can only make a limited impact when the root causes of low editor retention are twofold: inordinately and arbitrarily high learning curves, both in technical processes and bureaucratic policy reading; and a highly toxic community that provides to all editors significantly more negative (and unconstructive) feedback than positive feedback, but particularly provides to newbies very low-fuse temper comments and a huge degree of suspicion (due in part due to the genuine overwhelming levels of sockpuppetry that perhaps outnumber good faith newbies at this point).
  As for the Growth features, they are a very well-considered attempt to lower both root causes by more personal volunteer feedback. Nonetheless, they are not going to singlehandedly change the tide on a rotten community that hates both itself and outsiders, and the features are still technically bottlenecked by how few new people can successfully add a message to a talk page! (Yet Flow was almost universally condemned...) — Bilorv (talk) 12:51, 1 November 2021 (UTC)
• Like Bilorv, the way i see it, welcome message can only help retention if the follow up experience is there. When ppl don't know how to edit and everything is super strict, when they get told off by a bot or a user when they make a mistake, when they don't understand how to reply to a messages, when they are not allowed to contribute the information they want to because 'thousands of reasons' then no amount of welcome is going to help honestly. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 15:21, 1 November 2021 (UTC)
• Automated greetings don't help, heh. I could have told you that- I was genuinely either mildly annoyed or wholly uninterested in the greeting message I got when I first joined. The technical learning curve and various policies, oddly, wasn't an issue. --SilverTiger12 (talk) 18:04, 1 November 2021 (UTC)
  • @SilverTiger12: for me, the technical side was intuitive and the various policies were interesting, an active attractor. But this is a selective bias among people who stayed (and are invested enough to read The Signpost). — Bilorv (talk) 15:05, 2 November 2021 (UTC)
• I was surprised to read this. A non-trivial contributor to my initial "retention" was User:Vanjagenije's welcome message with a plate of cookies. As a TW user I now know it was just three clicks of a button, but back then it seemed like a really nice gesture. Though I did not respond to the message itself, it did make the atmosphere more... friendly. But eh, anecdotal evidence and all that... W. Tell DCCXLVI (^{talk to me!}/_c) 07:06, 2 November 2021 (UTC)
  • I like to think that the messages do still make a difference in a non-measurable way (after all, I keep sending them). Maybe I leave a message to an IP and the person creates an account. Maybe a welcome stays prominently in the mind of a person who's an account for a one-off edit, and months later they return, but have to create a new account as they've forgotten their password. However, if there is a difference, I think it has to be a fairly small one. — Bilorv (talk) 15:05, 2 November 2021 (UTC)