2019:Community Growth/Onboarding and Retention: Hungarian and French Wikipedias

From Wikimania



When new editors start in Wikipedia they face a lot of challenges: technical, cultural and systemic challenges. As a result, a lot of new editors quickly leave Wikipedia and never come back. The question of how we can retain new editors, how we can keep them motivated and help them learning what they need to know in order to become Wikipedians has immense importance for community growth. This session will include content and presenters from these two submissions about newcomer retention efforts in Hungarian and French Wikipedia. The two short presentations are followed by a joint Q&A:

Retention program in Hungary
Speaker: Samat
After a longer preparation period, Wikimedia Hungary started an editor retention program this year in order to improve the capability retaining old and new editors in the Hungarian community. This session would like to briefly introduce the main idea and plans of the program, and present the first experience and learning from it. See original submission.

Welcome and help: how to keep a community ready for newcomers
Speaker: Trizek
In 2011, French Wikipedia decided to make some efforts about newcomers, to ease their first steps, for example rewriting help contents and documentation and privileging tools that are easier to use for newcomers. During this talk, you will discover the different efforts led by the French community since years to welcome newcomers and reduce the barriers they face. The talk will be about tools and methods used to know what newcomers need, that are both freely reusable. We will also discuss about the community changes (so as pain-points and blockers) that followed those efforts to make French Wikipedia a better place for newcomers. See original submission.