Hi Trizek; I attended your and Samat's presentation Onboarding and Retention: Hungarian and French Wikipedias in Stockholm and found it very interesting. I'm trying to find out what, maybe, German-language Wikipedia could learn from your approaches to improve retention of newbies and the number of active editors. One thing I learned is that in French Wikipedia, you use Flow for the "Forum des nouveaux" (German Wikipedia on the other hand uses, as everywhere, the classic approach for "Fragen von Neulingen".) Another thing seems to be a somewhat different approach to newbie welcoming messages and mentoring, though I'm not yet quite sure where the key differences are. Did I get this right:
- French Wikipedia uses uniformly Modèle:Bienvenue nouveau to welcome new users, all new users (or only new users with edits?) are welcomed using this template, it is distributed by a bot, but always signed by a specific human editor.
- Is the user who signed the message then seen as in some way "responsible" for the newbie and being their designated contact person?
- German Wikipedia uses a variety of welcoming templates, people are free to choose one from de:Kategorie:Vorlage:Begrüßung (particulary frequently used are de:Vorlage:Hallo, de:Vorlage:Willkommen, and de:Vorlage:Begrüßungsbox.) These are distributed at the discretion of people welcoming new editors (not by a bot). They contain pointers to the mentoring programme where people can, if they want, choose a specific mentor or place a wish for mentoring (a mentor will then respond).
- It seems that you have some kind of new mentorship programme which replaced your old one. In your presentation on page 8, you say that "the opt-in Mentorship program is not used anymore". How is it different from your current Mentorship programme, that is, I particularly don't quite understand how the new programme is no longer "opt-in"? Is it mandatory? How would you describe how it differs from the German system?