Welcome to Wikipedia! Here's what we're doing to help you stick around
Originally published on the WMF blog on 21 October 2019
Someone signing up to edit a Wikipedia page for the first time may feel a bit like a visitor to a new planet—excited, to be sure, but wildly overwhelmed.
Many new editors must wonder: Just how many millions of articles are in this vast online resource? And which of those millions of articles need that particular person's help?
More than 10,000 users open accounts on Wikipedia each day, and the English language version alone contains nearly six million articles. Many new users give up before they start, however, intimidated by how many different ways there are to get started, and how challenging it can be to learn to edit. Wikipedia wants their help, of course; its success requires an engaged community of contributors, providing wisdom at all levels to enhance the product and enrich the greater good.
With the goal of increasing new users' engagement, the Wikimedia Foundation Research team and their collaborators in the Data Science Lab at EPFL, a technical university in Switzerland, undertook a study to see how Wikipedia might solve this so-called "cold start" problem. How, by asking a few simple questions at the outset of someone's volunteering as an editor, it could nurture and coax that person, guiding them to the places where their expertise could be most helpful—easing them into the experience, and making it satisfying enough to encourage them to stick around. They published the results in the proceedings of the Thirteenth International AAAI Conference on Web and Social Media (ICWSM 2019).