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The following Wikimedia Foundation staff monitor this page: KStoller-WMF Senior Product Manager, UTC-8 Trizek (WMF) Senior Movement Communications Specialist, UTC+2 Sdkb-WMF Movement Communications Product Ambassador, UTC-5 To notify them,  ping their username.

Apparently there is somewhere a list of tasks that are deemed suitable for newcomers. I did not readily find this list, but the following report by a newcomer I happened upon may be of interest to whom it may concern:

A note on "Newcomer Tasks"

I started editing by going through "Newcomer Tasks". After three days and a handful of edits, I have given up. The vast majority of the "Newcomer Tasks" I was shown were completely unsuited for actual newcomers. I mostly looked at tasks in the history topic. Most of them consist of being asked to improve very poor articles on very obscure topics. In many cases, there seem to be only few books or articles covering the article topic, and they tend to only be available in specialized libraries. I do not know how these "Newcomer Tasks" are chosen. Based on what I've seen, most of the articles seem to have what I found to be called "maintenance templates". I suspect that these articles are automatically assigned to newcomers based on these templates. That is a very poor way of introducing newcomers to editing Wikipedia. It feels more like being given the odious tasks that nobody else wants to perform, than tasks tailored to the needs and skills of newcomers. It feels like starting an internship and being given the tasks of making coffee and cleaning up behind the staff. I expect those "Newcomer Tasks" to drive away a lot of people who might have gone on to become valuable contributors if they hadn't been turned off right at the start. While that isn't the case for me, it seems that I will have to find my own way on Wikipedia.

 ​‑‑Lambiam 16:12, 27 October 2025 (UTC)[reply]

@Lambiam, do you have a link to this newcomer feedback, please?

These newcomers tasks aren't designed to be a "one fits all" solution. We know that newcomers who come to the wikis are very diverse. We also measured that the majority newcomers are more likely to return and continue editing through suggested edits.

You can find the tasks at special:Homepage. Their repartition is visible at Special:NewcomerTasksInfo while their configuration is at special:Communityconfiguration/GrowthSuggestedEdits.

Let me know if you have more questions! Trizek_(WMF) (talk) 10:48, 6 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]

I happened upon this note here: User:Long is the way § A note on "Newcomer Tasks". Note that this is by now almost a year old.  ​‑‑Lambiam 18:23, 6 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Hah. I see they may have the same set of bugbears I ran into early on, given their userpage Paradise Lost quote. @Long is the way, I see you're still around, if you've got anything else you'd like to add. Looks like you've made it through ok in the end. :) -- asilvering (talk) 02:06, 26 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]

In the sense that I didn't just leave, sure. But as my edit count shows, I haven't exactly become a regular editor. And between the ill-conceived newcomer tasks and the rampant hostility towards newer users, I probably never will. Long is the way (talk) 16:59, 26 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Sorry to hear it. If you'd like a hand finding some more interesting and less daunting tasks, I'm happy to help, just let me know. And if you're experiencing hostility for being a relative newcomer, please feel free to let me know where that's going on, as well, and I can try to sort it out. The community's been getting better and better at this. But that's a low bar - it's been very bad - and there's nothing admins can do about it if we don't see it. -- asilvering (talk) 20:21, 26 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]

So far I haven't experienced any hostility, but that is probably due to the facts that I haven't done much and that I watched behind the scenes for a long time before joining, so I have some idea which areas to stay away from (e.g. noticeboards, deletion discussions, and vanity projects like anything to do with the main page). Of course, half the time admins are the source of the hostility. Long is the way (talk) 20:57, 26 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]

That, too, we're slowly getting better at - see WP:RECALL, for example. From my own experience, I can tell you that I got very jaded from having watched behind the scenes, as you did, and I didn't quite realize how badly jaded that had made me until I left that kind of thing more or less behind me and just started working on improving the encyclopedia. It turns out most people really are muddling along just fine, and getting an idea of how a place works by watching what happens when things go wrong is perhaps useful from an academic perspective but pretty terrible at loading you with a bunch of negativity bias. (There's a reason checkusers are all grumps.)

I can also report that my own newbie experience (and I did personally experience hostility) vastly improved once I became WP:XC. I'm not sure it will have such a dramatic effect for you, since you have a much older account than I did at the time. But it will probably make a difference. 500 edits sounds like a lot, but there are loads of useful, quick tasks you can do that run up edit count pretty quickly without falling afoul of WP:GAMING concerns. I sorted a bunch of articles for WP:GERMANY and wrote a bunch of short descriptions, myself. -- asilvering (talk) 21:23, 26 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Hi all! The WMF's Growth team has been working on a series of Structured Tasks that are presented to newcomers via their Homepage. Their purpose is to break down editing into a guided series of steps that helps editors learn about Wikipedia's policies and guidelines while making useful contributions. Our research indicates that this approach increases newcomer retention, helping to recruit more editors over time. We'd like to introduce the latest Structured Task, Revise Tone, which helps editors identify and revise non-neutral language in articles. If you all are interested, we would like to include English Wikipedia among the pilot wikis for an A/B test as we work on developing and refining it.

The task works by using a machine learning model to identify passages that may have tone issues, similar to CluebotNG's model for identifying vandalism (it is not a large language model akin to ChatGPT). It has been trained on instances where the {{Peacock}} maintenance template was added to or removed from an article, allowing it to flag wording that an experienced editor would likely also flag.

Newcomers are first presented with an onboarding quiz adapted from WP:Manual of Style/Words to watch and the tutorial's neutrality quiz to help them learn about neutrality. They are then given a feed of passages where they can adjust the wording to make them more neutral or mark them as not needing changes.

I want to emphasize that the feature is still at a very early design stage. We have not generally included English Wikipedia as a pilot wiki for new features in the past, but if you all are open to it we'd like to try doing so here because it would provide an opportunity for us to collaborate more closely as we gather your input and shape its design. We will be paying attention to indicators such as whether it helps more newly registered users complete their first edit, improves newcomer retention, and results in edits with a lower revert rate than the average newcomer edit.

In addition to general feedback, we would love your thoughts on:

1. Does this task seem like a good way for newcomers to start learning about Wikipedia's policies and guidelines?
2. How could we make it clearer or more supportive for newcomers? For example, what kind of onboarding or guidance would be most effective?
3. Are there any concerns or objections you think we should consider before releasing a feature like this?

Thanks as always for your collaboration!

Cheers, Sdkb‑WMF ^talk 19:36, 7 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks for posting this, Sdkb! I guess I'll start us off. Thoughts thus far:

• What happens when a newcomer marks a passage as not needing changes? Does it go back in the queue to get suggested again? If it is suggested again to another newcomer, could they see feedback from the first on why they didn't change it?
• Is the neutrality quiz text-only, like the current version, or is it interactive? If it's interactive, is feedback on answers provided? Does any sort of 'score' result in different outcomes for the newcomer – e.g. "You're ready to get started" versus "Reading more about neutrality might be beneficial"?
• Our policies and guidelines tend to be general and conceptual. I do think specific examples, like those of the neutrality quiz, would help newcomers grasp the concepts easier, so I think this has potential.
• Some sort of feedback like I mentioned above on the quiz could be useful; I'd imagine the challenge is to make it relevant without also having to add more volunteer time to tasks. I do think including prominent links to a user's mentor along the task would be good in case there are questions during the process.
• My best guess for pushback would be regarding speed/ratelimit of the tool, as that's one aspect where other initiatives have gotten pushback in the past. Do you foresee this being available for some time, or for a certain number of edits, or something else?

Hope this helps! Happy editing, Perfect4th (talk) 03:39, 11 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks for sharing those thoughts/questions, @Perfect4th! Responding to them:

• What happens when a newcomer marks a passage as not needing changes? Does it go back in the queue to get suggested again? We remove the suggestion if they decline and select "The tone is appropriate". If they select "I'm not sure how to revise the tone" then we don't remove the suggestion.

• Is the neutrality quiz text-only, like the current version, or is it interactive? If it's interactive, is feedback on answers provided? It's interactive! Here's a video of what it currently looks like. We aren't currently planning to treat newcomers differently based on their completion of the onboarding quiz, but we will be internally tracking to see if it correlates with indicators like revert rates, and if there are significant differences we may consider introducing something like what you suggest.
• Our policies and guidelines tend to be general and conceptual. I do think specific examples, like those of the neutrality quiz, would help newcomers grasp the concepts easier, so I think this has potential. Very glad to hear this!
• I'd imagine the challenge is to make it relevant without also having to add more volunteer time to tasks Yes, definitely. We want this to be a task where newcomers can get started quickly, so we're balancing that against the need to explain the basics of neutrality.
• My best guess for pushback would be regarding speed/ratelimit of the tool, as that's one aspect where other initiatives have gotten pushback in the past. Do you foresee this being available for some time, or for a certain number of edits, or something else? Yes, those are certainly controls we will offer! All Structured Tasks can be adjusted by Community Configuration, which allows any admin to set a maximum number of task edits that a newcomer can complete per day or a maximum number of task edits they can complete in total before they're encouraged to move on to other types of editing. For instance, for the "Add a Link" structured task, which we completed rollout of in July, Asilvering set the limit to 15/day and 150 total. Our plan is to run this experiment on pilot wikis until we reach statistically significant findings, which will likely take at least a month. Also, if concerns arose and editors formed a consensus that the feature was unwanted, we would of course respect that and deactivate it until those concerns were addressed.

I hope all that helps clarify! Feel free to ask if you have any other questions. And if this has given you a view about whether or not you'd support having English Wikipedia be part of the pilot program for the task we'd value knowing that! Cheers, Sdkb‑WMF ^talk 03:51, 13 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]

I keep meaning to look more into this and forgetting to, but @Sdkb-WMF, from a read of this page only it sounds great, and I also think using en-wiki to test this kind of thing is fine so long as the number of accounts getting the test version isn't so high that it's going to suddenly result in a lot of confused patrollers/sockhunters. -- asilvering (talk) 04:38, 13 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]

I think what kinds of/how many suggestions are declined (and why, in cases where that's possible) might be a useful metric to keep track of as well – will the model be learning from the test situations? On the whole, though, I concur with asilvering's assessment. Perfect4th (talk) 06:05, 14 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Removing flowery adjectives is probably one of the better tasks to put into a system like this. Does the UI specifically flag the words it thinks need to be looked at? My lingering concern is that when I tested the training examples for this however many months ago, some of the edits it were asking about were entirely unrelated to tone, perhaps that was just the training but it would be reassuring to get confirmation. CMD (talk) 04:11, 13 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]

@Chipmunkdavis, the UI flags the specific passage/paragraph where the model thinks there may be an issue, but not (yet) the specific words. If we find during the pilot that newcomers are struggling to figure out which words are causing the tone issue, then getting the model to flag specific words (phab:T393051) is one enhancement we might prioritize.

During the community evaluation you participated in, yes, there were intentionally some examples that the model did not suspect of having any tone issue, since we wanted to assess whether its predictions aligned with human decisions across multiple kinds of data. The model has also been improved since then. That said, like any model it will always make some mistakes — that's one of the key reasons this feature brings humans into the loop, so that they can evaluate whether the passage needs revision or not. We try to make clear in the UI that sometimes no change will be needed by, for instance, including a question in the onboarding quiz where the correct answer is "none" and by coloring the "Revise" and "Decline" buttons both gray (rather than making one blue) so as not to push editors toward one over the other.

Cheers, Sdkb‑WMF ^talk 21:49, 13 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]

• Update: Thank you all for your thoughts in the discussion above! Based on that, we're planning to proceed with English Wikipedia as a pilot wiki for Revise Tone. We'll follow up to let you know once there's a version of the feature you can test and to establish dates for the A/B test. We'll continue to monitor this thread, so if you have any further thoughts, please let us know! Cheers, Sdkb‑WMF ^talk 23:56, 25 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]
• Update (experiment scheduled): Hi all! We're planning to begin the A/B test for Revise Tone on January 22. As a reminder, this means that half of all editors who visit their Newcomer Homepage will have access to the Revise Tone Structured Task from within their Suggested Edits feed. We are working on creating a URL so that those of you interested in testing out the feature yourself can do so; I'll share that here early this coming week. Feel free to ping me if you have any questions/comments/concerns; we appreciate your collaboration and are excited about this work! Cheers, Sdkb‑WMF ^talk 08:31, 16 January 2026 (UTC)[reply]

An editor who started in 2018 and has 91 career edits desperately needs a mentor, imho. I would like to send them to a link that explains how to request a mentor, but where is that? I do not see a section entitled "Request a mentor" on the page. If you use WP:Mentorship, which I initially assumed would be a good link, it goes to a 2005 essay instead. So, where should I tell someone to go to request a mentor? Mathglot (talk) 03:14, 16 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]

@Mathglot, they should already have one. They'll need to enable Special:Homepage to find the mentorship module - they probably don't have it on, since they've been around since before it was developed. The option is in preferences. -- asilvering (talk) 03:19, 16 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Mathglot, you can also check their automatically-assigned mentor via a template and link them directly. Just use {{#mentor|username}} – ex. {{#mentor|Perfect4th}} results in Ahmetlii. Happy editing, Perfect4th (talk) 03:32, 16 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Great responses; thank you both! That answers my question, as far as determining whether they have one, and who. But what about users who come here on their own? The project page has a brown banner in a prominent position right at the top for those who wish to enroll as a mentor, but there is nothing as prominent (and perhaps nothing period) for a user coming here to ask for one. It would be helpful to have a section § Request a mentor, in which versions of these two responses could be recast into guidance aimed at the user, not to mention that we could add redirects like WP:Request a mentor which might be a popular search term that would lead users here. Mathglot (talk) 04:28, 16 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]

I would support that. We've discussed this in the past (or at least creating a mentorship landing page for mentees) but never done it. It might also warrant consideration with how mentorship programs (or at least shortcuts) work with Adopt a User, too. The closest we have currently to an explanation is mentorship welcome templates such as {{Mentor welcome}}. Perfect4th (talk) 06:34, 16 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Yes, the latter I am familiar with, due to my involvement with the WP:Welcoming Committee, especially the templates. Feel free to ping me if you like to any discussions at a new, mentee landing page, as I could perhaps support the effort by giving feedback on clarity and comprehensibility in the role of a naive user wrt mentorship, which I am. Mathglot (talk) 07:28, 16 November 2025 (UTC) Mathglot (talk) 07:28, 16 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]

I've reserved redirect WP:Request a mentorWP:Request a mentor, so we can just retarget it when we have a destination for it. Thanks, Mathglot (talk) 17:23, 16 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]

I think this will become less and less relevant over time (since these days every new account gets a mentor, so the proportion of accounts who don't know about them can only decline), so it's probably best to throw up at least something really thin there now rather than wait to create something "good". -- asilvering (talk) 04:42, 17 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Went to check what's already on WP:Mentorship and found that this was discussed on the talk page already in 2022 with consensus to put information there. I could look at throwing something up on that page later. Perfect4th (talk) 16:39, 17 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Thank you! I've implemented the October 2022 Rfc result and moved "Wikipedia:Mentorship" to "Wikipedia:Mentorship (essay)" without leaving a redirect. Mathglot (talk) 08:18, 18 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]

I've retargeted seven redirects formerly pointing to the essay to redirect here instead. This should complete implementation of the 2022 Rfc. If and when someone writes a page or section about Requesting a mentor, please retarget Wikipedia:Request a mentorWikipedia:Request a mentor to it. Thanks, Mathglot (talk) 10:30, 18 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks for doing that! I threw up something simple I sandboxed yesterday at WP:Mentorship & retargeted WP:Request a mentor accordingly. If anyone hates it, feel free to revert or improve as necessary. Perfect4th (talk) 13:43, 18 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Perfect4th, thanks for starting that. I have rewritten the page, incorporating material from the mw pages and adapting it to fit here, while retaining all of your original content. There are answers on the page now for a great many more questions by newcomers and mentors; please check it out, and make any corrections as needed. In a rather great irony, there was no page or section anywhere I could find at Wikipedia or Wikimedia about how to request a mentor, so that question remains unanswered, and is pretty much the only one that is, since just about everything else is covered and has a response now. Mathglot (talk) 19:46, 19 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Mathglot, I'm liking this, thanks! I made a couple of changes, and we might consider changing some tenses as some of the "we" is from a WMF perspective rather than the community specifically, but those are minor details. I also added a couple of sections detailing how to turn on the homepage and find your mentor. My understanding is that every account that has not opted out has a mentor (for instance, yours is Alextejthompson, asilvering's is CoconutOctopus, and Barkeep49's is Sdkb; I believe it was deemed simpler to assign every user in the database a mentor rather than only new accounts). Thus, anyone trying to request or find a mentor either needs simply to opt back in or turn on their homepage to find theirs. Perhaps KStoller-WMF could confirm if that understanding is correct. Happy editing, Perfect4th (talk) 20:30, 19 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Perfect4th, thanks for those improvements. I actually had prepared some homepage stuff to include, but didn't in the end, because it is named a Mentor page and homepage stuff seemed o/t. But here is what I had, if you think it is worth adding:

Feel free to include, adapt, or ignore. Mathglot (talk) 08:40, 20 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Only took a month and a half to action this, but I implemented a bit more based on other comments here. A very belated and sincere thank you for all your work on developing this! Happy editing, Perfect4th (talk) 09:40, 2 January 2026 (UTC)[reply]

First of all, thanks to everyone who is working updating and improving this documentation!

@Perfect4th Currently, every new account created on English Wikipedia receives a mentor.  And all other accounts that enable the Homepage will be assigned a Mentor (unless they opt out). Older accounts / experienced editors who have never enabled the Homepage do not receive a Mentor.

We are developing an update based on community feedback that will allow communities to have more control over these defaults via: Special:CommunityConfiguration/Mentorship

The configuration form now includes an option to opt out experienced users from mentorship, along with settings to define the edit count and account age that qualify someone as an experienced user. I have not shared more about this feature yet because it is still in progress: T407436

As of now, if you enable the feature, it will ensure that new experienced editors that visit the Homepage will not receive a mentor, but it won’t yet “clean up” and remove all experienced editors from Mentorship. We hope to complete this work once we’ve removed some maintenance script blockers.

I hope that helps! - KStoller-WMF (talk) 19:36, 20 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Indeed; thanks! Mathglot (talk) 21:07, 26 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]

This edit adds two questionable links. The first is a link to "Bank of France", but this is part of the longer "Agricultural Bank of France" which already has a redlink. I'm not fully up on French banking history but there is no reason to assume these are the same bank, and at any rate the link adds confusion given the existing redlink. I wonder if it is possible to exclude text in redlinks, and perhaps to exclude text that is part of a series of capitalised words, rather than the entirety of the capitalised words. The second link is not as wrong, but it doesn’t add much and is in a quote which requires special care per MOS:NOLINKQUOTE. Excluding text in quotes is likely sensible. CMD (talk) 13:00, 19 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]

I'm also seeing issues with link suggestions. This edit added 3 links, the last two of which weren't needed. Games played I can understand, but Western Canada? I'm seeing a bunch of complaints about this at mw:Talk:Growth as well. I'd sooner just turn off link suggestions... Adding links requires some thought. I thought this had come up before but I can't find any prior discussion. MediaKyle (talk) 13:56, 19 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Prior discussions have mostly been on this page: the rollout discussion (now archived), a WMF improvement discussion during the test (now archived), the full rollout discussion (now archived), a warning message for inappropriate links discussion, and several further up from a user who noticed issues (the now-archived initial message and the threads above from #Inappropriate links are being added quite frequently to #People's names - not a good idea in this project). Perfect4th (talk) 15:22, 19 November 2025 (UTC) [reply]

Thanks for highlighting these instances, @Chipmunkdavis and @MediaKyle! I took a look at them.

For the Agricultural Bank of France instance, we're currently exploring introducing case sensitivity and named entity recognition to the model that powers Add a Link, which hopefully will help reduce the instance of partial name link suggestions like this one.

For the "baluster" instance, the model does not currently try to determine which text is part of a quote and treat it differently. That is a potential enhancement we could explore in the future, though; would you find that valuable?

For the edit you pointed to with possible overlinking, MediaKyle, we've previously taken some steps to reduce the likelihood the model suggests overlinks, such as blocking it from suggesting linking countries. But its suggestions are never going to be perfect, which is why editors are asked to use their judgement in accepting/declining them. The onboarding also instructs editors, Don't link common words, years, or dates. Since they are only just starting to learn about our style guidelines, newcomers are bound to make some mistakes, but we can always give them feedback on their talk page (or in revert summaries) to teach them, just as we would a newcomer making a mistake in another area.

I hope that helps provide a bit of insight. If you have any further thoughts on ways we might improve either the design of the feature or the model that powers it, those are always welcome!

Cheers, Sdkb‑WMF ^talk 07:53, 21 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Sdkb-WMF, Since you mentioned named entity recognition, case sensitivity, and France in the same sentence, I wonder if anyone is considering how one of the most obvious and essential differences between entity naming in French and English, namely title case in English but sentence case in French, ends up with en-wiki articles being named (or misnamed) in translation (or in untranslated titles) and how that affects your recognition algorithms. So, in what I would call the normal case, we might have: fr:Autorité de régulation de la communication audiovisuelle et numérique (Arcom, or ARCOM) in fr-wiki and Regulatory Authority for Audiovisual and Digital Communication in en-wiki. So far, so good. But then we also have, fr-wiki: fr:Autorité de régulation des communications électroniques, des postes et de la distribution de la presse (Arcep) but en-wiki: Autorité de Régulation des Communications Électroniques, des Postes et de la Distribution de la Presse (ARCEP); unjustifiably, imho, but there it is. And in other cases, it is in English, but in sentence case (no example to hand at the moment). Thoughts? Mathglot (talk) 22:40, 26 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]

This is a great example. Thank you!

I agree case sensitivity may not be an ultimate solution for all wikis as languages use it differently.

On the other hand, I think it's good to try only with enwiki in experiments. So that we can see the overall impact offline.

https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T405185#11391268

Named Entity Recognition models are generally specialized in one language or they learn the internals of the languages.

I've just tried this case with a NER model:

- frNER worked well.

- enNER split into two ORGs. I guess it's due to the comma. On the other hand, as suggested, it could be due to translations being misleading.

I think it's more important to improve the overall results for both case sensitivity and NER.

Therefore, I aim to run an experiment soon. So that we can see if these approaches could improve overall results.

Thank you very much for raising this.

It’s very helpful for understanding problems.

Please feel free to raise more cases. OKarakaya-WMF (talk) 10:38, 2 December 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Hello, @Pineapple Storage is currently inactive but still receiving mentees. On Wikipedia:Growth Team features/Mentor list, it says their status is "Away until 5 March 2026", but they are still being assigned mentees. Could an admin shift all their current mentees to me and stop new mentees being assigned to them? IAWW (talk) 09:26, 14 January 2026 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks for thinking about this! I am not opposed to an administrator making changes when it is clear that a mentor will be away for an extended period or is not responding effectively. That said, I wanted to provide some reassurance about the current behavior of the Mentorship system.

When a mentor is marked as away, mentee questions are automatically routed to a different active mentor, so questions should not go unanswered. In addition, the Growth Team released an improvement last year intended to ensure that only active mentors are assigned to brand new accounts, since new account holders are the most likely to reach out to their mentor (see T390933).

Based on what you are observing, does it seem like this functionality may not be working as intended? Thanks! - KStoller-WMF (talk) 17:57, 16 January 2026 (UTC)[reply]

Hi @KStoller-WMF, thanks for your work in this area. It's certainly a great system. Upon further review, it seems like it is actually working, since none have been assigned to Pineapple since Jan 6, though that was 2 days after he changed his options. For some reason I had it in my head that the gap between him changing his options and the latest mentor question was bigger. IAWW (talk) 20:09, 16 January 2026 (UTC)[reply]

Mentors may be interested in the results of the m:Research:Successful Newcomers Survey 2025, which surveyed new editors who had registered in the previous six months and made at least 25 edits. There were a few questions about the mentor program (3% thought their mentors wouldn't be helpful, and 1% thought their mentors were bots). ClaudineChionh (she/her · talk · email · global) 01:46, 16 January 2026 (UTC)[reply]

Agreed. The survey includes several relevant findings, and the recently published research: m:Research:Understanding_newcomer_mentorship_on_Wikipedia also offers additional insights.

One discouraging pattern is how infrequently newcomers thank mentors or follow up on the support they receive. That said, I appreciated the researcher’s observation:

"Newcomers very rarely thank their mentors (either via a reply or the actual thanks mechanism). The mentors definitely deserve thanks though -- they display incredible patience/kindness."

It is also notable that newcomer questions have increasingly shifted toward Mentorship in recent years. In 2025 alone, mentors on English Wikipedia responded to 14,267 questions. I hope that, over time, we can provide more meaningful impact data so mentors can more clearly see the positive difference their work makes. Thanks for all that you do to support new editors on the wikis! - KStoller-WMF (talk) 17:47, 16 January 2026 (UTC)[reply]

Wow, over 14,000 answers does feel like a decent number, and I look forward to seeing more impact data in the future. Thanks @KStoller-WMF! ClaudineChionh (she/her · talk · email · global) 04:01, 17 January 2026 (UTC)[reply]

Those age figures are amazing. But the gender figures... are not. -- asilvering (talk) 07:46, 17 January 2026 (UTC)[reply]

3% and 1% seem suspiciously low if anything! Perhaps those who thought mentors are bots or unhelpful stop before 25 edits. CMD (talk) 02:20, 17 January 2026 (UTC)[reply]

20% of them thought their user talk page messages were automated, though. And I really doubt 1/5 of them are being reverted by cluebot. -- asilvering (talk) 07:36, 17 January 2026 (UTC)[reply]

Given welcomes are automated on many other language wikis, it is a reasonable assumption that they are here too. CMD (talk) 08:14, 17 January 2026 (UTC)[reply]