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Wikimedia has introduced new features to Wikipedia for a better new user experience.
According to The Verge, the company has announced more platform-wide features after testing them for newcomers since 2019.
The landing page for new editors is visible to those who are signed in to their Wikipedia accounts. A mentor will be selected for them from a group of more experienced veterans on site who can provide guidance.
Users will also be prompted to start making minor edits through the landing page, sometimes with suggestions made by a machine learning system trained on Wikimedia.
“The Wikimedia Foundation noticed that there were issues with retaining new editors, meaning that many people would try to start editing but fail and not stick around,” said Marshall Miller, Wikimedia Group Product Manager.
“It’s so hard to edit Wikipedia. There are so many barriers to entry,” he added.
To date, 584 people have signed up to mentor new contributors in the global Wikipedia community.
Wikimedia now has a ‘structured tasks’ option, which includes things like adding relevant photos and links across the wiki to pages, as well as suggested tasks for newbies like copying.
The new Wikimedia system is designed to provide many interface-based benefits, the report said.
Users can see how many page views the articles they’ve changed received in the “impact” area of the newbie page to get a sense of the impact they’re having.
