Research:Productive newcomer proportion

This page describes a metric that's applied to a cohort of newcomers to determine the proportion of them fit into the R:productive newcomer user class.

Definition

The productive newcomer proportion is the proportion of R:productive newcomers in a cohort of newcomers.

WMF standardization

The productive newcomer proportion is commonly used to assess the effectiveness of a new feature or change to MediaWiki's interface to enable or encourage newcomers to contribute productively. This metric is often used to a check that an increase in engagement (e.g., edit count) represents a useful increase or just more vandalism.