User:Bücherwürmlein/Best practices in mentoring programs/fr-wikipedia

Questions

Organizational questions

Note: On the French Wikipédia, the mentors are called parrains (M) or marraines (F), as the newbies under mentoring are called filleul or filleule. That corresponds to godparent/godchild.

Do you have a wiki-page to organize your handling of your newbies?

Yes, fr:Projet:Service de Parrainage Actif.

Who takes care of those newbies (every user? "Mentors" and if so, who decides that they become "mentors"?)

Mentors. Every user asserting he's available to help the newbie, not himself under mentoring, not blocked the last 6 months and with minimum 500 edits could declare himself a mentor.

How do you handle newbies? Do you answer questions, do you "adopt" them in any way (templates, categories etc.)?

We use an adoption system, with userboxes for parrains and filleuls.

Those userboxes put automatically filleuls in a category want a mentor, and a bot generates a list of such users to help mentors to find newbies willing a parrain.

Which ways of communication do you use?

Mainly user talk pages.

Before the current mentoring system implementation, the main resource for newbies were a dedicated village pump to get help about Wikipédia editing or MediaWiki aspects, fr:Wikipédia:Guilde des Guides. General village pump and IRC channel are also used to get support.

Teaching process

In which way do you teach your newbies (contents)?

This is an empirical teaching, were filleul ask questions, and parrain answer them. In a small portion of cases, the parrains look the contributions of their filleuls and give spontaneous tips and hints. This last way is also used when the filleul have been a trouble for the encyclopaedia in the past.

How long do newbies usually stay in contact with the program?

Some weeks to some months. No formal statistical study have been done yet.

What do you think are newbies needs?

Very concrete stuff, like wiki syntax question, categorization/templates/infoboxes subtilities, fix errors or solve picture/licensing problems.

Success

How many newbies and, in case you have mentors, how many mentors do you have in your Wikipedia (all in all/per month)? Please outline the development in the last years/months if possible.

Would you describe your project as successful? Why or why not? What would you like to improve?

How many articles have your newbies written?

Do you have problems with the inactivity of newbies?

Do you have any other numbers, facts, statistics about your program and would like to share them?

If you have questions, improvements or ideas please contact me via buecherwuermlein(at)t-oline.de.