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

Organizational questions

1. Do you have a wiki-page to organize your handling of your newbies?
   • When a user does it's first edits a robot automaticly welcomes the user (about 1-2 ours later). The message on a talk page In this message the users get redirected to a few pages, from those pages i especially like: [1] which in 30 minutes learns you the basics. Many of the other pages linked in the template are also usefull pages which tell the users what they should and shouldn't do. But the question is offcourse how much this information is read by the new users, it's a lot of information.
2. Who takes care of those newbies (every user? "Mentors" and if so, who decides that they become "mentors"?)
   • There is no mentoring programm on nl-wiki, every user can welcome new users, most of them are welcomed by a robot. But if questions are asked to users most are willing to help. Some users are looked after if they seem to need a lot of help. But this isn't organised.
3. How do you handle newbies? Do you answer questions, do you "adopt" them in any way (templates, categories etc.)?
   • See answer above
4. Which ways of communication do you use?
   • Mainly users are spoken to on their talkpage. In our Helpdesk questions can be asked. I think those questions are most of the times answered with a lot of patience, and the answers are usefull. I noticed in the past that new users sometimes find it easier to talk with me throught e-mail, an advantage of the e-mail is that the new users keep reading their mail, their talkpage is forgotten a lot of times by them. For example on this moment there is a user with whom I now allready have send a dozen of mails over the 10 past days. This user keeps coming back to his article to inprove it. [2]

• • Besides the questions: A lot of new users which contribute inmidiatly start a new article. I think around 15-40 new articles each day are the first article, er even first edit of that user. Most of these articles are not good enough, self promotion, bad grammar, not neutral or just not the wiki style are common problems. When a user creates a not good enough article then there is put a template on the article and the article is put on our list. Sometimes the users are informated by the user which nominates the article [3], if this isn't done then a robot [4] ads a usefull message. A problem with this is that new users get the message very late, a lot of times they are gone by then, and will never read it. Another problem is that users in many cases not say what are the exact problems with the article. They just refer people to the conventions instead of saying which points should be improved.

Teaching process

1. In which way do you teach your newbies (contents)?
   • Mainly with the automatic welcome message after there first hour of edits which refers them to pages where they can teach themself.
2. How long do newbies usually stay in contact with the program?
   • We don't have a programm, most user just dump an article to never be seen again.
3. What do you think are newbies needs?
   • I think that when every user has one person he/she can speak to and ask questions to this would help him or her a lot. This person should support them to get their article up to the standard, and do some edits to these articles as well to show how it is done.

Success

1. 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.
   • don't know numbers on this one.
2. Would you describe your project as successful? Why or why not? What would you like to improve?
   • I think improvements can be made when welcoming new users in the fact that new users seem to get lost in all the pages now, give them an user they can adress there questions to. This user also should watch them a bit, look whether there edits are ok. And point the things that go wrong better then just adressing them to the conventions from which they do 9 out of 10 right and have to search that one missing point themself.
3. How many articles have your newbies written?
   • Around 15-40 a day
4. Do you have problems with the inactivity of newbies?
   • A lot of new user write an article and when it is nominated for deletion never seem to look back.
5. Do you have any other numbers, facts, statistics about your program and would like to share them?
   • Remember the usefull statistics at [5]