1036529 - List or feed of first-time contributions

Status: RESOLVED WONTFIX

(developer.mozilla.org Graveyard :: Collaboration, enhancement)

Description

[Janet Swisher]

What problems would this solve?
===============================
Data from discussion communities indicates that if new members get a response to their first contribution within 25 minutes, they're 90% likely to make a second contribution; 60% if they get a response within one hour, and 10% after 24 hours. (See http://www.feverbee.com/2014/07/responding-to-a-members-first-contribution.html)

Those numbers may not apply exactly to wiki contributions, but right now we have no way of easily detecting and responding to first contributions in a personal way (though we will soon have automated badges).

Who would use this?
===================
Staff, topic and l10 leaders, and other core volunteers who are interested in encouraging new contributors. 

What would users see?
=====================
This could be a filter or option on the revision dashboard. It might also make sense as an RSS feed, since these events may not be very frequent. 

What would users do? What would happen as a result?
===================================================
The workflow that this feature would enable also depends on on-site messaging. Users could see a list of first-time contributions, and could message the newcomer to thank them for their contribution, describe why it was useful, and point them towards similar contributions that they could do. 

Is there anything else we should know?
======================================
I am not concerned that newcomers might get responses from multiple oldtimers. Love-bombing is good :-)

I don't think that this feature has privacy considerations beyond those of the on-site messaging feature, but please point out if I'm missing something.

Comment 1

[Māris Fogels [:mars] (please needinfo)]

See bug 878187 for a description of an on-site messaging system that members could use to get in touch with new contributors.

Comment 2

[Luke Crouch [:groovecoder]]

Should this be implemented as a list or feed that requires staff & leaders to manually check? Any interest in a pro-active email to staff, topic, and/or l10n leaders when a user makes their first contribution to MDN, topic, or locale respectively?

Comment 3

[Janet Swisher]

That might make sense, given that the point is to respond in a very timely way. We should get input from folks who would use it. I can bring this up in the next MDN Community meeting (Weds., July 16).

Comment 4

[Janet Swisher]

Other use cases for this feature:

* Monitoring for common newbie mistakes, such as putting translations in the /en-US space.
* Giving "likes" or "high-fives" (bug 677821) of first-time contributions; this could be implemented independently of the on-site messaging feature.

Comment 5

[Justin Crawford [:hoosteeno] [:jcrawford]]

Janet, could you review this in light of bug 1113252 and identify specs using that same functionality but serving the need identified in comment 0?

Comment 6

[Janet Swisher]

I've set this bug to depend on bug 878187, because I don't see much utility for it without that (or whatever feature we implement to address user-to-user communication). We could make the first-edit notifications available to a wider segment of the MDN community, but without the ability to take action on the information, it is not very useful. Currently, the only actions a user can take in response to first-edit notifications are to revert the change or (if they have privileges) delete the page.

If we did have user-to-user communication, then (some set of) users could take action based on first-edits by sending appropriate responses to the new user. Similarly, if we had the ability to "like" edits (bug 677821), users could take action by affirming good first edits; that's much less information transmitted than a general-purpose communication, but still lets the newcomer know that their contribution was seen and appreciated. 

I don't see a community benefit to this feature without some way to communicate to the new user.

Comment 7

[Jean-Yves Perrier [:teoli]]

Janet: I think we have this now (for spam control). Should we morph this bug into a follow-up or close it and open follow-up bugs?

Comment 8

[Janet Swisher]

Probably close it and open follow-up bugs.

For example, for growing our l10n communities, it would be great for l10n leaders to be able to know about first-time contributors in their specific locale. But that might be implemented by a "first-time" flag on revision dashboard, rather than as a separate feed.

Comment 9

[BMO Automation]

MDN Web Docs' bug reporting has now moved to GitHub. From now on, please file content bugs at https://github.com/mdn/sprints/issues/ and platform bugs at https://github.com/mdn/kuma/issues/.