Effects of Receiving Personalized Welcome Messages on French Wikipedia

The process of learning about a community and how to participate is a question with pragmatic importance to communities and scientific importance in the study of people's involvement in groups. On French Wikipedia, where over five hundred new accounts are created per day, the work of supporting newcomers is an essential if time-consuming task. In this context, can automated messages offering human mentorship increase newcomer participation? In a field experiment involving 57,084 new user accounts, we tested the effect of such messages on whether people contributed to Wikipedia and how much time they spent once they did. Consistent with field experiments on other language Wikipedia communities, we did not find an effect. We discuss this finding in light of other studies on automated welcoming systems on Wikipedia and meta-analyze the results to confirm this null result.

探究如何了解一个社区及其参与方式，这一问题对于社区而言具有实际应用的重大意义，在研究人们群体参与行为方面亦具有科学价值。在法语维基百科上，日均新增账户超过五百个，因此支持新用户的任务虽耗时却至关重要。在此背景下，提供人类导师支持的自动信息能否提升新用户的参与度？在涉及57,084个新用户账户的实地实验中，我们测试了此类信息对人们是否向维基百科贡献内容及其贡献后所花费时间的潜在影响。与在其他语言维基百科社区进行的实地实验结果一致，我们没有发现任何显著效果。在参照其他关于维基百科自动欢迎系统的研究的基础上，我们对此发现进行了讨论，并通过元分析确认了这一无显著效果的结论。