Socialization in online communities allows existing members to welcome and
recruit newcomers, introduce them to community norms and practices, and sustain
their early participation. However, socializing newcomers does not come for
free: in large communities, socialization can result in a significant workload
for mentors and is hard to scale. In this study we present results from an
experiment that measured the effect of a lightweight socialization tool on the
activity and retention of newly registered users attempting to edit for the
first time Wikipedia. Wikipedia is struggling with the retention of newcomers
and our results indicate that a mechanism to elicit lightweight feedback and to
provide early mentoring to newcomers improves their chances of becoming
long-term contributors.Comment: 9 pages, 5 figures, accepted for presentation at CSCW'1
