Help talk:Growth/Tools/Suggested edits

Hello! I'm a fairly established editor and I got curious about the newcomer tasks. There's a lot I like, but the very first suggested edit I got was to "copy edit" this article. That article does not need copy editing. It needs work, but nothing a newbie in this context is prepared to do. I'd like to suggest the following:

1. Remove "written in in-universe style" as a "copy editing" maint tag -- this is a research problem that is only disguised as a prose problem.
2. If possible, filter the articles that get suggested to newbies so they won't see articles tagged with "may not meet notability guidelines". By definition these articles looked deeply flawed to an experienced editor but not in a way where they could fix it themselves -- they don't give newbies a good place for entry.
3. Pie-in-the-sky idea, use custom text searches to find untagged articles that have common typos like "teh" or peacock terms like "stunning natural beauty".

I love the idea behind this task, but frankly, my experience is that people don't bother to tag the actually-routine copyediting because if they're looking at it, they can just fix it. It might even be better to have "add a link" as the only easy newcomer task, and make copyediting "medium", to be more honest with newcomers about the complexity.

OK I went and looked at the guild of copy editors' tags and I think a newbie could likely handle {{cleanup tense}}, {{inappropriate person}}, {{copy edit section}} but not {{copy edit inline}} (since a lot of those are actually asking for refs/research, not copy editing) -- for the inline ones I'd just do {{awkward}}, {{colloquialism}}, {{sentence fragment}}, and maybe {{expand acronym}} or {{verify spelling}}. I think it's better to be very limited in the tags we point newbies to, than to misrepresent what's needed at the article they're sent to.

For later tasks, it might be useful to point newbies to external links cleanup, since converting an external link to a citation is always an improvement and not as hard as finding a new source from scratch.

@LEvalyn Thank you for being so thoughtful about how we can improve this newcomer task! I agree that the maintenance templates that surface the copy edit task are often associated with articles where there isn't a clear or newcomer-friendly edit available. I've discussed this in the past with a few English Wikipedia editors, and they had a similar conclusion. Some adjustments were made to templates, but perhaps there are further template changes that could help!

The good news is that it's really easy to make a change to which templates populate this task. Any English Wikipedia Admin can update the template list. I think your best bet is to post your suggestions as a new thread here: Wikipedia_talk:Growth_Team_features. The right people are following that page and can asses the proposal and help make changes.

Pie-in-the-sky idea, use custom text searches to find untagged articles that have common typos like "teh" or peacock terms like "stunning natural beauty".

We are actually looking into this! We've looked into various ways to introduce a structured copyediting task: Structured tasks/Copyedit. And next fiscal year, the Research team will investigate detecting "peacock prose" as a way to create a new Structured task suggested edit for newcomers. My hope is that Newcomer tasks will include more "easy" tasks in the future.

It might even be better to have "add a link" as the only easy newcomer task, and make copyediting "medium", to be more honest with newcomers about the complexity.

That's a good point. We've wanted to keep at least two tasks categorized as easy in case there aren't any link suggestions available. In fact, that seems to be an issue on English Wikipedia right now: there are only two articles that are tagged for needing links! (If you are interested, you can see a breakdown of how few tasks are available in the "links" category here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:NewcomerTasksInfo). You will notice there is also a "link-recommendation" task that has 50,000+ recommendations; that's a new Suggested Edit task that we are discussing here: Wikipedia_talk:Growth_Team_features#Should_English_Wikipedia_enable_the_Suggested_Links_newcomer_task?

If we enabled the Suggested Links task (AKA "link-recommendations") then more newcomers will receive this task, and fewer newcomers will be directed to copy editing tasks initially.

For later tasks, it might be useful to point newbies to external links cleanup, since converting an external link to a citation is always an improvement and not as hard as finding a new source from scratch.

I like that idea, I've just added the external links cleanup idea to the list of potential task ideas the Growth team should consider adding support for. Let me know if you think of other ideas for how we could expand and improve the tasks we suggest to new editors! And thanks again for taking the time to think about ways we can better support new editors!

Correcting spelling and grammar issues is easy, but copy editing for tone is at least as difficult as locating sources to satisfy cn tags. It requires a specialist skill: being actually good at writing appropriate English. On the other hand, I think formatting citations is very easy, although I'm not sure how it interacts with any editing tools apart from the source editor.

Yes! Doing copy-editing properly is often extremely hard. It requires a very nuanced understanding of the language, an ability to guess what the writer might have meant, and in Wikipedias often a willingness to pursue sources to find out what the writer should have written. It sometimes requires knowledge of the subject: a naive copy-editor unaware of British bishoprics is likely to "correct" the commas in a phrase "the bishops of Chichester, and Bath and Wells" without realising that there are only two bishops involved, one of whom is bishop of Bath and Wells. (I think this example comes from Fowler, I can't remember).

Every day, the English Wikipedia is getting subtly trashed by well-meaning editors with limited language skills, accidentally changing meanings and shifting emphases. Please, please, remove copy-editing from the list of easy newcomer tasks. Finding references is much safer and easier. Maybe swap these two round, put references in easy, and copy-editing in medium?

The "Add a reference" task should stay at medium, in part because the newcomer has to recognize a reliable source.

Yes, some competence and experience is necessary to recognise a reliable source, but if a newcomer adds a bad source, it's easy to see what they've done: their work is visible in black-and-white in the references. It's even easier to fix it. In contrast, where they've corrected grammar but wildly fouled-up the meaning of a sentence, there is no visible clue in the article. A few edits later, the evidence will be hard to find even in the page history. Copy-editing is therefore far more dangerous. I think what you may be getting at, @NGC 54, is that no editing in Wikipedia is truly easy! But as it stands, the text encourages willy-nilly poor-quality copy-editing by suggesting that this is a safe starter-job for the unaware.

Hello, thanks for providing feedback and including the Growth team in this conversation!

I agree that copy editing can be very difficult for newcomers!  The Growth team hopes to eventually develop a copy edit structured task that can highlight specific grammar and spelling issues.  However, the current copy edit task can be a challenge for newcomers as there often isn’t an obvious issue to solve.

Any admin on English Wikipedia has the power to disable the Copyedit task from Special:EditGrowthConfig.  The Growth team created that configuration page with the knowledge that one solution won’t work for all wikis, and we hope that each community will find ways to adapt the features to their unique needs. In other words, the Growth team is in full support of communities updating EditGrowthConfig as needed to fit their wiki; you don’t need our approval or assistance to make a change. :)

But here’s some further info that I hope is helpful. The copy edit Suggested Edits displayed to newcomers are selected because they have specific maintenance templates and those maintenance templates have been identified as fitting certain newcomer task types in English Wikipedia’s Growth Configuration. So, for example, if an article is tagged with the {{tone}} template, then it might be suggested to a newcomer as needing a Copyedit. Once the article is improved enough that someone removes the {{tone}} template, then it will also get removed from the newcomer Suggested Edits feed.

So adjusting the templates used to populate the task is a smaller change that might be worth exploring before completely disabling the copy edit task?

Currently these are the templates that are used to populate that copy edit task:

• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Template:Advert
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Template:Inappropriate_person
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Template:In-universe
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Template:Tone
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Template:Advert
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Template:Peacock

Which of those are not newcomer friendly and should be removed?  Are there more newcomer-friendly templates we should consider adding?  Perhaps Copy_edit_section or Copy_edit_inline?  Should we consider creating a new template created especially for newcomers?

"no editing in Wikipedia is truly easy!"

So true! The Growth team recently discussed changing the language since "easy" isn't that accurate.

The Growth team has been working towards creating “Structured tasks” for the suggested edits feed, and we hope Structured tasks can eventually replace the current "easy" tasks. Structured tasks break down the editing workflow into a series of steps that newcomers can easily accomplish.  Current structured tasks (“add a link” and “add an image”) are not yet available on English Wikipedia, but we have been testing them on a smaller subset of wikis and gradually rolling them out to more wikis as we iterate and improve the tasks.  The great news is that our experiment analysis shows that these structured tasks are really helping more newcomers make an initial edit, improve newcomer retention, and lead to an improvement in the quality of newcomer edits as measured by the revert rate (-11.0% over baseline)!  Of course the downside is that there are then more newcomer edits to patrol.

As of now, English Wikipedia is included in the last round of wikis we communicate and release this feature to: T308144. But we could consider releasing on English Wikipedia earlier if there is interest. Once again it will be a community configurable feature that can be adjusted and disabled via Special:EditGrowthConfig.  :)

Thank you so much for this detailed response. I really appreciate the full background. The new structured tasks sound very good; I do appreciate your work and the difficult balancing acts that you face.

@Bluetpp (WMF) -- thank you for adding information about guidance. Could you also please add an image of the panel showing some guidance? The image with the topics may need to be moved to a different area so that everything fits.

An update is needed (including images).

Yes, this is true. This is the kind of thing that remains as a low priority item in my to-do list. If you like to help, you are more than welcomed! :)