The interests should be improved. You cannot select only astronomy, only geometry or only algebra... You cannot select a certain country. You cannot select only zoology, only botany, only mycology, only genetics or any other branch of biology. I do not see psychology. What happens if a user wants zoology, mycology, geometry, psychology, Belgium, France and Pakistan? That user should select General science, Biology and...?
Topic on Talk:Growth/Personalized first day/Structured tasks
I tested the tools on Romanian Wikipedia, and I think that the suggested edits could be improved (following templates is not enough, because there are articles with issues but without templates for those issues). Copyediting could also search after wrong-written words and so on. Linking could also search after articles that have big number of words compared with the number of links. Reference finding could also search after articles that do not have references or have sentences without references, not only to display articles with the templates from MediaWiki:NewcomerTasks.json. Updating articles could also search after articles that were edited a long time ago on the local wiki, but were edited intensively in other languages (taking into account Wikidata, the number of bytes added and the reverted edits; I think taht it would require a powerful AI). Expanding articles could also search after articles that have a small number of words on the local wiki, but have a bigger number of word in other languages (taking into account Wikidata; I think that it would require a powerful AI).
ro:Special:PageHistory/MediaWiki:NewcomerTasks.json: The problem with Expanding articles is that there are a lot of stub-templates, and MediaWiki:NewcomerTasks.json can only use a limited number of stub-templates; if you use ~800, Expanding articles no longer works.
Interests: I select Physics, but I receive as the first suggested edit ro:Nebuloasa Rozeta, ro:Ganymede (satelit), ro:Progress (navă spațială), ro:Lista expedițiilor pe ISS, ro:Cassiopeia (constelație), ro:Descoperirea și explorarea sistemului solar and ro:New Horizons?! It is annoying, because I would like to add Astronomy as interest.
Today, I received ro:Alexie al III-lea Angelos on "Reference finding" ("Computers and internet")...
And ro:Dryocalamus on "Expanding articles" ("Computers and internet")?!
Sorry for my late reply.
The topic matching system we use can triage articles by topics, with more or less success. We took the 39 topics with best matching results of a list of 64 topics. This leads to some limitations, but the team in charge of this algorithm still works on improving it.
Even if you can find some false-positives, topic matching overall provides accurate results, and newcomers work on them. I suggest that we deploy suggested edits on your wiki fr newcomers, and after a few weeks, we check on the data to see if they are actually making some edits.