Topic on Talk:Growth/Personalized first day/Structured tasks/Add a link

The role of Suggested Edits is to teach users how to edit. But this task is an unusual way to edit, that do not teach the users how to add a link in a normal way.

I think that this feature will confuse newcomers. The newcomers should learn how to add links, not to decide if the suggested links are ok. When they will normally edit an article, there will be no AI to help them.

Hello @NGC 54 -- thank you for thinking about this and posting your opinion. When we first started talking about structured tasks, we thought about this exact question: should we aim toward teaching newcomers to use the traditional tools, or toward newcomers being able to do easy edits at higher volume?

I agree that the feature we're building is a new way to edit. We think that this is a good idea for two big reasons:

1. We know from our research that many newcomers struggle to succeed with editing at first, and we think that if they have a quick way to be successful, they will feel more positively about editing and want to continue to do it.
2. We also know that many people are unlikely ever to edit using the usual tools. Perhaps they want to contribute, but don't have time to learn or think that using the usual tools is difficult on their mobile device. We want to try building a new way to edit, which will hopefully allow new kinds of people to edit.

For those reasons, we decided to build a new kind of editing flow, instead of only showing newcomers how to use the existing tools. But that said, many community members brought up a similar point that you did: even if we make it easy for newcomers at first, we want to make sure that they can learn how to use the usual tools when they are ready. We don't want them to get stuck with link edits, but rather to move on to learning more.. That's what our team will be working on next, in a project called "positive reinforcement", in which we will try to encourage newcomers to continue editing and try more challenging kinds of edits.

Does this make sense? What do you think?

@MMiller (WMF): I do not think that adding a link is a very hard task. Remember that VisualEditor shows you how to add a link when you open it for the first time (if I remember correctly)...

In any case, the normal task that is currently deployed will disappear?

@NGC 54 -- I think that your opinion is valid here; it's possible that this structured task will not make a major difference to how easy it is for newcomers to edit. But we think it has that potential, and we're going to be collecting the right data to be able to tell whether our hypothesis is correct.

Yes, this will replace the previous unstructured "add links" task when it is deployed. But we do plan to keep a control group of users who will continue to receive the previous task so that we can compare and see whether outcomes are different for the users with the structured task.

I have seen this tool only be used by new editors, editing 60 pages a minute. That means they are only adding links without knowing what they add, and without adding value, actually adding nonsense. The links they add are technically valid, but are usually distracting the reader to non value adding information without any sensible context. To my blunt opinion this tool only leads to vandalism.

Hello @Edoderoo -- thanks for coming here to weigh in. Your experience is from Dutch Wikipedia, correct? We're glad your wiki is one of the first to try "add a link", and I appreciate that you looked at the edits and provided this feedback. The feature is only deployed to about 10 wikis right now, because it is in the phase that we call "Iteration 1". This is the first version, which we use to learn and improve for future versions. When we deploy a first version, we expect to see problems, and we also hope to see value -- enough to make us want to keep working on the feature for future versions.

Our goal with "add a link" is to give newcomers a tool that makes it very easy for them to make their first edits, so that they get excited about Wikipedia and want to learn more and make more kinds of edits. We know that wikilinks are not the most valuable improvement to an article, but we thought that the value is that it would be something simple to get newcomers involved, and something with which they could not do too much damage. We now have enough data to see that the feature actually accomplished this goal: newcomers who have it available are more likely to make their first unreverted edits to articles than those who don't. In other words, it causes people to edit who never would have otherwise. That is good news for this idea.

But as you say, there are also issues. Some newcomers use the feature so heavily that they are overlinking. Other ones may not be applying strong judgment. We've heard similar feedback from Arabic Wikipedia, Hungarian Wikipedia, and German Wikipedia. These are some of the ideas we've gathered so far for improvement:

• Nudge newcomers to do other, more valuable kinds of tasks after they do a few link tasks. One task we might nudge them toward is "add an image", which we just released on Arabic, Czech, and Bengali Wikipedias (I would be very interested in your thoughts on that task).
• Don't let newcomers do too many of the tasks or proceed through them too quickly. We might only let them do 25 per day, or stop them if they are spending less than, say, 30 seconds on an article, or stop them if they are saying yes to more than 90% of the suggestions, etc.
• Don't offer so many links per article -- right now we offer up to 10 suggestions per article, but we might limit it to 3.
• Don't allow links in sections that usually shouldn't get them, like the References section.
• Limit the suggestions to articles that seem underlinked, perhaps by looking at the ratio of wikilinks in the article to bytes in the article.

What do you think of these ideas? Can you think of other ways that we can keep the good parts of the feature (causing more newcomers to edit), while reducing the bad parts (generating some low value edits).

We'll be working on the improvements in the beginning of 2022. I look forward to hearing back! And if you are able to get opinions from any other Dutch volunteers, those would be valuable.

Right now I see links being suggested like Nederland which is way too much of an open door. A link should add value, like an additional edit should add value, not add bytes. Adding links is quite a delicate task, and I doubt it is a good thing to hand over to newbies. Let me be blunt: a stupid script is suggesting links, and an unexperienced (read: still stupid) newbie says: 'Yes, this is a link'. If a script is needed to get newcomers in, we're on the wrong route. For me it is analog to learning kids to write through grafiti on the wall. Technically it is writing, but it is also a secure way to make sure their efforts will be seen as vandalism.

But if you want to encourage ppl do add value, then let them add one link, and challenge them for the next edit to find a source, to add a sourced fact, to find and correct a spelling mistake or a grammar thing. Images will be tricky, as most ppl do not understand our license model. What I have seen so far, is that now ppl are challenged to add 100 links to 50 pages. The next day they find several of their edits reversed, which is also not an invitation to do some more work.