Hello @John Broughton @Sdkb @NickK @Nick Moyes @Galendalia @Barkeep49 @Pelagic @Czar @LittlePuppers @HLHJ and everyone else who is following along!
First results
Thank you all for helping us design and build the "add a link" feature (which now has its own separate project page). We deployed the first version of it about ten weeks ago in four wikis, and we've since expanded it to ten wikis. It's going well so far! We've recently posted the data from the first two weeks of the feature, which we used to get an initial read on whether users seem to be engaged, and whether it is resulting in valuable edits. I invite you all to take a look, and reply with any of your reactions and questions, or ideas of what to look further into.
Basically, we see newcomers doing a high volume of these edits (more than from the conventional unstructured tasks), and that these edits have a low revert rate (lower than the conventional unstructured tasks). Some users do dozens or even hundreds of these edits, with one user on Arabic Wikipedia having done over a thousand. We're not seeing anyone abuse the feature or cause runaway vandalism by, say, clicking "yes" on everything.
We're now assembling a larger dataset with more than the first two weeks of data, and we'll be posting a more in-depth analysis in the future. I want to refrain from drawing any big conclusions before then, but from this initial data, I am optimistic that the "add a link" task is valuable for getting newcomers engaged. We'll still want to look into important questions, like whether these newcomers move on to other kinds of edits, whether this task is more engaging on mobile or desktop, and where in the flow users get stuck. Those questions will help us decide how to improve "add a link", and also how to build our next structured task, "add an image" (please check that out if you haven't yet!)
Wikimania
Wikimania starts tomorrow, and I hope that anyone who is registered for it can attend our session about "add a link". We'll be doing into details on the algorithm, how we built it, and the results so far. There will also be some time for Q&A. The session will be Sunday August 15, 15:450 UTC, and the details on the session are here. Since this Wikimania is virtual, I hope many of you will be attending part of it!