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We have a "new" feature for English Wikipedia's newcomers: Add a link. It is new to English Wikipedia, but it's been released on almost all other Wikipedia language editions.
TL;DR
Add a link allows newcomers to discover editing by adding relevant links between articles. We will make the Add a link task available starting May 21, but the activation is up to your community.
Current situation
One of the suggested edits at English Wikipedia is adding links between articles. This task is based on some maintenance templates. If this maintenance template is not used, then no task is available. I just checked how many article were available for this task: three. Last time I checked, on April 13, one (1!) article was suggested to newcomers.
We observed that the low availability of articles to edit, and the lack of diversity, can create frustration for newcomers.
Add a link, using link suggestions, is available at all Wikipedias (minus a few tiny new wikis). English and Germain are the two ones without this easy task.
A new experience
"Add a link" offers a new experience. It creates a "suggest" editing mode, where an algorithm suggests links. Users have to select if the link is relevant. At the moment, links are relevant in 70% of cases. The idea is to encourage newcomers to use their judgment to decide whether the link fits well.
The full process is described at mw:Help:Growth/Tools/Add_a_link. You can test it at any other Wikipedia, for instance at simple.wikipedia.org.
This new experience is beneficial for newcomers:
The feature is community configurable, and some limits have been set: some sections or elements of an article are excluded from receiving links (infobox, bibliographies, references...). The number of links added per article per day, and the number of articles newcomers can edit each day, is configurable too. The algorithm is configured to avoid overlinking, to prevent WP:SEAOFBLUE, etc.
Communities' feedback, and our responses
As we deployed this tool to all Wikipedias, we heard the following questions and concerns:
How can you help us?
“Add a link” will be available at your wiki on May 21, but not activated. Rather than enabling this feature by default, we will release the task as "turned off" and any English Wikipedia admin can turn it on via
special:EditGrowthConfig. Next step is up to English Wikipedia community: turning Add a link on, as a test, or as a pillar of newcomer's onboarding.
If you have any questions, let us know!
KStoller-WMF ( talk) and Trizek_(WMF) ( talk) 19:11, 30 April 2024 (UTC)
I just checked how many article were available for this task: three. Last time I checked, on April 13, one (1!) article was suggested to newcomers.This isn't because people don't use the maintenance tag, but because newbies are already coming to do this task thanks to the article suggestions on the newcomer homepage. It's one of English wikipedia's few backlogs that aren't actually backlogged!
a clear instruction on how to add links and search on articles within Wikipedia to add links, so no worries there. It's just the removing of the tag that I think it's missing. -- asilvering ( talk) 17:38, 6 May 2024 (UTC)
According to the thread just above, the new algorithm based links
task will be available and disabled on English Wikipedia in one week. (The current task is template based).
The default rate limit for links added in this way is 25 per editor per day, and three per article per day.
Should we enable this feature? Should we modify the defaults?
Any editor feel free to refactor this, add subheadings / RFC tags if you feel it necessary. I'm just tryna start a conversation to check in on consensus. Folly Mox ( talk) 17:57, 15 May 2024 (UTC)
the number of edits each newcomer can make daily. The parameter at de:Spezial:EditGrowthConfig certainly google translates to "maximum number of link suggestions to display for each suggested task".As to linking month names, country names, etc., I brought this up last year at Wikipedia talk:Growth Team features/Archive 7 § Usefulness of "Add links" task? A few threads later, Trizek confirmed
we aren't using any sort of rejection links lists.Anyway there doesn't seem to be much engagement with this topic, so for the purpose of establishing consensus, I'll say Sure, let's turn it on and give it a go. It seems like it should be easy enough to turn it back off if the newcomer links become too high maintenance. Folly Mox ( talk) 18:46, 18 May 2024 (UTC)
there is anything newabout algorithmic attempts to determine appropriate internal link density in articles. What's new is that the algorithmic
links
newcomer task is pretty much ready for activation at en.wp, and only a handful of people seem to care so far.I have no idea if this is what you meant in
your comment or whether you currently care about this, and rather unfortunately I couldn't think of any method of notifying you that wouldn't be considered
canvassing, so I figured maximum transparency would be straight canvassing you to the discussion itself. Avoiding work,
Folly Mox (
talk)
12:44, 30 June 2024 (UTC)On my Homepage I can click Get A Mentor, and it will add a mentor for me. But on my friends account that was created recently they don't have the mentor area on their Homepage. All of their settings in preferences appear the same as mine. Is there any reason only some people can see this? Does an account have to be x days old or made y many edits? For reference, their account is 3 months old and they have made 35 edits on Wikipedia and another 77 on Commons. It seems they would benefit more than me by having this on their Homepage. Jimmyjrg ( talk) 00:05, 23 May 2024 (UTC)
I mentioned this over at MediaWiki and they suggested I discuss it here too so an admin can make the relevant changes if there is agreement.
My suggestion: the {{in-universe}} maint tag shouldn't be used to populate the copy-editing task, because it is really a research problem disguised as a prose problem (i.e., the main way to fix it is to go find secondary sources). I looked through the maint tags at the Guild of Copy Editors, and I think newbies would be prepared for {{cleanup tense}}, {{inappropriate person}}, and {{copy edit section}} -- but not {{copy edit inline}} (since a lot of those are actually asking for refs/research). For the inline ones I'd just do {{awkward}}, {{colloquialism}}, {{sentence fragment}}, and maybe {{expand acronym}} or {{verify spelling}}.
My reasoning: 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. I know there's a shortage of tasks to give to newbies, but I think it's better to say "no easy tasks available" than to send them to an article like Teen Idol (novel) and tell them it just needs a simple copy-edit. That's the first article I got when I tried out the newcomer tasks for myself, and it needs a lot of work, but it doesn't need copy-editing at all. ~ L 🌸 ( talk) 19:40, 31 May 2024 (UTC)
The topic relates to newcomers and it is also a topic that will soon be more present in Growth features. As a consequence, I'm posting it here as I believe this invite is relevant to anyone who follows this page.
The Editing team works on Edit check, a set of tools to help users understanding Wikipedia policies while they are editing. The first major Check is References check, which displays an invite to add a citation when people add a paragraph to a Wikipedia article. This project showed promising results.
The Editing team hosts a conversation on Wednesday 3 July 2024, 17:30 UTC. The subject is "Expanding Edit Check". This meeting will be hosted on Zoom, in English. ( signup page)
The two main topics will be:
See you there! Trizek_(WMF) ( talk) 17:58, 1 July 2024 (UTC)
I'm going to turn off my mentee questions until I have more free time to edit in larger bursts. Over the past three months I have received 21 questions:
Of these 21 questions, for 9 of them their question on my talk page was their only contribution, and 5 stopped editing shortly after the question and around a dozen edits or less. 3 currently edit actively. I highlight those 13 questions in particular because the conversation is one-sided; I try to reinvent myself and how I present my answer to their question in an original way that's relevant to them, but they're all the same and way too open-ended, and I end up sounding like a broken record. And, of those questions, they are pretty much exclusively articles and drafts that violate the big WP:NOT rules; WP:PROMOTION, WP:NOTREPOSITORY, WP:NOTBLOG, WP:NOTSOCIALNETWORK, WP:NOTNEWS, and WP:INDISCRIMINATE are all present in these questions. It's just me saying no no no without actually saying no.
I put this out there to hear if anyone else is getting this unlucky with their mentee questions? And how do you resist the burnout? Panini! • 🥪 19:30, 7 July 2024 (UTC)
I try to reinvent myself and how I present my answer to their question in an original way that's relevant to them. Please, this is insane. It is totally unnecessary, none of them will appreciate it anyway, and they probably won't even notice you're trying to do this. I say all of this with love and care and with the experience of having taught undergraduates for a decade. Do not waste your time and energy and goodwill on answering questions creatively when you could answer them simply. Some of these mentees might never log in again! -- asilvering ( talk) 03:24, 8 July 2024 (UTC)
As far as I can tell, this "Newcomer tasks" bullshit exists only to facilitate disruptive edits.
Here is a list of every "Newcomer task" edit I have stumbled upon, in the order I found them:
You will notice that the "copyeditor" in those last two edits is unable to spell the word "grammar". It is not a typo as it happened twice.
I then looked at the history of the last article, which has for some reason had a number of "Newcomer task" edits over the past few years. I looked at this string of eight edits, which had a few good changes, a few neutral rewordings, and a number of bad changes. I decided I can't be bothered to go through them one by one and fix what's wrong and instead came here to complain.
Who thought it would be a good idea to invite new editors, who are not fully familiar with wikitext, have zero knowledge of the Manual of Style and policies such as on copyright, and in many cases are not native English speakers and do not have a good command of English, to perform copyediting?
I propose that the "Newcomer tasks" feature be discontinued. Un assiolo ( talk) 17:38, 8 July 2024 (UTC)
the feature creation team was not initially aware that there were multiple English varieties– I... what? Really? That's concerning. – Joe ( talk) 13:57, 9 July 2024 (UTC)
copyedit
task, despite having no opposition against including it in each discussion it's been brought up. Then again, despite the impact of this feature, community engagement with improving its outcomes has been very low in the experienced editor base. Maybe what we really need is some cowpoke admin to start making improvements without a generated consensus.
Folly Mox (
talk)
14:16, 9 July 2024 (UTC)
This is the
talk page for discussing
Growth Team features and anything related to its purposes and tasks. |
|
Archives:
Index,
1,
2,
3,
4,
5,
6,
7Auto-archiving period: 60 days
![]() |
![]() | This project page does not require a rating on Wikipedia's
content assessment scale. It is of interest to multiple WikiProjects. | ||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
![]() |
Daily pageviews of Wikipedia:Growth Team features
A graph should have been displayed here but
graphs are temporarily disabled. Until they are enabled again, visit the interactive graph at
pageviews.wmcloud.org |
Index
|
|||||||
This page has archives. Sections older than 60 days may be automatically archived by Lowercase sigmabot III when more than 5 sections are present. |
![]() | This WMF project has been
mentioned by a media organization:
|
We have a "new" feature for English Wikipedia's newcomers: Add a link. It is new to English Wikipedia, but it's been released on almost all other Wikipedia language editions.
TL;DR
Add a link allows newcomers to discover editing by adding relevant links between articles. We will make the Add a link task available starting May 21, but the activation is up to your community.
Current situation
One of the suggested edits at English Wikipedia is adding links between articles. This task is based on some maintenance templates. If this maintenance template is not used, then no task is available. I just checked how many article were available for this task: three. Last time I checked, on April 13, one (1!) article was suggested to newcomers.
We observed that the low availability of articles to edit, and the lack of diversity, can create frustration for newcomers.
Add a link, using link suggestions, is available at all Wikipedias (minus a few tiny new wikis). English and Germain are the two ones without this easy task.
A new experience
"Add a link" offers a new experience. It creates a "suggest" editing mode, where an algorithm suggests links. Users have to select if the link is relevant. At the moment, links are relevant in 70% of cases. The idea is to encourage newcomers to use their judgment to decide whether the link fits well.
The full process is described at mw:Help:Growth/Tools/Add_a_link. You can test it at any other Wikipedia, for instance at simple.wikipedia.org.
This new experience is beneficial for newcomers:
The feature is community configurable, and some limits have been set: some sections or elements of an article are excluded from receiving links (infobox, bibliographies, references...). The number of links added per article per day, and the number of articles newcomers can edit each day, is configurable too. The algorithm is configured to avoid overlinking, to prevent WP:SEAOFBLUE, etc.
Communities' feedback, and our responses
As we deployed this tool to all Wikipedias, we heard the following questions and concerns:
How can you help us?
“Add a link” will be available at your wiki on May 21, but not activated. Rather than enabling this feature by default, we will release the task as "turned off" and any English Wikipedia admin can turn it on via
special:EditGrowthConfig. Next step is up to English Wikipedia community: turning Add a link on, as a test, or as a pillar of newcomer's onboarding.
If you have any questions, let us know!
KStoller-WMF ( talk) and Trizek_(WMF) ( talk) 19:11, 30 April 2024 (UTC)
I just checked how many article were available for this task: three. Last time I checked, on April 13, one (1!) article was suggested to newcomers.This isn't because people don't use the maintenance tag, but because newbies are already coming to do this task thanks to the article suggestions on the newcomer homepage. It's one of English wikipedia's few backlogs that aren't actually backlogged!
a clear instruction on how to add links and search on articles within Wikipedia to add links, so no worries there. It's just the removing of the tag that I think it's missing. -- asilvering ( talk) 17:38, 6 May 2024 (UTC)
According to the thread just above, the new algorithm based links
task will be available and disabled on English Wikipedia in one week. (The current task is template based).
The default rate limit for links added in this way is 25 per editor per day, and three per article per day.
Should we enable this feature? Should we modify the defaults?
Any editor feel free to refactor this, add subheadings / RFC tags if you feel it necessary. I'm just tryna start a conversation to check in on consensus. Folly Mox ( talk) 17:57, 15 May 2024 (UTC)
the number of edits each newcomer can make daily. The parameter at de:Spezial:EditGrowthConfig certainly google translates to "maximum number of link suggestions to display for each suggested task".As to linking month names, country names, etc., I brought this up last year at Wikipedia talk:Growth Team features/Archive 7 § Usefulness of "Add links" task? A few threads later, Trizek confirmed
we aren't using any sort of rejection links lists.Anyway there doesn't seem to be much engagement with this topic, so for the purpose of establishing consensus, I'll say Sure, let's turn it on and give it a go. It seems like it should be easy enough to turn it back off if the newcomer links become too high maintenance. Folly Mox ( talk) 18:46, 18 May 2024 (UTC)
there is anything newabout algorithmic attempts to determine appropriate internal link density in articles. What's new is that the algorithmic
links
newcomer task is pretty much ready for activation at en.wp, and only a handful of people seem to care so far.I have no idea if this is what you meant in
your comment or whether you currently care about this, and rather unfortunately I couldn't think of any method of notifying you that wouldn't be considered
canvassing, so I figured maximum transparency would be straight canvassing you to the discussion itself. Avoiding work,
Folly Mox (
talk)
12:44, 30 June 2024 (UTC)On my Homepage I can click Get A Mentor, and it will add a mentor for me. But on my friends account that was created recently they don't have the mentor area on their Homepage. All of their settings in preferences appear the same as mine. Is there any reason only some people can see this? Does an account have to be x days old or made y many edits? For reference, their account is 3 months old and they have made 35 edits on Wikipedia and another 77 on Commons. It seems they would benefit more than me by having this on their Homepage. Jimmyjrg ( talk) 00:05, 23 May 2024 (UTC)
I mentioned this over at MediaWiki and they suggested I discuss it here too so an admin can make the relevant changes if there is agreement.
My suggestion: the {{in-universe}} maint tag shouldn't be used to populate the copy-editing task, because it is really a research problem disguised as a prose problem (i.e., the main way to fix it is to go find secondary sources). I looked through the maint tags at the Guild of Copy Editors, and I think newbies would be prepared for {{cleanup tense}}, {{inappropriate person}}, and {{copy edit section}} -- but not {{copy edit inline}} (since a lot of those are actually asking for refs/research). For the inline ones I'd just do {{awkward}}, {{colloquialism}}, {{sentence fragment}}, and maybe {{expand acronym}} or {{verify spelling}}.
My reasoning: 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. I know there's a shortage of tasks to give to newbies, but I think it's better to say "no easy tasks available" than to send them to an article like Teen Idol (novel) and tell them it just needs a simple copy-edit. That's the first article I got when I tried out the newcomer tasks for myself, and it needs a lot of work, but it doesn't need copy-editing at all. ~ L 🌸 ( talk) 19:40, 31 May 2024 (UTC)
The topic relates to newcomers and it is also a topic that will soon be more present in Growth features. As a consequence, I'm posting it here as I believe this invite is relevant to anyone who follows this page.
The Editing team works on Edit check, a set of tools to help users understanding Wikipedia policies while they are editing. The first major Check is References check, which displays an invite to add a citation when people add a paragraph to a Wikipedia article. This project showed promising results.
The Editing team hosts a conversation on Wednesday 3 July 2024, 17:30 UTC. The subject is "Expanding Edit Check". This meeting will be hosted on Zoom, in English. ( signup page)
The two main topics will be:
See you there! Trizek_(WMF) ( talk) 17:58, 1 July 2024 (UTC)
I'm going to turn off my mentee questions until I have more free time to edit in larger bursts. Over the past three months I have received 21 questions:
Of these 21 questions, for 9 of them their question on my talk page was their only contribution, and 5 stopped editing shortly after the question and around a dozen edits or less. 3 currently edit actively. I highlight those 13 questions in particular because the conversation is one-sided; I try to reinvent myself and how I present my answer to their question in an original way that's relevant to them, but they're all the same and way too open-ended, and I end up sounding like a broken record. And, of those questions, they are pretty much exclusively articles and drafts that violate the big WP:NOT rules; WP:PROMOTION, WP:NOTREPOSITORY, WP:NOTBLOG, WP:NOTSOCIALNETWORK, WP:NOTNEWS, and WP:INDISCRIMINATE are all present in these questions. It's just me saying no no no without actually saying no.
I put this out there to hear if anyone else is getting this unlucky with their mentee questions? And how do you resist the burnout? Panini! • 🥪 19:30, 7 July 2024 (UTC)
I try to reinvent myself and how I present my answer to their question in an original way that's relevant to them. Please, this is insane. It is totally unnecessary, none of them will appreciate it anyway, and they probably won't even notice you're trying to do this. I say all of this with love and care and with the experience of having taught undergraduates for a decade. Do not waste your time and energy and goodwill on answering questions creatively when you could answer them simply. Some of these mentees might never log in again! -- asilvering ( talk) 03:24, 8 July 2024 (UTC)
As far as I can tell, this "Newcomer tasks" bullshit exists only to facilitate disruptive edits.
Here is a list of every "Newcomer task" edit I have stumbled upon, in the order I found them:
You will notice that the "copyeditor" in those last two edits is unable to spell the word "grammar". It is not a typo as it happened twice.
I then looked at the history of the last article, which has for some reason had a number of "Newcomer task" edits over the past few years. I looked at this string of eight edits, which had a few good changes, a few neutral rewordings, and a number of bad changes. I decided I can't be bothered to go through them one by one and fix what's wrong and instead came here to complain.
Who thought it would be a good idea to invite new editors, who are not fully familiar with wikitext, have zero knowledge of the Manual of Style and policies such as on copyright, and in many cases are not native English speakers and do not have a good command of English, to perform copyediting?
I propose that the "Newcomer tasks" feature be discontinued. Un assiolo ( talk) 17:38, 8 July 2024 (UTC)
the feature creation team was not initially aware that there were multiple English varieties– I... what? Really? That's concerning. – Joe ( talk) 13:57, 9 July 2024 (UTC)
copyedit
task, despite having no opposition against including it in each discussion it's been brought up. Then again, despite the impact of this feature, community engagement with improving its outcomes has been very low in the experienced editor base. Maybe what we really need is some cowpoke admin to start making improvements without a generated consensus.
Folly Mox (
talk)
14:16, 9 July 2024 (UTC)