Talk:Growth/Constructive activation experimentation

Mobile Editing for New Editors

@Pavan santhosh.s, I just read your A Case for Mobile Editing Diff post, and appreciate the specific anecdote and details you share.

As the Product Manager on the Growth team, these thoughts especially resonated with me:

The difficulties faced by these mobile editors weren’t minor inconveniences. There are significant barriers that hindered their ability to contribute effectively. The mobile editing experience was far from optimal, and this led to a frustrating user experience for many.

...This journey towards improving mobile editing is a testament to the Wikimedia movement’s commitment to inclusivity and accessibility. It’s an ongoing journey, one that will continue to evolve as technology and user needs change.

Getting started editing on Wikipedia is difficult, but it's especially challenging on mobile! And user needs and expectations have changed dramatically in the last two decades! There is so much that can and should be done to help improve the mobile editing experience. Luckily we have a few WMF teams working on improvements now, including the Mobile Apps team, the Editing team, and the Growth team.

The Growth team is starting a project that will focus on the needs of new editors on mobile devices: Constructive activation experimentation. I would love to hear your feedback and insight if you have the time and interest!

Do you think structured tasks, like Add a link, can help more newcomers get started? What other tasks are easy enough (and important to the wikis) that we should consider creating a more structured way to guide new editors through the process? KStoller-WMF (talk) 20:56, 27 June 2024 (UTC)

@KStoller-WMF Thank you very much for your message. I am happy to know about the efforts going into this crucial area of work. I am more than happy to provide my humble input in this respect. Let me brainstorm and get back to you within a couple of days. Thank you for approaching me about this.

Best, Pavan santhosh.s (talk) 13:13, 1 July 2024 (UTC)

Greetings @KStoller-WMF, Apologies for the delay in replying back to you. Pavan santhosh.s and I have gone through two of the five structured tasks i.e "Add an image" and "Add a link" and have a few feedback points from our understanding of their working.

Add a link:

1. The “Add a link” feature can be a good feature for someone exploring Wikipedia through mobile apps as it makes the reader aware of the scope of contributing to Wikipedia and gives an easy way to enter into the editing side of a project.
2. Although this feature provides a possibility to expand the user base of newcomers, there is a potential chance that it may still create a gap in the user’s understanding of the platform and general editing model
3. Overall, this feature can be an addition considered for bringing in new users, but the existing users and veteran editors might not find it useful

Add an image:

1. The “Add an image” feature is a good feature for both experienced and new users who are contributing to Wikipedia using the mobile app. This feature has the potential to decrease the number of articles with no image/illustration.
2. However, the major concern is around reviewing these articles after the image was added. Having a wrong image is more likely to disrupt the article and constant review/monitoring can become a challenge in this case. We recommend an evaluation system in place involving expert/senior Wikimedians to verify/approve these images once a newcomer adds an image using this feature.
3. While the feature gives the capability to add images, we are wondering about its ability to add maps, videos, and resizing images before begin added to the article

To enhance the experience of users contributing to Wikipedia, it is crucial to arrive at a gradient of agreement, especially since certain features may create significant learning gaps for editors transitioning from the mobile application to the desktop version. This issue is particularly relevant for new editors who use the mobile application or site and are being guided by veteran editors unfamiliar with the new interface, having only used the desktop version. We are very much interested in the development of the "Add a reference" feature and would be eager to participate in providing feedback once work on this feature commences. Thank you for your time! Regards, - Nivas (CIS-A2K) (talk) 10:57, 22 July 2024 (UTC)

@Nivas (CIS-A2K) - Thank you so much for taking the time to formulate such a thoughtful reply! (And sorry for the delayed response, I've been thinking about your feedback but apparently forgot to actually respond).

You raised an important point about the potential gap in understanding when using structured tasks. While these tasks lower the barrier to entry, they could inadvertently lead to confusion when editors transition to more complex, unguided editing. Some community members have shared concerns that users who start with structured tasks might remain reliant on them and not progress to other types of edits. However, our data shows that this is not typically the case—newcomers who begin with structured tasks do move on to other editing types: Growth/Personalized first day/Structured tasks/Newcomer task edit type analysis, April 2022.

The "Add an Image" Feature will suggest maps and charts, which sometimes makes sense, but is sometimes problematic because because maps and charts may have labels in the wrong language. We've discussed using the task to surface videos as well, which we could certainly do, but would take further work on the backend and user interface design of the task.

Regarding the concern about reviewing images added through the "Add an Image" feature, we are aware of the challenge of ensuring accuracy without overburdening patrollers. While we don’t have immediate improvements planned to address this, we will continue discussions with the Moderator Tools team to explore ways to make these tasks easier to review. We recognize that incorrect images are problematic, and we’ll be considering how best to improve and moderate edits added through Structured Tasks. KStoller-WMF (talk) 22:35, 11 September 2024 (UTC)

Hello, I think add a link / structured tasks are great to get new editors started and also good for general quality improvements. I mentioned several other possible tasks here – I think suggested categories would also be useful and that it could suggest media along with their machine translated captions (for checking) from WMC or other language Wikipedia articles. However, I think the approach in terms of adding media is suboptimal and structured tasks should rather be combined with ways to add media to all language articles at once. Something else currently missing is adjusting tasks according to the user's interest and/or skills. Re point 2.2 above, I think there should be auto-detection once many of a user's suggested edits have been reverted so somebody checks the rest (same goes for a large share of reverted edits overall).

Moreover, suggested edits can also be useful for more experienced editors so it would be nice if they were extended by skill-level, so for example it can start to suggest adding citations (eg using this) or missing sections (partly based on the see also section or other language articles) of articles of subjects the user is interested in or connect them to new-article requests. This is because there's as much of a problem with keeping editors contributing and engaged. It may also make sense to add users who completed eg 50 suggested edits to a queue where experienced editors quickly view their diffs in quick succession with some tool to see if there's any issues and if so can provide the user with some guidance. For add an image the user could also be lead to a WMC category and be asked to select some good media file from there if there are many in the cat but none/few in the article. Prototyperspective (talk) 23:54, 8 September 2024 (UTC)

Thank you so much for your valuable feedback!

@Prototyperspective, I agree that expanding and extending the range of structured tasks is essential, and your suggestion to create more advanced tasks that allow editors to grow as they gain experience is particularly insightful. We're actively exploring ways to streamline the development of structured tasks, aiming to make them faster to build and more flexible. Currently, each task requires a separate data pipeline, which takes significant time to build and maintain. One of our key goals this year is to develop a more extensible system, allowing us to introduce new tasks more efficiently. KStoller-WMF (talk) 22:31, 11 September 2024 (UTC)

Interesting, thanks for the info. Made this Wishlist proposal. If you have something to add there please comment on its Talk page, e.g. maybe it should mention this goal of building a more extensible system for new task types. Prototyperspective (talk) 18:09, 24 October 2024 (UTC)