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

Hi all, when rejecting the suggestion i would be glad to provide the reason. It makes the newcomer responsible, improves the tracability and could help to adjust the model. For example in an article speaking of a time of 20 minutes, i was suggested a link to the newspaper 20 minutes (FR Wikipedia). When i reject and i could say because one is a period of time, the other is a newspaper. --Christian 🇫🇷 FR ⛹🏽 Paris 2024🗼 (talk) 07:50, 15 July 2024 (UTC)

Thanks for the feedback, @Wladek92!

When an editor rejects a link suggestion, we log a rejection reason. We provide four reasons why a link may be rejected and "Linking to wrong article" is one of the rejection reasons. We aren't logging that reason publicly, but the hope is that eventually we might start to use this suggestion rejection data to help further improve the "Add a link" model. It's a complex process, especially since we have a different model for each language currently, but I definitely agree that it would improve this task further if we could start to use rejection data in this way. Thanks for using the feature and providing us with feedback!

yes i have seen the 4 reasons but my remark was i have selected "wrong article" but we do not know what was wrong (homonimy, out of scope, ...), so that it would be an extension of the criteria possibly used to rafine further link selections. So let us keep for later.

hi all, I am using 'add a link' on the FR Wikipedia for mathematics only and i receive a suggestion. When entering the process, i get soon a popup message telling that 'there are no more suggestions available for this article' exiting to next article to process. It is strange, in this case the initial article should not have been proposed (... ?). Article -> https://fr.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Th%C3%A9or%C3%A8me_de_Prokhorov&gesuggestededit=1&veaction=edit and number of suggestions left -> 392.

This often appears 1 case on 10 or less maybe and is not good to retain newcomers. This same article is presented again and again regularly next time an article is suggested (and of course no link can be set) - its boring. Should it be linked with the domain (math) ? on internal sorting process ?. Thanks. --Christian 🇫🇷 FR ⛹🏽 Paris 2024🗼 (talk) 07:42, 15 July 2024 (UTC)

Thanks for letting us know! I agree this isn't a good user experience. My understanding is that this "there are no more suggestions available for this article" error happens occasionally for a variety of reasons. With the current suggestion model and backend we can't prevent this error entirely, but perhaps we should look into how oven it's happening, and see if there are any further improvements we can make to limit the frequency that an editor ends up seeing this error.

Thanks for the feedback!

i try the tool to add links on math pages but a user deliberatly cancel my work. So i wonder why the link were submitted for suggestion as people dont agree to see the links (,,,,?). See cancels made by -> https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sp%C3%A9cial:Contributions/Vers75

Tracked in Phabricator
Task T326791

I typically dislike when tutorials auto-advance from step to step, as sometimes I may just be reading something more cautiously, or I may be momentarily distracted with some other task.

For context, I'm an experienced user, so not the target audience for this feature, but adding links between articles is a type of edit I always liked to do, so I enabled the newcomer homepage so that I could try it out, and was quite surprised when the tutorial auto-advanced without warning.

I would recommend reconsidering the decision of enabling the auto-play by default, and instead using some other nudge like flashing the next number in the tutorial (after a reasonable delay), so the user will know to click it when they finish reading the instructions.

Thank you for your feedback. We went with auto-advance as a way to show that next steps are available.

I'll check on the data we have regarding how steps are read now and if people play with the backward/forward buttons.

@Waldyrious, we will observe the interactions users have with the auto-advance and from there decide on the possible actions. This task is documented.

so we found in hewiki, that wrong links suggested by the tool are often added by people using it.

we would like to "strengthen" it a bit by adding or modifying the instructions the tool presents to the users.

can you please point to the "system messages" used by the tool? or better yet, could you explain how i can activate "add a link" tool on one's own account, presumably by adding something to the personal JS ?

currently, some but not all users see it on hewiki.

peace.

Hello @קיפודנחש.

To enable the "add a link" tool, you will first need the newcomer homepage enabled, and then you might need to complete a second step if you haven't been opted into the "add a link" experiment by default.

1. From your preferences, you will want to be sure that הצגת דף הבית למתחילים is enabled / checked.
2. Then navigate to your newcomer homepage.
3. Select some topics.
4. Then if you only want to view "add a link" edits, then you can select עריכות קלות and make sure that only the following is selected: הוספת קישורים בין ערכים

Are you not seeing that option? I can provide a snippet of code if needed, but I think once you enable the newcomer homepage you should see that option.

To help new users utilize "add a link" more effectively, I also highly suggest you customize the Growth Configuration for hewiki. There are many improvements that could be added including adding a "Destination page for learning more about link recommendation task type."

Does this help?

@KStoller-WMF: yes, it helps. thank you so much!

peace.

Hello!

Among many overlinking incidents this brings, there is one that is very common across many pages on ruwiki: in the bibliography section the tool suggest wikifying the city where the publisher resides (most commonly in ruwiki that is Moscow (Москва), lots of links, at least in the (rather small) selection of articles I encounter). Unfortunately, it is not obvious for newcomers that those links do not really add value (moreover, I myself am also more or less a newcomer and I am not sure, whether there is actually a consensus established against this behaviour, but at least it seems like there is none for it). It seems logical to stop this from happening.

One possible way would be to have an option of disabling this function for certain names of sections, configurable per-project-wise. This way we could, for example, disable it in bibliography section, this would have a negative implication (adding wikilinks to authors might be net positive), but it would stop this flood of links to cities.

Another possible way could be having a blacklist of articles, to which links should not send.

Sorry, now I see that this is already discussed in T279519

Hello

Do you have some diffs I can use for documentation purposes? It would help to prioritize the work on Add a link, by having a better understanding of the context in which links have been applied.

Feel free to post them directly below this message, or to comment on the Phabricator task.

Thank you!

The UI of adding the links is the really great part of this feature! It is simple and quick.

Unfortunately, often the process results in several links in one diff, out of which some are overlinking. When a patrolling member visits the diff, they might want to revert part of them. Obviously, it is not very hard to revert several of them by hand for any particular page, but there are many of them so it would help if this process was somehow streamlined.

I would suggest having a version of this tool accessible to the patrollers, where they could review the changes and, in the same interface as the newcomers, cancel some of the changes. The additional profit is that the tool would get the feedback on the reasons, why this particular link should not be wikified.

Thank you for your message Medvednikita.

Coincidentally, we have discussed about this issue in a team meeting more or less while you wrote this message. Having a tool inspired by add a link for patrollers (or, why not, for more experienced newbies) is something we could consider, but only if it is a popular request.

This is a small and unimportant problem, but it still felt strange, so let me describe just in case. When you finish going through suggested links in an article, there is a button to submit, and a button to return to the editing process -- but no button to cancel all the changes and go pick another article. This is not a real problem -- one can obviously return to the previous page or use any other way of navigation -- still seems nice to simply have a discard changes option.

Hello Medvednikita

Thank you for your feedback!

What would be the use case there? You'd like to have a "cancel" button because you aren't sure of what you've done? Because you were just testing editing? Another reason?

I'm curious of the motivations there, since it would help us to understand the entire process a user follows in this case. ;)

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.

Today I try to do some experimental edits in bnwiki. When I save edit's than I saw that edited article was added in my watchlist. Why this is was needed? (diff, diff, diff)

@MdsShakil -- thanks for bringing this up, and I see that you found the Phabricator task. The reason we automatically add the articles to the watchlist is because this task was primarily built for newcomers, who do not know about or understand watchlists. We wanted to add by default so that they could start building a watchlist and getting notifications, helping them get more involved in the wiki. What do you think would be best for us to do?

Also, do you have any other thoughts or ideas about the "add a link" work?