Topic on Talk:Growth/Personalized first day/Structured tasks

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!

• Are you tracking how often users who use this "Add a link" feature return for another "Add a link" session?
• Or how often those who "Add a link" as their first edit return for another editing session at all (say at least 24 hours later) vs. standard new accounts? I.e., as an intro to Wikipedia, how does this tool fare for retaining potential editors?

@Czar -- yes, we're keeping track of data that will allow us to answer all those questions. That analysis is another level deeper than what we've done so far, and we're going to be getting to the sorts of questions you're asking in September, when we'll have more bandwidth from our team's data scientist. I'm definitely looking forward to digging into those numbers, and I'll post the results so we can discuss!

Thanks for the update! I'll take a look at the data and join the session tomorrow, but glad to hear that the initial results seem promising!

One question that comes to mind from whether these newcomers move on to other kinds of edits—is there any particular pathway for that? It'd be neat if, after a user has done a bunch of suggested edits, they're invited to check out their homepage, the task center, or even the community portal.

@Sdkb -- we haven't yet built an explicit pathway for what we're calling "leveling up", in which we might say to newcomers, "You've done 20 of these link edits, with no reverts! You may be ready to try a more difficult task, like adding an image." It's something that we're planning to do later this year as part of our broader "positive reinforcement" work (this project page is still quite bare, but we'll be expanding it).

One other thing that we did recently that's in this vein is to let the user switch out of "suggestions mode" into the visual editor. This means that if they're working on link suggestions, but they notice a copyedit that needs to be made, they can switch over and make that copyedit -- it provides them a door to discover other kinds of editing. We don't yet encourage them to make that switch -- it's something we need to think about the right way to do, but the opportunity is there for them. Please let us know any thoughts you have on how might do this well, and see you at the session on Sunday!

For anyone who wasn't able to attend the Wikimania session, the video is available to view here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ar034Gha24o. Thank you to @Sdkb, who joined the discussion after and weighed in with good perspective!