Topic on Talk:Growth/Personalized first day/Structured tasks/Add an image

One issue we've noticed so far is a large number of users saving edits from outside the "add an image" workflow.

That sounds like exactly the success we want, assuming they are having even marginal success. If any of these users are finding and adding a different image, and that image is plausibly equal or better than the one you suggested, that is a huge success. The proper way to do this work, really, is to look through the relevant available images and use good judgement to select the best one.

If a user stays in Add-a-link just making lots of links, there really isn't much value in that. What we want are tasks that lead people to the general-purpose editor. Our lifeblood is an on-ramp for users to progress into the full range of work we do. We want them continuing to gain general editing experience and knowledge, to gain the expertise for more sophisticated levels of labor, to be able to oversee the next round of new users. Only a few will stick around to become high value expert contributors, and we need some rare individuals who promote to administrator.

Your goal is for some of these people to eventually make the circle back here, offering years of insight and field experience to some team working some future project.

You may need to carefully reconsider metrics for these kinds of tasks. It's not really a win if someone is parked in the structured workflow grinding the basic metric-count higher and higher. The big win is when they discard the training wheels and keep editing.

Hello @Alsee! Thank you for checking out this latest project and its first results. We are definitely on the same page -- we do want users of suggested edits to progress to other, more challenging (and valuable) types of edits. Our main goal with suggested edits is to help newcomers get off on the right foot when the wiki seems overwhelming at first, and help them get to that "aha!" moment when they're proud to have impacted Wikipedia. The way we think about it is that different users have different amounts of time, skills, energy, and boldness to spend on their editing experiences, and we want to offer them the right opportunities so they can find their way to being as impactful as their life allows. That does mean, though, that some users may never progress beyond simple edits, and we think that they should be able to find a home in the wikis, too.

We've so far built two of these "structured tasks": "add a link" and "add an image", with the former being easier and the latter being harder. Our thinking is that we will nudge users to progress from one to the other, and then on to unstructured editing tasks. And so, now that there are two of these task types, our team's next project is actually called "positive reinforcement", which is about how we will encourage users to continue their editing and to level up to more valuable work. Do you have ideas about how we could do that?

To speak directly to what you mentioned about users saving edits from outside the "add an image" flow -- it turns out there are good and bad things happening. We deliberately designed the flow so that users could exit it and make other kinds of edits to the article. For instance, we imagined them noticing copyedits they could make. This ability to exit into the editor is one that other community members surfaced as very important as they weighed in during the design phases. While some of the edits made through the "exit" path are constructive, many are not, and seem to reflect confusion on the part of the user -- we think they are disoriented and maybe didn't mean to exit the flow. This is something we're looking into the data to understand. We definitely want users to exit the flow and make other edits if that is their aim, but we don't want them to do it accidentally and get lost.

You also mentioned that it would be better if users could sift through multiple image suggestions for the article to choose the best one. That's a design we considered here. It's definitely a possibility for the future, but for our first iteration, we wanted to build something simpler and quicker so that we could learn sooner. One of our concerns with the "multiple images" design, though, was whether the user might be inclined to choose "the best of the lot", even if none of them were really a fit for the article. Would you share that concern?