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

New user Luminar021 had been doing edits adding wikilinks to articles, most of which are in violation of MOS:OL, and saying these are newcomer tasks. Since as far as I can tell the newcomer system is opaque, I have no way of checking whether this really is a newcomer task or not. Can someone look into this?

Also I think it's a really unfortunate decision that newcomer tasks are hidden, unlike all other Wikipedia communication. Is there a Phabricator task open for this?

Thanks, ~~~~

Hello Danbloch

I checked Luminar021's talk page, where someone left them a message. In your opinion, have Luminar021's edits improved since then? If not, it could be good to renew this message, or go further, like it would be done for any other can-be-improved edit.

Regarding the opaqueness, could you clarify? Maybe you are not (yet) aware of the fact that a new onboarding process exists on all Wikipedias?

A special page (the "Homepage") is displayed to newcomers, where they can find tasks to start editing. These tasks go along with guidance.

Tasks given to newcomers are based on templates for most of them. These templates are curated by the community, at en:Special:EditGrowthConfig.

All newcomers tasks are tagged in Recent Changes (direct link), so as at other places (Watchlist, Special:Contributions...).

Let me know if I can help you any further.

Thanks for the response, and for the various links.

Luminar021's edits may have improved slightly, say from 90% bad to 75 or 80% bad. It isn't worth going to the effort of undoing the majority of them, but they're certainly not making Wikipedia better.

I have another concern, though. Based on the links you sent and the auto-generated tags in the edit history, Luminar021's tasks are "Newcomer task: copyedit", but the actual edits they're doing are "add a link", so they're not following the newcomer workflow in any case.

And by "opaque" I meant that I wanted to see if the newcomer system was really telling them to make these changes. Now that I've played around a bit with the system I gather that it doesn't have assignments per se. But I also want to see what the instructions were for creating wikilinks, which I would need to know to meaningfully discuss what a newcomer was doing, and there doesn't seem to be any way to see this. Finally, it would be useful if there were a way to find newcomers' mentors, so I could tell them, "Hey, your mentee is screwing up" and not get further involved.

Feel free to incorporate these concerns or not, as you see fit.

Regards, ~~~~

Most users follow instructions. Some other don't, even if they are asked to change their behavior. If they add links badly, especially when the task they selected (copyedit) is not about adding links, what can be done? It could surprise you as I work on helping newcomers making their first steps, but here I can only advise to be more strict with this newcomer.

If you have turned on the Homepage and the Help panel in your preferences, you are supposed to have the guidance being displayed if you select a task to work on.

Instructions for "Copyedit" are the following, and they aren't about adding more links:

1. Copy editing is about making a small fix to the way an article is written, such as spelling, grammar, or the clarity of the text. Copy edits help articles to be more professional and trustworthy. Reaching Mercury from Earthh poses significant technical challenges.
2. To make a difference, you only need to make one or two small corrections. You do not need to work on the entire article. You also don't need to have any special knowledge about the topic.
3. You can fix spelling and grammar errors. This might include sentences that are too long, repeated words, or incorrect punctuation. Mars has has two small moons.
4. You can also rewrite sentences so that they do not contain opinions. Wikipedia content should be neutral, clear, and encyclopedic. However, be careful not to change the facts in the sentence. Jupiter is the largest, and most interesting, planet in the Solar System. This sentence contains an opinion that should be removed.
5. Once you see a correction you want to make, click "Edit" to get started. Then go ahead and fix issues by deleting and typing as needed.
6. Either find more changes to make, or go ahead and click "Publish changes…" to publish your edit!

Learn more about copy editing

We are discussing on improving newcomers' mentors visibility. However, we are in a particular case with English Wikipedia, where only 10% of newcomers know that a mentor was assigned to them. It could be a bit strange to have a user posting at the newcomer's talk page out of the blue, claiming to be their mentor and providing advice. We are looking for a solution to address this.