Topic on Help talk:Growth/Tools/Suggested edits

Hello! I'm a fairly established editor and I got curious about the newcomer tasks. There's a lot I like, but the very first suggested edit I got was to "copy edit" this article. That article does not need copy editing. It needs work, but nothing a newbie in this context is prepared to do. I'd like to suggest the following:

1. Remove "written in in-universe style" as a "copy editing" maint tag -- this is a research problem that is only disguised as a prose problem.
2. If possible, filter the articles that get suggested to newbies so they won't see articles tagged with "may not meet notability guidelines". By definition these articles looked deeply flawed to an experienced editor but not in a way where they could fix it themselves -- they don't give newbies a good place for entry.
3. Pie-in-the-sky idea, use custom text searches to find untagged articles that have common typos like "teh" or peacock terms like "stunning natural beauty".

I love the idea behind this task, but frankly, my experience is that people don't bother to tag the actually-routine copyediting because if they're looking at it, they can just fix it. It might even be better to have "add a link" as the only easy newcomer task, and make copyediting "medium", to be more honest with newcomers about the complexity.

OK I went and looked at the guild of copy editors' tags and I think a newbie could likely handle {{cleanup tense}}, {{inappropriate person}}, {{copy edit section}} but not {{copy edit inline}} (since a lot of those are actually asking for refs/research, not copy editing) -- for the inline ones I'd just do {{awkward}}, {{colloquialism}}, {{sentence fragment}}, and maybe {{expand acronym}} or {{verify spelling}}. I think it's better to be very limited in the tags we point newbies to, than to misrepresent what's needed at the article they're sent to.

For later tasks, it might be useful to point newbies to external links cleanup, since converting an external link to a citation is always an improvement and not as hard as finding a new source from scratch.

@LEvalyn Thank you for being so thoughtful about how we can improve this newcomer task! I agree that the maintenance templates that surface the copy edit task are often associated with articles where there isn't a clear or newcomer-friendly edit available. I've discussed this in the past with a few English Wikipedia editors, and they had a similar conclusion. Some adjustments were made to templates, but perhaps there are further template changes that could help!

The good news is that it's really easy to make a change to which templates populate this task. Any English Wikipedia Admin can update the template list. I think your best bet is to post your suggestions as a new thread here: Wikipedia_talk:Growth_Team_features. The right people are following that page and can asses the proposal and help make changes.

Pie-in-the-sky idea, use custom text searches to find untagged articles that have common typos like "teh" or peacock terms like "stunning natural beauty".

We are actually looking into this! We've looked into various ways to introduce a structured copyediting task: Structured tasks/Copyedit. And next fiscal year, the Research team will investigate detecting "peacock prose" as a way to create a new Structured task suggested edit for newcomers. My hope is that Newcomer tasks will include more "easy" tasks in the future.

It might even be better to have "add a link" as the only easy newcomer task, and make copyediting "medium", to be more honest with newcomers about the complexity.

That's a good point. We've wanted to keep at least two tasks categorized as easy in case there aren't any link suggestions available. In fact, that seems to be an issue on English Wikipedia right now: there are only two articles that are tagged for needing links! (If you are interested, you can see a breakdown of how few tasks are available in the "links" category here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:NewcomerTasksInfo). You will notice there is also a "link-recommendation" task that has 50,000+ recommendations; that's a new Suggested Edit task that we are discussing here: Wikipedia_talk:Growth_Team_features#Should_English_Wikipedia_enable_the_Suggested_Links_newcomer_task?

If we enabled the Suggested Links task (AKA "link-recommendations") then more newcomers will receive this task, and fewer newcomers will be directed to copy editing tasks initially.

For later tasks, it might be useful to point newbies to external links cleanup, since converting an external link to a citation is always an improvement and not as hard as finding a new source from scratch.

I like that idea, I've just added the external links cleanup idea to the list of potential task ideas the Growth team should consider adding support for. Let me know if you think of other ideas for how we could expand and improve the tasks we suggest to new editors! And thanks again for taking the time to think about ways we can better support new editors!