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

This is the second time I am getting slammed by new editors editing at a newly released article moved from draft space, where it is rapidly discovered and then hit many times, *always* in the lead section, where newcomers should rarely, if ever set foot, and almost always detrimental to the article, through no fault of their own, violating various guidelines as they add pointless or incorrect links to the lead of an article. In the meantime, I have various articles and other drafts and templates and requests pending, none of which I have gotten to, because 100% of my time is now fighting fires at one article. This is disruptive, halts my editing, and doesn't help new editors, either. If I had only one or two or three such edits, I would leave longer edit summaries and stop by their UTP to provide additional guidance, but at this point, I just have time to stick my finger in the hole in the dike and stop the hemorrhaging.

Please do something about this. At a minimum, set up throttling, and limit newcomer tasks per article. There are 6.9 million of them, please don't send all the new editors to one article I am trying to maintain. Secondly, please do not send any newcomers to fix or add links that are not needed per the guideline, improperly formed, or piped when they should not be. Thanks, Mathglot (talk) 02:31, 3 October 2024 (UTC)

You can use w:Template:No newcomer task to disable newcomer tasks on a specific article. This of course doesn't excuse the system's behavior, merely works around it.

@Mathglot Thanks for reporting this, and sorry to hear that this is happening!

My guess is that this is likely happening because English Wikipedia generally only has a few articles with templates that match the "Add links between articles" task, and so many newcomers get funneled into only a few articles. Looking right now, it appears that English Wikipedia only has 1 task suggested for that "Add links between articles" task: Special:NewcomerTasksInfo

There are several options that are available right away:

• As Pppery suggests, an immediate fix is to use w:Template:No newcomer task to disable newcomer tasks on a specific article.

• Remove maintenance templates from articles that are associated with the Newcomer task if they are no longer relevant. You can find the templates used to surface Suggested Edits here: Special:CommunityConfiguration/GrowthSuggestedEdits

• Add `Underlinked` or `Dead end` templates to articles when it makes sense so there are more articles in the "Add links between articles" task queue.

• Admins can enable the "Add a link (Structured task)" at any time, and this Structured task will replace the current "Add links between articles" open-ended task. This should ensure there are thousands of "easy" Newcomer tasks available, so newcomers aren't being directed to a limited number of articles. This should entirely fix the issue, and is also likely to help more new account holders start editing: Add a link/Experiment analysis.

And there are changes the Growth team can consider to help improve Suggested Edits to prevent scenarios like the one you mentioned:

• I created this task: Suggested Edits: Decide how to avoid scenarios where one article receives excessive #Newcomer Task attention (T364350). The Growth team discussed this task recently, and there are many different ways we could approach this. Perhaps the simplest is to avoid displaying a certain task type if there are less than a certain number of suggestions in the task pool. Does that seem like an adequate solution? Let me know if you have any feedback on how we should approach this problem. Thanks!

Thank you, everyone for this great support. I was going out of my head, as this has continued and I am floundering, and was going to comment again, but these replies have saved the day. The no-newcomer-tasks will let me breathe again, and Kstoller's phab and ideas may lead to improvements down the road; I hope so.

I'll use the no-newcomers template (thank you for that) but I have to say that goes against the grain for me, as I am a big booster of new users: I help them out, I start off their UTP with a welcome message, I have created or updated a bunch of welcome templates at en:WP:WT, and it hurts to turn newcomers away, and is the opposite of what I want to do. But I just feel I have no choice in this situation. It's hogtying me, and setting my teeth on edge, and it means I have less time to help each individual newcomer, because it is just a flood of them and I have no time.

As an additional remark for Kstoller (besides thanks for that), is that in this case, afaict almost all of the myriad edits made since release are all to the lead. It is commonplace that new editors head straight for the lead, often the first sentence. New editors are new editors, so they are not going to know all the MOS guidelines about links, or about making edits to the body first and not the lead, but anything that could be done (in addition to throttling) to maybe pop up a "Linking Do's and Dont's" (if the newcomer tasks is "Add links", and analogously for other tasks) would be a help. Maybe a newcomer-task Edit notice? When things calm down, maybe I could even help think what it should say, and how it could be formatted, or some other means of conveying to the new user after telling them to add links, what links are beneficial and what ones are not. (Keep in mind as a future goal for this, that AI-assistance would probably work very well here. I have no doubt that Chat GPT is already at the level where it could digest several paragraphs of article content as well as our Links guideline, and suggest what terms should be linked, albeit not which ones would end up red, but imho that does not matter.)

Again, thanks for the support, and ping me here or at en-wiki if you want assistance with more ideas about this. Mathglot (talk) 03:21, 4 October 2024 (UTC)

@Mathglot, thank you for your feedback and your appreciation.

Do you have a few diffs to share of newcomers adding links where they shouldn't, so that we can document the case?

Bouncing on what Kstoller said, preventing newcomers from adding links to the lead section is not possible with the current add-links task at English Wikipedia. The only way is to change the instructions for that open-ended task, but instructions aren't always read.

All issues caused by add a link current state at English Wikipedia (including this one) will be fixed with Suggested links and its step-by-step process, which is based on machine suggestions. It is the process you describe in your last message.

And if you want to help more newcomers, I really encourage you to join mentorship! :)

Thank you again.