Community Wishlist Survey 2023/Archive/First edit tutorial

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First edit tutorial

NoN Outside the scope of Community Tech

  • Problem: High learning curve for editing Wikipedia: Need to know MoS, secondary sources, footnotes, copyright, NPoV, edit summary, notability.
  • Proposed solution: For someone's first edit, make it very structured, like a checklist or a tutorial. Let Wikipedia show, step by step, with no distractions or deviation, what needs to be done for an edit that will stay.
  • Who would benefit: Everyone, more first-time editors continuing to edit, less biting of newcomers, less frustration in general.
  • More comments:
  • Phabricator tickets:
  • Proposer: Cardofk (talk) 18:59, 23 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Discussion

Exactly! I love to see a wishlist item that is so close to what the Growth team is working on! The Growth team has been working on "Structured tasks" for first-time editors (which is one of the Suggested edits we provide to newcomers. Structured tasks are designed to help a brand new account holder make their first edit successfully. They offer onboarding and basic step-by-step instructions. So far, the Growth team has built two of these structured tasks for newcomers: one that helps new editors add internal links and one that helps new editors add images.
In an experiment evaluating the "add a link" task, we saw this task not only helped more new account holders try to edit for the first time, but it also improved newcomer retention! Neither of these Structured tasks are released on English Wikipedia yet, although you can test them from Beta wiki if you want to try them for yourself. They are also available on many other wikis currently (deployment table).
We hope to gradually release Structured tasks to more wikis as we make further improvements, train the models for more wikis, and introduce these features to each language wiki (T304110 & T322592).
So, @Cardofk, do you think the Growth team's work on Structured tasks is fulfilling this wish? If not, what details can you add to help differentiate this wish from the Growth team's work? For example, do you see an area we could focus on more to help make a first edit tutorial more helpful to newcomers? Growth's Structured tasks currently focus on one very specific type of edit (adding a link / image) but do you see some other way for us to make a tutorial more general or universal? Thanks again for adding this proposal! - KStoller-WMF (talk) 04:59, 24 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]
In Vietnamese wikipedia, the "add a link" feature is used for spamming edits to get to extended-confirmed level, but adding other tools into helping newcomers is a good way to attract new editors into the project. Thingofme (talk) 09:36, 24 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]
Hi @Thingofme! Sorry to hear that the "add a link" feature is leading to spamming on Vietnamese wikipedia! Unfortunately misuse of a tool is likely to be a concern for any tool designed to make editing easier for newcomers; anything that helps make an edit easier for a newcomer will also make editing easier for someone looking to quickly increase their edit count.
That being said, the Growth team's tools are all configurable by wiki via: Special:EditGrowthConfig (here's the direct link to Vietnamese Wikipedia's Growth configuration page).
Communities can configure:
  • The maximum number of link suggestions to show on each suggested task. For example: a new editor could receive up to three link suggestions per article currently.
  • The maximum number of "add a link" suggested tasks newcomers can complete daily. For example: a new editor could complete up to 25 of these easy "add a link" edits per day before we stop showing them in the newcomer's "Suggested edits" feed.
Communities can configure several other settings for the "Add a link" task and even disable the task if they find it too disruptive for patrollers. However, for any wiki interested in improving new editor retention, I would suggest leaving this feature enabled. If abuse is an issue, perhaps just adjust the configuration to decrease the maximum number of "add a link" suggested tasks an editor can complete daily.
Oh, also another resource that might be helpful is the Growth team's product KPIs dashboard here. From there you can easily see the number of "add a link" edits completed on viwiki, along with the number of "add a link" reverts on viwiki. Based on those metrics it looks to me as though most "add a link" edits are valid and not being reverted.
Please let me know if you want to discuss further. Or feel free to add further feedback regarding Structured Tasks on the associated talk page. Thank you! - KStoller-WMF (talk) 23:58, 24 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]
However, in other wikis, there have been useful guides for first edits/articles like The Wikipedia Adventure, however, this proposal will help newcomers from entering the wiki and understanding the wiki better. Thingofme (talk) 09:38, 24 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]
@Cardofk thanks again for this proposal! As it is currently written it's a rather large wish that overlaps with much of the Growth team's current work. Based on the fact that the Community tech team declines proposals if they "are already in Wikimedia Foundation teams' plans" [1], I would suggest that you clarify the proposal further to differentiate it from the Growth team's work on Structured tasks or the proposal will likely be archived. Thank you! KStoller-WMF (talk) 23:43, 31 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]
Thank you KStoller-WMF, yeah, I know that the proposal is too large and generalised, but I do not mind if it is archived, I just wanted to flag this as something important. I am glad that efforts are being made to make the learning curve in Wikipedia less steep. Cardofk (talk) 08:28, 1 February 2023 (UTC)[reply]
@Cardofk - thanks again for thinking about newcomers! The Growth team is fully dedicated to this user group and user problem. We still have a long way to go, and it's a challenge to find solutions that work for all users on all different wikis, but we are doing our best to take steps towards creating better onboarding for newcomers.
The team was torn on if we should move this to "Larger suggestions" or Archive... but since this proposal is "already in Wikimedia Foundation teams' plans" [1], I think I'll follow that Community tech guidance and archive this.
However, you still have two more days to add a new Wishlist proposal if you have any smaller feature ideas for helping newcomers. Thanks again for highlighting the need for better tools and tutorials for new editors! KStoller-WMF (talk) 22:24, 3 February 2023 (UTC)[reply]
  • This is great. I wonder if a manufactured, gamified tutorial (i.e., a fictional article with obvious typos/MOS violations) could help with this. "Newcomer tasks" were definitely helpful in introducing me to English Wikipedia editing, but sometimes the articles I was served early on were a bit intimidating, especially as I was completely unfamiliar to the editing technology as well. As I'm fairly new to Wikipedia editing, I've done "Newcomer tasks," and I think it was very welcoming and still has lots of room for improvement. Wracking (talk) 07:26, 30 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]
    @Wracking That's great to hear that you got started with Newcomer tasks! I agree that many of those tasks are still fairly intimidating to a brand new editor. We hope that Structured tasks will help, but I agree there is still a lot of room for improvement when it comes to onboarding new editors! One task that is fairly newcomer-friendly and structured is Content translation, but it's not currently a task we present on the Newcomer homepage. We might explore ideas around this soon T321529. Let me know if you are interested in offering feedback on idea or designs in the future. Thanks! KStoller-WMF (talk) 23:55, 31 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]
  • As noted above, this wish is closely aligned with work the WMF Growth team already has in progress: https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Growth/Personalized_first_day/Structured_tasks So I'm moving to "out of scope for Community Tech". KStoller-WMF (talk) 22:27, 3 February 2023 (UTC)[reply]
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