Wikipedia talk:Growth Team features

Should English Wikipedia enable the Suggested Links newcomer task?

According to the thread just above, the new algorithm based links task will be available and disabled on English Wikipedia in one week. (The current task is template based).

The default rate limit for links added in this way is 25 per editor per day, and three per article per day.

Should we enable this feature? Should we modify the defaults?

Any editor feel free to refactor this, add subheadings / RFC tags if you feel it necessary. I'm just tryna start a conversation to check in on consensus. Folly Mox (talk) 17:57, 15 May 2024 (UTC)

Thanks, @Folly Mox for starting this discussion and @Sdkb for making sure we opened up this discussion to a wider audience!

I just wanted to give you an update and let you know that we have the backend prepared to release the Suggested Links newcomer task.  You will now see two "Add links between articles" tasks in Special:EditGrowthConfig. The one with the 🤖 robot icon is the new "Suggested links" task. However, the task has a "Disabled in site configuration" notice next to the task. This is the first time we are releasing this task in this manner (making the task available but not enabling the feature ourselves).  We ran into some unexpected technical complexities with this approach (T308144#9811861). I think we have two options for how to proceed:

1. The Growth team can enable the task at any time on the server side. Just let me know if you think consensus is reached and we are happy to enable the task.  (We can also disable the task if requested).
2. Or, we can wait until the new version of Community Configuration is released (likely by July 2024), and at that point we can ensure the configuration form is working as intended so any English Wikipedia admin can enable or disable the task.

Sorry for the additional complexity, this release is coming at an odd time as the Growth team is also working to finish up the new CommunityConfiguration Extension. KStoller-WMF (talk) 17:41, 23 May 2024 (UTC)

Sorry for the delay! The new Community Configuration extension is released, and the "Add a link (Structured task)" is now set up so that any English Wikipedia admin can enable it here: Special:CommunityConfiguration/GrowthSuggestedEdits. In other words, the Growth team released the task as "turned off" T370802, and editors will NOT have access to the task until an English Wikipedia admin enables the task.

As @Folly Mox suggests, defaults can also be adjusted. For example, setting the "The maximum number of "Add a link" suggested tasks a newcomer can complete daily" to a lower number might be appreciated by patrollers. Or increasing the "Minimum required link score" should improve the quality of suggestions, but will decrease the number of tasks available.

Let me know if there is anything I can do to help. I could write a Signpost article to share more details so there is more awareness about the task before it's enabled? Or are there any remaining questions I can help answer? KStoller-WMF (talk) 23:10, 6 August 2024 (UTC)

If we need more input or want to adjust some defaults before an admin decides about flipping the switch is it time for those RfC tags @Folly Mox? Perfect4th (talk) 04:11, 7 August 2024 (UTC)

Notified: WP:VPR. Sdkb ^talk 21:14, 16 May 2024 (UTC)

In general, this looks like a useful feature. The setting is, I believe, the number of link suggestions per article and the number of articles per day. In my experience, more links per article, and fewer articles per day works better: 9×4 seems just fine. What I don't like about the feature is that it does not seem to be learning anything from our feedback. If you tell it not to wikilink month names, it will still wikilink month names. If, say, "Italy, Germany, Poland, and Greece" is somewhere in the text, it will offer to wikilink Poland, but not the other three; manual link addition is not possible in this mode. Can WMF work on these and other issues, or is this their final product - that I don't know. Ponor (talk) 02:49, 17 May 2024 (UTC)

In the thread just above, Trizek describes the "25" value as the number of edits each newcomer can make daily. The parameter at de:Spezial:EditGrowthConfig certainly google translates to "maximum number of link suggestions to display for each suggested task".

As to linking month names, country names, etc., I brought this up last year at Wikipedia talk:Growth Team features/Archive 7 § Usefulness of "Add links" task? A few threads later, Trizek confirmed we aren't using any sort of rejection links lists.

Anyway there doesn't seem to be much engagement with this topic, so for the purpose of establishing consensus, I'll say Sure, let's turn it on and give it a go. It seems like it should be easy enough to turn it back off if the newcomer links become too high maintenance. Folly Mox (talk) 18:46, 18 May 2024 (UTC)

Agreed. I think they misunderstood the setting, they're allowing 25 tasks, 3 links each: https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spezial:EditGrowthConfig?uselang=en Ponor (talk) 13:12, 21 May 2024 (UTC)

The task is not enabled at de.wp. :)

These numbers (25 tasks, 3 links per task) are the default settings we suggest. Most big wikis kept them, except Russian (5 tasks, 3 links per task). Trizek_(WMF) (talk) 15:04, 21 May 2024 (UTC)

Also not opposed to enabling, presumably it will have a tracking tag or consistent edit summary? fr.wiki stats show decent takeup, although as on en.wiki that page does not have ways to see individual examples. CMD (talk) 02:09, 22 May 2024 (UTC)

Good question, @Chipmunkdavis. Yes, these edits are all tagged. Here's an example edit summary and associated tags:

(Link suggestions feature: 2 links added.) (Tags: Visual edit, Newcomer task, Suggested: add links)

You can view example edits on French Wikipedia via this filtered Recent Changes view.

Special:NewcomerTasksInfo will show you task availability, if you want to review metrics on task click through rates, completion, and revert rates, we have a Growth KPIs dashboard here. KStoller-WMF (talk) 19:26, 22 May 2024 (UTC)

I'm speaking from a good deal of ignorance about how this will work, but as an old-hand editor, I do think particular aspects should be monitored, such as reverts to these link edits and how much this will pile up in editors' watchlists (i.e., I have no idea as to how much of these are going to pop up in my watchlist to have to review), and such. I like the idea of experimenting with this, but I also hope this will not be so hardened that we can't possibly ever decide to stop it. Stefen Tower_{s among the rest!} ^{Gab • Gruntwerk} 20:44, 25 May 2024 (UTC)

@StefenTower, we are here to answer your questions. :)

It is possible to monitor the reverted links, using Recent Changes or Watchlist, as both links addition and reverts are tagged. See for French Wikipedia, where I filtered all Add a link edits, with reverted edits highlighted in red. As I post this message, I see 2 reverted edits for 500 links addition. It looks like what I observe on average, at any major Wikipedia. Would it be the same at English Wikipedia? Honestly, I don't know.

Reverted edits are not the only point to consider. Let's imagine an article where three links were added, where one link is not okay. Some users will revert the full edit, or leave it like this. Being myself active at French Wikipedia as a volunteer, I use Diffedit to quickly fix these links.

Also, my watchlist is not really flooded by these links addition. I just checked my watchlist, and I only see three articles edited to add links over the last 500 edits at articles I monitor. ut again, I can't transpose it to English Wikipedia.

We're offering your community the chance to activate the functionality, literally: once you've decided to do so, an admin will be able to turn Add a link on. And the reverse is true: it will be possible to deactivate the feature in the same way. If the prefered option is a test, the Growth team will have to take care of setting it up.

Trizek_(WMF) (talk) 17:04, 27 May 2024 (UTC)

Edit revert rate is something we monitor for all tasks, and in a previous A/B test, we found that the revert rate for newcomers who get Add a Link is 11% lower than the baseline.

Another option is that the daily task limit can be configured to be lower. The default is currently 25, which means any new account holder that has access to the task can complete up to 25 "add a link" tasks per day. Any English Wikipedia admin can update to a lower number via Special:EditGrowthConfig.

But also I just wanted to chime in and second what @Trizek (WMF) mentioned: English Wikipedia is welcome to enable the task and see how it goes. If the task is too disruptive to patrollers and experienced editors, it can be turned off. KStoller-WMF (talk) 17:20, 27 May 2024 (UTC)

Thanks both for your replies. I'm glad this can be adjusted if it gets out of hand. I don't think editors would want their watchlists filling up with a lot more to review. Stefen Tower_{s among the rest!} ^{Gab • Gruntwerk} 21:03, 6 June 2024 (UTC)

• I'm in favor of giving it a go, if any problems arise they can be discussed. Hoping this helps newbies acclimate to Wikipedia! —Ganesha811 (talk) 13:07, 2 June 2024 (UTC)
• +1 I apparently neglected to post my comment any one of the 3+ times I typed it up, but I think we should try it. We can always turn it off again if it causes problems. Happy editing, Perfect4th (talk) 20:47, 2 July 2024 (UTC)

@SebastianHelm: I've just noticed that last November at Wikipedia talk:Manual of Style/Linking § MOS:OVERLINK: Absolute or relative level? you asked me to ping you when there is anything new about algorithmic attempts to determine appropriate internal link density in articles. What's new is that the algorithmic links newcomer task is pretty much ready for activation at en.wp, and only a handful of people seem to care so far.

I have no idea if this is what you meant in your comment or whether you currently care about this, and rather unfortunately I couldn't think of any method of notifying you that wouldn't be considered canvassing, so I figured maximum transparency would be straight canvassing you to the discussion itself. Avoiding work, Folly Mox (talk) 12:44, 30 June 2024 (UTC)

• Enable the feature This sounds really wonderful and has been used on several other language editions of Wikipedia already. I am curious what percentage of linking will either get slightly modified to more specific targets, outright reverted versus "good links", i.e link is retained (particularly on articles where other edits continue). ~ 🦝 Shushugah (he/him • talk) 14:37, 25 July 2024 (UTC)
• I'd like to see this happen. I was manually adding articles to the Category:Articles with too few wikilinks a while ago, and I found that most new editors did a good job, and few of them added more than a couple of links. (The instructions say to only add a small number, and most folks stick to that.) Sometimes I saw the same editors over and over, but mostly it was new folks each day. I remember seeing some impressively specific and precise links getting added, for articles on niche subjects that I'd never have expected us to have an article for.
  I'd also like to see this happen gradually. Maybe only a small percentage gets access for the first few weeks, and the number ramps up slowly from there? Or maybe the per-editor daily limit is reduced (3 links x 5 articles?), so that people can get feedback on their link choices before handling too many articles? WhatamIdoing (talk) 02:19, 31 July 2024 (UTC)

  It is possible to have Add a link for a limited number of users. The Growth team can set it up. Regarding a per-editor limit, the community can set it up anytime in Special:CommunityConfiguration/GrowthSuggestedEdits.

  Speaking of community configuration, we will soon provide the possibility for your community to turn Add a link on. It should be made possible next week. Trizek_(WMF) (talk) 15:40, 31 July 2024 (UTC)

  I think that limiting the number of users at the start would be valuable because it will change the mix of edits in the RecentChanges queue. The English Wikipedia is so big that we get about 50 new editors making their first edit each hour. If we suddenly have 10 extra edits adding links every hour, then patrollers/watchlist users will be surprised by a sudden shift in edit content. I think a gradual introduction will help community on the reviewing end (e.g., who may need time to have conversations about how most first edits are suboptimal, and adding a superfluous link is less destructive than most other mistakes that newbies make). I don't think it will make any direct difference to the individuals making these edits. WhatamIdoing (talk) 16:08, 31 July 2024 (UTC)

  True. Newcomer with no Suggested links shave other tasks to work on. If the community prefers to start with XX% of new accounts getting Add a link, we can implement it. Trizek_(WMF) (talk) 17:24, 31 July 2024 (UTC)

  I have a technical question: at Special:CommunityConfiguration there is a list of section names to exclude from consideration for this task, including examples such as "References" and "See also". If we added "0" to this list, would the lead paragraph be excluded from analysis? (A separate question is whether this is a good idea: most articles seem to display the richest link density in the lead, but many very short articles have no subsections, so excluding section "0" [if even possible] would skip them entirely.) Folly Mox (talk) 11:13, 9 September 2024 (UTC)

  The lead paragraph is not excluded, for the reasons you give. The higher the density of links in an article, the lesser links are suggested.

  Should we explore an option to exclude the lead paragraph? Trizek_(WMF) (talk) 14:21, 9 September 2024 (UTC)

  "Section 0" would be the entire lead section, rather than the just the first paragraph. WhatamIdoing (talk) 16:58, 9 September 2024 (UTC)

  Whatever above the first section header. I used the wrong term for section 0; this happen when you cover multiple wikis, languages and cultures! :D Trizek_(WMF) (talk) 12:08, 10 September 2024 (UTC)

What number of users should be involved in the trial

Okay, we seem in agreement that we should give this a try, with some trepidation about how it might cause significant, unforeseen issues. Limiting the number of users who have access to this feature looks to me like a good idea. So, what number of users should we be limiting this to? And how long a trial do we think is good to have before we increase that limit? My inclination would be to start very, very small, but soon after that ramp up to a larger number that is still a small proportion of the overall number of new users. Thoughts? -- asilvering (talk) 18:23, 9 September 2024 (UTC)

Looks like the first mentorship run was 2% of new accounts. I'd be fine with that (or really any number that gets this going). Maybe a two-week period and then check in? 2% for two weeks, and if everything goes okay go to 5% or something? We could notify the CVU talk/Village Pump/somewhere with recent changes patrollers that the trial is beginning if anyone feels that would help. Happy editing, Perfect4th (talk) 19:18, 9 September 2024 (UTC)

It always helps, because if you will let me indulge in cynicism for a moment, a very typical Wikipedian response to change is to complain that "there's no consensus", and that often begins with claiming "nobody knew about it". I have actually seen this claimed for decisions that were made in CENT-listed RFCs, for things that I personally announced on over 100 pages, in addition to announcements made by others, and even by editors who participated in the discussions that they are now alleging never happened. Some of this is simple forgetfulness (so much happens that we can't remember it all) or because someone really did get missed (we once ran site banners for two solid weeks about something, and the banners happened to coincide perfectly with one editor's two-week summer holiday), but some editors can be convinced by the diffs, so it's well to have them. WhatamIdoing (talk) 19:34, 9 September 2024 (UTC)

If you want to start very small, consider a very small percentage of users for the first week/fortnight, and double regularly. you don't want to get stuck limiting it to a tiny percentage for months/years. If there are structural problems (e.g., it selects articles that have a lot of links, but it doesn't notice the links because they're inside templates or tables), then we should discover those problems within the first several thousand edits.

The trickier bit is giving the reviewers time to adjust mentally. The unavoidable fact is that new editors make mistakes. They might make fewer mistakes in this system, but fewer is not none. It's not even almost none. Increasing the number of new editors may ensure Wikipedia's survival in the long term, but right now, new editors == more well-intended but imperfect edits.

If you do RecentChanges patrol a lot, then you develop a feel for what's "normal", and you notice deviations from what you expect. Like: So many people editing about India today. Weird that I've seen this same website several times today – a spam campaign, or just a coincidence? Ugh, I can't wait until that election's over, so this political stuff will let up. If it looks like everyone is "suddenly" adding "a lot of" links, then you'll notice the deviation from normal, and that will subconsciously make you think that there is something suspicious or abnormal about adding links. If we flipped this on for 100%, we could predict now that several patrollers would complain that "too many" newbies are adding "too many" links in "too many" articles. This wouldn't be proof that there are violations of Wikipedia:Manual of Style/Linking (the typical FA has hundreds of links in it), but it would be evidence that the patrollers had noticed a shift in the editing patterns.

A fact that you might want to store in your back pocket, for responding to those inevitable complaints, is that if you divide Wikipedia's non-list articles into "shorter" and "longer" halves, the shorter articles (=stubs and near-stubs) average about two links per sentence, and the longer articles average somewhere around two links per three sentences.

Also, some editors prefer very sparse links in articles, and from their POV, moving from their preferred state towards a purely average level of linking makes the articles worse. We should not be surprised by complaints about this. WhatamIdoing (talk) 19:26, 9 September 2024 (UTC)

Growth News, July 2024

Community Configuration

The Growth team released Community Configuration at all Wikipedias. You can access it at Special:CommunityConfiguration.

This new special page replaces Special:EditGrowthConfig. For now, all Growth features can be configured using Community Configuration. Configuration for AutoModerator (T365046) and other features will be available in the future.

You can help with translations. The interface translation is done at Translatewiki.net. You can also help translate the documentation.

If you attend Wikimania 2024, please join us for the session about Community configuration's future!

Current work

Newcomer Homepage Community Updates module

We will add a new Community Configurable module to the Newcomer Homepage that will allow communities to highlight specific events, projects, campaigns, and initiatives. We have released a simple version available to beta wikis. We will conduct an A/B test at our pilot wikis using the new Metrics Platform. We still welcome community feedback on initial designs and plans, in any language at our project talk page.

Future work

Increase constructive activation on mobile

As part of the Growth team 2024/2025 Annual Plan, the Growth team will explore various ways to increase the percentage of newcomers who successfully start editing.

Editing a Wikipedia page requires too much context and patience. It means many trial and error for newcomers to contribute, meaning a steeper learning curve and potential discouraging reverts. To support a new generation of volunteers, we will increase the number and availability of smaller, structured, and more task-specific editing workflows (E.g. Edit Check and Structured Tasks). The Growth team will primarily focus on Structured Tasks, while working closely with the Editing team to ensure our work integrates well with Edit Check.

Stay informed

Growth team weekly updates are available on wiki (in English) if you want to know more about our day-to-day work. If you want to receive more general updates about technical activity happening across the Wikimedia movement (including Growth work), we encourage you to subscribe to Tech News.

Growth team's newsletter prepared by the Growth team and posted by bot • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.

15:08, 30 July 2024 (UTC)

Refining copy-editing newcomer tasks

I have been thinking off an on about how newcomer tasks can best set newbies up for success. A while ago I posted some thoughts at the MediaWiki discussion zone and they suggested talking here for enwiki consensus. So I'd like to pose two suggestions that I think are just a matter of how the tool is configured, to see what others think:

1. Should Template:Tone be removed from the copyediting task list? In my experience, something gets tagged with "tone" (instead of something more specific) when an experienced editor looks at a huge mess, says "yikes", and walks away. Even when the problem is a prose problem (as opposed to a more complex research problem), newbies are often still in the early stages of unlearning essaylike prose styles, and may find encyclopedic tone more challenging than the promised "copy-editing".

1A. I could be convinced that Template:Peacock and Template:Advert are also prone to flagging, 1, articles with research problems and, 2, articles with prose style problems that fall outside of simple copyediting or many newcomers' starting skills.

2. Can tasks be filtered so that newcomers are not shown articles tagged with Template:Notability? These articles also looked deeply flawed to an experienced editor but not in a way where they could fix it easily; they may offer a very poor model of what a wiki article 'should' look like; and they may lead to a dispiriting wasted effort on the newbies' part if the article is later deleted.

In both cases, I'm hoping to avoid sending newbies to complicated, messy articles and telling them they just need the quick "easy task" of copy editing. ~ L 🌸 (talk) 00:21, 9 September 2024 (UTC)

Hah, apparently I did raise some of this here in July (sorry for my patchy memory) but thanks to Pppery's intervention then, I am posing new suggestions this time! I'd love to hear folks' thoughts. ~ L 🌸 (talk) 00:34, 9 September 2024 (UTC)

The "copyediting tasks actually really difficult and dispiriting" problem has come up repeatedly over the past few years (here is me wondering who will bring it up in 2024 - guess that's you). We've had professional writers call them overwhelming. So I'm just... going to go ahead and use these fancy new tools I just got and remove "tone" and "advert". "Peacock" I suspect might be a bit more useful, so I hesitate over that one.

Filtering out articles tagged for notability sounds like a good idea. I have no idea how much this would reduce the pool of tasks - maybe not much? But it doesn't seem likely to me to be harmful. -- asilvering (talk) 00:55, 9 September 2024 (UTC)

I can see the argument that "peacock" works as a newbie copy-editing task, since it's more focused on sentence edits and the problem is explained more concretely. Thanks for removing tone and advert!! ~ L 🌸 (talk) 01:16, 9 September 2024 (UTC)

Finally! Thanks, asilvering, for doing that! Would it perhaps be worth it to request a query of how many articles are both newcomer copyediting eligible and tagged for notability just to check? Happy editing, Perfect4th (talk) 03:07, 9 September 2024 (UTC)

I thought we had already got rid of {{Tone}} last year, but I suppose my memory has failed me again. Thanks asilvering for taking care of that.

A naive and basic search for hastemplate:Notability and hastemplate:"Multiple issues" returns ~30k articles, down from ~58k for {{Notability}} alone, and of course not all {{Multiple issues}} will be in the subset that include an article in the copyedit task. It should be possible to compose a search for the exact quantity without querying the database, but I just woke up so won't attempt.

The root problem, as I continue to see it same as last year, is that the issues that established Wikipedia editors tend to tag with maintenance templates rather than simply solve on sight are typically not easy, and not a good introduction for low editcount junior contributors.

It doesn't particularly help that the minimalist instructions in the Suggested Edits flow still don't include guidance to click through the maintenance template to understand the problem tagged and what a solution might look like, so most people seem to tend towards doing mild copyediting of the lead paragraph, which ends up roughly evenly balanced between not a substantial improvement and a clear disimprovement, with some outliers (although I haven't RCPed for the Newcomer task: copyedit tag for many months now, so my impressions may be outdated like my body and car). Folly Mox (talk) 09:52, 9 September 2024 (UTC)

Yes, that root problem you identify is why I have reasonably high hopes for the structured tasks. We can enable Find A Link now, we just haven't yet. I'll go give that discussion a kick. -- asilvering (talk) 18:20, 9 September 2024 (UTC)

Sorry if this is an aside, but how did this edit come through? There are not tags on the affected text, and I can't find copyedit-related tags elsewhere. CMD (talk) 14:12, 9 September 2024 (UTC)

It's the "needs citations for verification" one. I have no idea why it's tagged with "copy edit" though - should be "references" surely. Hopefully someone from WMF can clarify. -- asilvering (talk) 18:10, 9 September 2024 (UTC)

@Trizek (WMF), is there any chance you can explain this one? -- asilvering (talk) 20:37, 9 September 2024 (UTC)

There is one {{verify spelling}} in the "Current political issues" section. :) I almost missed it! Trizek_(WMF) (talk) 13:07, 10 September 2024 (UTC)

Thanks. I wonder what brought the editing so far from the tag. CMD (talk) 13:36, 10 September 2024 (UTC)

The Suggested Edits flow IIRC (maybe only if you click through the five help snippets) has an animated focus effect on the "edit lead" pencil. There's nothing in the included guidance that suggests editors find a specific maintenance tag (or indeed, click a maintenance tag), and initial article focus doesn't skip to any maintenance tag that may have included the article in the task pool. So almost all copyedit task edits tend to affect the lead, and many exclusively. Folly Mox (talk) 14:11, 10 September 2024 (UTC)

We tag the edit according to the task type the user selected. But as these tasks open the full editor, the user can do what is asked and more. We expect use Edit check at some point to narrow down the focus of the task. Trizek_(WMF) (talk) 15:29, 10 September 2024 (UTC)

Since it was so hard for us to find it, they probably had trouble finding it too, haha. -- asilvering (talk) 17:11, 10 September 2024 (UTC)

Aha! My mistake. -- asilvering (talk) 15:17, 10 September 2024 (UTC)

No worries asilvering, it was a good challenge! :D Trizek_(WMF) (talk) 15:27, 10 September 2024 (UTC)

articletopic and its intersection with Suggested Edits

I've noticed just now that not all of the available articletopics listed at :mw:ORES/Articletopic § Taxonomy are available at Special:Homepage/suggested-edits. Specifically, the following articletopics are not presented as options:

• internet-culture (~5k articles)
• linguistics (~207k)
• books (~64k)
• radio (~32k)
• software (~20k)
• geographical (~302k)
• libraries-and-information (~3k)
• space (~41k)

(although these final two may be wrapped up by the label "General Science", which I assume maps to stem). The catchalls media and visual-arts also don't seem to be represented. My vdiff may contain inaccuracies.

What is the reasoning behind these unincluded topics? Folly Mox (talk) 10:50, 9 September 2024 (UTC)

I quickly skimmed around, and found this: "The ORES model we use now offers 64 topics, and we chose to expose 39 of them to newcomers."

If I remember correctly the 2019 discussions around this, the goal was to provide a number of topics that would not be overwhelming. Also, we selected the (groups of) topics that returned the highest number of articles at most mid-sized Wikipedias. Variations regarding contents are important wiki to wiki; English Wikipedia is always the exception. :)

Trizek_(WMF) (talk) 13:39, 9 September 2024 (UTC)

Fascinating. I can see why we might want to avoid driving newcomers to "internet culture", but I'm not sure what could be wrong with "books" or "radio". -- asilvering (talk) 20:36, 9 September 2024 (UTC)

We’ve been exploring ways to introduce more granular topic filtering in the future. For example, many newcomers prefer editing articles related to their home region, but we currently don’t offer the ability to filter suggestions by country. This is something we're actively researching: Research on Language-Agnostic Topic Classification by Country.

As we incorporate this level of granularity into the UI, we could also consider expanding filtering options for other topics, while ensuring the user experience remains simple and intuitive. KStoller-WMF (talk) 22:54, 9 September 2024 (UTC)

Also, I just wanted to clarify that it’s not that we are only exposed 39 of the 64 topics — it’s that we combined some of them so that it was a smaller number of topics for newcomers to review and select. 

If we eventually add in more topic granularity (like being able to filter by countries or smaller geographic regions) then we will also need to rethink the UX of the filtering to allow for that additional complexity, and at that point maybe we should consider breaking up some of these categories if it makes sense. KStoller-WMF (talk) 00:01, 10 September 2024 (UTC)

Yes, apologies for the inclarity in my OP: it's obvious that geographical subregions are bundled into macroregions, and I only realised after creating the list that space and libraries-and-information are likely subsumed under "General Science". books, radio and software could be made accessible to (albeit not individually selectable by) Newcomer Tasks if the parent category media were included. I think linguistics and geographical would be nice for people to see. Maybe some other topics could be bundled into their parent topics to create some space and prevent overwhelm? I do realise en.wp is an outlier, with better coverage than other wikis under consideration. Folly Mox (talk) 16:17, 10 September 2024 (UTC)

If a question is asked and nobody is around to answer it, was the question ever asked in the first place?

From general browsing I saw that Ritchie333 had some mentee questions that had stalled for about 3-6 days, so I stepped in to answer them to make sure they weren't left unresolved for too long. One mentee, Gazingo is doing some particularly great history work and asking great questions :)

This is not Ritchie's fault of course, as life can be busy in a second. I got so bad at answering questions in a timely manner that I had to turn them off for example. Do we have a system (or should one be made), where a second backup user is notified of absent responses? I'm not sure what a solution to that would like otherwise, but I think it's important for us to consider these questions getting answered to the earliest convenience for the mentee's sake for the sake of encouragement. The Teahouse is quick to answer usually, so maybe an automated suggestion to ask there if the question stalls could work too? Panini! • 🥪 07:13, 29 September 2024 (UTC)

This relates to phab:T321509, and has precedent at Wikipedia talk:Growth Team features/Archive 7 § Marking inactive editors/mentors as 'Away' and Wikipedia talk:Growth Team features/Mentor list § Marking a mentor as "away".

I think a pretty good solution might be a bot report, since that could highlight unanswered mentee questions sooner than we would ever want to mark a mentor as "away". We could have a bot that ingested the current active mentor list each day, then scanned their talkpages every twenty minutes or so for threads that meet all of the following criteria: title matches "Question from username (full timestamp)", one person in the conversation, initial timestamp at least k hours in the past (for some value k— 12? 24? 6?). Then the bot could update a report that people could subscribe to if they're interested in answering questions posed to busy / inactive mentors. (Or it could post to Wikipedia talk:Teahouse??)

It sounds pretty simple (although not so simple I could code it properly). WP:BOTR might be a next step here. Folly Mox (talk) 17:27, 29 September 2024 (UTC)

Like the idea behind this. * Pppery * _{it has begun...} 17:41, 29 September 2024 (UTC)

Have we defined what a timely manner for answering questions is? Obviously we can’t expect individual mentors to answer as quickly as the Teahouse, but should we want mentors to be active every day for questions (and does that disqualify those who aren’t)? I’ve only seen inactivity quantified at the away setting of the mentorship dashboard, which defines it as ‘more than a week’. Do mentors know the time expectation for answers? And yes, I say this knowing I’ve been bad about this recently.

Also, +1 to liking the bot report idea. Happy editing, Perfect4th (talk) 17:51, 29 September 2024 (UTC)