I think it's a good idea to use maintenance templates in the general case.
I am concerned that there may be some maintenance templates that are unsuited. For example, the templates in en:Category:Wikipedia copyright maintenance templates usually require some delicacy/care to ensure that that fix has been implemented correctly, and usually require administrator effort to remove the copyright violation copy from the page history.
Hello, the Growth team has asked ambassadors for each target wiki to provide a list of maintenance templates, and we're not using _all_ maintenance templates, just some of them, which we deem to provide reliable results.
@Izno -- thanks for reading the newsletter and weighing in! Yes, like @Martin Urbanec (WMF) said, we are being careful to use maintenance templates that actually make sense for newcomers to work on. We did that work in this Phabricator task and its subtask, if you're interested in seeing the details. Which maintenance templates do you think are the best ones for newcomers to work on?
I think the lists I see in that task are pretty reasonable. I would be concerned about image-related ones since we immediately get into complex questions of non-free media and possibly biting new users who naively upload a non-free image which is immediately deleted.
Got it -- thanks. That makes sense about images. We were also talking about images in this other thread: Topic:V8fug8k6weg1p4ua
There seems to be a belief - among new and inexperienced editors, at least - that adding a maintenance template is going to lead to (relatively) quick action by other editors. This is false. For example, the category https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Articles_lacking_sources (generated by maintenance templates) has 186,000 articles in it. There are several hundred thousand articles in the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Articles_needing_additional_references category, and many articles that have that template were marked as such in 2006.
In other words, the value of adding a maintenance template that asks other editors to improve an article is somewhere between very small and zero. If the Growth Team succeeds in teaching lots of editors how to place these templates, they will have contributed very little to the project. And, in fact, editors who spend a lot of time placing these templates could, in a more perfect world, be actually improving Wikipedia articles, instead.
Thanks for checking out the project pages and for your thorough comments, @John Broughton! I've learned a lot already from your input. I wanted to answer this one first before getting into the ones specifically about "structured tasks".
First, I just want to make sure it was clear that with newcomer tasks (which has been live on several wikis since November), we are not asking newcomers to place maintenance templates on articles -- rather, we are drawing on the existing maintenance templates to surface articles needing attention to newcomers. So hopefully this feature is a force for drawing down the backlog of maintenance templates, as opposed to increasing it. Indeed, I think a great potential outcome would be if enough newcomers were working through maintenance templates that it did make sense for more to be added by other users, starting a virtuous cycle.
One of the biggest problems with using maintenance templates for this project, though, is how open-ended they are -- we've seen newcomers who want to know which words should be links, or which sentences should be copyedited. That's why we're now talking about structured tasks on the other project page.
Another big problem with maintenance templates is removing them after the work is completed. The issue is that if a newcomer makes edits on an article after being prompted by a maintenance template, they probably don't yet have the wiki skills to understand templates and how to remove them. They also may not have the judgment necessary to tell if the template's need is entirely, or only partially, resolved. We don't yet have a solution for this -- perhaps we could encourage patrollers to look out for edits via this feature, and take a look at whether the template should be removed? Can you think of anything that would help here? Thank you!
@MMiller (WMF), I'm looking at this from the point of view of Tamil Wikipedia. I have a similar concern as @Izno. Many tasks like adding references or even illustrations from the commons require a familiarity with Wiki editing as well as policies sometimes, which is hard to expect in newcomers. Is the plan to guide them through the entire process? If not, it's better to stick with simpler tasks, I think. -- ~~~~
@Sundar, we have set difficulty levels for each task we cover (adding images is not included).
| Task | Difficulty level |
| Copyedit article | Easy |
| Add Links | Easy |
| Update article | Medium |
| Add References | Medium |
| Expand article | Hard |
This way, users aren't encouraged to take more advanced tasks. Sure they can start with an hard task if they are fearless, but that's at their own risks.
Each task we cover has guidance. When one selects an article with a given task, they receive specific guidance on how to achieve this task. This covers editing basics; going deeper into policies is something we expect users to discover as time goes by, or by interacting with other users (especially their mentor).
Hope this helps! :)
(1) The word "copyedit" may not mean what you think it does. Per https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copy_editing , it "encompasses any or all of the tasks along a continuum from simple mechanical corrections (mechanical editing) through sentence-level interventions (line, or stylistic, editing) to substantial remedial work on literary style and clarity, disorganized passages, baggy prose, muddled tables and figures, and the like." In other words, at minimum one should distinguish between the extremes of grammatical corrections and rewording of sentences, and reorganizing and revising an article, both of which fall under the label of "copyediting".
(2) There are two different types of links, external (rarely used in the English Wikipedia) and wikilinks (internal). It might be helpful to treat the two as separate things.
(3) Adding a citation using Citoid isn't particularly difficult.
Hi @John Broughton -- thanks for weighing in! I have some responses and follow-up questions for you:
(1) I agree that copyedit is a broad concept! A challenge we have here is that since we are sourcing these tasks based on maintenance templates, we're using the templates that communities call their "copyedit" templates, and different wiki communities may have different conventions around the types of copyediting problems for which they apply their copyedit template. We're using the word "copyedit" deliberately to be broad, because we're not sure more specifically exactly which type of copyedits the articles will need when the newcomer arrives. Do you think we should use a different word? I think you participated in a similar conversation about finding spelling error tasks with the Growth team's future "structured task" workflows. I think those workflows will allow us be more specific with what exactly newcomers should do.
(2) I think that could be a good idea -- to use the phrase "wikilink" instead of just "link". I remember in one of our user tests, a newcomer thought that by "add links", we actually meant adding references, since references are links to external websites.
(3) I agree that using Citoid itself is pretty easy. I think the reason we classified "Add references" as a medium task is that the harder part of references is finding the actual reference, and using judgment to decide whether the source is reliable. Does that make sense?
(1) The problem is that it's not at all true that most copyediting is "Easy". If it were, for example, there would not be articles dating back to 2007 that still require "clarification" - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Wikipedia_articles_needing_clarification . [I realize this isn't necessarily a very constructive response; I'll ponder what additional comments I can make that would be helpful.]
(2) Glad to be helpful.
(3) The point is well made that finding a reliable and relevant source is the difficult part of correctly adding a citation.
