Growth/Personalized first day/Structured tasks

This page describes the Growth team's work on the "structured tasks" project, which is related to the "newcomer tasks" and "newcomer homepage" projects. This page contains major assets, designs, open questions, and decisions. Most incremental updates on progress will be posted on the general Growth team updates page, with some large or detailed updates posted here.

Current status

 * 2020-05-01: planning and documenting initial notes

Summary
The Growth team deployed the "newcomer tasks" project in November 2019, which gives newcomers a feed of suggested articles to edit on their newcomer homepage. As of April 2020, the suggested articles are sourced only from articles that have maintenance templates applied by experienced editors, which do not give newcomers particular direction on which sentences, words, or sections specifically need attention. Despite this lack of direction, we are happy to see that newcomers have been making productive suggested edits.

Although maintenance templates provide varied types of edits for newcomers to make, they may be too broad and open-ended for newcomers to succeed with. And on mobile devices, the visual or wikitext editors may overwhelm newcomers on the small screen.

Therefore, we want to experiment with an idea called "structured tasks". This is about breaking down editing workflows into a series of steps that newcomers can accomplish easily. Following the successful examples from Android and Language team work, we think these types of edits will be easier for newcomers to do and easier to do on mobile, helping more newcomers do more edits. These structured tasks would be accessible to newcomers as part of the newcomer tasks project.

Editing is complicated
Through the Growth team's experience, we've come to believe that a newcomer's first moments on the wiki can quickly determine whether they want to stay or leave. We believe that newcomers want to stay when they can quickly make an edit and have a positive experience. But contributing to Wikipedia -- almost any type of contribution -- is complicated, and this makes it hard for them to succeed quickly. For instance, there are about a dozen steps required in order to do something as simple as adding a single sentence to an article:


 * 1) Search for the right article.
 * 2) Figure out whether the information you want to add is already in the article.
 * 3) Choose a section to which to add the sentence.
 * 4) Click to start editing.
 * 5) Type the sentence in the right place.
 * 6) Click the citation button.
 * 7) Return to the source to get the link or citation info.
 * 8) Fill out and save the citation form.
 * 9) Click to publish the edit.
 * 10) Fill out an edit summary.
 * 11) Publish.

Newcomers looking at the visual or wikitext editor for the first time don’t know what those steps are, what order in which to do them, or which buttons to click to make them happen. In other words, their experience is not structured. They may just be overwhelmed and leave. Or they may use trial-and-error, make a mistake, and get negative feedback from experienced editors. That's what this project is about: how might we help newcomers step through these workflows in the right order?

Building on knowledge from other teams
The idea of "structured tasks" has been working well on the Wikipedia Android app and in the Content Translation tool. We're inspired by their work.

With their "suggested edits" project, the Android team broke down the process of adding a title description to a Wikipedia article into one easy step of typing into a text box. They have since done the same with translating title descriptions across languages. In order to do the same tasks without a structured workflow, users would have to go to Wikidata and go through several steps to make those same edits. The team learned that this method works: many Android users make hundreds of these small contributions.

The Language team built the Content Translation tool, which does several things to structure the process of translating an article. It offers a side-by-side interface built for translations, it breaks the translation down into sections, and it automatically applies machine translation algorithms. Though Wikipedians could translate articles before the existence of the tool, the number of manual steps required made it very difficult. This tool is successful, with hundreds of thousands of translations completed. We learned that when translating an article is broken down into steps, with rote parts (e.g. running machine translation) taken care of automatically, more articles get translated.

The Growth team is thinking about applying these same principles to content edits in articles, like adding links, adding images, adding references, and adding sentences.

A structured task sketch
The best way to explain how we're thinking about structured tasks may be through showing a quick sketch. The first structured task we've thought about is "add a link". But the same ideas could apply to structured tasks for "add an image", "add a reference", or even "add a fact".

In the newcomer tasks feature, lots of newcomers complete "add a link" tasks -- in which they add internal blue links in articles that don't have many. This seems like a simple editing task to get started. But we think that many newcomers may not understand how to go through the steps of adding a link and may not know which words to make into links. We're imagining a workflow that walks them through it, step-by-step, with the assistance of an algorithm that can guess which words or phrases might make the best links.

In the sketch below, the newcomer arrives on an article, and is given a suggestion of a word that might make a good link. If they agree that it should be made a link, they are walked through the steps of making the link. This will hopefully teach them to add links on their own in the future -- and perhaps they'll enjoy continuing to receive these algorithmic link suggestions. Regarding the algorithm, the WMF Research team has done some preliminary work that makes us confident that such an algorithm is possible.



In thinking further about this, we sketched a second idea. Instead of being geared toward teaching the newcomer to add links using the visual editor, this next workflow lets the user quickly confirm or reject recommendations from the algorithm, directly editing the article. While it does not teach them how to add links via the editor, it might help a newcomer edit at high volume, and might be a better fit for a user who is trying to be productive with simple tasks while they are on the go. Or perhaps might be a good fit for users who only are interested in very simple edits, similarly to how the Android app has many editors who only want to write title descriptions.



In thinking about structured tasks, it looks like this might be a big question: should workflows be more geared toward teaching newcomers to use the traditional tools, or be more geared toward newcomers being able to do easy edits at higher volume?

Why this idea is prioritized
We think that quickly making productive edits is what leads to newcomer success. Once they've done some edits, the rest of the wiki experience quickly becomes richer. Newcomers can then see their impact, get thanked, ask informed questions to their mentors, create their userpage, etc. Therefore, we want lots of newcomers to make their first edits as soon as possible. We have already seen from the newcomer tasks project that many newcomers are looking for easy tasks to do. But we also have observed these things:


 * Only about 25% of the newcomers who click on a suggestion actually edit it.
 * Only about 25% of those who do a suggested edit do another one.
 * There are a handful of newcomers who really thrive on suggested edits, doing dozens of them every day. This shows the potential for newcomers to accomplish a lot of wiki work.
 * In live user tests, when newcomers are told to copyedit an article or add links to an article, they frequently want to know exactly which sentence or words need their attention. In other words, attempting to edit the full article is too open-ended.

Taking these points along with the experiences described above of the Android and Content Translation teams, we think we could increase the number of newcomers editing and continuing to edit by structuring some of the content editing workflows in Wikipedia.

Opportunities with structured tasks
When we break down editing workflows into steps, we call them "structured tasks". Here are some of the possible benefits we think could come from structured tasks:


 * Make it easy for newcomers to make meaningful contributions.
 * Develop editing workflows that make sense for mobile. Mobile design principles tell us that users should see one step at a time, not a complicated workspace.
 * Let newcomers increase their skills incrementally. They could take on successfully more challenging types of tasks.
 * Let people find an editing experience that fits them. By giving newcomers a feed of structured tasks, they could find the type of tasks that they prefer.
 * Perhaps similar workflows could be opened to experienced editors in the future.

Concerns and downsides to structured tasks
Whenever we add new ways for people to edit Wikipedia, there are many things that can go wrong:


 * By making editing too quick and easy, we may attract vandals, or users who don't apply enough care when editing.
 * Giving newcomers simple workflows may keep them from learning the traditional editing tools, which are essential for doing the most impactful wiki work.
 * Structured tasks may not be good at accounting for differences across languages, idiosyncrasies with wikitext, and could cause other kinds of bugs.
 * Algorithms that surface structured tasks may not be accurate enough, and falsely encourage newcomers to complete edits they shouldn't.