Hello @Edoderoo -- thanks for coming here to weigh in. Your experience is from Dutch Wikipedia, correct? We're glad your wiki is one of the first to try "add a link", and I appreciate that you looked at the edits and provided this feedback. The feature is only deployed to about 10 wikis right now, because it is in the phase that we call "Iteration 1". This is the first version, which we use to learn and improve for future versions. When we deploy a first version, we expect to see problems, and we also hope to see value -- enough to make us want to keep working on the feature for future versions.
Our goal with "add a link" is to give newcomers a tool that makes it very easy for them to make their first edits, so that they get excited about Wikipedia and want to learn more and make more kinds of edits. We know that wikilinks are not the most valuable improvement to an article, but we thought that the value is that it would be something simple to get newcomers involved, and something with which they could not do too much damage. We now have enough data to see that the feature actually accomplished this goal: newcomers who have it available are more likely to make their first unreverted edits to articles than those who don't. In other words, it causes people to edit who never would have otherwise. That is good news for this idea.
But as you say, there are also issues. Some newcomers use the feature so heavily that they are overlinking. Other ones may not be applying strong judgment. We've heard similar feedback from Arabic Wikipedia, Hungarian Wikipedia, and German Wikipedia. These are some of the ideas we've gathered so far for improvement:
- Nudge newcomers to do other, more valuable kinds of tasks after they do a few link tasks. One task we might nudge them toward is "add an image", which we just released on Arabic, Czech, and Bengali Wikipedias (I would be very interested in your thoughts on that task).
- Don't let newcomers do too many of the tasks or proceed through them too quickly. We might only let them do 25 per day, or stop them if they are spending less than, say, 30 seconds on an article, or stop them if they are saying yes to more than 90% of the suggestions, etc.
- Don't offer so many links per article -- right now we offer up to 10 suggestions per article, but we might limit it to 3.
- Don't allow links in sections that usually shouldn't get them, like the References section.
- Limit the suggestions to articles that seem underlinked, perhaps by looking at the ratio of wikilinks in the article to bytes in the article.
What do you think of these ideas? Can you think of other ways that we can keep the good parts of the feature (causing more newcomers to edit), while reducing the bad parts (generating some low value edits).
We'll be working on the improvements in the beginning of 2022. I look forward to hearing back! And if you are able to get opinions from any other Dutch volunteers, those would be valuable.