Topic on Talk:Growth/Personalized first day/Structured tasks/Add an image

@John Broughton @Zoozaz1 @Sdkb -- you brought up thoughts about how the algorithm works, and how to prefer the three main inputs to it:

• Look at the Wikidata item for the article. If it has an image (P18), choose that image.
• Look at the Wikidata item for the article. If it has a Commons category associated (P373), choose an image from the category.
• Look at the articles about the same topic in other language Wikipedias. Choose a lead image from those articles.

Ideally, we would be able to generate sufficient data on images from each input to calculate the rank ordering of which inputs are the best and worst. Imagine if people went through hundreds of potential matches, and labeled them "Yes" or "No", and then we could see which inputs have the most "Yes" answers. Perhaps volunteers might help us do something like that. Or farther down the line, if the feature is in the wikis, we could look at revert rates for images from different inputs.

But absent that quantitative approach, it's good to have some expectations. It sounds like all three of you expect the Commons category input to be the least reliable. That makes sense to me, and aligns with what we saw when we evaluated a couple hundred of these matches. Because many images can be in a Commons category, there can be plenty of images that are only peripherally relevant.

I agree that the other two inputs both seem pretty strong. Usually a Wikidata item only has one P18 image, and so I would imagine the person applying it to the Wikidata item believes that it is an appropriate image to illustrate the concept as a whole. Is that your expectation as well?

For images from articles in other languages, this one usually seems to work well, but has some wrinkles to it. The main issue can be illustrated with the following example, in which the article where the image is drawn from is a lot more extensive than the unillustrated article. In English Wikipedia, the article "Economy of North Rhine-Westphalia" has no image. It's a pretty short article. Its counterpart in German Wikipedia is a long article with lots of images, which makes sense because that region is in Germany. Which image would we recommend? One idea is to choose the first or "lead" image in the article, which in this case is a photo of a factory. Perhaps that would work as the single image in the English article, but only with a good caption explaining why it belongs in the article.

But overall, I do agree that the "images from articles in other languages" approach has the great benefit of another Wikipedian having consciously decided that the image is appropriate for a Wikipedia article on the same topic.

Whether the first or third source, listed above, is best, is an empirical question; it should be fairly easy to do a comparison. I think we're also agreed that the second source, above, is the least desirable.

More generally, I think that you should be moving in the direction of presenting, serially, three (or four, maximum) images to the editor, if there are that many; if the editor says "yes" to the first, that's all he/she sees; if he/she says "no", then the second image is present, for the same yes/no choice. (That responds to "which image would we recommend", if an article in another Wikipedia has multiple images; you don't have to choose, if you present, sequentially, multiple choices. (I do wonder if the larger the image, the more likely it is to be useful; that's another empirical question.)

@John Broughton -- I talked with our team's designer about the question of presenting multiple images serially, and I just posted some ideas in the Design section. The first idea just shows the simple "single image" workflow. But the second two are ideas for how to present multiple image suggestions. In one of them, the user sees all the suggestions at once, and the other one presents the suggestions serially, with an additional step at the end for the user to decide between them if they ended up liking more than one. I know that none of these are exactly what you proposed, in which the series of images stops as soon as the user chooses one, but I was thinking that these workflows would give the user a chance to discover that an image later in the series is actually better than an earlier one. What do you think?

Edit: I see in another of your responses that you said that "best of the bunch" might add needless complication for little benefit. That's a good thing to keep in mind.

I don't have strong feelings about the three options. What I do have concerns about is the text (from the Commons) that accompanies the images you're showing. The new editor has no idea where that text came from, and the extent to which it should influence his/her decision. What if the text for one image is a fairly good match to the topic, while the text for another image is not - should that be a deciding factor?

I also think it's a serious mistake to show the image on top of the task window, with the article text below: (a) image, (b) topic information, and (c) question. I strongly suggest that the order be (a) topic information [which the editor saw in the previous task window, and therefore sets the stage, (b) image, and (c) question [which is immediately below the image, to which it is, obviously, closely related].