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

I wouldn't say this was an unqualified success. There were complaints on en.Wikipedia that low quality or inappropriate images were being added, and that people were adding them for reward, rather than to improve the encyclopedia. As a result, some accounts were blocked.

See, for example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Administrators%27_noticeboard/Archive322#Image_competition%3F which also refers to a discussion on Meta.

See also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:Joy_Ayara

@Pigsonthewing, thanks for your comment. The Wikipedia Pages Wanting Photos campaign was a new experiment and a simplified campaign to recruit newcomers who may be interested in putting into use the millions of photos on Wikimedia Commons and other works that have been released for use under a free license. We are very proud that many of the new editors recruited from the campaign continue to contribute to various Wikimedia projects to date. This is something we find really interesting as the campaign demonstrated that adding images to articles could be a great way to recruit and engage new editors. It could also be a way to engage and retain existing editors who may want to do something entirely different from creating new articles or improving existing contents. However, the blocking of the user you cited was justifiable but that's not strange or unexpected for a new campaign involving new editors. We shouldn't judge an entire campaign based on some bad behaviour from a few new editors.

:We mop thousands of copyvios contributed to Commons during and after the WLX contest annually but we can't discredit those contests based on bad contributions from some new editors. That's usually not a smart way to evaluate the overall impact of a project. This is not to compare Commons to Wikipedia as the latter deals with live articles

:I'd also like to note that we cannot second-guess the motivation of other editors by simply assuming that all participants participated just to win prizes. We should assume good-faith as such assumption may be considered disrespectful, insulting and demoralising to our volunteers who have no such motivation. The WPWP campaign was not the first and only project that offer prizes. Almost all contests and campaign organized in the Wikimedia movement including the WLX offer prizes.

:That being said, we took the feedback provided by some communities notably, the English and French Wikipedia seriously as they are very valuable and would be useful for the international team to improving the campaign in the next edition.  And if the works on the "structured task" is completed before the next edition in 2021, that would really be helpful in taking care of some of the concerns raised particularly those that are related to poor contributions by new editors. Again, thanks for your comments and Merry Christmas. T Cells (talk) 15:52, 24 December 2020 (UTC)

"We shouldn't judge an entire campaign based on some bad behaviour from a few new editors."

Indeed not. I did not do so.

"we cannot second-guess the motivation of other editors by simply assuming that all participants participated just to win prizes."

Indeed not. I did not do so.

Thanks for linking to that discussion, @Pigsonthewing. It definitely shows that while a lot can go right from urging people to add images, a lot can also go wrong. We should think about what we can learn and try to head it off in building new features. It seems like some of the main challenges were:

• People adding totally irrelevant images. This would hopefully not happen often because this feature would be built on an algorithm which usually proposes images that are relevant. In other words, there would not be an opportunity for the user to search Commons and insert something random to the article.
• People might be incentivized to add images carelessly just to rack up points. Right now, our features don't offer any kind of awards, but we might offer a good way to see your "stats", so you can be proud of your progress. I think one thing that can help with the incentives is to give the user credit for the times that they declined to add a suggested image: saying "no" to a suggestion should "count" as work, just like saying "yes" does. So instead of someone thinking about their "images added" number, perhaps we can refocus them on their "images reviewed" number.
• People continuing to rapidly add images even as they are being reverted. It sounds like there were some scenarios in which users were adding irrelevant images so quickly that people couldn't clean up after them and block them quickly enough. In the Wikipedia Android app, they incorporated some automatic rules that remove a user's access to tasks where they have been frequently reverted. Maybe that's something we can think about.

How does this sound? Can you think of other pitfalls to plan for?

Another question I have is about image "quality" and how users should evaluate it. For instance, the only available image of an obscure historical figure might be a grainy or blurry photo (like this one). Or the only available image of a town might mostly be a big field with some of the town in the background (like this one). What do you think about cases like those? Is it good to include those illustrations in the Wikipedia articles, despite their drawbacks?

For both of those examples, I'd say they're better than nothing, but I could envision a circumstance in which an image is so bad that we'd prefer to have nothing. That situation comes up sometimes when we're deciding whether we should illustrate a particular section, but it's less common at the level of an entire page. On English Wikipedia, there's some philosophical disagreement about how strictly to interpret MOS:IMAGERELEVANCE—some editors want only images that have a clear instructional purpose, whereas others such as myself are much more lenient about images that fall more (but not completely) toward the decorative end of the spectrum.