Topic on Talk:Growth/2023

Hi! I wonder if there is an easily accessible ”exclusion” list, which tells the system not to use certain words as ”link targets”?

As an example, in Swedish, my main language, the words ”Lika” and ”Ingå” often appear as suggested links. While Lika is a province in Croatia (=suitable link target), in swedish it also means ”same as” (like in ”like for like”). Needless to say, that this creates quite a few ”false positives”. The same with ”Ingå” (a smaller river =suitable link target), the word however also means ”is included in”.

If I knew where to add words to such a list (if it exists), then I’d be happy doing this myself as I run into them?

Thanks @Gunboz for the feedback!

We are evaluating this and several other ideas for improving "add a link" accuracy, while also investigating ways to make these edits easier to review.

What's your experience like with "add a link" tasks? Besides occasional incorrect suggestions, do you feel like this task is working well on Swedish Wikipedia? Do you have any experience patrolling these tasks, and if so: do you have any recommendations for making these edits easier to review?

Hi and thanks for reaching out!

1. I think the task/ feature is excellent: it’s like ”low threshold” editing when I’m too tired or similar to write or proofread outright. It brings me to surprising new subjects, and quite often I also end up fixing some other small stuff after posting the links to an article. And it helps finding quite a few ambiguous articles (pls see my other suggestion on that subject on this page).
2. Re. patrolling: I have roll-back authority (and have used it on occasion when seeing stupid stuff happening to articles on my watch list), but I have not yet performed any ”systematic patrolling”. I will now check with some more experienced users on svwp, how I could go about doing that (unless you have some ideas or hints), and then get back to yourself in a week or so, reporting on my experience on patrolling these add a link edits, if that would be useful to you and your team?

Thanks so much for the feedback, @Gunboz !

1. That's great to hear!
2. That would be so helpful, thank you! Since "add a link" makes these small edits so easy to complete, we've had some patrollers mention that it's a burden to review them all. I'm curious to know if this has been an issue on svwp, or if svwp has any other feedback or recommendations for improving "add a link". Thank you!

Hi again @KStoller-WMF! I’ve had a look at this. First of all, I don’t know if this has been an issue on svwp (yet), one reason being that the feature was just released there very recently. However, I noticed a couple of (possible) issues with how patrolling these links does work today:

1. One gets to see ”the whole article” on the left side of the screen, just like with any other edits that have been performed on an article, and then a comment on the right side, saying like ”article xxx has been linked”.
2. This setup is imho not really helpful: a) one does not need to see the ”whole article” (left side) in this case, as when reviewing an edit of content. Maybe just the sentence with the new link would suffice, possibly the sentende before and/ or after could be helpful in addition, but absolutely not more. This would save a lot of unnecessary scrolling in the linking article. b) On the other hand, on the right side, where today only the link target article name is shown, this is definitely to lean. There is no way to determine if a link to Swan is to the animal or the sailing boat by just seeing that one word ”Swan”. If here instead the first one or two sentences of the target article would be displayed, it would be immediately clear if the new link is suitable or not (in this way I can immediately see the context around the new link on the left side and then the subject where it links to on the right, right next to each other, helping me take a split-second decision re. suitable or not).
3. The result of such a change/ suggestion would be, that the patroller would be presented a table of linking snippets on the left (text around where the link was inserted) and a clear description of the link target on the right, where each table row represents one new link. This would mean, that the table has two main columns. One could also add a third column on the left side of the table with a hyperlink to the ”linking article”, in case the patroller would like to access it for further overview or editing, although I doubt that this would be used very much in this context. And on the right side there should definitely be a hyperlink to a ”remove link” function, where the insert of the new link could be easily reverted by the patroller, if deemed unsuitable. In all a table with 4 columns.
4. With such a setup I believe, that the patrolling of these links would cost 1-5 seconds per new link, and I think that I would prefer to get a chunk of 20 to 100 such new links to verify in one go, as opposed to one by one, as with normal content edits. And I think that this would be feasible, since newly added links (especially as in this case, based upon the recommendation of the system) can create considerably less harm, than destructive editing can, so that this patrolling is much less time critical, i.e. one could wait and collect a batch of these added link edits and then let a ”link patroller” sink his/ her teeth into one such batch.
5. The way the patrolling of this has to be done today, it is imho definitely neither easy nor fun. I believe that this would be completely turned around if based on the suggested table- and batch method.
6. Needless to say, that I would be happy to take a look at or beta-test such a function, if you were to go ahead and give it a try.

Thank you @Gunboz for the extensive feedback! We are still in the early stages of determining how we can improve the patroller experience for these edits, so this is super helpful. I will likely have further questions once we can focus on this more, and I'll be sure to reach out if I have further questions or we have some designs ideas ready for feedback. Thank you!

There may also be a next step to this: The other day I had a chat with another user on svwp, @Plumbum208, who actually brought me to you guys in the first place. His analysis, using Petscan was, that the Add a link tool "finds easy links", i.e. links to certain relatively well known subjects, which then end up with a lot of incoming links, possibly leaving other subjects "by the wayside" which might be rarely used and less commongly known, but still (and possibly therefore) would deserve to be more noticed. One use of this insight, after the patrolling issue is handled (btw. svwp does not enforce patrolling, like for example dewp, which might make this issue less severe on svwp), may be to present more than three link suggestion for an article, maybe also in a table with text snippets, then sort these based on the number of incoming links to put the less used on top, or some variant of this idea.

Thanks for this idea @Gunboz, I've filed it as task T310120