Both in 2014 (per my request in the Talk page of Category talk:All articles with too few wikilinks) as well as just now (reference my comment/request in Wikipedia talk:Community portal) I've noticed a troubling trend that I think is almost certainly killing people's willingness/enthusiasm to help out with minor tasks needing to be done:
the Community Portal simply says "here's a gargantuan list of things that need to be done. Go! ...and good luck..." RATHER THAN what I think would be far more effective, which would either be accomplished in the form of:
- Upon someone clicking "More" in the Community Portal's "Help Out" tasks to be done, there should be an option to "Sort by Category." This should harvest the Category information that already exists at the bottom of most Wikipedia articles, in order to create more of a "flow chart" sortable method for people to say "well I'm interested/have expertise in [field/category], so let's see if there's anything related to that subject matter that needs to be edited..."
Alternatively, and this would be far more effective, but also far more difficult to accomplish programming-wise:
- Similarly to how we can each choose our own Preferences for our account, either on our own User account settings/preferences page OR on a hypothetical to-be-created Community Portal "Settings" tab, we should each (personally/individually) be able to choose a "display first" set of "My PERSONAL interests are in the fields of [xyz]" such that each user's Community Portal visit would display a custom-tailored Help Out task set, that actually might be relevant to them.
This would require programming to integrate individual users' preferences/interests and cross-compare against what Categories any given article/page has assigned to it.
In my mind I'm just thinking of "if/then"s, for instance "IF User:Bush6984's preferences = brass band, physics, traveling, THEN display on her Community Portal articles whose Categories are related to brass band, physics, traveling."
2.a. Related to this: it could be suggested that upon each person's first visit to the Community Portal that they are prompted to select their fields of interest and/or expertise, so as to "jump start" this effort along its way.
2.b. In tutorials for newcomers, such as The Wikipedia Adventure (that I did), this could be a great way to encourage people to get involved, tailored to their own interests and preferences.
Logically, if people find tasks that are of interest to them and/or that they have expertise in, they will be FAR more likely to click and contribute on one of those to-do tasks than the current setup where it's just a gargantuan mess of things, of which 99.99% of articles are irrelevant, uninteresting, or beyond someone's field of expertise to be able to contribute to helping with. Using myself as a personal example, as well as my degree in psychology understanding how/why people think and act when energy barriers are in-play, I can guarantee that many would-be editors simply give up and don't care to sift through the thousands of "Help Out" tasks, because it's just too much information overload and overwhelm.
If we thus simplify this for them, thereby lowering the cognitive energy barrier required of the Wikipedian for them to be able to contribute as suits their interests, via computing power, I would bet money that input/editing would increase in these realms.