Project Information
- Name of project: Newcomer tasks
- Project home page: https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Growth/Personalized_first_day/Newcomer_tasks
- Tracking task: T227728: [EPIC] Growth: Newcomer tasks 1.0
- Name of team which owns the project: Growth-Team
- Primary contact for the project: @JTannerWMF
- Target date for deployment: November 5th for the first iteration; ("v1.0"); further iterations in the following weeks and months
- Link to code repository: part of the existing GrowthExperiments extension; still under development
- Is this a brand-new project: sort of but not really, it adds to an existing project (the newcomer homepage)
- Has this project ever been reviewed before: no
- Has any risk assessment (STRIDE, etc.) been performed: I don't believe so
- Is there an existing RFC or has this been presented to the community: no, except for project page updates and community ambassador contacts
- Is this project tied to a team quarterly goal: yes
- Does this project require its own privacy policy: no (other than the existing WelcomeSurvey privacy policy)
Description of the project and how it will be used
The best way to quickly get an idea of what this feature is like is to browse through these mockups. The description below links to individual slides in those mockups.
We are adding a "suggested edits" module to the newcomer homepage (Special:Homepage). This module will display articles that the local wiki community has flagged using "maintenance templates" (the boxes that say things like "this article needs copyediting" or "this article needs an image") and encourage the user to edit one and perform the task (fix typos, add an image, etc). In the first iteration, we will allow users to choose different task types based on difficulty level (mockup) but allow no other customization; in a future iteration we will also ask them which topics they're interested in when they first use the suggested edits feature (mockup) and show them task suggestions based on that (they could then change their topic filter later). When the user clicks a suggestion, we'd initially just send them to that article, but in later iterations we'd also give them guidance when they get there.
As part of this project, we've removed the topic-related questions from the WelcomeSurvey, because the topic question shown when the user initiates the suggested edits module replaces those. We've also added new answer options to the "why did you create your account" question, and we're planning to add a languages question. There are also some styling/layout and minor functionality changes to Special:Homepage itself.
Description of any sensitive data to be collected or exposed
This is the first feature that would use the survey answers from the WelcomeSurvey for personalization. Users would see different interface text in the suggested edits module depending on their answer to the "why did you create your account" question, and in a future iteration we plan to use answers to the languages question to suggest translation tasks.
We'll also be instrumenting how these new features are used with EventLogging. Legal is reviewing our measurement plan. The main things we want to instrument are:
- Clicks on and interactions with the module, like for every other homepage module
- Which pages are shown to the user as suggestions
- Which suggestions each user clicks on
- What happens during edit sessions that follow from a user clicking a suggestion (this data is already recorded by the EditAttemptStep schema, but it's sampled at 6.25% of edit sessions; for edit sessions following from a suggestion click, we'd oversample this schema to 100%)
We would record the user ID for all of these events, subject to a retention period.
Technologies employed
Mostly regular PHP and JavaScript. For topic-based suggestions, we may query the existing ElasticSearch cluster; this isn't part of the first iteration, and we haven't fully decided how to implement it yet.
Dependencies and vendor code
Nothing out of the ordinary, just things that are already in production: OOjs UI, EventLogging, PageImages, PageViewInfo, TextExtracts
Working test environment
This feature is still being developed, but it's enabled in beta labs, so new functionality appears there as patches get merged