As the uploader of a very large number of generic Commons images (about 250,000 BSicons), it seems to be common for random users to find my uploads through Special:Random. Since about August, some of those users have started making edits, like this one. (Virtually all of the edits are tagged as Mobile edit, Mobile app edit, Android app edit, Suggested Edits edit.)

Rather unfortunately, many of those edits have been unproductive, and the quality of edits has decreased over time. The quality of the descriptions, when the users try, is often low; for a specific group of images like BSicons, generic descriptions like "wheelchair icon" are not particularly helpful; many users simply copy text from other parts of the page (including the actual page title and the URL); and I have had to remove or replace almost all of those descriptions. While this is not a problem with the code, I thought it was worth filing a Phabricator task anyway, since this seems to be a systematic problem and is frequently resulting in bad outcomes, and it is unclear to me whether the developers of this feature are aware that this is happening.

In the past 30 days, there were sixteen edits resulting from this feature to pages on my watchlist, and the majority of them were unhelpful.

• Five edits (1 2 3 4 5) appeared to be blatant self-promotion (e.g. the user's own username).
• Five edits (1 2 3 4 5) appeared to be test edits, and the added descriptions were unrelated to the content.
• Six edits (1 2 3 4 5 6) appeared to be coherent descriptions.
  • Of these, four were variations of "Image for BSicon diagrams", the generic description for most of my BSicon uploads; one in English (somehow worded worse than the original), two in Turkish, and one in German. It's obviously somewhat useful to have this translated, and it's not a terrible description, but the process is insanely inefficient compared to, say, doing this in a more semi-automated fashion (e.g. adding lots of descriptions for whole groups of similar images in multiple languages through QuickStatements).
  • The other two were variations of "wheelchair logo": one in Turkish, and one in English (but incorrectly inserted into the German field, so I removed it). Again, not terrible, generally accurate, but it could be better. (Almost every not-terrible description which isn't "Image for BSicon diagrams" has been something like "wheelchair logo", for some reason.)

There aren't really any standards for descriptions in structured data, but most of the descriptions I've written myself sound something like "BSicon, metro (dark blue), representing an open accessible stop on a smooth reverse curve on a closed underground line". (I've modelled these on the tone of Wikidata descriptions.) Unfortunately I haven't added a lot of these yet, because I currently mass-upload using pywikibot and would need to significantly complicate my workflow in order to add detailed descriptions to my new uploads.

Looking at the recent changes resulting from Suggested Edits, some of the descriptions seem to be somewhat-not-terrible, but many of them are either lifted directly from the existing non-structured descriptions (without translation) or are obviously vandalism. They seem to be a little better than the ones on my uploads, though. I don't have any concrete suggestions for how the situation could be improved, although some possibilities that come to mind are:

• Excluding certain groups of images from the feature (e.g. images in X category or with X extension).
• Disabling the feature if e.g. the user has recently visited Special:Random and has made fewer than ten edits.
• Limiting the edits to translations.
• Introducing edit filters for descriptions (e.g. URLs, usernames, emoji).
• Turning off the feature until e.g. a clearer baseline has been established for how to write good descriptions.