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"newcomer task add link" is assigned to edits irrelevant to structured edits
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Description

While looking through recent edits made via add a link, I noticed that irrelevant edits can get the "newcomer task add link" tag as well, such as https://cs.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Tu%C4%8D%C5%88%C3%A1ci_z_Madagaskaru_(film)&curid=1623589&diff=19983434&oldid=19983430, https://cs.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Peter_Olayinka&curid=1246461&diff=19983437&oldid=19983427.

Patrik L. was affected by T284088 when trying this out, so what likely hapened is that any edit made to the article when add link interface is not working will be tagged.

Event Timeline

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@MMiller_WMF @nettrom_WMF FYI, this could affect any experiment analysis run on the tags data.

For the old suggested edit tasks, where it isn't really possible to tell suggested and non-suggested edits apart, because they are both normal edits, we tracked edits the user made to a page to which they arrived via the suggested edits system. Link recommendations inherited that. We ended up with a setup where we hook into the save process so we could probably tag edits reliably now.

An ugly but simple hack would be to add some kind of URL flag via ve.init.mw.ArticleTarget.saveFlags and detect that in the onRecentChange_save hook.

For the old suggested edit tasks, where it isn't really possible to tell suggested and non-suggested edits apart, because they are both normal edits, we tracked edits the user made to a page to which they arrived via the suggested edits system. Link recommendations inherited that. We ended up with a setup where we hook into the save process so we could probably tag edits reliably now.

An ugly but simple hack would be to add some kind of URL flag via ve.init.mw.ArticleTarget.saveFlags and detect that in the onRecentChange_save hook.

I don't know how often it happens, but we would want to track non-VE suggested edits as well.

@MMiller_WMF @nettrom_WMF FYI, this could affect any experiment analysis run on the tags data.

If I understand correctly, this is pretty rare. It occurs when the user has help panel disabled and interacts with the link recommendation suggestions, which would only be existing users (who are not part of the experiment group) or experiment group users who find their way to the preference and toggle it off (and those users could be excluded from analysis by looking to see if the help panel preference is enabled or not).

@Urbanecm_WMF @Tgr @kostajh -- if this is really all caused by users who edit the page outside the workflow, having arrived at the page via the "add a link" in recent history, then I think it's okay to leave it the way it is for now without implementing the ugly but simple hack. Those are edits that resulted from the existence of "add a link".

But what would the non-hack way of fixing this be?

Change 698783 had a related patch set uploaded (by Kosta Harlan; author: Kosta Harlan):

[mediawiki/extensions/GrowthExperiments@master] Prevent adding "add links" edit tag when edit is made external to interface

https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/698783

@Urbanecm_WMF @Tgr @kostajh -- if this is really all caused by users who edit the page outside the workflow, having arrived at the page via the "add a link" in recent history, then I think it's okay to leave it the way it is for now without implementing the ugly but simple hack. Those are edits that resulted from the existence of "add a link".

But what would the non-hack way of fixing this be?

I took a different approach in https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/c/mediawiki/extensions/GrowthExperiments/+/698783, there's a bit longer explanation there but tl;dr we know when an edit is using add link interface via the VisualEditor post-save hook, and can check at that time if 1) the edit did not use "add link" interface but 2) we expected it to so that we can then 3) untrack it for the user so that "add links" tag isn't added later on in the request cycle.

kostajh triaged this task as Medium priority.Jun 11 2021, 11:27 AM

Change 698783 merged by jenkins-bot:

[mediawiki/extensions/GrowthExperiments@master] Prevent adding "add links" edit tag when edit is made external to interface

https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/698783

Etonkovidova subscribed.

Checked on wmf.14 and also re-checked the test cases reported in T277518: Add Links: edits from VE/source editor tagged as Suggested: add links (for possible regressions) - any edits done outside of link recommendations surface won't have Suggested:add links tag.


A question to @MMiller_WMF (and @nettrom_WMF) re tracking newcomer tasks.

  • Undoing Suggested: add links edits - Suggested: add links tag (and Newcomer task tag) won't be displayed), only Undo tag will be present. It might make it difficult to track down reverted edits.
unstructured taskslink recommendation task
Screen Shot 2021-07-15 at 3.39.06 PM.png (926×3 px, 396 KB)
Screen Shot 2021-07-15 at 3.41.10 PM.png (956×3 px, 425 KB)

@Etonkovidova -- I think what you're saying sounds fine. Ideally, we only want the "Suggested: add links" tag on those edits that are really adding links through our workflow. But what I would expect to see is the "Reverted" tag on the first edit in your screenshots (since they were undone in the second edit). I wonder why that's not there?

@Etonkovidova -- I think what you're saying sounds fine. Ideally, we only want the "Suggested: add links" tag on those edits that are really adding links through our workflow. But what I would expect to see is the "Reverted" tag on the first edit in your screenshots (since they were undone in the second edit). I wonder why that's not there?

I did some additional testing (checked for rollback action) and compared it for tags that are added to non-suggesed edits (and just normal edits) that gets reverted.

It turned our that the present behavior for applying tags when add link edits gets reverted is accurate.
(Edit #1) 'Yes' answer gets published - Newcomer task and Suggested: add links tags are added.
(Edit #2) Edit # 1 is reverted, either via the rollback link in View history or via the undo link.

Edit # 2 gets tags Rollback or Undo (without Newcomer task or Suggested: add links) but Edit #1 will get additional tag Reverted.

My confusion was due to

  • View history requires additional reload, so the reverted edits would display Reverted tag
  • Newcomer task tag will be retained with Rollback or Undo tags, but not with Suggested: add links tag (this is the difference that I noticed in my comment above). But this is not important since Reverted will be applied to the edit that was reverted.
non-structured task - "Newcomer task" is present for reverted editsstructured task - "Newcomer task" is NOT present for reverted edits
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Screen Shot 2021-07-19 at 2.02.51 PM.png (228×2 px, 122 KB)