In general, mentees being able to select a mentor (based on various informations mentors showcase about themselves) would be nice, that's how the traditional (pre-Growth) mentorship model worked, e.g. Adopt-a-user. (Related: T272497: Consider to pair mentors and mentees based on Topics mentees selected)

If we ever do T264766: Allow mentor talk pages to be protected from non-mentees, this could become something of a loophole.

A minimalistic, Special:ClaimMentee-like interface would be little work (the capability could easily be added to the existing special page). Not very user-friendly though.

Perhaps we should first explore a way for mentees to opt out of mentorship as proposed within T278712 - since at present we have no mechanism that allows mentees to know which alternative mentors they should instead select. And this also solves the issue for mentees who don't want *any* mentor whatsoever.

On testwiki wmf.16 currently mentees can assign themselves a mentor via

action=growthsetmentor&format=json&mentee=[logged in mentee username] &mentor=[mentor's username]&reason=testing&token[token]&formatversion=2

The above action is successful even if

• a mentor is away
• mentors opted to manually select their mentees