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Rollback AND topic selection on Pilot wikis
Closed, DeclinedPublic2 Estimated Story Points

Description

Follow up from: T305408: Newcomer tasks: deploy AND selection to all wikis

The original work on this was to support a series of GLAM events. Although our quick "and" topic selection helped enable those events, it was deemed confusing and possibly disruptive to other newcomers:

  • T305406: Newcomer tasks: quick analysis of AND selection usage found: 11.8% of desktop users and 6.5% of mobile users tried out this feature. Usage does vary by wiki, but the larger proportion of usage on desktop is consistent. We also found that those who exit the topic selection dialogue with AND enabled and in a state that results in zero available tasks are unlikely to fix the problem by reopening the dialogue, and they are also unlikely to return to the Homepage within the next 24 hours.
  • At smaller wikis, the feature isn't very useful because there aren't enough articles within many topics, so newcomers end up with an empty state often.

Based on the data gathered, the feedback from Ambassadors, knowing that we don't have time on our immediately roadmap to focus on topic filtering improvements, and knowing that we need to find ways to cut down our maintenance overhead where possible, I'm in favor of rollback from deployed wikis (we can keep the code in case there's a campaign event that requires it like it happened with the GLAM in the past). That would save us the burden of maintaining a feature that we're not pushing forward and allow us to allocate resources for T297117: Newcomer tasks: Provide more granular/advanced topic filtering for people with specific topics in the future.


Acceptance Criteria:

Remove "And" topic selection from Pilot wikis.

Given I'm at a wiki where the "And" selection was deployed and I have it selected,
When I return to my homepage / suggested edits,
Then suggested edits should be narrowed to the topics that were previously selected, but default to "Or" selection rather than "And" selection.

Event Timeline

Change 912956 had a related patch set uploaded (by Kosta Harlan; author: Kosta Harlan):

[mediawiki/extensions/GrowthExperiments@master] NewcomerTasksUserOptionsLookup: Fallback to OR if match mode is disabled

https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/912956

Change 912959 had a related patch set uploaded (by Kosta Harlan; author: Kosta Harlan):

[operations/mediawiki-config@master] GrowthExperiments: Undeploy topic match mode

https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/912959

Not urgent at all, but if a campaign would require this feature again, I wonder if we should convert the feature flag into a campaign preference instead, eg: "useMatchModes": true.

Not urgent at all, but if a campaign would require this feature again, I wonder if we should convert the feature flag into a campaign preference instead, eg: "useMatchModes": true.

Maybe... we'd probably want to distinguish between the feature being globally available, and then being available to a campaign. Some campaigns might not have anything to do with AND'ing topics together, for example.

kostajh changed the task status from Open to In Progress.Apr 28 2023, 10:31 AM
kostajh triaged this task as Medium priority.

Change 912956 merged by jenkins-bot:

[mediawiki/extensions/GrowthExperiments@master] NewcomerTasksUserOptionsLookup: Fallback to OR if match mode is disabled

https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/912956

Should this remain open, or should it be moved to blocked or QA?

Etonkovidova subscribed.

Should this remain open, or should it be moved to blocked or QA?

I checked pilot wikis (cswiki, arwiki, bnwiki, and ptwiki) Match all selected topics (AND filter) is present. The filter is not a default filter.

The code for removing (disabling) the filter (https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/912956) is done and merged to production; it's just need to be to turned on. Moving to Blocked as pending a decision.

KStoller-WMF set the point value for this task to 2.Oct 31 2023, 4:31 PM

@Trizek-WMF - just FYI if you think any further community communication is needed here.

@Trizek-WMF - just FYI if you think any further community communication is needed here.

Let's chat with Ambassadors, as only their wikis use this feature.

Urbanecm_WMF subscribed.

In that case, this is blocked. Moving to reflect reality.

Do we have any answers on this @Trizek-WMF? There might be some work done around the topic selection dialog for WE1.3 and it would be nice to know if the "AND" match mode is to be kept or not.

I forgot to update the task here. The summary of the discussions (Nov 14) was:

sounds like it’s imperfect but still a useful feature, so we might not want to rollback.

Also, most feedback I get from experienced users is that filtering should be better.

If we have some work done as par of WE1.3, that's good news! :)

Change 912959 abandoned by Kosta Harlan:

[operations/mediawiki-config@master] GrowthExperiments: Undeploy topic match mode

Reason:

https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/912959

Although the current implementation of "And" topic selection isn't ideal, there seems to be community agreement that it's needed, it should just be better. In other words, this is work we want to come back to in the future and improve rather than discard completely.