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Suggested edits: Disable Suggested edits when no suggestions are available
Open, Needs TriagePublic

Description

NOTE: An alternative approach is filled as T332824: Make wgSuggestedEditsEnabled modifiable via Special:EditGrowthConfig. Only one of those two solutions should be resolved – the other is a candidate for declining.

On new Wikipedias, Suggested edits aren't working well, because no suggestions are available:

image.png (1×2 px, 364 KB)

We can avoid this state by automatically disabling Suggested edits when no suggestions can be offered to users. Alternatively, we can automatically disable Suggested edits when there is less than N articles available. That way, new Wikipedias can enable Suggested edits themselves once they have the task types available.

Also see the parent and discussion on T270300, T332824 or T341909.

Event Timeline

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I think disabling a feature based on search result count would be bad for usability. Search result count can go from non-zero to zero without any external intervention (e.g. because all tasks get done by new users, or by existing users, or something changes in how structured suggestions are generated) and a homepage module disappearing seemingly for no reason would be very confusing to the user.

On the other hand zero available task types can only happen because the wiki configuration was changed intentionally to not offer any tasks, so hiding the suggested edits module in that case seems reasonable.

There are things we might want to do when there are non-zero task types but zero task (e.g. not send notifications telling the user to try suggested edits), but I don't think disabling the module is one of them. We should instead show it in some disabled state, possibly, if that's worth the extra effort.