User Stories

• Newcomer: As a new Wikipedia editor, I want to be guided through adding links to orphan articles so that I can make meaningful contributions without feeling overwhelmed.
• Experienced Editor: As an experienced editor, I want an efficient way to address orphan articles, so that I can improve Wikipedia’s content network with minimal effort.
• Wikimedian: As a Wikipedia community member, I want to see well-integrated new content, so that Wikipedia remains a well-connected knowledge resource.

An orphan article is defined as "an article with no links from other pages in the main article namespace"

Objective

Develop and deploy a structured task to help newcomers add incoming links to orphan articles, improving their visibility and integration into Wikipedia’s content network.

Background

Structured tasks are designed to simplify editing for newcomers by breaking complex actions into guided steps, ensuring accessibility on mobile devices, and leveraging algorithmic support. The "Add a Link" and "Add an Image" Structured Tasks lead to an increase in newcomer participation, especially the mobile web platform. (1)

Orphan articles lack incoming links, making them hard to discover and navigate. Addressing this issue aligns with research highlighting the importance of internal linking for article visibility and engagement. Studies have also shown structural biases in linking, particularly affecting articles about women and underrepresented topics. Machine learning models can assist editors by identifying high-quality link recommendations.

Related work:

• Research Epic: T293030: [EPIC] Specify new task for Linking articles as a structured tasks
• Research: Link-translation for De-orphaning articles
• Research paper: Orphan Articles: The Dark Matter of Wikipedia
• Wiki-Visibility experimental Tool: Increasing the visibility of orphan articles
• Research paper: Entity Insertion in Multilingual Linked Corpora: The Case of Wikipedia
• Growth Project: Structured Tasks
• Growth Project: Newcomer Task ideas

Expected Outcomes

• Increased number of orphan articles receiving incoming links.
• Improved discoverability (page views) of orphaned articles.
• Enhanced newcomer engagement and retention through structured tasks.

Milestones

• Complete initial recommendation model
• Evaluate recommendation model: ensure recommendations meet quality standards
• Design user interface & workflow
• Community feedback: enable experienced editors to provide feedback
• User testing
• Second Design iteration
• Experiment plan & instrumentation specs
• Pilot A/B test deployment in a set of test wikis with active orphan article backlogs.
• Publish results & gather community feedback for iteration before wider rollout.