**Hypothesis [draft]:** If we prototype a personalised feed of noteworthy recent edits, and gather feedback from at least 20 editors, we will be able to make a decision about whether to build such a feed in MediaWiki.
# User stories
As a new Wikipedia editor, I want to know what interesting changes have been made to pages I care about, so that I can learn more about how to edit and am motivated to return to Wikipedia to stay up to date.
As an experienced Wikipedia editor, I want to know what interesting changes have been made to pages I care about, so that I can identify edits I need to make.
# User problems
New editors generally start their editing experience (especially with the Newcomer Homepage) by learning how to make individual edits. Newcomer Homepage structured tasks - which the Dashboard aims to extend - provide editors with the confidence to make changes to Wikipedia content. We would like to progress that learning to the next step - showing editors that other users are also changing content, and they can review those changes. We have opportunities to show new editors what additional changes have happened to pages they have contributed to, and what is happening on other relevant pages. Users who make a change to a page are generally interested in following whether their change sticks, and what other changes are made to that page. We think that this will engage users to return to the site and make additional edits.
For experienced editors, in informal qualitative polls we have found that somewhere around half of active editors visit their Watchlist as the first page they open when visiting Wikipedia to begin editing. The Watchlist enables them to answer questions like "What has happened since I last visited Wikipedia?" and "What might need my attention now?". The Watchlist (and RecentChanges), however, provide a purely chronological view of edits to Wikipedia. Although they can be filtered, they do not allow users to sort by //importance// or //noteworthiness//. The first edits users see on these pages are simply the most recent to be made, not the most significant, or most requiring review by other editors. Users with larger watchlists may find it very hard to sort the interesting from the mundane, or may miss edits entirely if subsequent edits have happened on a given page.
# 'Edits for you'
We would like to explore building an "Edits for you" feed. The intention would be to surface recent edits that a given editor is likely to find interesting and worth looking at. Unlike {T404174}, here we're thinking beyond the moderator use case to active editors in general. We don't want to focus this feed on edits requiring moderation, though they could certainly be noteworthy and worth displaying among other edits.
This feed likely needs to be as close to 'live' as possible for our end users - if a noteworthy edit happened a few minutes ago, we should be able to show that to users. Some of the categories noted below do not need to be calculated live, however, like the topic of a page - this isn't likely to change on a regular basis, so we could be storing that data and recalculating it on a periodic basis.
Defining 'noteworthy' will be the main challenge here. There are two aspects to this: general interest, and personal interest. Some signals might indicate an edit is inherently interesting, and others might indicate the edit is interesting to a specific user.
**General**
* Size of edit (Large additions or removals)
* Recency (Prioritise more recent edits)
* Number of thanks the edit received (Well-thanked edits are likely to be interesting)
* Revert status (Reverted edits are probably less interesting)
* Article additions with no citation
* Human edits (bot edits are generally not interesting)
* Edit to a page receiving unusually high pageviews
**Personalised**
* Topic (is this edit to a page in a topic the user frequently edits?)
* Edits to pages the user created
* Edits to pages the user edited
* Watch status (is the user watching this page?)
* New discussion started (e.g. on the discussion page of an article of relevance to this user)
* Discussion response in a thread the user already participated in
# Open questions
Other open questions we haven't thought about yet:
* Should this feed be main namespace only? It seems like some of the potential aspects listed above would be easiest to rank if we assumed every edit is a content edit (e.g. talk page edits are almost always substantial additions of content, but content edits might vary more in size and often be negative in size), but we know that non-mainspace edits are also often interesting, talk page additions again being a good example.
* Should this feed include logged actions? An article being patrolled or protected is a very noteworthy action.
* How could we enable editors to customise the parameters of their feed? Could we allow editors to define which parameters are more or less important to them?
* Could we allow editors to override certain parameters, such as topic, rather than using the data we calculate?
* Where should this feed live - a view of Recent Changes, a new special page, or somewhere else?