User story & summary:

As a newcomer on English Wikipedia, I want access to easy first editing tasks that are structured and help me learn gradually, because I need a chance to gradually learn policies, editing norms, and how to edit.

As an experienced editor or patroller on English Wikipedia, I want proof that the "Add a link" task is valuable for newcomer activation and retention, because structured tasks are a new editing paradigm that create some additional work for patrollers.

Background & research:

We have released the "Add a link" Structured task to most Wikipedias as enabled. We feel confident in doing this as we've conducted several A/B tests that show this task is helping new editors get started:

• Add a link Experiment analysis
• Add an image (and add a link) experiment analysis

However, we recognize that patrollers are sometimes frustrated with these tasks. We've outlined patroller feedback and some of the improvements we've completed to address concerns: Structured_tasks/Community_feedback

Most Wikipedias have decided that the benefits of this task outweigh the additional burden it places on patrollers. However, at some of our larger wikis, we are first talking about the task with communities and letting communities decide if they want to enable this task. On English Wikipedia, community members asked to scale the task out gradually, so we currently have a natural experiment with a control (newcomers don't receive access to the "Add a Link" Structured Task) and a treatment group (newcomers receive access to the "Add a Link" Structured Task).

Connection to WMF Annual Plan:

This work relates to the WMF Annual Plan's Wiki Experiences 1.2 Key Result -- Constructive Activation.

Related Experiments:

The enwiki experiment is already instrumented and released, and we have conducted similar experiments on our pilot wikis in the past:

• Add a link Experiment analysis
• Add an image (and add a link) experiment analysis
• List of previous Growth experiments

Previous Add a Link Experiment Analysis links:

• Add a link: experiment T277356
• Add a link: Instrumentation T273827
• Add a link: leading indicators T277355 gitlab/T277355-leading-indicators.ipynb
• Add a link: analysis T286816
  • gitlab/T286816-edit-data-gathering.ipynb
  • gitlab/T286816-user-dataset.ipynb

Scope of Analysis [Draft]:

Key Metric:

• Constructive Activation (control vs. treatment group on Mobile Web) & (control vs. treatment group on Desktop)

Secondary Metrics:

• Retention (control vs. treatment group on Mobile Web) & (control vs. treatment group on Desktop)
• Revert Rate (control vs. treatment group on Mobile Web) & (control vs. treatment group on Desktop)

Acceptance Criteria:

• Review experiment and instrumentation to ensure we are collecting the data necessary for experiment analysis.
• Discuss scope of the experiment with Growth's PM & document final scope details in this task
• Update notebooks
• ✨Perform analysis✨
• Share findings with Growth team and the Community (either via a summary in this task, or a MediaWiki page).