Village Pump (technical) - New Extension:GettingStarted

New Extension:GettingStarted

Hi all,

Today we've launched the first preliminary version of a new way to try and get newly-registered people up to speed.

Right now, only between 20-25% of registered accounts ever edit, even once. We'd like to improve that fairly dismal rate. Our first experiment is aimed at helping users who sign up, willing to edit, but who don't have an idea of where to get started editing.

To help those editors get started, we're presenting newly-registered users with articles gathered by SuggestBot from the copyediting backlog, optimizing for shorter articles that are easier to edit. In the future we will continue to tweak and optimize the task list, either by adding other easy task types, or reducing the number of choices new users have to make. We also have future plans for adding helpful tools, such as tooltip-based guided tours of how to edit.

Feel free to take a look at the Special:GettingStarted page now, though it appears slightly differently for users who just registered, so check out the screenshot to the right as well. Please let us know if you have any questions or feedback, and I'll keep folks updated as we iterate on this idea. If you're interested in more detail, our product requirements and analysis plans are available to read. Steven Walling (WMF) • talk 00:38, 14 December 2012 (UTC)

Looks neat. Is the extension pulling off a wiki-page that SuggestBot updates? If so, which page is it? And per WP:BEANS, is that page at least semi-protected? How often is the list updated? (If this is answered somewhere else, sorry about that!) Legoktm (talk) 03:04, 14 December 2012 (UTC)

Yes, SuggestBot is supposed to update Template:Opentask-short every hour (so named because it is similar to Template:Opentask from the Community Portal). I don't believe that template is semi-protected, but good idea. Steven Walling (WMF) • talk 03:08, 14 December 2012 (UTC)

Thanks. Looks pretty cool to me. Legoktm (talk) 03:26, 14 December 2012 (UTC)

SuggestBot reverted the padlock: jcgoble3 (talk) 04:33, 14 December 2012 (UTC)

Aaaand the bots keep going back and forth. It's actually important that we leave out the padlock, since the template is transcluded. It doesn't seem the padlock gets transcluded in to the MediaWiki message, so it's not a real UI problem. However, we probably want the bots to quit edit warring. ;) Steven Walling (WMF) • talk 07:26, 14 December 2012 (UTC)

Time for WP:LAME#Bot wars. I've notified both operators, although I now see that you notified SuggestBot's operator. Nyttend (talk) 12:04, 14 December 2012 (UTC)

Y Done See WP:LAME#Template:Opentask-short. jcgoble3 (talk) 21:55, 14 December 2012 (UTC)

Sorry about causing this, the script updating the template page isn't sophisticated enough to prevent this issue. I've stopped the bot for now and will rewrite its logic so it doesn't touch the padlock template. I'll probably also move the notice about SuggestBot updating the template from the talk page in the process. Should be going again in a few hours. Cheers, Nettrom (talk) 16:15, 14 December 2012 (UTC)

I've implemented a fix that keeps the ... sections intact while the list might get replaced. I've also made the bot less insistent on editing regardless of the circumstances. Should hopefully keep everything running smoothly from now on, otherwise I'm sure someone will get in touch again. Cheers, Nettrom (talk) 19:01, 14 December 2012 (UTC)

I was going to suggest using {{nobots|deny=Lowercase sigmabot}} however your solution works as well. Legoktm (talk) 19:12, 14 December 2012 (UTC)

For me, the "How to help / Fix spelling and grammar ..." box spills about half-off the right side of my screen. Using a 1024x768 resolution with Chrome on XP. Chris857 (talk) 03:34, 14 December 2012 (UTC)

Yes, at that browser size that happens for now. We're going to add styles that are more responsive in next iterations (we do weekly deployments). Steven Walling (WMF) • talk 07:26, 14 December 2012 (UTC)

OT (for here, anyway), is there a discussion somewhere about finding the reason for this surprising (to me) statistic? It's hard to imagine 75% of people bothering to register are just overwhelmed. I wonder if there is some other reason people would register and not edit. Other than giving you a personalized watchlist, what benefit would there be to registering if you are just reading? —— 17:14, 14 December 2012 (UTC)

this seems to me like asking for trouble and frustration. imagine what will happen when, say, 455 new editors will be presented with the same list of 10 "article for improvement". if 10% will respond, the many edit collisions that will ensue is a fire-safe method to guarantee huge amount of frustration.

one way around it is to find some way to "personalize" the list, i.e. distribute the articles among the users in some clever way. complete randomization will not be good - you do not want to present to the user a whole new list every time she goes to Special:GettingStarted, but presenting the same list to everyone can cause trouble. קיפודנחש (aka kipod) (talk) 17:36, 14 December 2012 (UTC)

The frequency of updates is something we can tinker with. It's also in our roadmap of potential features to add a 'refresh' button on the page, allowing people to skip through multiple article sets. We'll also have a sense of the rate at which people are trying to edit, but running in to edit conflicts or other problems (we're anonymously tracking article edit attempts and save attempts or previews, in addition actually saved edits). Steven Walling (WMF) • talk 19:52, 14 December 2012 (UTC)

twisi, the idea of presenting to the whole english speaking crowd a set of 10 articles and asking them "edit these", does not make sense.

if you won't get enough response to create collisions then the whole effort probably isn't worth it, and if you *will*, you'll just frustrate the participants. peace - קיפודנחש (aka kipod) (talk) 20:05, 14 December 2012 (UTC)

The image is too blurry for me to read. Kdammers (talk) 07:49, 15 December 2012 (UTC) — comment moved from section below by PartTimeGnome

You can click the image to see a larger version. Once at that page, click the "Full resolution" link to see the image at its maximum size. (If your mouse pointer then turns into a magnifying glass when you hover over the image, you might need to click once more to see it at maximum size.) – PartTimeGnome (talk | contribs) 16:55, 15 December 2012 (UTC)