Wikipedia talk:Growth Team features/Archive 10
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Copyedit popup
When I click on an article in the Suggested edits section of my Homepage, I get a little popup explaining how to copyedit. This is awesome! But two things bug me:
- There are six "slides" of tips listed, but there is no "next" or "back" button to navigate through them. I can only click on each individual number, which means I must carefully reposition my mouse for each slide. Adding a "next" and "back" button would make this a lot easier.
- The link provided for "Learn more about copy editing" at the end goes to WP:WBA instead of WP:CE. I would think the latter is more relevant to copy editing – is there any reason the former was chosen? Toadspike [Talk] 16:17, 20 September 2025 (UTC)
- Point 1 is something for Phabricator. Point 2, see Wikipedia_talk:Growth_Team_features/Archive_7#Change_help_page_associated_with_"Copyedit"_task?. * Pppery * it has begun... 16:57, 20 September 2025 (UTC)
- Hrm, thanks. I didn't know that the "Copyedit" task includes pages tagged with non-copyedit issues. In that case the link doesn't need changing. The task name is a little confusing, but I can't think of a better option. Toadspike [Talk] 17:14, 20 September 2025 (UTC)
- In the traditional publishing world, copyediting includes editing for a variety of style matters, including tone and organization of content. isaacl (talk) 17:27, 20 September 2025 (UTC)
- I am going to be complaining about this until the end of time. To get out my broken record: I really don't think that GTF should be calling any of these edits "copyediting", as that just leads to confusion. -- asilvering (talk) 19:33, 23 September 2025 (UTC)
- +1, though I'm not sure quite what else to call them. "Small improvements" or "quick cleanup" make them sound unimportant. Toadspike [Talk] 20:11, 23 September 2025 (UTC)
- "Simple cleanup", "maintenance"... anything but "copy edits". I don't think "small improvements" makes it sound unimportant - at least for the purposes of the newbies looking to get their toes wet, "small" is a selling point. -- asilvering (talk) 20:14, 23 September 2025 (UTC)
- Good thoughts. What's the process for formally discussing a name change? Does it need an RfC? A Phab ticket? I really don't think "copyedit" is the best word for this – it is vague and boring.
- Of those options I think "small improvements" or "simple cleanup" is best, though if we call it "simple" and editors then have trouble it could be more demoralizing. Toadspike [Talk] 20:21, 23 September 2025 (UTC)
- "Simple cleanup", "maintenance"... anything but "copy edits". I don't think "small improvements" makes it sound unimportant - at least for the purposes of the newbies looking to get their toes wet, "small" is a selling point. -- asilvering (talk) 20:14, 23 September 2025 (UTC)
- It's not clear to me that it's confusing to newcomers, who have no knowledge of what gets tagged on English Wikipedia as a copyediting issue. But if there is a wording that is equally clear to new editors and to experienced Wikipedia editors who have a specific frame of reference for the term copyediting, then sure. isaacl (talk) 04:49, 24 September 2025 (UTC)
- That confusion is actually part of what brought me to GTF in the first place four years ago as a newbie. The newcomer homepage refers to these edits as "copy editing". -- asilvering (talk) 04:58, 24 September 2025 (UTC)
- I appreciate your personal feedback. I'm not sure, though, if your concern is the same as the Toadspike's. It sounds more like you would prefer a term that provides more indication of what is covered, for those unfamiliar with the term copyedit? I would agree that copyedit is primarily a publishing term. isaacl (talk) 05:10, 24 September 2025 (UTC)
- That confusion is actually part of what brought me to GTF in the first place four years ago as a newbie. The newcomer homepage refers to these edits as "copy editing". -- asilvering (talk) 04:58, 24 September 2025 (UTC)
- +1, though I'm not sure quite what else to call them. "Small improvements" or "quick cleanup" make them sound unimportant. Toadspike [Talk] 20:11, 23 September 2025 (UTC)
- I am going to be complaining about this until the end of time. To get out my broken record: I really don't think that GTF should be calling any of these edits "copyediting", as that just leads to confusion. -- asilvering (talk) 19:33, 23 September 2025 (UTC)
- In the traditional publishing world, copyediting includes editing for a variety of style matters, including tone and organization of content. isaacl (talk) 17:27, 20 September 2025 (UTC)
- Hrm, thanks. I didn't know that the "Copyedit" task includes pages tagged with non-copyedit issues. In that case the link doesn't need changing. The task name is a little confusing, but I can't think of a better option. Toadspike [Talk] 17:14, 20 September 2025 (UTC)
- @Toadspike, I logged the feature improvement you suggest. The numbers are supposed to be big enough so that they would be easy to be clicked. I added a screenshot to the Phab task, and the numbers are the same size of regular text (if not bigger). Feel free to add your screenshot there si that we can compare.
- @all, as we know that relying on maintenance templates tagging is not always working well for copyediting, and that copyediting's definition varies a lot between wikis, we are exploring a new, more specific structured task, that will encourage users to work on revising the tone of existing edits. More to come about this soon with @Sdkb-WMF. Trizek_(WMF) (talk) 15:53, 25 September 2025 (UTC)
Inappropriate links are being added quite frequently
First, case does matter. A number of suggested links are ignoring this. "Cairns region" just means the area around Cairns, plain old English. "Cairns Region" refers to a local goverment area created in 2008. So, when discussing anything in the last century, it makes no sense to link to Cairns Region. I am seeing a number of these case-insenstive suggestions adding inappropriate links. This is just one example.
The article fitting out is about shipbuilding. Unfortunately, it's also a plain English expression used in any form of building construction but it is being suggested to add this link in articles unrelated to shipbuilding.
Similarly "Kin Kin Creek" is being changed to Kin Kin Creek. Again, not appropriate. Yes, the town name happens to be the same as the creek name, but that's no reason to partially link the creek name to the town.
Since it is obvious that users are mindlessly adding these particular suggested links without any kind of checking for appropriatness, please remove them from the program. Is anybody reviewing the suggested links before putting them out there to this army of "just do what I'm told" newcomers? Maybe that list should be made available so people can point out ones to be removed before they are offered
Do we have any way of determining if these edits (in total) are being reviewed? Because, based on the high-level of errors I am seeing in my watchlist, a lot of erroneous links will be added by this program if they are not being *carefully* reviewed, doing harm to the encyclopedia. It's not a great way to start my day to this barrage of errors in my watchlist.
Please can we review this program of adding links to make it less harmful by more careful curation of the suggestions and clear advice to the newcomers to check both articles (and use some common sense!). Kerry (talk) 21:42, 24 September 2025 (UTC)
- Whether or not it should be, the article Church of England is about the Anglican church in the United Kingdom. If the term "Church of England" is in an Australian article, then its link (if needed) would to be Anglican Church of Australia (unless the context was talking about the church in the UK) and presumably similiar comments would appear to Canadian articles and the Anglican Church of Canada etc. This is another suggested link that should be removed from the program. Kerry (talk) 21:52, 24 September 2025 (UTC)
- Hi Kerry! Thanks for raising this. Several of the people involved in this work are away this week at an offsite, but I have flagged this for them to look at when they get back.
- For now, one thing: Rich Farmbrough also noticed issues with case sensitivity above, and I have observed them myself, so the Machine Learning team is exploring potential adjustments to the model to improve that. That work is captured at phab:T405185 — please feel free to add comments there if you notice anything missing in the task description that might be useful for the team to have in mind as they work on this.
- Cheers, Sdkb-WMF talk 22:44, 24 September 2025 (UTC)
- It might be worth checking - if Foo is the putative link, whether Foo (disambiguation) exists. All the best: Rich Farmbrough 12:51, 25 September 2025 (UTC).
- Another today inapropriate link Church of Scotland (which discusses the church as it operates in Scotland) was added to the Austrlian article Gabbinbar Homestead. Now this is an example of a situation where isn't really a link to go there as the context of the mention of the Church of Scotland is 1868 and we don't really have an article about Australian Presbyterianism in that era, as Presbyterian Church of Australia describes an organisation founded in the 1900s (and the Presbyterians in Australia have split and merged with other denominations over the years so "it's complicated"). Now initially I just reverted to remove the link, but then I replaced it with Presbyterianism which is a generic article on the beliefs and practices of Presbyterians not linked to any specific location; I did this as I don't know whether which program would serve up this inappropriate link to another user at some later stage so I needed to link it to something to prevent that. Will the suggestion be offered up again to another user or is it a one-shot? Kerry (talk) 23:47, 25 September 2025 (UTC)
- And another inappropriate link Toogoom was added to an article discussing a farm by that name. Yes, it is the name of an article about a town but a farm isn't a town. I notice that this seems to be an ongoing problem with suggestions involving place names. This is because place naming spreads across feature types, e.g. Brisbane River -> town of Brisbane -> South Brisbane, East Brisbane -> East Brisbane State School, South Brisbane Methodist Church, etc. This is why we are getting suggestions to add links resulting in Kin Kin Creek. It seems to me that proper names are creating a lot of these inappropriate links (where people are mindlessly adding whatever is suggested -- I presume we can't tell when someone decides not to add the suggested link?). Whereas I don't see the linking problems with the architectural features (e.g. sash window). Might it be better to skip proper names in this program and stick with architectural feature? Kerry (talk) 01:05, 26 September 2025 (UTC)
- And another inappropriate link Toogoom was added to an article discussing a farm by that name. Yes, it is the name of an article about a town but a farm isn't a town. I notice that this seems to be an ongoing problem with suggestions involving place names. This is because place naming spreads across feature types, e.g. Brisbane River -> town of Brisbane -> South Brisbane, East Brisbane -> East Brisbane State School, South Brisbane Methodist Church, etc. This is why we are getting suggestions to add links resulting in Kin Kin Creek. It seems to me that proper names are creating a lot of these inappropriate links (where people are mindlessly adding whatever is suggested -- I presume we can't tell when someone decides not to add the suggested link?). Whereas I don't see the linking problems with the architectural features (e.g. sash window). Might it be better to skip proper names in this program and stick with architectural feature? Kerry (talk) 01:05, 26 September 2025 (UTC)
- Another today inapropriate link Church of Scotland (which discusses the church as it operates in Scotland) was added to the Austrlian article Gabbinbar Homestead. Now this is an example of a situation where isn't really a link to go there as the context of the mention of the Church of Scotland is 1868 and we don't really have an article about Australian Presbyterianism in that era, as Presbyterian Church of Australia describes an organisation founded in the 1900s (and the Presbyterians in Australia have split and merged with other denominations over the years so "it's complicated"). Now initially I just reverted to remove the link, but then I replaced it with Presbyterianism which is a generic article on the beliefs and practices of Presbyterians not linked to any specific location; I did this as I don't know whether which program would serve up this inappropriate link to another user at some later stage so I needed to link it to something to prevent that. Will the suggestion be offered up again to another user or is it a one-shot? Kerry (talk) 23:47, 25 September 2025 (UTC)
- It might be worth checking - if Foo is the putative link, whether Foo (disambiguation) exists. All the best: Rich Farmbrough 12:51, 25 September 2025 (UTC).
Lack of case sensitivity
Today I have seen the suggested links being added to "the new school" (an plain English concept) to The New School and "south east corner" to South East Corner, and so on. Can we please remove these case-insensitive suggestions. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Kerry Raymond (talk • contribs) 07:46, 27 September 2025 (UTC)
More case-insensitive inappropriate links suggested
In this suggested edit "the goods line" (used in the plain English sense of a railway line used for carrying goods is being linked to a specific The Goods Line article. Kerry (talk) 21:59, 27 September 2025 (UTC)
Add a Link warning message
In the discussion above, the idea came up of a warning message specific to users who appear to be adding inappropriate links via the Add a Link structured task. To follow up on that, here is a draft for such a message:
Hello, I'm {{subst:REVISIONUSER}}. Thank you for editing Wikipedia. I noticed that some of the linking you did {{#if:{{{article|}}}|at {{{article}}}}} via the Add a Link structured task appears to have linked to an article on a different topic than was being referenced.
Please keep in mind that the link suggestions you are shown are machine-generated and will be wrong some of the time. Your role in the task is to identify which suggestions are correct and add only those links.
We value a small number of good edits over a larger number with more errors, so you are encouraged to edit slowly at a pace that makes you confident in your judgements. Editors who rush through the task and make many errors may be restricted.
If you have any questions about the Add a Link task, feel free to reply to ask me or to [[User talk:{{#mentor:PAGENAME}}|submit a question to your mentor]]. Thanks.
This message could be incorporated into the existing user warning system and added to Twinkle. Hopefully it'd encourage patrollers to communicate with newcomers struggling with the task while reducing the effort needed to do so. What do you think of it? I'll leave it to someone else to implement if desired (with any desired tweaks) in deference to community control over the user warning/template space.
Courtesy pinging the editors from the prior thread: @Kerry Raymond, @Rich Farmbrough, and @Asilvering.
Cheers, Sdkb-WMF talk 05:40, 23 September 2025 (UTC)
- Looks good to me, except
appears to have linked to an article on a different topic than was being referenced
should probably be more vague (eg, "added an inappropriate link") or account for other possibilities - unless it's been fixed recently and I didn't notice, the structured link task still makes suggestions like names of cities and countries, where the link might go to the correct article, but where we'd prefer there was no wikilink at all. -- asilvering (talk) 05:55, 23 September 2025 (UTC)- @Asilvering, good point! Perhaps there should be a generic message by default but variables to capture more specific ways in which someone might be adding an inappropriate link. If these variables were built into the Twinkle integration, hopefully editors would use them — it seems important to educate a newcomer who is struggling with the task on what specifically they are doing wrong. Sdkb-WMF talk 14:50, 23 September 2025 (UTC)
- Maybe we can have a generic template with an open-ended parameter replacing that part of the default message? I can definitely work on a Twinkle pull request for this once the template is ready. Chaotic Enby (talk · contribs) 17:14, 23 September 2025 (UTC)
- I think that would work well.
- On another note, how does the
{{#mentor:PAGENAME}}magic work? I tried it on my alt unsuccessfully; I was asking Trizek (WMF) how to do that on the Teahouse talk a while back, but never figured out how to make it work. Perfect4th (talk) 17:40, 23 September 2025 (UTC)- Sadly, I don't think it can do what you were thinking about, as we don't have a
{{USERNAME}}magic word that returns the reader's username. More generally, that magic word takes the username (without User:), so{{#mentor:Chaotic Enby}}givesLuniZunie(fun fact, I had no idea I even had a mentor) and{{#mentor:Perfect4th}}givesAhmetlii. Chaotic Enby (talk · contribs) 18:48, 23 September 2025 (UTC) - [[User talk:{{#mentor:{{SUBPAGENAME}}}}|submit a question to your mentor]] should work fine. You may want to make it conditional on there being a mentor. All the best: Rich Farmbrough 13:09, 24 September 2025 (UTC).
- {{subst:#mentor:{{SUBPAGENAME}}}} is probably better, because the mentor name is then saved explicitly, and archiving/copy paste won't break it. All the best: Rich Farmbrough 13:12, 24 September 2025 (UTC).
- {{#mentor:{{SUBPAGENAME}}}} will work at a user talk page. However, I'm not sure if substing would be an interesting option, the mentor can retire, or the mentee being claimed. Trizek_(WMF) (talk) 15:34, 25 September 2025 (UTC)
- @Rich Farmbrough my understanding is that everyone has a mentor (whether they know it or not). -- asilvering (talk) 16:50, 25 September 2025 (UTC)
- Yep, although only half of the editors have access to mentor features (from the mentee side) by default. Chaotic Enby (talk · contribs) 17:24, 25 September 2025 (UTC)
- I'm pretty sure that too has been turned up to 100% at this point. -- asilvering (talk) 18:20, 25 September 2025 (UTC)
- It is 100% now. :) Trizek_(WMF) (talk) 06:58, 26 September 2025 (UTC)
- What is the point of that? And how is it decided? All the best: Rich Farmbrough 18:19, 27 September 2025 (UTC).
- It is 100% now. :) Trizek_(WMF) (talk) 06:58, 26 September 2025 (UTC)
- I'm pretty sure that too has been turned up to 100% at this point. -- asilvering (talk) 18:20, 25 September 2025 (UTC)
- {{subst:#mentor:{{SUBPAGENAME}}}} is probably better, because the mentor name is then saved explicitly, and archiving/copy paste won't break it. All the best: Rich Farmbrough 13:12, 24 September 2025 (UTC).
- Sadly, I don't think it can do what you were thinking about, as we don't have a
- Maybe we can have a generic template with an open-ended parameter replacing that part of the default message? I can definitely work on a Twinkle pull request for this once the template is ready. Chaotic Enby (talk · contribs) 17:14, 23 September 2025 (UTC)
- @Asilvering, good point! Perhaps there should be a generic message by default but variables to capture more specific ways in which someone might be adding an inappropriate link. If these variables were built into the Twinkle integration, hopefully editors would use them — it seems important to educate a newcomer who is struggling with the task on what specifically they are doing wrong. Sdkb-WMF talk 14:50, 23 September 2025 (UTC)
- @Asilvering, @Chaotic Enby, @Perfect4th, and @Rich Farmbrough: My read of the discussion above is that there's consensus this would be a nice warning message to have, with some suggestions for improvement on my initial draft. Would one of you be able to go ahead and create it with whatever language you think is best, and the community can refine it/request Twinkle integration from there? Cheers, Sdkb-WMF talk 18:09, 30 September 2025 (UTC)
- I'm on it! Chaotic Enby (talk · contribs) 18:18, 30 September 2025 (UTC)
- Done with {{uw-addalink}}, I can work on the Twinkle integration now! Chaotic Enby (talk · contribs) 19:53, 30 September 2025 (UTC)
- @Sdkb-WMF: I just coded it and submitted the pull request. The only hiccup is that the
{{{reason}}}parameter can't be filled, but that is actually a broader issue with Twinkle's warning menu, which doesn't allow the user to fill in extra parameters for templates that allow them. Chaotic Enby (talk · contribs) 10:12, 5 October 2025 (UTC)
- @Sdkb-WMF: I just coded it and submitted the pull request. The only hiccup is that the
Suggested links is adding links to disambiguation pages
See this edit. Kerry (talk) 21:26, 27 September 2025 (UTC)
- Hi Kerry; thanks for flagging this, and apologies for the delayed reply! The "Add a Link" task is designed so that it does not suggest adding links to disambiguation pages. It also suggests a maximum of three links per article, far fewer than the editor added here. I'm guessing that what happened is that the editor, after completing the suggested edits, switched over to the VisualEditor and added additional links there, including the disambiguation page link(s). There is a warning that pops up whenever you add a link to a disambiguation page, but they may have missed it. Hopefully the ping/explanation from your revert will help them learn. Sdkb‑WMF talk 23:47, 6 October 2025 (UTC)
Concerns about mentor editing skill
Is this the correct place to report concerns about an editor's competence to be a mentor? I've just noticed a editor has signed themselves up to be a mentor, but I don't think they're quite ready yet. They have a handful of recent warnings for LLM usage, improper GA reviews, and numerous other odds and ends. Sarsenet•he/they•(talk) 13:23, 10 October 2025 (UTC)
- @Sarsenet Thanks for keeping an eye on the suitability of Mentors. As WMF staff, I likely should stay out of the decision making, but I can share that if there is consensus, an administrator can remove specific users from Mentorship through Special:ManageMentors.
- The Growth team designed Mentorship so that administrators can set the eligibility thresholds for becoming a mentor, which can be adjusted at Special:CommunityConfiguration/Mentorship. For example, if the current threshold of 500 edits or 90 days seems too low, it can be raised to a higher level. I hope that helps! - KStoller-WMF (talk) 16:52, 10 October 2025 (UTC)
- One other note, English Wikipedia also has the option to uncheck the "Editors who meet all eligibility criteria are automatically eligible to enroll as mentors" setting via: Special:CommunityConfiguration/Mentorship.
- Doing so would change the mentorship enrollment process so that eligible editors who meet the defined thresholds could no longer sign up directly. Instead, only administrators would be able to add editors to Mentorship. There are pros and cons to this approach, but we built this functionality for wikis that prefer more oversight and control over who becomes a mentor. Currently, only Arabic Wikipedia manages mentorship in this way, but the option is available to all wikis. - KStoller-WMF (talk) 18:00, 10 October 2025 (UTC)
- Sarsenet think this would be more appropriate to bring to WP:AN’s attention. signed, Rosguill talk 18:09, 10 October 2025 (UTC)
- Would saying something to the editor on their talk page be effective or worth a try, Sarsenet? I'd hope that a newer editor might be receptive to a "thanks for volunteering but I don't think you're quite ready for this yet" from a more experienced one, and it seems gentler than going straight to AN, but it is admittedly a situational- and editor-dependent solution. Perfect4th (talk) 18:45, 10 October 2025 (UTC)
- I've posted asking them to withdraw. Doug Weller talk 09:38, 11 October 2025 (UTC)
- And that failed, spectacularly Doug Weller talk 19:03, 12 October 2025 (UTC)
- They did withdraw, but yeah, that's not an especially collaborative response. Perfect4th (talk) 23:33, 12 October 2025 (UTC)
- And that failed, spectacularly Doug Weller talk 19:03, 12 October 2025 (UTC)
- I've posted asking them to withdraw. Doug Weller talk 09:38, 11 October 2025 (UTC)
- Would saying something to the editor on their talk page be effective or worth a try, Sarsenet? I'd hope that a newer editor might be receptive to a "thanks for volunteering but I don't think you're quite ready for this yet" from a more experienced one, and it seems gentler than going straight to AN, but it is admittedly a situational- and editor-dependent solution. Perfect4th (talk) 18:45, 10 October 2025 (UTC)
- Hello all
- We see the same problem on other wikis, which is worth investigating with a view to possible future improvements. What do you think would help identify potential mentors? We already have options for becoming a mentor listed on the community configuration page. Are any missing? Do you have any other ideas that could help select good mentors?
- Thank you, Trizek_(WMF) (talk) 08:37, 16 October 2025 (UTC)
- Is there a way to automatically track whether mentees answer questions, or their activity in general? I've previously raised directly with an admin an inactive mentor with months of unanswered questions. CMD (talk) 09:16, 16 October 2025 (UTC)
- Not as a "native" feature, but it is something that seems to be doable using a bot. French Wikipedia considers that option. They already have a bot that tracks when someone responds to the welcome message (which is sent to all new users - no discrimination - and signed by their mentor). Trizek_(WMF) (talk) 16:20, 16 October 2025 (UTC)
- Oh that's useful. Do they also track if mentors follow up? CMD (talk) 17:06, 16 October 2025 (UTC)
- Not as a "native" feature, but it is something that seems to be doable using a bot. French Wikipedia considers that option. They already have a bot that tracks when someone responds to the welcome message (which is sent to all new users - no discrimination - and signed by their mentor). Trizek_(WMF) (talk) 16:20, 16 October 2025 (UTC)
- Is there a way to automatically track whether mentees answer questions, or their activity in general? I've previously raised directly with an admin an inactive mentor with months of unanswered questions. CMD (talk) 09:16, 16 October 2025 (UTC)
Growth News #35
A quarterly update from the Growth team on our work to improve the new editor experience.
New releases
English Wikipedia gets "Add a Link" Structured Task
We released the "Add a Link" Structured Task to 100% of accounts at English Wikipedia on Tuesday, September 2nd (before then it was available to 20% of accounts).
Growth features for Wikidata
After examining if the Growth features and Mentorship could be adapted to Wikidata, we activated the Growth features on Beta Wikidata to allow for testing and discussion (T400937). Although some features, like Suggested Edits, are Wikipedia-specific, the Growth team designed most features to be more wiki-agnostic.
Work in progress
Revise Tone Structured Task
The Growth team is making progress on the technical architecture, onboarding design, and early user testing. We are targeting an A/B test before the end of this year, with constructive edits by newcomers as the primary success metric.
Add a link to more wikis
The machine learning team has been working on a new model that can suggest links to more languages, including Urdu, Chinese, and Japanese Wikipedias. We are starting to release the “Add a Link” feature to Wikipedias that weren’t supported by the previous model.
Add a link, which can be configured by the community locally, increases the chance that a new contributor will make their first edit and then continue to participate in Wikipedia.
Research
The Growth team is involved in several research initiatives to help guide our future work:
Progression System – We have published initial findings from interviews with 10 English and French Wikipedia newcomers. The research examined motivations, challenges, and feedback on a prototype system intended to help editors build confidence, develop skills, and contribute more constructively over time.
Mobile Web Editing Research – This project combines quantitative and qualitative data, community feedback, and user journey analysis to identify possible ways to enhance the mobile editing experience.
Newcomers Survey – This project surveys successful newcomers on English Wikipedia to understand their early editing experiences, tool use, and community interactions.
Community events
The Growth team participated in several community events to listen, share, and collaborate on improving newcomer experiences across Wikimedia projects.
Wikimania - Organizers as key partners to support newcomers' growth in our movement
This session invited organizers to share how they introduce newcomers to Growth features and the challenges they encounter. The discussion focused on common newcomer questions and opportunities to strengthen collaboration in supporting new editors.
Wikimania - Lightning Talk: Structured Tasks
This talk demonstrated how Structured Tasks help newcomers take their first successful steps on Wikipedia. It shared impact data, community configurations, and a demo of “Add a Link,” illustrating how these tasks make editing more accessible and sustainable, particularly for mobile contributors.
Wikimania - Building a Sustainable Future for Wikimedia Contributors
With active editor numbers declining, the Contributors Strategy aims to create a clearer, more engaging path for participation. This session, led by the WMF Contributors group with involvement from the Editing, Growth, Moderator Tools, and Connection (formerly Campaigns) teams, highlighted efforts to streamline contributor experiences, offer structured and mobile-friendly workflows, and foster meaningful engagement. Participants learned about ongoing initiatives and shared feedback to help shape a more inclusive and sustainable future for Wikimedia contributors.
CEE Meeting - Retaining beginners and improving content moderation: an inclusive and sustainable future for Wikipedia contributors
Many communities face a decline in volunteer engagement. Newcomers often leave soon after joining, while experienced editors struggle to manage increasingly complex workflows and overwhelming backlogs. We presented the Contributors Strategy and the different features and workflows that can help communities to address these challenges. We listened to the specific needs of the CEE communities to help guide the Contributors teams' work.
Growth team's newsletter prepared by the Growth team and posted by bot • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.
10:23, 22 October 2025 (UTC)
Question regarding mentee questions
Hello, I recently signed up to be a mentor and today I got a question that doesn't really make much sense.
What's the standard process here? Do I reply and say something like 'Welcome to Wikipedia, let me know if you have any questions...' etc., or just ignore it? SnowyRiver28 (talk) 07:21, 12 October 2025 (UTC)
- I usually just say something like, “Hi (username)! The mentor question feature is to ask a question about editing Wikipedia – I can't help with much outside of that. Do you have any questions about editing Wikipedia?“ I don’t usually get a response. Perfect4th (talk) 17:56, 12 October 2025 (UTC)
- Yeah, those questions come up fairly often. You can respond with something like what @Perfect4th suggested, or if it completely falls below the WP:CIR standard, you can just ignore it. Sdkb talk 01:26, 13 October 2025 (UTC)
- I tend to go with "Good luck!" or "Congratulations!" for this variety. A bit of a laugh at their expense, I suppose, but I don't think these sorts are likely to come back. -- asilvering (talk) 02:45, 13 October 2025 (UTC)
- How are expectations set? It's quite important that both "editing" and "Wikipedia" are given prominence. We should also make sure that our somewhat unusual use of the word "editor" is explained. All the best: Rich Farmbrough 07:45, 15 October 2025 (UTC).
- @Rich Farmbrough As for how expectations are set, mentees can contact their mentors from the Homepage, through the Help Panel, or directly on their mentor’s talk page once they become more familiar with how Talk pages work.
- On the Homepage, the main text reads:
- We’ve assigned you an experienced editor to answer your questions about editing. Learn more about mentors.
- Ask your mentor a question about editing
- View your mentor's other conversations
- Selecting Learn more about mentors opens a pop-up with additional details, including how to opt out of Mentorship:
- Who is your mentor?
- Your mentor is another person with a lot of experience editing on Wikipedia. They’ve volunteered to guide newer people like you on how to edit, and can answer questions you may have about using the site.
- When you send a message to your mentor, they will see it on their user talk page and you should receive a notification when they reply.
- When newcomers reach out to their mentor through the Help Panel, there is slightly less context provided, but the copy still emphasizes that the questions should relate to editing. Based on enwiki Mentorship data (available in the "Questions posted to mentors or help desk" section), most newcomers currently contact their mentors from the Homepage rather than through the Help Panel.
- We always welcome suggestions for improving the copy. However, in some cases I imagine that no amount of context or onboarding is likely to prevent the occasional off-topic or unexpected message.
- I also wanted to note that this is a useful edge case to consider as the Growth team considers ways to automate the review of inactive mentors (related to the Mentor_inactivity_threshold discussion & T321509). In some situations, choosing not to respond to a mentee’s question may be a reasonable approach. - KStoller-WMF (talk) 22:33, 16 October 2025 (UTC)
- The wording seems pretty explicit. I think "no response" is unlikely to be the optimum response- we might consider four categories of message ("question").
- About editing.
- About content.
- General.
- Offensive, harmful or otherwise inappropriate.
- In most of the first two cases we should either be able to reply constructively, or point the editor to another resource. In the case of general questions that are fact-based we can point them to the Reference Desk (unless we happen to know the answer, and are happy to reply). For most other categories, (life advice etc.) we should have a form of words which explains we do not provide advice, and maybe a link to a list of organisations that do.
- In the case of offensive or harmful, for milder cases a canned response following the lines of the escalating warnings is probably the way to go, for more serious cases a notification on ANI is appropriate. The default for non-editing-advice and non-content can be a simple "I am happy to advise about editing Wikipedia, but I will not [generally] respond to any other messages." This could be ameliorated with a reason, but to some extent that is dangerous ground as it invites argument. All the best: Rich Farmbrough 10:28, 20 October 2025 (UTC).
- I don't wish to imply that there should be a compulsory process for mentors, more that there should be some advice available for them, to give them options for difficult messages and mentees. Hope that's helpful. All the best: Rich Farmbrough 10:33, 20 October 2025 (UTC).
- I agree with this. Perhaps there could be some sort of template developed to standardise the response mentors use for questions that are off-topic and unrelated to the encyclopedia? I've only been a mentor a short while and have noticed these form the majority of the questions I've received. I feel this would be better than simply not responding to the question (except for offensive or harmful statements from mentees). SnowyRiver28 (talk) 13:35, 20 October 2025 (UTC)
- I like the thought of that template — do you or someone else have an interest in creating it? Sdkb talk 03:59, 23 October 2025 (UTC)
- I’d be happy to do it when I get the chance, but if someone sees this before I get to it feel free! SnowyRiver28 (talk) 04:15, 23 October 2025 (UTC)
- I like the thought of that template — do you or someone else have an interest in creating it? Sdkb talk 03:59, 23 October 2025 (UTC)
- The wording seems pretty explicit. I think "no response" is unlikely to be the optimum response- we might consider four categories of message ("question").
People's names - not a good idea in this project
A lot of people have the same name, some of them are famous, some of them aren't. We have many disambiguation pages that demonstrate how common names are. A suggested link with a person's name (unless they are really famous) is often going to be someone unrelated to the article content. Look at this this suggested edit. A description of a fire affecting the building which is subject of the article also burned down the offices of William Hendren next door. On the basis of having the same name, the suggested link to William Hendren was added. However, that article is for a politician who lived in Ipswich, Queensland, about 1400 km away. There is no basis for the addition of that link unless a citation is added to confirm that the politician did happen to own an office in Townsville. Kerry (talk) 22:40, 27 September 2025 (UTC)
- Thanks for sharing this example, Kerry! When the task suggests an article to link, it includes a preview of that article, as well as the option to click through to view the full article, so that the editor can determine whether or not it is an appropriate link. I think you're correct that names are one area where there is some risk of deceptively erroneous suggestions. (In this case, William Hendren the legislator lived at the same time and in the same province as William Hendren the fire victim, so if it's not the same person, that's quite a coincidence!) But newcomers are told in the onboarding that some suggestions will be incorrect, and they have the option to skip those about which they are unsure. And ultimately, being newcomers, they are bound to make some mistakes as they navigate the process of learning to edit. Hopefully your revert is instructive for them. If you see them or any other editor making less careful additions, you can also leave the {{Uw-addalink}} warning (which will hopefully be available soon via Twinkle) on their talk page. Cheers, Sdkb‑WMF talk 00:08, 7 October 2025 (UTC)
- That distance with the transport options available in that era make it fairly unlikely and, in the absence of mention of owning an office in Townsville, a citation was needed. Adding a link like any other Wikipedia editing requires judgement and that requires knowledge of the topic space. Dropping random newbies into topic areas in which they have no interest/expertise won't end well because they lack the judgement. Kerry (talk) 09:08, 8 October 2025 (UTC)
- Agreed with Kerry. We are seeing and discussing similar problems in WP:CGR as to newbies adding links connecting some obscure person by some name to a more famous homonymous person. Eg some obscure "Isocrates" who lived in the Hellenistic period to the famous philosopher Isocrates who died hundreds of years earlier. Repeated names and portions of names are extremely common in ancient history. The Realencyclopaedie, just for a few examples, notes eight different Eutyches, 24 different Aristotles, and 11 different Socrates. There are hundreds of Iulii or Cornelii. Newbies don't know these things. As Kerry says,
dropping random newbies into topic areas in which they have no interest/expertise won't end well because they lack the judgement
which choosing appropriate links requires. Ifly6 (talk) 15:07, 24 October 2025 (UTC)- Supporting this as well, although one I recently reverted was far more recent and from different countries (well I assume), let alone provinces. CMD (talk) 15:19, 24 October 2025 (UTC)
- Agreed with Kerry. We are seeing and discussing similar problems in WP:CGR as to newbies adding links connecting some obscure person by some name to a more famous homonymous person. Eg some obscure "Isocrates" who lived in the Hellenistic period to the famous philosopher Isocrates who died hundreds of years earlier. Repeated names and portions of names are extremely common in ancient history. The Realencyclopaedie, just for a few examples, notes eight different Eutyches, 24 different Aristotles, and 11 different Socrates. There are hundreds of Iulii or Cornelii. Newbies don't know these things. As Kerry says,
- That distance with the transport options available in that era make it fairly unlikely and, in the absence of mention of owning an office in Townsville, a citation was needed. Adding a link like any other Wikipedia editing requires judgement and that requires knowledge of the topic space. Dropping random newbies into topic areas in which they have no interest/expertise won't end well because they lack the judgement. Kerry (talk) 09:08, 8 October 2025 (UTC)
Mentor change
Hi,
I don't find my current mentor helpful. I would like to change him/her. Can you help me? Wikibiryalanmakinesi (talk) 01:58, 6 November 2025 (UTC)
- Hi @Wikibiryalanmakinesi
- You can have a look at the list of mentors, and ask one of them to become your new mentor.
- Trizek_(WMF) (talk) 10:49, 6 November 2025 (UTC).
- Sorry to hear this! The other option is to simply opt out of mentorship (via the "..." menu on the "Your mentor" module on the Homepage). After you opt out, you will see a "Get a mentor" button and you'll be reassigned to a random mentor.
- Let us know if you have any thoughts on how we can help improve the Mentorship features to support you better! I hope your new Mentor is a better fit! Best - KStoller-WMF (talk) 19:48, 7 November 2025 (UTC)
- Thanks. This is helpful. Wikibiryalanmakinesi (talk) 21:40, 7 November 2025 (UTC)
Suitability of newcomer tasks
Apparently there is somewhere a list of tasks that are deemed suitable for newcomers. I did not readily find this list, but the following report by a newcomer I happened upon may be of interest to whom it may concern:
A note on "Newcomer Tasks"
I started editing by going through "Newcomer Tasks". After three days and a handful of edits, I have given up. The vast majority of the "Newcomer Tasks" I was shown were completely unsuited for actual newcomers. I mostly looked at tasks in the history topic. Most of them consist of being asked to improve very poor articles on very obscure topics. In many cases, there seem to be only few books or articles covering the article topic, and they tend to only be available in specialized libraries. I do not know how these "Newcomer Tasks" are chosen. Based on what I've seen, most of the articles seem to have what I found to be called "maintenance templates". I suspect that these articles are automatically assigned to newcomers based on these templates. That is a very poor way of introducing newcomers to editing Wikipedia. It feels more like being given the odious tasks that nobody else wants to perform, than tasks tailored to the needs and skills of newcomers. It feels like starting an internship and being given the tasks of making coffee and cleaning up behind the staff. I expect those "Newcomer Tasks" to drive away a lot of people who might have gone on to become valuable contributors if they hadn't been turned off right at the start. While that isn't the case for me, it seems that I will have to find my own way on Wikipedia.
‑‑Lambiam 16:12, 27 October 2025 (UTC)
- @Lambiam, do you have a link to this newcomer feedback, please?
- These newcomers tasks aren't designed to be a "one fits all" solution. We know that newcomers who come to the wikis are very diverse. We also measured that the majority newcomers are more likely to return and continue editing through suggested edits.
- You can find the tasks at special:Homepage. Their repartition is visible at Special:NewcomerTasksInfo while their configuration is at special:Communityconfiguration/GrowthSuggestedEdits.
- Let me know if you have more questions! Trizek_(WMF) (talk) 10:48, 6 November 2025 (UTC)
- I happened upon this note here: User:Long is the way § A note on "Newcomer Tasks". Note that this is by now almost a year old. ‑‑Lambiam 18:23, 6 November 2025 (UTC)
- Hah. I see they may have the same set of bugbears I ran into early on, given their userpage Paradise Lost quote. @Long is the way, I see you're still around, if you've got anything else you'd like to add. Looks like you've made it through ok in the end. :) -- asilvering (talk) 02:06, 26 November 2025 (UTC)
- In the sense that I didn't just leave, sure. But as my edit count shows, I haven't exactly become a regular editor. And between the ill-conceived newcomer tasks and the rampant hostility towards newer users, I probably never will. Long is the way (talk) 16:59, 26 November 2025 (UTC)
- Sorry to hear it. If you'd like a hand finding some more interesting and less daunting tasks, I'm happy to help, just let me know. And if you're experiencing hostility for being a relative newcomer, please feel free to let me know where that's going on, as well, and I can try to sort it out. The community's been getting better and better at this. But that's a low bar - it's been very bad - and there's nothing admins can do about it if we don't see it. -- asilvering (talk) 20:21, 26 November 2025 (UTC)
- So far I haven't experienced any hostility, but that is probably due to the facts that I haven't done much and that I watched behind the scenes for a long time before joining, so I have some idea which areas to stay away from (e.g. noticeboards, deletion discussions, and vanity projects like anything to do with the main page). Of course, half the time admins are the source of the hostility. Long is the way (talk) 20:57, 26 November 2025 (UTC)
- That, too, we're slowly getting better at - see WP:RECALL, for example. From my own experience, I can tell you that I got very jaded from having watched behind the scenes, as you did, and I didn't quite realize how badly jaded that had made me until I left that kind of thing more or less behind me and just started working on improving the encyclopedia. It turns out most people really are muddling along just fine, and getting an idea of how a place works by watching what happens when things go wrong is perhaps useful from an academic perspective but pretty terrible at loading you with a bunch of negativity bias. (There's a reason checkusers are all grumps.)
- I can also report that my own newbie experience (and I did personally experience hostility) vastly improved once I became WP:XC. I'm not sure it will have such a dramatic effect for you, since you have a much older account than I did at the time. But it will probably make a difference. 500 edits sounds like a lot, but there are loads of useful, quick tasks you can do that run up edit count pretty quickly without falling afoul of WP:GAMING concerns. I sorted a bunch of articles for WP:GERMANY and wrote a bunch of short descriptions, myself. -- asilvering (talk) 21:23, 26 November 2025 (UTC)
- So far I haven't experienced any hostility, but that is probably due to the facts that I haven't done much and that I watched behind the scenes for a long time before joining, so I have some idea which areas to stay away from (e.g. noticeboards, deletion discussions, and vanity projects like anything to do with the main page). Of course, half the time admins are the source of the hostility. Long is the way (talk) 20:57, 26 November 2025 (UTC)
- Sorry to hear it. If you'd like a hand finding some more interesting and less daunting tasks, I'm happy to help, just let me know. And if you're experiencing hostility for being a relative newcomer, please feel free to let me know where that's going on, as well, and I can try to sort it out. The community's been getting better and better at this. But that's a low bar - it's been very bad - and there's nothing admins can do about it if we don't see it. -- asilvering (talk) 20:21, 26 November 2025 (UTC)
- In the sense that I didn't just leave, sure. But as my edit count shows, I haven't exactly become a regular editor. And between the ill-conceived newcomer tasks and the rampant hostility towards newer users, I probably never will. Long is the way (talk) 16:59, 26 November 2025 (UTC)
- Hah. I see they may have the same set of bugbears I ran into early on, given their userpage Paradise Lost quote. @Long is the way, I see you're still around, if you've got anything else you'd like to add. Looks like you've made it through ok in the end. :) -- asilvering (talk) 02:06, 26 November 2025 (UTC)
- I happened upon this note here: User:Long is the way § A note on "Newcomer Tasks". Note that this is by now almost a year old. ‑‑Lambiam 18:23, 6 November 2025 (UTC)
Add a link: partial parts of existing relinks (and links?) and links in quotes
This edit adds two questionable links. The first is a link to "Bank of France", but this is part of the longer "Agricultural Bank of France" which already has a redlink. I'm not fully up on French banking history but there is no reason to assume these are the same bank, and at any rate the link adds confusion given the existing redlink. I wonder if it is possible to exclude text in redlinks, and perhaps to exclude text that is part of a series of capitalised words, rather than the entirety of the capitalised words. The second link is not as wrong, but it doesn’t add much and is in a quote which requires special care per MOS:NOLINKQUOTE. Excluding text in quotes is likely sensible. CMD (talk) 13:00, 19 November 2025 (UTC)
- I'm also seeing issues with link suggestions. This edit added 3 links, the last two of which weren't needed. Games played I can understand, but Western Canada? I'm seeing a bunch of complaints about this at mw:Talk:Growth as well. I'd sooner just turn off link suggestions... Adding links requires some thought. I thought this had come up before but I can't find any prior discussion. MediaKyle (talk) 13:56, 19 November 2025 (UTC)
- Prior discussions have mostly been on this page: the rollout discussion (now archived), a WMF improvement discussion during the test (now archived), the full rollout discussion (now archived), a warning message for inappropriate links discussion, and several further up from a user who noticed issues (the now-archived initial message and the threads above from #Inappropriate links are being added quite frequently to #People's names - not a good idea in this project). Perfect4th (talk) 15:22, 19 November 2025 (UTC)
- Thanks for highlighting these instances, @Chipmunkdavis and @MediaKyle! I took a look at them.
- For the Agricultural Bank of France instance, we're currently exploring introducing case sensitivity and named entity recognition to the model that powers Add a Link, which hopefully will help reduce the instance of partial name link suggestions like this one.
- For the "baluster" instance, the model does not currently try to determine which text is part of a quote and treat it differently. That is a potential enhancement we could explore in the future, though; would you find that valuable?
- For the edit you pointed to with possible overlinking, MediaKyle, we've previously taken some steps to reduce the likelihood the model suggests overlinks, such as blocking it from suggesting linking countries. But its suggestions are never going to be perfect, which is why editors are asked to use their judgement in accepting/declining them. The onboarding also instructs editors,
Don't link common words, years, or dates.
Since they are only just starting to learn about our style guidelines, newcomers are bound to make some mistakes, but we can always give them feedback on their talk page (or in revert summaries) to teach them, just as we would a newcomer making a mistake in another area. - I hope that helps provide a bit of insight. If you have any further thoughts on ways we might improve either the design of the feature or the model that powers it, those are always welcome!
- Cheers, Sdkb‑WMF talk 07:53, 21 November 2025 (UTC)
- Sdkb-WMF, Since you mentioned named entity recognition, case sensitivity, and France in the same sentence, I wonder if anyone is considering how one of the most obvious and essential differences between entity naming in French and English, namely title case in English but sentence case in French, ends up with en-wiki articles being named (or misnamed) in translation (or in untranslated titles) and how that affects your recognition algorithms. So, in what I would call the normal case, we might have: fr:Autorité de régulation de la communication audiovisuelle et numérique (Arcom, or ARCOM) in fr-wiki and Regulatory Authority for Audiovisual and Digital Communication in en-wiki. So far, so good. But then we also have, fr-wiki: fr:Autorité de régulation des communications électroniques, des postes et de la distribution de la presse (Arcep) but en-wiki: Autorité de Régulation des Communications Électroniques, des Postes et de la Distribution de la Presse (ARCEP); unjustifiably, imho, but there it is. And in other cases, it is in English, but in sentence case (no example to hand at the moment). Thoughts? Mathglot (talk) 22:40, 26 November 2025 (UTC)
- This is a great example. Thank you!
- I agree case sensitivity may not be an ultimate solution for all wikis as languages use it differently.
- On the other hand, I think it's good to try only with enwiki in experiments. So that we can see the overall impact offline.
- https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T405185#11391268
- Named Entity Recognition models are generally specialized in one language or they learn the internals of the languages.
- I've just tried this case with a NER model:
- - frNER worked well.
- - enNER split into two ORGs. I guess it's due to the comma. On the other hand, as suggested, it could be due to translations being misleading.
- I think it's more important to improve the overall results for both case sensitivity and NER.
- Therefore, I aim to run an experiment soon. So that we can see if these approaches could improve overall results.
- Thank you very much for raising this.
- It’s very helpful for understanding problems.
- Please feel free to raise more cases. OKarakaya-WMF (talk) 10:38, 2 December 2025 (UTC)
- Sdkb-WMF, Since you mentioned named entity recognition, case sensitivity, and France in the same sentence, I wonder if anyone is considering how one of the most obvious and essential differences between entity naming in French and English, namely title case in English but sentence case in French, ends up with en-wiki articles being named (or misnamed) in translation (or in untranslated titles) and how that affects your recognition algorithms. So, in what I would call the normal case, we might have: fr:Autorité de régulation de la communication audiovisuelle et numérique (Arcom, or ARCOM) in fr-wiki and Regulatory Authority for Audiovisual and Digital Communication in en-wiki. So far, so good. But then we also have, fr-wiki: fr:Autorité de régulation des communications électroniques, des postes et de la distribution de la presse (Arcep) but en-wiki: Autorité de Régulation des Communications Électroniques, des Postes et de la Distribution de la Presse (ARCEP); unjustifiably, imho, but there it is. And in other cases, it is in English, but in sentence case (no example to hand at the moment). Thoughts? Mathglot (talk) 22:40, 26 November 2025 (UTC)
Where should someone go to request a mentor
An editor who started in 2018 and has 91 career edits desperately needs a mentor, imho. I would like to send them to a link that explains how to request a mentor, but where is that? I do not see a section entitled "Request a mentor" on the page. If you use WP:Mentorship, which I initially assumed would be a good link, it goes to a 2005 essay instead. So, where should I tell someone to go to request a mentor? Mathglot (talk) 03:14, 16 November 2025 (UTC)
- @Mathglot, they should already have one. They'll need to enable Special:Homepage to find the mentorship module - they probably don't have it on, since they've been around since before it was developed. The option is in preferences. -- asilvering (talk) 03:19, 16 November 2025 (UTC)
- Mathglot, you can also check their automatically-assigned mentor via a template and link them directly. Just use
{{#mentor|username}}– ex.{{#mentor|Perfect4th}}results inAhmetlii. Happy editing, Perfect4th (talk) 03:32, 16 November 2025 (UTC)- Great responses; thank you both! That answers my question, as far as determining whether they have one, and who. But what about users who come here on their own? The project page has a brown banner in a prominent position right at the top for those who wish to enroll as a mentor, but there is nothing as prominent (and perhaps nothing period) for a user coming here to ask for one. It would be helpful to have a section § Request a mentor, in which versions of these two responses could be recast into guidance aimed at the user, not to mention that we could add redirects like WP:Request a mentor which might be a popular search term that would lead users here. Mathglot (talk) 04:28, 16 November 2025 (UTC)
- I would support that. We've discussed this in the past (or at least creating a mentorship landing page for mentees) but never done it. It might also warrant consideration with how mentorship programs (or at least shortcuts) work with Adopt a User, too. The closest we have currently to an explanation is mentorship welcome templates such as {{Mentor welcome}}. Perfect4th (talk) 06:34, 16 November 2025 (UTC)
- Yes, the latter I am familiar with, due to my involvement with the WP:Welcoming Committee, especially the templates. Feel free to ping me if you like to any discussions at a new, mentee landing page, as I could perhaps support the effort by giving feedback on clarity and comprehensibility in the role of a naive user wrt mentorship, which I am. Mathglot (talk) 07:28, 16 November 2025 (UTC) Mathglot (talk) 07:28, 16 November 2025 (UTC)
- I've reserved redirect WP:Request a mentor, so we can just retarget it when we have a destination for it. Thanks, Mathglot (talk) 17:23, 16 November 2025 (UTC)
- I think this will become less and less relevant over time (since these days every new account gets a mentor, so the proportion of accounts who don't know about them can only decline), so it's probably best to throw up at least something really thin there now rather than wait to create something "good". -- asilvering (talk) 04:42, 17 November 2025 (UTC)
- Went to check what's already on WP:Mentorship and found that this was discussed on the talk page already in 2022 with consensus to put information there. I could look at throwing something up on that page later. Perfect4th (talk) 16:39, 17 November 2025 (UTC)
- Thank you! I've implemented the October 2022 Rfc result and moved "Wikipedia:Mentorship" to "Wikipedia:Mentorship (essay)" without leaving a redirect. Mathglot (talk) 08:18, 18 November 2025 (UTC)
- I've retargeted seven redirects formerly pointing to the essay to redirect here instead. This should complete implementation of the 2022 Rfc. If and when someone writes a page or section about Requesting a mentor, please retarget Wikipedia:Request a mentor to it. Thanks, Mathglot (talk) 10:30, 18 November 2025 (UTC)
- Thanks for doing that! I threw up something simple I sandboxed yesterday at WP:Mentorship & retargeted WP:Request a mentor accordingly. If anyone hates it, feel free to revert or improve as necessary. Perfect4th (talk) 13:43, 18 November 2025 (UTC)
- Perfect4th, thanks for starting that. I have rewritten the page, incorporating material from the mw pages and adapting it to fit here, while retaining all of your original content. There are answers on the page now for a great many more questions by newcomers and mentors; please check it out, and make any corrections as needed. In a rather great irony, there was no page or section anywhere I could find at Wikipedia or Wikimedia about how to request a mentor, so that question remains unanswered, and is pretty much the only one that is, since just about everything else is covered and has a response now. Mathglot (talk) 19:46, 19 November 2025 (UTC)
- Mathglot, I'm liking this, thanks! I made a couple of changes, and we might consider changing some tenses as some of the "we" is from a WMF perspective rather than the community specifically, but those are minor details. I also added a couple of sections detailing how to turn on the homepage and find your mentor. My understanding is that every account that has not opted out has a mentor (for instance, yours is Alextejthompson, asilvering's is CoconutOctopus, and Barkeep49's is Sdkb; I believe it was deemed simpler to assign every user in the database a mentor rather than only new accounts). Thus, anyone trying to request or find a mentor either needs simply to opt back in or turn on their homepage to find theirs. Perhaps KStoller-WMF could confirm if that understanding is correct. Happy editing, Perfect4th (talk) 20:30, 19 November 2025 (UTC)
- Perfect4th, thanks for those improvements. I actually had prepared some homepage stuff to include, but didn't in the end, because it is named a Mentor page and homepage stuff seemed o/t. But here is what I had, if you think it is worth adding:
- Mathglot, I'm liking this, thanks! I made a couple of changes, and we might consider changing some tenses as some of the "we" is from a WMF perspective rather than the community specifically, but those are minor details. I also added a couple of sections detailing how to turn on the homepage and find your mentor. My understanding is that every account that has not opted out has a mentor (for instance, yours is Alextejthompson, asilvering's is CoconutOctopus, and Barkeep49's is Sdkb; I believe it was deemed simpler to assign every user in the database a mentor rather than only new accounts). Thus, anyone trying to request or find a mentor either needs simply to opt back in or turn on their homepage to find theirs. Perhaps KStoller-WMF could confirm if that understanding is correct. Happy editing, Perfect4th (talk) 20:30, 19 November 2025 (UTC)
- Perfect4th, thanks for starting that. I have rewritten the page, incorporating material from the mw pages and adapting it to fit here, while retaining all of your original content. There are answers on the page now for a great many more questions by newcomers and mentors; please check it out, and make any corrections as needed. In a rather great irony, there was no page or section anywhere I could find at Wikipedia or Wikimedia about how to request a mentor, so that question remains unanswered, and is pretty much the only one that is, since just about everything else is covered and has a response now. Mathglot (talk) 19:46, 19 November 2025 (UTC)
- Thanks for doing that! I threw up something simple I sandboxed yesterday at WP:Mentorship & retargeted WP:Request a mentor accordingly. If anyone hates it, feel free to revert or improve as necessary. Perfect4th (talk) 13:43, 18 November 2025 (UTC)
- Went to check what's already on WP:Mentorship and found that this was discussed on the talk page already in 2022 with consensus to put information there. I could look at throwing something up on that page later. Perfect4th (talk) 16:39, 17 November 2025 (UTC)
- I think this will become less and less relevant over time (since these days every new account gets a mentor, so the proportion of accounts who don't know about them can only decline), so it's probably best to throw up at least something really thin there now rather than wait to create something "good". -- asilvering (talk) 04:42, 17 November 2025 (UTC)
- I would support that. We've discussed this in the past (or at least creating a mentorship landing page for mentees) but never done it. It might also warrant consideration with how mentorship programs (or at least shortcuts) work with Adopt a User, too. The closest we have currently to an explanation is mentorship welcome templates such as {{Mentor welcome}}. Perfect4th (talk) 06:34, 16 November 2025 (UTC)
- Great responses; thank you both! That answers my question, as far as determining whether they have one, and who. But what about users who come here on their own? The project page has a brown banner in a prominent position right at the top for those who wish to enroll as a mentor, but there is nothing as prominent (and perhaps nothing period) for a user coming here to ask for one. It would be helpful to have a section § Request a mentor, in which versions of these two responses could be recast into guidance aimed at the user, not to mention that we could add redirects like WP:Request a mentor which might be a popular search term that would lead users here. Mathglot (talk) 04:28, 16 November 2025 (UTC)
some homepage stuff to consider for addition |
|---|
|
Homepage
This special page hosts the newcomer tasks workflow, and contains other modules that give newcomers access to the most important things they need to see on their first day. After creating their account, newcomers see a popup (and some other notifications) encouraging them to visit their homepage, which is accessible through the link to their username along the top of their browser window. Editors can toggle this feature at Special:Preferences → User profile → Newcomer editor features → Display newcomer homepage. How do I access the Homepage?
If you recently created your account on Wikipedia, the homepage is accessible by clicking on your username; the link is located top right on every page. If you already have an account on Wikipedia, you need to §§ How do I enable my homepage? and enable the homepage in your preferences. When done, the homepage is accessible by clicking on your username, or on your talk page link. There, you will find a new tab that goes to your homepage. You also have an option in your preferences to go directly to your homepage when you click on your username. How do I enable my homepage?
Enable the homepage in your Preferences by going HERE and doing THIS... |
- Feel free to include, adapt, or ignore. Mathglot (talk) 08:40, 20 November 2025 (UTC)
- Only took a month and a half to action this, but I implemented a bit more based on other comments here. A very belated and sincere thank you for all your work on developing this! Happy editing, Perfect4th (talk) 09:40, 2 January 2026 (UTC)
- First of all, thanks to everyone who is working updating and improving this documentation!
- @Perfect4th Currently, every new account created on English Wikipedia receives a mentor. And all other accounts that enable the Homepage will be assigned a Mentor (unless they opt out). Older accounts / experienced editors who have never enabled the Homepage do not receive a Mentor.
- We are developing an update based on community feedback that will allow communities to have more control over these defaults via: Special:CommunityConfiguration/Mentorship
- The configuration form now includes an option to opt out experienced users from mentorship, along with settings to define the edit count and account age that qualify someone as an experienced user. I have not shared more about this feature yet because it is still in progress: T407436
- As of now, if you enable the feature, it will ensure that new experienced editors that visit the Homepage will not receive a mentor, but it won’t yet “clean up” and remove all experienced editors from Mentorship. We hope to complete this work once we’ve removed some maintenance script blockers.
- I hope that helps! - KStoller-WMF (talk) 19:36, 20 November 2025 (UTC)
- Indeed; thanks! Mathglot (talk) 21:07, 26 November 2025 (UTC)
- Feel free to include, adapt, or ignore. Mathglot (talk) 08:40, 20 November 2025 (UTC)
Removing mentor
Hello, @Pineapple Storage is currently inactive but still receiving mentees. On Wikipedia:Growth Team features/Mentor list, it says their status is "Away until 5 March 2026", but they are still being assigned mentees. Could an admin shift all their current mentees to me and stop new mentees being assigned to them? IAWW (talk) 09:26, 14 January 2026 (UTC)
- Thanks for thinking about this! I am not opposed to an administrator making changes when it is clear that a mentor will be away for an extended period or is not responding effectively. That said, I wanted to provide some reassurance about the current behavior of the Mentorship system.
- When a mentor is marked as away, mentee questions are automatically routed to a different active mentor, so questions should not go unanswered. In addition, the Growth Team released an improvement last year intended to ensure that only active mentors are assigned to brand new accounts, since new account holders are the most likely to reach out to their mentor (see T390933).
- Based on what you are observing, does it seem like this functionality may not be working as intended? Thanks! - KStoller-WMF (talk) 17:57, 16 January 2026 (UTC)
- Hi @KStoller-WMF, thanks for your work in this area. It's certainly a great system. Upon further review, it seems like it is actually working, since none have been assigned to Pineapple since Jan 6, though that was 2 days after he changed his options. For some reason I had it in my head that the gap between him changing his options and the latest mentor question was bigger. IAWW (talk) 20:09, 16 January 2026 (UTC)
WMF Successful Newcomers Survey results
Mentors may be interested in the results of the m:Research:Successful Newcomers Survey 2025, which surveyed new editors who had registered in the previous six months and made at least 25 edits. There were a few questions about the mentor program (3% thought their mentors wouldn't be helpful, and 1% thought their mentors were bots). ClaudineChionh (she/her · talk · email · global) 01:46, 16 January 2026 (UTC)
- Agreed. The survey includes several relevant findings, and the recently published research: m:Research:Understanding_newcomer_mentorship_on_Wikipedia also offers additional insights.
- One discouraging pattern is how infrequently newcomers thank mentors or follow up on the support they receive. That said, I appreciated the researcher’s observation:
- "Newcomers very rarely thank their mentors (either via a reply or the actual thanks mechanism). The mentors definitely deserve thanks though -- they display incredible patience/kindness."
- It is also notable that newcomer questions have increasingly shifted toward Mentorship in recent years. In 2025 alone, mentors on English Wikipedia responded to 14,267 questions. I hope that, over time, we can provide more meaningful impact data so mentors can more clearly see the positive difference their work makes. Thanks for all that you do to support new editors on the wikis! - KStoller-WMF (talk) 17:47, 16 January 2026 (UTC)
- Wow, over 14,000 answers does feel like a decent number, and I look forward to seeing more impact data in the future. Thanks @KStoller-WMF! ClaudineChionh (she/her · talk · email · global) 04:01, 17 January 2026 (UTC)
- Those age figures are amazing. But the gender figures... are not. -- asilvering (talk) 07:46, 17 January 2026 (UTC)
- 3% and 1% seem suspiciously low if anything! Perhaps those who thought mentors are bots or unhelpful stop before 25 edits. CMD (talk) 02:20, 17 January 2026 (UTC)
- 20% of them thought their user talk page messages were automated, though. And I really doubt 1/5 of them are being reverted by cluebot. -- asilvering (talk) 07:36, 17 January 2026 (UTC)
- Given welcomes are automated on many other language wikis, it is a reasonable assumption that they are here too. CMD (talk) 08:14, 17 January 2026 (UTC)
- 20% of them thought their user talk page messages were automated, though. And I really doubt 1/5 of them are being reverted by cluebot. -- asilvering (talk) 07:36, 17 January 2026 (UTC)
Introducing the Revise Tone Structured Task
Hi all! The WMF's Growth team has been working on a series of Structured Tasks that are presented to newcomers via their Homepage. Their purpose is to break down editing into a guided series of steps that helps editors learn about Wikipedia's policies and guidelines while making useful contributions. Our research indicates that this approach increases newcomer retention, helping to recruit more editors over time. We'd like to introduce the latest Structured Task, Revise Tone, which helps editors identify and revise non-neutral language in articles. If you all are interested, we would like to include English Wikipedia among the pilot wikis for an A/B test as we work on developing and refining it.
The task works by using a machine learning model to identify passages that may have tone issues, similar to CluebotNG's model for identifying vandalism (it is not a large language model akin to ChatGPT). It has been trained on instances where the {{Peacock}} maintenance template was added to or removed from an article, allowing it to flag wording that an experienced editor would likely also flag.
Newcomers are first presented with an onboarding quiz adapted from WP:Manual of Style/Words to watch and the tutorial's neutrality quiz to help them learn about neutrality. They are then given a feed of passages where they can adjust the wording to make them more neutral or mark them as not needing changes.
I want to emphasize that the feature is still at a very early design stage. We have not generally included English Wikipedia as a pilot wiki for new features in the past, but if you all are open to it we'd like to try doing so here because it would provide an opportunity for us to collaborate more closely as we gather your input and shape its design. We will be paying attention to indicators such as whether it helps more newly registered users complete their first edit, improves newcomer retention, and results in edits with a lower revert rate than the average newcomer edit.
In addition to general feedback, we would love your thoughts on:
- Does this task seem like a good way for newcomers to start learning about Wikipedia's policies and guidelines?
- How could we make it clearer or more supportive for newcomers? For example, what kind of onboarding or guidance would be most effective?
- Are there any concerns or objections you think we should consider before releasing a feature like this?
Thanks as always for your collaboration!
Cheers, Sdkb‑WMF talk 19:36, 7 November 2025 (UTC)
- Thanks for posting this, Sdkb! I guess I'll start us off. Thoughts thus far:
- What happens when a newcomer marks a passage as not needing changes? Does it go back in the queue to get suggested again? If it is suggested again to another newcomer, could they see feedback from the first on why they didn't change it?
- Is the neutrality quiz text-only, like the current version, or is it interactive? If it's interactive, is feedback on answers provided? Does any sort of 'score' result in different outcomes for the newcomer – e.g. "You're ready to get started" versus "Reading more about neutrality might be beneficial"?
- Our policies and guidelines tend to be general and conceptual. I do think specific examples, like those of the neutrality quiz, would help newcomers grasp the concepts easier, so I think this has potential.
- Some sort of feedback like I mentioned above on the quiz could be useful; I'd imagine the challenge is to make it relevant without also having to add more volunteer time to tasks. I do think including prominent links to a user's mentor along the task would be good in case there are questions during the process.
- My best guess for pushback would be regarding speed/ratelimit of the tool, as that's one aspect where other initiatives have gotten pushback in the past. Do you foresee this being available for some time, or for a certain number of edits, or something else?
- Hope this helps! Happy editing, Perfect4th (talk) 03:39, 11 November 2025 (UTC)
- Thanks for sharing those thoughts/questions, @Perfect4th! Responding to them:
What happens when a newcomer marks a passage as not needing changes? Does it go back in the queue to get suggested again?
We remove the suggestion if they decline and select "The tone is appropriate". If they select "I'm not sure how to revise the tone" then we don't remove the suggestion.
The onboarding quiz Is the neutrality quiz text-only, like the current version, or is it interactive? If it's interactive, is feedback on answers provided?
It's interactive! Here's a video of what it currently looks like. We aren't currently planning to treat newcomers differently based on their completion of the onboarding quiz, but we will be internally tracking to see if it correlates with indicators like revert rates, and if there are significant differences we may consider introducing something like what you suggest.Our policies and guidelines tend to be general and conceptual. I do think specific examples, like those of the neutrality quiz, would help newcomers grasp the concepts easier, so I think this has potential.
Very glad to hear this!I'd imagine the challenge is to make it relevant without also having to add more volunteer time to tasks
Yes, definitely. We want this to be a task where newcomers can get started quickly, so we're balancing that against the need to explain the basics of neutrality.My best guess for pushback would be regarding speed/ratelimit of the tool, as that's one aspect where other initiatives have gotten pushback in the past. Do you foresee this being available for some time, or for a certain number of edits, or something else?
Yes, those are certainly controls we will offer! All Structured Tasks can be adjusted by Community Configuration, which allows any admin to set a maximum number of task edits that a newcomer can complete per day or a maximum number of task edits they can complete in total before they're encouraged to move on to other types of editing. For instance, for the "Add a Link" structured task, which we completed rollout of in July, Asilvering set the limit to 15/day and 150 total. Our plan is to run this experiment on pilot wikis until we reach statistically significant findings, which will likely take at least a month. Also, if concerns arose and editors formed a consensus that the feature was unwanted, we would of course respect that and deactivate it until those concerns were addressed.
- I hope all that helps clarify! Feel free to ask if you have any other questions. And if this has given you a view about whether or not you'd support having English Wikipedia be part of the pilot program for the task we'd value knowing that! Cheers, Sdkb‑WMF talk 03:51, 13 November 2025 (UTC)
- I keep meaning to look more into this and forgetting to, but @Sdkb-WMF, from a read of this page only it sounds great, and I also think using en-wiki to test this kind of thing is fine so long as the number of accounts getting the test version isn't so high that it's going to suddenly result in a lot of confused patrollers/sockhunters. -- asilvering (talk) 04:38, 13 November 2025 (UTC)
- I think what kinds of/how many suggestions are declined (and why, in cases where that's possible) might be a useful metric to keep track of as well – will the model be learning from the test situations? On the whole, though, I concur with asilvering's assessment. Perfect4th (talk) 06:05, 14 November 2025 (UTC)
- Thanks for sharing those thoughts/questions, @Perfect4th! Responding to them:
- Removing flowery adjectives is probably one of the better tasks to put into a system like this. Does the UI specifically flag the words it thinks need to be looked at? My lingering concern is that when I tested the training examples for this however many months ago, some of the edits it were asking about were entirely unrelated to tone, perhaps that was just the training but it would be reassuring to get confirmation. CMD (talk) 04:11, 13 November 2025 (UTC)
The mobile UI during a check - @Chipmunkdavis, the UI flags the specific passage/paragraph where the model thinks there may be an issue, but not (yet) the specific words. If we find during the pilot that newcomers are struggling to figure out which words are causing the tone issue, then getting the model to flag specific words (phab:T393051) is one enhancement we might prioritize.
- During the community evaluation you participated in, yes, there were intentionally some examples that the model did not suspect of having any tone issue, since we wanted to assess whether its predictions aligned with human decisions across multiple kinds of data. The model has also been improved since then. That said, like any model it will always make some mistakes — that's one of the key reasons this feature brings humans into the loop, so that they can evaluate whether the passage needs revision or not. We try to make clear in the UI that sometimes no change will be needed by, for instance, including a question in the onboarding quiz where the correct answer is "none" and by coloring the "Revise" and "Decline" buttons both gray (rather than making one blue) so as not to push editors toward one over the other.
- Cheers, Sdkb‑WMF talk 21:49, 13 November 2025 (UTC)
- Update: Thank you all for your thoughts in the discussion above! Based on that, we're planning to proceed with English Wikipedia as a pilot wiki for Revise Tone. We'll follow up to let you know once there's a version of the feature you can test and to establish dates for the A/B test. We'll continue to monitor this thread, so if you have any further thoughts, please let us know! Cheers, Sdkb‑WMF talk 23:56, 25 November 2025 (UTC)
- Update (experiment scheduled): Hi all! We're planning to begin the A/B test for Revise Tone on January 22. As a reminder, this means that half of all editors who visit their Newcomer Homepage will have access to the Revise Tone Structured Task from within their Suggested Edits feed. We are working on creating a URL so that those of you interested in testing out the feature yourself can do so; I'll share that here early this coming week. Feel free to ping me if you have any questions/comments/concerns; we appreciate your collaboration and are excited about this work! Cheers, Sdkb‑WMF talk 08:31, 16 January 2026 (UTC)
- Following up on this, the start date was pushed back a little to Monday, January 26. Here's how you can test it:
- In your preferences, ensure that "Display newcomer homepage" is checked.
- Follow this link.
- Follow the prompts in the Suggested Edits module, selecting "Revise tone" as the task you'd like to work on.
- Visit articles to test out the feature.
- Please let me know if you run into any issues setting up the test. And once you try it out, we'd love to know what you think of it and any bugs/issues you spot! (Because it's an early-stage pilot feature, you may find it a little rougher around the edges. But we're actively documenting/addressing issues as we find them.) Cheers, Sdkb‑WMF talk 20:08, 24 January 2026 (UTC)
- The experiment is now live! Here is a feed containing the edits made through it so far! (As a reminder, these are edits by newcomers, so expect to see some mistakes.) Sdkb‑WMF talk 17:13, 27 January 2026 (UTC)
- Hi! Thanks a lot, I am taking a look right now! First edit in the feed has a pretty accurate edit summary, quite happy with the results so far. Chaotic Enby (talk · contribs) 20:46, 27 January 2026 (UTC)
- Next few spot checks:
- Hi! Thanks a lot, I am taking a look right now! First edit in the feed has a pretty accurate edit summary, quite happy with the results so far. Chaotic Enby (talk · contribs) 20:46, 27 January 2026 (UTC)
- The experiment is now live! Here is a feed containing the edits made through it so far! (As a reminder, these are edits by newcomers, so expect to see some mistakes.) Sdkb‑WMF talk 17:13, 27 January 2026 (UTC)
- Following up on this, the start date was pushed back a little to Monday, January 26. Here's how you can test it:
- Special:Diff/1335182534: Unsourced and unencyclopedic? Kudos on the removal.
- Special:Diff/1335182524: Probably not that big of a promotional issue as the subject lived nearly ten centuries ago. Subjective, but I would've kept "wealthy" or gotten rid of the elegant variation altogether and used his name instead.
- Special:Diff/1335181844: Wording is more encyclopedic but some information gets lost (
a change in defensive patterns
omits the fact that there was less defense and introduces an ENGVAR change). Improvement overall, but tells us about potential issues that may co-occur with removing problematic tone. - Special:Diff/1329130466/1335181270: Pretty good changes. Only unsure about the addition of
He had features on the hip-life group 4x4{{Who|date=January 2026}} hit track, "Sikletele,"
, as 4x4 seems to be the name of the group, although I might be mistaken. - Special:Diff/1335177223: This edit did not make tone-related corrections, but minor copyedits and the addition of a clarifier, all in different paragraphs. Only one data point, but maybe how clearly described the task is should be something to keep in mind. Is the plugin capable of flagging different paragraphs in the same suggestion, or was this an initiative the editor took on their own?
- Special:Diff/1335174467: Also looks like a solid improvement.
- Special:Diff/1335173921: Straightforward removal, good.
- A few nitpicks and things to keep in mind for the future, but all in all, pretty satisfying results! Chaotic Enby (talk · contribs) 21:02, 27 January 2026 (UTC)
- Thanks for doing those spot checks, @Chaotic Enby; it's very useful to see your comments on them! @KStoller-WMF and I also did some ourselves and saw similar things. Overall we find it encouraging! Cheers, Sdkb‑WMF talk 23:31, 27 January 2026 (UTC)
- Thanks for taking the time to review, @Chaotic Enby!
- To your question, the current Revise Tone feature highlights a single paragraph within an article. However, the interface allows users to dismiss or minimize the suggestion and make other changes instead. As a result, we sometimes see edits tagged as “Suggested: revise tone” even when the actual change is unrelated to tone.
- We recognize that this is not ideal, as the tag may not always reflect the nature of the edit. That said, it would be very difficult to reliably determine whether an edit ultimately addressed tone. In this context, the tag still provides useful signal to experienced editors about how a newcomer arrived at the task and the onboarding experience they received.
- We will be able to share more data in the coming weeks. In the meantime, early results suggest that newcomers find the onboarding “quiz” engaging, which is encouraging and points to a promising way to introduce core editing policies in a more interactive and newcomer-friendly manner. - KStoller-WMF (talk) 01:50, 28 January 2026 (UTC)
- Thanks a lot to both of you for the feedback, and for working on the whole project! Chaotic Enby (talk · contribs) 02:24, 28 January 2026 (UTC)
- Thanks for doing those spot checks, @Chaotic Enby; it's very useful to see your comments on them! @KStoller-WMF and I also did some ourselves and saw similar things. Overall we find it encouraging! Cheers, Sdkb‑WMF talk 23:31, 27 January 2026 (UTC)
Suggestion Mode – new Beta Feature on Tuesday
[This is an Editing Team project, not a Growth Team one, but it is closely related so I am sharing it here, too.]
Hi folks. Please see this post, Wikipedia:Village pump (technical)#Suggestion Mode – new Beta Feature on Tuesday, about an upcoming Beta Feature that is relevant to your interests in helping to support newcomers in various ways. It is a tool for VisualEditor users, especially newcomers in the future, to discover constructive ways to contribute, while also inspiring them to explore the policies and guidelines these changes are grounded in. More details are in the post. Thanks, Quiddity (WMF) (talk) 00:35, 6 February 2026 (UTC)
Discussion at Template talk:W-graphical § Proposed "newuser" parameter
You are invited to join the discussion at Template talk:W-graphical § Proposed "newuser" parameter. -- Marchjuly (talk) 04:17, 10 February 2026 (UTC)
Mentor list EC restriction
The mentor list states that You need to have at least 500 edits and have had an account for at least 90 days to sign up as a mentor
, but it does not appear that there is any technical restriction on signing up before then. Is there meant to be one/do we want one? (Though yes, I know 500/90 and EC aren't the same thing) Perfect4th (talk) 17:21, 9 February 2026 (UTC)
- Hi @Perfect4th! To our understanding, we do have technical restrictions in place — if a user who does not meet the requirements goes to Special:EnrollAsMentor, they will encounter a permission error. The mentor list page you linked isn't protected, but the actual list it transcludes is. Hope that helps! Sdkb‑WMF talk 18:30, 9 February 2026 (UTC)
- Gotcha, Sdkb-WMF, but it looks like an editor with only 72 edits signed up in 2024 and is receiving questions (although I'm not sure whether they're an alt, it looks like there's one or two accounts on their talk responding for them). Are the technical restrictions newer? Perfect4th (talk) 23:41, 9 February 2026 (UTC)
- Hello @Perfect4th, thank you for taking the time to check the mentor list! My name is Martin and I'm a software engineer on the Growth team and I work on the mentorship features. @Sdkb-WMF asked me to double check this case.
- This particular user was added by @Pppery, who's an administrator. The technical restrictions were in place back then (they were added in 2022, see phab:T314414). However, the restrictions do not apply to changes made by administrators. This allows the community to make exceptions if necessary.
- I hope this clarifies what happened here. If you have any other questions, please do feel free to let us know and we would be happy to clarify further. Best regards, Martin Urbanec (WMF) (talk) 09:52, 10 February 2026 (UTC)
- The reason I added that account as a mentor was because they had started answering questions that were directed to 方志維, and I assumed they had abandoned that account and started a new one while wanting to remain a mentor. * Pppery * it has begun... 20:30, 10 February 2026 (UTC)
- Ah excellent, thanks for explaining and also to Pppery for staying on top of it! Perfect4th (talk) 16:08, 13 February 2026 (UTC)
- Gotcha, Sdkb-WMF, but it looks like an editor with only 72 edits signed up in 2024 and is receiving questions (although I'm not sure whether they're an alt, it looks like there's one or two accounts on their talk responding for them). Are the technical restrictions newer? Perfect4th (talk) 23:41, 9 February 2026 (UTC)
Mentees not reassigned?
Hi, I had quit mentorship late last year due to being preoccupied with IRL stuff, but over the past two months it still seems like I've been getting questions from mentees (e.g. the topics on my talk page from 13th January and 19th Feburary are still being tagged as "Mentorship module question"). Could someone check if all my mentees have been reassigned and no one is currently assigned to me? Thanks. Liu1126 (talk) 12:27, 22 February 2026 (UTC)
- Hi @Liu1126! Your mentor dashboard should indicate your status and list out any mentees currently assigned to you. What do you see when you visit it? Sdkb‑WMF talk 20:54, 22 February 2026 (UTC)
- I can't see anything, it just redirects me to Special:EnrollAsMentor. Liu1126 (talk) 21:31, 22 February 2026 (UTC)
- Ah, that seems to be a bug. I've reported it and the Growth team engineers will investigate. Apologies for the additional questions you've been involuntarily receiving! Sdkb‑WMF talk 04:09, 24 February 2026 (UTC)
- I can't see anything, it just redirects me to Special:EnrollAsMentor. Liu1126 (talk) 21:31, 22 February 2026 (UTC)
Expand short articles newcomer task should be disabled
The Expand short articles newcomer task is not a helpful one. It takes a new user to a random topic, which they may have no knowledge or interest in, and asks them to do quite a substantial amount of research and writing. This is not really newcomer-friendly. Further, likely in part due to this difficulty, it is a magnet for poorly written llm work, to the point that I have seen a new user do a series of large expansions minutes apart (not good quality ones). According to Special:CommunityConfiguration/GrowthSuggestedEdits, the task finds three articles, Stubs, articles with Expand section tags, and articles with Expand lead tags. The first two face the same issues with requiring substantial work. The third may require less research if done with an effective knowledge of our lead expectation, and may even be relatively simple for an experienced user, but that effective knowledge is not something newcomers should be expected to have. All can be disabled with the same button. CMD (talk) 07:26, 21 February 2026 (UTC)
- Hi @Chipmunkdavis, and thanks for sharing those thoughts! The Expand Short Articles task is certainly a much harder task than the other newcomer tasks. We classified it as "Hard" because of this, meaning that the newest editors won't be pointed to it at first. The idea is to build out a progression system, where editors start off with tasks that require a more limited skillset and have more guidance, like "add a link", and then eventually level up to more advanced tasks that require more skills and have a more freeform structure. Over time we're adding more rungs to the ladder to smooth out the learning curve.
- If it's helpful to have more info about the current setup, when editors start the task, a help panel opens with guidance presented over a few slides, currently the following:
- Help panel guidanceMany Wikipedia articles, whether they are short or long, can be expanded with more information. This helps people learn more about a topic.
- To make a difference, you only need to add one new fact to this article. You do not need to add a whole new paragraph or section.
- Follow these guidelines when expanding the article:
- Look at articles about similar topics to get ideas for content that is missing.
- Only add factual information that can be verified by others.
- Write using a neutral tone, leaving out any of your own opinions.
- When you find a section you want to expand, click "Edit" to get started. If you wish, you can add a new header to start a section.
- When you add new information, make sure to add a reference, so that others can see where the information came from.
- When you are finished expanding the article, go ahead and click "Publish changes…" to publish your edit!
- Learn more about expanding articles
- Regarding LLM-written content, that's certainly a trend we're monitoring. We have a relevant feature in the works — Paste Check will be able to identify when editors paste content from LLMs and present them with appropriate guidance.
- It'd be helpful to know if there are any specific configuration changes that you think might be able to address the problem you're seeing short of disabling the task entirely. For instance, changes to the help panel, a minimum edit count to do the task, rate limiting edits made through the task, etc.
- Cheers, Sdkb‑WMF talk 08:56, 21 February 2026 (UTC)
- Thanks Sdkb, I am familiar with Paste Check and have supported it in past discussions. It seems that the Expand task is a bit unmoored from its surrounding structure. "you only need to add one new fact to this article" is not the vibe the word "Expand" gives, nor the vibe I would read into Template:Expand section or similar. It also contradicts the help link below it; Wikipedia:Writing better articles is about writing entire articles, rather than single sentences/facts. "Add a fact and reference to a stub article" would be a task benefiting from a different name and a different help link. CMD (talk) 09:26, 21 February 2026 (UTC)
- @Chipmunkdavis, fwiw, in principle it should be sending editors to topics they're interested in, since editors get to pick topics to populate their homepage with. Though, it's ORES, so, ymmv. (Personally, I found it pretty useless. In a world of cheap ML algos I would really have hoped for better by now...) Have you noticed this being a problem across lots of newcomer edits? We're always going to have some newcomers who fail at any task we give them, but if we're getting a high volume of junk we can certainly remove tags from that list. -- asilvering (talk) 21:36, 21 February 2026 (UTC)
- My first Homepage expand task is Orlando International Airport Intermodal Terminal, which I know nothing about. The filter by topics options are incredibly broad, probably to the point of meaninglessness in many cases (Biographies all, General science, Asia). I'm not, not interested in transportation, but that's a category that presumably covers a huge number of articles. I've noticed repeated problems with this particular newcomer edit at various times, which has attracted my attention more than other tagged newcomer edits I have come across, and seems vulnerable to poor edits in a way the others are not. CMD (talk) 03:01, 22 February 2026 (UTC)
- Similarly, with things like entertainment, the stuff that gets tagged for expansion is often fairly obscure stuff. Here's one example of someone doing a bunch of Expand tasks on movies by adding AI-generated plot summaries, often as little as 3 minutes apart.
- I don't really think the fact that it's classified as Hard has any effect on anything. A common pattern is for people to do poor-quality and often AI copyedits -- when I did an audit of 60 newcomer task copyedits, less than 33% of them were even vaguely OK - and then moving on to AI writing. Gnomingstuff (talk) 20:10, 22 February 2026 (UTC)
- Regarding the topic filters, yes, those are definitely quite broad right now. Introducing more advanced/granular filtering (T297117) is on our project shortlist, and will hopefully help point newcomers toward articles where they have more familiarity/interest.
- Regarding the user you noticed adding AI-generated plot summaries, in addition to Paste Check as I mentioned above, I see you called out the rapid edit rate as one indication of a problem. The Community Configuration settings currently have options for the "Add a Link" Structured Task to limit the number of edits a newcomer can make through them per day (currently 15) and in total (currently 150). Would you find it useful to have these settings available for other Newcomer Tasks? Would it be helpful to have a setting to caution/limit newcomers who are editing faster than a specified rate? And are there other potential settings/safeguards that come to mind that might help curtail the issue?
- Cheers, Sdkb‑WMF talk 20:22, 24 February 2026 (UTC)
- A rate limit for tasks would definitely be useful, especially if we could set individual rate limits for each task. -- asilvering (talk) 07:16, 25 February 2026 (UTC)
- I don't see how classifying this task as "hard" is really all that meaningful or consequential. If an editor can start getting suggested "hard" tasks merely by racking up points, then they won't be ready. Progression to harder tasks should be contingent upon getting meaningful feedback. Stepwise Continuous Dysfunction (talk) 22:28, 27 February 2026 (UTC)
- It's not about "points". The tasks are categorized according to how difficult they are, and newbies can choose whichever kind of task they like. -- asilvering (talk) 01:54, 28 February 2026 (UTC)
- I was using "points" in a very loose sense (probably too vaguely) to allude back to the description above:
The Expand Short Articles task is certainly a much harder task than the other newcomer tasks. We classified it as "Hard" because of this, meaning that the newest editors won't be pointed to it at first. The idea is to build out a progression system, where editors start off with tasks that require a more limited skillset and have more guidance, like "add a link", and then eventually level up to more advanced tasks that require more skills and have a more freeform structure. Over time we're adding more rungs to the ladder to smooth out the learning curve.
If an editor can climb that ladder without getting feedback on whether their edits so far have been actual improvements, then it's "progression" without progress. Stepwise Continuous Dysfunction (talk) 04:49, 1 March 2026 (UTC)- I think you're taking what was said there much too literally. You can start a new account yourself to have a look at what the newcomer dashboard looks like. Editors can choose any task they want at any time, just like they can do anywhere else on the encyclopedia. The only exceptions I'm aware of are semi/xc/full protection, and that we close the newcomer task "add a link" at 150 edits. -- asilvering (talk) 06:25, 1 March 2026 (UTC)
- I was using "points" in a very loose sense (probably too vaguely) to allude back to the description above:
- It's not about "points". The tasks are categorized according to how difficult they are, and newbies can choose whichever kind of task they like. -- asilvering (talk) 01:54, 28 February 2026 (UTC)
- My first Homepage expand task is Orlando International Airport Intermodal Terminal, which I know nothing about. The filter by topics options are incredibly broad, probably to the point of meaninglessness in many cases (Biographies all, General science, Asia). I'm not, not interested in transportation, but that's a category that presumably covers a huge number of articles. I've noticed repeated problems with this particular newcomer edit at various times, which has attracted my attention more than other tagged newcomer edits I have come across, and seems vulnerable to poor edits in a way the others are not. CMD (talk) 03:01, 22 February 2026 (UTC)
Could someone provide this statistic?
"Mentorship panel question" edits on the talk page of an absent user
Hello @Sdkb-WMF: 4 edits recently were made on User talk:I dream of horses which are tagged with "Mentorship panel question", but IDoH has not edited since 2024. Would you please look into what happened? Thanks. ↠Pine (✉) 19:49, 20 March 2026 (UTC)
- @Pine - Thanks for noticing this! It looks like I dream of horses is still listed as an active Mentor on Special:ManageMentors. Any enwiki admin should be able to remove them from Mentorship and their assigned mentees will be automatically assigned to other mentors and they should stop receiving questions.
- The Growth team would love to eventually automate the removal of inactive mentors, but we haven't managed to fit that work in yet: T321509 Provide a system to automatically suspend or remove mentors from the list of mentors. - KStoller-WMF (talk) 20:50, 20 March 2026 (UTC)
- @KStoller-WMF: thank you. That Phab ticket has been around for way too long, in my opinion. Anything that automates de-motivation, confusion or extra work for volunteers, such as new volunteer messages probably going unanswered because they're on the talk pages of inactive mentors and creating extra manual work for admins to prune inactive mentors, would be on my wish list to address sooner rather than later (see Six Sigma). When do you think that Phab ticket can get resolved?
- @Clovermoss: when you have a moment, would you please remove IDoH from the list of mentors? Thank you. ↠Pine (✉) 21:11, 20 March 2026 (UTC)
- Agreed that T321509 does need to be done. In the mean time I've been periodically going through the mentor rolls and marking people who have been inactive as "away" for a year. In I dream of horses' case I did that last March (expecting them to return someday) and it expired
* Pppery * it has begun... 21:22, 20 March 2026 (UTC)
- @Pppery: thanks. I miss IDoH. ↠Pine (✉) 21:26, 20 March 2026 (UTC)
Done let me know if there's any other inactive editors that need to be removed from the list if you notice them. Clovermoss🍀 (talk) 21:48, 20 March 2026 (UTC)
- @Pppery: thanks. I miss IDoH. ↠Pine (✉) 21:26, 20 March 2026 (UTC)
- Agreed that T321509 does need to be done. In the mean time I've been periodically going through the mentor rolls and marking people who have been inactive as "away" for a year. In I dream of horses' case I did that last March (expecting them to return someday) and it expired
- Hi @KStoller-WMF: reminder of the question regarding when that Phab ticket can get resolved. Thanks, ↠Pine (✉) 00:08, 24 March 2026 (UTC)
- Thanks for the reminder, @Pine.
- Let me chat with engineers about this task. I've moved the task to "Needs Refinement", which means we will discuss it next week in our backlog refinement meeting with engineers. I'll be sure to update the task after that discussion. KStoller-WMF (talk) 22:26, 25 March 2026 (UTC)
- @KStoller-WMF: thanks. I subscribed to phab:T321509. ↠Pine (✉) 01:17, 27 March 2026 (UTC)
