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[wmf.4] Surfacing tasks are displayed to autocreated users
Closed, DeclinedPublicBUG REPORT

Description

Per @Trizek-WMF report.

Steps to replicate the issue

  • Create an account on a non-pilot wiki (any wiki except frwiki, eswiki, or arzwiki)
  • Go to to one of the pilot wikis (for Surfacing add links tasks - frwiki or eswiki) - make sure that user has zero edits on that wiki. As an autoreated user, you won't have Homepage enabled automatically.

What happens?:

  • When you go to one of the articles with link-recommendation (structured Add link), you'll be presented with surface link recommendation.
    Screenshot 2025-06-09 at 11.24.47 AM.png (1×2 px, 753 KB)
  • a user clicks on a highlighted item and presented with a dialog box for inserting a link:

Screenshot 2025-06-09 at 11.27.31 AM.png (876×2 px, 500 KB)

  • clicking on 'Yes' will redirect a user to a page where a user is prompted to enable Homepage in User preferences or to go to the Main page

Screenshot 2025-06-09 at 11.29.34 AM.png (688×3 px, 162 KB)

What should have happened instead?:

  • should we exclude autocreated users from Surfacing add links tasks?

Event Timeline

Restricted Application added a subscriber: Aklapper. · View Herald Transcript
KStoller-WMF moved this task from Inbox to Up Next on the Growth-Team board.

When we discussed about this with @KStoller-WMF we considered it a hook for readers with less than X edits to activate their homepage. Maybe we could improve the workflow by adding directly a button, "Activate and take me to the suggested edit task"

I think the current UX feels buggy, but I can also see the argument that surfacing easy tasks to autocreated accounts is perhaps valuable and something we should consider.

But I personally think that it would be smoother if we addressed T292090 first.

Let's revisit this task & priority after we have initial experiment results: T377098: Experiment Analysis: Surfacing Structured Tasks experiment (WE1.2.6 / WE1.2.9).

This is definitely something to consider if we pursue further experiments related to surfacing structured tasks, but for now we plan to stop the experiment and not roll it out, so let's decline this task.

Related: T397515: End the Surfacing Structured Tasks experiment