Hi all,

I'd love to get some feedback on a new Growth team project: task recommendations for Wikipedia editors. The design specification and background for this is at https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Task_recommendations. I also gave a brief introduction to this at the last Foundation Metrics & Activities meeting, viewable at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2JbZ1uWoKEg#t=3483

The two prototype recommendation systems are live now on Beta Labs (en.wikipedia.beta.wmflabs.org). If you edit copies of real articles (like Dog, Cat, or Cheese) you'll get some good results. However, this replica of English Wikipedia is a bit slow, so be patient with us. 

The next step for this project is to A/B test this with newly-registered users on Wikipedia. Since translations of the interface have been pretty quick (thank you translators!), we'll likely A/B test in at least English, German, and French, if not other languages too. We've done some usability testing, including at Wikimania, but we need to run a randomized experiment to give us a first look at whether these recommendations can have a positive impact on new editor productivity and retention. 

Right now, the main goal of the recommendations we've built is to get someone who's made their first few edits to keep going. That's why it only looks at the last article you edited, and makes recommendations off of that. In the future, we might consider doing something more sophisticated, such as combing through your entire edit history to recommend articles. We hope that we can build something which can be continually useful for a content contributor as they get more experienced. 

Thanks,