Regarding discoverability. I think there is a bigger problem: We have an issue of discoverability of work for Wikipedians. I remember in my first days as a Wikipedian, I would go to the main page and then click on random pages until I would find something to improve. A friend of mine in his early days was clicking on Special:Random in English Wikipedia and translating the results to Persian (wasting energy that could have gone to translating more important articles.)
I dream of a day that I could have only one personalized dashboard page (linked at the top of every page next to my user page) which would have boxes with stuff like:
- Recentchanges: Unpatrolled edits, live
- New files uploaded to be reviewed
- Articles to improve or create in the topic I set (basically my tool)
- Articles in topics I set that need attention (clean up tags, etc.)
- Links to places I find useful: WP:ANI, WP:SPI, etc.
- Random small clean ups suggested: e.g. a feed of possible spelling issues or typos to check or fix.
- A personalized todo list I could add personal notes
- Events that might be happening around me
And of course each user could customize to their needs, some contributors prefer patrolling, some prefer copy-editing, some prefer content improvements. We could add some fancy graphs for positive reinforcement. It can also have tabs for "my dashboard", "recommended dashboard for patrolling", etc. Sorta like bloomberg terminals even.
One symptom of the lack of such a page is that many users use their own userpage as a partial replacement for a dashboard and their user page has become a list of links.
It's not even that hard to implement (at least a basic version of it). A tech-savvy Wikipedian could potentially make this via a gadget, taking advantage of Special:BlankPage and some user json pages to hold the preferences (similar to Twinkle)
Thankfully, Growth features added this dashboard for newcomers, but I want it to be expanded to old-timers too (and tailored and customized of course). I know there is also
Special:Contribute being thought too and that can is also similar to what I have in mind (even the design is similar)
Sorry for the brain dump!