I'm not yet convinced this is a problem. There are a variety of permanent tags (edit filter, VisualEditor, etc.). In all cases, it's a good-faith tag of the edit.

Edit filter tags are permanent, even though they sometimes wrongly flag an edit as harmful. It's just understood that the situation will be cleared up, and editors will move on.

Similarly, the fact that a user made a Special:GettingStarted edit doesn't even mean they're necessarily new. It's understood and accepted that established users can also have this tag on their edits if they use the page.

It indicates how they made it. It certainly is not a marker of whether the edit is productive. And it doesn't really say anything about the user, let alone the user's future work.

This proposal is a specific case of https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=18670 .

The general trend of permanently tagging edits should be examined. Other sites engage in similar practices (such as Facebook marking mobile posts), but whether this is a good thing or whether it should be encouraged is up for debate.

In this case, I don't think permanently marking someone's first edits after you've secretly tagged them as part of an experiment that they didn't opt in to is a good idea. Do other bad tags exist? Yes, but those aren't really relevant here.

swalling wrote:

(In reply to comment #3)

The general trend of permanently tagging edits should be examined. Other
sites
engage in similar practices (such as Facebook marking mobile posts), but
whether this is a good thing or whether it should be encouraged is up for
debate.

In this case, I don't think permanently marking someone's first edits after
you've secretly tagged them as part of an experiment that they didn't opt in
to
is a good idea. Do other bad tags exist? Yes, but those aren't really
relevant
here.

It sounds like you have a general problem with permanent tags.

I think our actual enhancement is to not tag edits of users who aren't new anymore if they make further edits via Special:GettingStarted, e.g. if you're autoconfirmed don't tag their edit, even if if comes via GettingStarted. That's an enhacement we should make, but it's not the same thing as altering MediaWiki tags so they're there one minute and gone the next. That's unexpected and broken behavior according to how tags currently work in all other cases.

I've changed the bug title to reflect what we're actually going to do around tagging in GettingStarted, to ensure that the tag is accurate.

(In reply to comment #4)

It sounds like you have a general problem with permanent tags.

It sounds like you didn't read comment 3.

Related URL: https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/65337 (Gerrit Change I3bc2235ac9d5ae1060c86df03663dcb8a6966a38)

swalling wrote:

https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/#/c/65337/ was merged, and henceforth only users who aren't autoconfirmed will get their GettingStarted edits tagged.