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**Obviously an admin needs to do it, but yes, let's get going on this. It is abundantly obvious that the WMF will not help us with this anytime soon. {{ping|Kudpung}} How do we implement this?- [[user: MrX|Mr]][[user talk:MrX|X]] 18:19, 26 June 2017 (UTC) |
**Obviously an admin needs to do it, but yes, let's get going on this. It is abundantly obvious that the WMF will not help us with this anytime soon. {{ping|Kudpung}} How do we implement this?- [[user: MrX|Mr]][[user talk:MrX|X]] 18:19, 26 June 2017 (UTC) |
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***Build a landing page in template namespace then ping me. ~ [[User:BU Rob13|<b>Rob</b><small><sub>13</sub></small>]]<sup style="margin-left:-1.0ex;">[[User talk:BU Rob13|Talk]]</sup> 18:42, 26 June 2017 (UTC) |
***Build a landing page in template namespace then ping me. ~ [[User:BU Rob13|<b>Rob</b><small><sub>13</sub></small>]]<sup style="margin-left:-1.0ex;">[[User talk:BU Rob13|Talk]]</sup> 18:42, 26 June 2017 (UTC) |
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== ACTRIAL as a research experiment == |
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As I mentioned over the weekend, I met today with some WMF folks interested in New Page Patrol & ACTRIAL: [[User:Kaldari|Kaldari]] and [[User:MusikAnimal|MusikAnimal]] from Community Tech, and [[User:Halfak (WMF)|Aaron Halfaker]] and [[User:Jmorgan (WMF)|Jonathan Morgan]] from Research and Data. The people we've been talking to, here and on related pages, have made a lot of good arguments in favor of ACTRIAL. So we're interested in running ACTRIAL as a research experiment, so that we can look at the impact on new user retention and productivity, as well as the impact on page creation and reviewing. |
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This is a new plan, and we need to run it by a few people -- both at WMF, and here, with you. I'll describe the current outline of the plan, and we're interested to know what you think. |
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This week, Aaron is going to do a [[statistical power]] analysis, which will help us understand how long the trial would have to be, in order to get statistically significant results. We'll share that analysis with you next week, once Aaron's done. We've done similar experiments before on the [https://www-users.cs.umn.edu/~halfak/publications/Accept_Decline_Postpone/schneider14accept.pdf Articles for Creation workflow] and [https://mako.cc/academic/narayan_etal-the_wikipedia_adventure-cscw2017.pdf the Wikipedia Adventure], and we've been able to get statistical significance within two to four weeks on those. But this is a different case, and Aaron's analysis will tell us more. We also need to make sure that we've got resources to run the analysis for the experiment; we're working on that now, and we hope to have that settled by next week as well. |
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Once we've got that settled, our idea is to propose the trial as an RfC, to make sure the community is okay with WMF making the change. As part of that process, we'll put together a set of metrics to evaluate, with your help. (We'll use the [[Wikipedia:Autoconfirmed article creation trial#Questions we could ask|ACTRIAL questions]] as a guide.) Then we'll make the change, which will probably be sending non-autoconfirmed users to the [[Wikipedia:Article wizard|Article wizard]] to create their article in draft space. Once the trial's over, we'll turn it off, the analyst will crunch numbers, and we'll present the results for everyone's discussion. |
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I hope this idea comes as good news for everyone here. :) Either way, I'd like to know what you think. -- [[User:DannyH (WMF)|DannyH (WMF)]] ([[User talk:DannyH (WMF)|talk]]) 22:14, 26 June 2017 (UTC) |
Revision as of 22:16, 26 June 2017
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2016 community wishlist
In November 2016 the Wikimedia Foundation will begin soliciting proposals for the next "community wishlist" at meta:2016 Community Wishlist Survey. The meta:2015 Community Wishlist Survey resulted in some great successes for the community - the projects selected by that survey are ones that the Wikimedia Foundation probably would not have done otherwise, but as a result of the survey, they did these things with community support.
I am unsure of the technical needs of NPP/AfC reform, but is there anyone here who could articulate a request which could be provided through Wikimedia Foundation staff development of software or other WMF support? If so, this upcoming wishlist survey could be an opportunity to both solicit community support and, with that, get a commitment for staff time from the WMF.
If this project is seeking ideas for getting started, making an early proposal in the community wishlist survey could be a good way to get attention and community feedback. An early proposal would be seen by more people sooner, and by the design of the survey, earlier proposals are more likely to get more votes of support. If the work group being organized here can come to agreement from the posting of the proposal to the wishlist, and for everyone to give support from the beginning, then that would likely draw even more attention to the idea.
If I can help anyone here make a proposal to the wishlist then ping me. I am not sure what kind of solution is best, but I do recognize the problem to address. Blue Rasberry (talk) 16:30, 27 September 2016 (UTC)
- To be honest, the chances of getting something up are low because there's 10 years of neglect, software rot and technical debt to catch up on -- the TODO list is way too long, and I suspect we will have to wait for a couple of years. I myself have at least five things to propose this round. Server configuration like that needed for ACTRIAL is explicitly outside the scope of the Community Tech team. That said, things to consider:
- A new landing page that explains what Wikipedia is and isn't and points newbies towards improving existing articles. Kudpung will be better able to explain this one.
- Is there anything about Special:NewPagesFeed that impedes your productivity? Are there any features that are obviously missing?
- Is there anything about MediaWiki in general that slows down patrolling and the necessary followup (e.g. of sockpuppets)? Are there any features that are obviously missing? (I can name several, such as not being able to search for deleted pages.)
- Do you have any ideas for new tools?
- Hope this helps. MER-C 04:04, 28 September 2016 (UTC)
- The WMF software department writes programs that it likes to write, so the chance of getting new NPP features is almost zero. I think that we should write the necessary software without waiting for the WMF to do so. — Esquivalience (talk) 11:14, 28 September 2016 (UTC)
- MER-C If you are thinking about the history then you are thinking of a time before 100 million dollars of annual investment. Contrary to popular Wikimedia community opinion, there is a difference between what can be accomplished with a budget of 0 versus what can happen with a budget of $$$$99999999. Playing the proposal game might not be right for you but someone else might have an idea, and I hope if someone else posts something then you could support.
- Esquivalience I encourage you to explore non-WMF options if you see fit. In 2015, there were a list of wild ideas that WMF staff would not have chosen, and most of them have now been granted. At the time of the survey I think the Wikimedia community had little expectation of anything coming from it but I have been very happy and surprised with the outcomes. It is true that WMF software engineers do what they want, and they have had some shockingly horrible ideas in the past, but I like the idea of community support for the wishlist as a community shakedown of the WMF in which the castle provides bread and circus to prevent another user revolt and defenestration like the last time. We just had the spectacle of a beheading and are still in a state of anarchy so I wish you could have a little excitement about the potential for a power grab while a feeding frenzy is still possible. This is a popularity contest for ideas and if anyone wants to play the game then the option is available.
- Give this a look - there might be something here. Blue Rasberry (talk) 14:07, 28 September 2016 (UTC)
- A "landing page" proposal was submitted by JohnCD to the 2015 wishlist survey, though not under that name. It didn't do very well and was withdrawn before the end, on advice that WMF involvement was not necessary to implement this: Noyster (talk), 14:54, 28 September 2016 (UTC)
- The problem is that in spite of its millions of dollars surplus, the WMF practically refuses to anything that they think they can get done for them for free by community volunteers. My argument is that we, the volunteers, did not found Wikipedia, and they should spend the money on salaried devs to do whatever is required to protect the quality and reputation of their cherished Wikimedia movement. At the end of the day, without the volunteer content creators and content maintenance workers, there would be no no Wikipedia to appeal for donations for to pay their bloated salaried contingent and (some) bloated salaries.
- The wishlist is at Wikipedia:Page Curation/Suggested improvements and a 17 page one was sent to the WMF at their behest over two months ago and not a peep yet of thanks, or even acknowledgement of receipt by those concerned. Kudpung กุดผึ้ง (talk) 09:37, 29 September 2016 (UTC)
- The WMF software department writes programs that it likes to write, so the chance of getting new NPP features is almost zero. I think that we should write the necessary software without waiting for the WMF to do so. — Esquivalience (talk) 11:14, 28 September 2016 (UTC)
- I would like to thank Bluerasberry for his detailed, thoughtful, and very accurate post. It does however illustrate how absolutely important it is to read the project page here and to follow up with the linked pages before commenting. Article Creation Work Flow (landing page project) was a Foundaton project which was the other half of Page Curation. To understand any of this, one also needs to understand what motivated a group of users to WP:ACTRIAL, which in hindsight, because it could in fact have been implemented locally with filters, should have been done by the community as a user revolt. After all, en.Wiki has rarely seen an RfC with so many participants and such an overwhelming consensus.
- What should be done now, IMHO, rather than re-invent the wheel, is to:
- take the excellent Landing page development that the WMF begun and simply complete it. And this is why I also don't consider the issues listed at Wikipedia:Page Curation/Suggested improvements to be simply part of anyone's wish list. I regard them as fundamental core issues that for some reason the Foundation refuses to address and complete in favour of their relentless crusade to spend funds on nice little gadgets, rather than the serious stuff that is the very fabric of Wikipedia content. Foundation initiated wishlist projects are simply their red herrings to draw our attention away from the real issues. The problems surrounding the control of new content are not be be confused with fancy gimmicks such as syntax highlighting, visual editor, image viewer, notations, or flow.
- Address he issues at Wikipedia:Page Curation/Suggested improvements - Quiddity (WMF) is suggesting a shortlist of the five or so most important ones but it's a bit late for that now.
- Merge AfC and NPP into one, solid, well 'staffed' new article control system.
- What should be done now, IMHO, rather than re-invent the wheel, is to:
- By all means let's explore non-WMF options, but we should be able to expect some return for the donations that our content generates that pays the WMF their salaries. We have a lot to do at our end first though and sadly, either that revolt may be lingering on the horizon, or Wikipedia is going to lose more newbies and even more of its established users. Kudpung กุดผึ้ง (talk) 14:01, 30 September 2016 (UTC)
The WMF software department writes programs that it likes to write, so the chance of getting new NPP features is almost zero
. I can't say anything "official", but I can say this is simply untrue. Please speak your mind at the survey — MusikAnimal talk 06:26, 1 October 2016 (UTC)- But this is absolutely true, MusikAnimal: ...the WMF practically refuses to do anything that they think they can get done for them for free by community volunteers, and whatever the internal squabbles were at the time, the WMF today has absolutey no excuse for not completing Article Creation Work Flow (landing page project) now. Right now. If they say again that funds are not available, it is a monstrous red herring. Their own reputation for quality encyclpedias depends on good policing of content and with a 15,900 NPP backlog up from 7,000 a few weeks ago, something has to be done. It's in their own interest to deploy ACTRIAL and the landing page. One problem is that they won't tell us who is in charge. Kudpung กุดผึ้ง (talk) 08:29, 1 October 2016 (UTC)
- @Kudpung: I wasn't around for that, so I don't know... but I beleive in 2012 there wasn't a team devoted to making things the community wants. There is now, and the wishlist is the place to show what there is a demand for. If something on the wishlist is already being worked on by a volunteer, Community Tech will try to work with them to get it completed, but otherwise the wish will not be ignored under the suspicion that a volunteer might at some point do it. For this landing page project, several things I see we can do without any coding at all using interface pages. If you can find me the assets (images) we can create this fairly quickly. The main landing page we could still do with an interface page, but it's a bit hacky, and wouldn't have the hover states. If you want to do the talking, I'm willing to step in as a volunteer developer for this as it seems quite simple... These just look like splash pages that provide simple information. Am I missing anything else? — MusikAnimal talk 15:54, 1 October 2016 (UTC)
- Okay, I see that there is some logic involved, in particular bypassing this process for experienced editors. We could do this with some simple JS, but that would require it be executed on every page... not that ideal. Just mind you again there's MediaWiki:Search-nonefound and MediaWiki:Newarticletext. This appears to be where the landing page info is shown, and we can freely put whatever we want there right now. But at the same time, it sounds like the extension was almost finished before being lost to higher-priority work... so I think this is an excellent candidate for the wishlist, and I encourage you to push for it! — MusikAnimal talk 17:46, 1 October 2016 (UTC)
- I don't think that following the wishlist process should be necessary to finish the last few percent of the extension. I am skeptical of the wishlist because, as evidenced by the abandoning of half-baked software, the WMF likely cannot finish anything major in a year along with nine other projects (even minor ones for convenience), and they haven't proved this wrong since 2011. Quality control is not only high-priority for an organization that maintains the most widely-used reference work, it's absolutely critical work, unlike other technologies that the WMF worked on during this period. For instance, readers can live without Media Viewer, but without proper quality control, they will question the quality of the encyclopedia and where their donations are going, and probably use Wikipedia less. Imagine if for example, the maintainers of Encyclopedia Britannica or World Book were 90% shiny software and 10% content and quality. They'd become a running joke pretty quickly! — Esquivalience (talk) 21:50, 1 October 2016 (UTC)
- Okay, I see that there is some logic involved, in particular bypassing this process for experienced editors. We could do this with some simple JS, but that would require it be executed on every page... not that ideal. Just mind you again there's MediaWiki:Search-nonefound and MediaWiki:Newarticletext. This appears to be where the landing page info is shown, and we can freely put whatever we want there right now. But at the same time, it sounds like the extension was almost finished before being lost to higher-priority work... so I think this is an excellent candidate for the wishlist, and I encourage you to push for it! — MusikAnimal talk 17:46, 1 October 2016 (UTC)
- @Kudpung: I wasn't around for that, so I don't know... but I beleive in 2012 there wasn't a team devoted to making things the community wants. There is now, and the wishlist is the place to show what there is a demand for. If something on the wishlist is already being worked on by a volunteer, Community Tech will try to work with them to get it completed, but otherwise the wish will not be ignored under the suspicion that a volunteer might at some point do it. For this landing page project, several things I see we can do without any coding at all using interface pages. If you can find me the assets (images) we can create this fairly quickly. The main landing page we could still do with an interface page, but it's a bit hacky, and wouldn't have the hover states. If you want to do the talking, I'm willing to step in as a volunteer developer for this as it seems quite simple... These just look like splash pages that provide simple information. Am I missing anything else? — MusikAnimal talk 15:54, 1 October 2016 (UTC)
- As the person who started the discussion that ended up in ACTRIAL, I can only say I support it more strongly than before. I've now had experience patrolling from both the non-admin and admin side, and I really never understood the reason for shutting it down if there was no subsequent implementation of anything meaningful. Tools are helpful, but the true core of the NPP problem is that it's so chaotic that even those of us who know what we're doing have a hard time keeping track of everything; until that's addressed in earnest, it will remain the mess it is now. The Blade of the Northern Lights (話して下さい) 15:06, 1 October 2016 (UTC)
- But this is absolutely true, MusikAnimal: ...the WMF practically refuses to do anything that they think they can get done for them for free by community volunteers, and whatever the internal squabbles were at the time, the WMF today has absolutey no excuse for not completing Article Creation Work Flow (landing page project) now. Right now. If they say again that funds are not available, it is a monstrous red herring. Their own reputation for quality encyclpedias depends on good policing of content and with a 15,900 NPP backlog up from 7,000 a few weeks ago, something has to be done. It's in their own interest to deploy ACTRIAL and the landing page. One problem is that they won't tell us who is in charge. Kudpung กุดผึ้ง (talk) 08:29, 1 October 2016 (UTC)
- The Blade of the Northern Lights, Esquivalience, MusikAnimal, JohnCD, vQuakr, Bluerasberry. I'm going to be frank here - I know I'm known for not minicing my words, but now it's time for some home truths:
- Wish lists are about as serious and effective as a child's letter to Santa Claus at the North Pole. Also, individual users will ask fro some feature without even noticing that there are community groups desperately trying for years to get the same thing done. I have extremely good and well founded reason to have very little confidence that the WMF will actually provide any serious software that is needed unless the community actually threatens and perhaps even carries out a revolt. The Foundation employees are totally ensconced in their world of spending thousands of dollars on gimmicks that are absolutely non essential and which Wikipedia can live without, and which they dream up to keep themselves in a salaried position.
- I am sick of being the only user who is apparently actively doing anything. about NPP - a lot of people join in the discussions but nobody actually does anything. I went specifically to Italy in June to address these issues only to find that a WMF staffer has usurped the meeting I reserved to use it under a similar abstract just to try and convince us again that they are listening to our needs. I've cobbled this project together but still not one of the signatories to the Work Group appears to have read the reading list - if they had they wouldn't be here asking the questions. I'm beginning to feel ashamed of the encyclopedia I've dedicated literally thousands of hours to and I'm sure that Blade and others who have been around a long time feel the same.
- There was nothing 'half-baked' about Article Creation Flow. Brandon Harris is an excellent programmer, understood exactly what I was describing as needed, but he was taken off the project due to some internal squabble at he WMF - probably what led staff like Oliver Keys and Howie Fung to be so rude and demeaning to had-working volunteers during the Wikimania conference in DC in 2012.
- WMF wishlists are just red herrings. They are like the constant research projects, all contrived to make us believe 'something is being done'. What can we do about it? Nothing - even the Board of Trustees is rotten to the core and after all these years there is still absolutely no bridge over the 'us vs them' gap between the communities and the Foundation.
- The issue surrounding the control of new content, whether it be through NPP or AfC, is so critical, that the WMF CEO should be brought into play. It's time for action, It's time for the Foundation to spend some money on essential software, and I'm sorry MusikAnimal if my words sound harsh, you are on the right track, you are wonderfully engaged, but you might possibly be relatively new to all this and you are too trusting of what you hear on the WMF grapevine. Where s your name here?What we are asking for here is not something the en.Wki wants, it's something the entire Wkimedia movement needs and if they don't provide it, it will be their own demise. Already the news media in the UK is awash with snide comments about the quality of Wikioedia. It's become a joke on the busses, the subway, and in the pubs; TV script writers are are using it in their serious TV crime dramas (Lewis, etc) I have absolute, irrefutable hard proof that when the WMF runs a survey, 1). it's often anther red herring. 2). They will totally ignore the real results and publish instead what they want us to hear. What they don't hear is what goes on down here on the factory floor - most of them have never even edited the encyclopedia.
- Even Quiddity (WMF) in spite of his attempts to be helpful is not really concerned with these issues because he's tied up with the WMF's cherished Flow project. I am of the teams of dozens of volunteers who have had to clean up some of the most monstrous and costly (tens of thousands of dollars and junkets) blunders the WMF has made, even after them having been told in no uncertain terms what's about to happen. We were just laughed at and I won't mention the senior staff names here, but email me for the facts if you will. Kudpung กุดผึ้ง (talk) 01:43, 2 October 2016 (UTC)
- Imagine a world where all the Wikipedia volunteer maintenance workers went on strike
- - that moment is closer than the WMF and most of us realise - new page patrolling has already dwindled to a near stop, nobody can be botheted to close the NPP RfC which expired already nearly a week ago, AfC is chaos, and the NPP backlog is increasing exponentially and is nearly at the level that made Blade and I engineer ACTRIAL.
- Please everyone, just do us all a favour, read the pages I have created here, read the links I have provided, and act now. Please start here: Wikipedia:The future of NPP and AfC/To do. Kudpung กุดผึ้ง (talk) 01:43, 2 October 2016 (UTC)
- I understand your frustration and from an engineering perspective I am eager to help. Please review meta:2015 Community Wishlist Survey/Results. All of the top 10 are either finished or are in development, with exception of one that was declined with good reason (probably saying too much but for the record it wasn't Community Tech that declined it). Another five wishes in the bottom 40 or so have been completed, and another 12 are in development. There's only been one year of the wish list, and it went pretty well, I think. Obviously not all 100+ wishes are to be granted in one year's time, but the top 10 are given priority and all are not ignored. You'll probably see many of the same wishes for 2016, which is completely OK, and they'll be re-prioritized based on rank, feasibility, and engineering investment (e.g. some of the lower ones were easy and quick wins). This is a model the German community has used for some time also with success stories. If you don't ask for Article Creation Workflow to be completed, someone else might, but it seems you'd be the best spokesman for it. I have profound respect for you (and can't wait to meet you in Montreal), but I hope you realize the wish list is not a "red herring", and unlike the past N number of years, it is an opportunity to take advantage of engineering resources dedicated to helping volunteers like you. Would it hurt to try? :) I honestly feel like it would one of the quick wins given how close it was to completion — MusikAnimal talk 02:28, 2 October 2016 (UTC)
Please remain seated with your computers switched on until Wikipedia comes to a complete stop
MusikAnimal, I understand your arguments, really I do, but there are a couple of things that everyone still fails to understand:
- I'm not doing this for me or to help me, I'm doing it for Wikipedia because I don't want to see the tens of thousands of hours (and dollars) I've spent ln Wikipedia going to waste.
- I have 100% proof that the WMF is so poorly organised that they polarise and no one ends up doing anything that needs a bit more professionalism.
- I've been nudging the Foundation on and off for years to get this done. I spoke with Quiddity (WMF) in Italy and began a dialog on his MedWiki talk page after having been given to believe that he was somehow involved in this (because he usurped my meeting in Italy, and based it obliquely on my own abstract). I was then called on Skype by another WMF department for an hour nearly three months ago. AS mentioned above, there has been absolutely no further rection from the Foundation.
- Your wishlist suggestion makes sense, but again, why does it always have to be me? A bit of collective pressure from the community would work better. It's not just Artcle Creation Flow that we need completed, it's the rest of the issues on the Page Curation software, someone to close the expired RfC for NPP qualifications, and someone to start the ball rolling on the merging NPP and AfC. One of the best voices would be DGG but he is of course tied up with something else until the end of the year. Kudpung กุดผึ้ง (talk) 03:11, 2 October 2016 (UTC)
(Not directed at anyone in particular, but this has to go somewhere) I'm willing to accept the wish list has had some success with assisting the community, and to that end I'm glad it's here. The problem is that NPP poses an existential problem and needs action now, and the community made it clear what it wanted in 2011 and has yet to see it materialize. Being an American it's a bit like what the Affordable Care Act is to healthcare costs, the responses from the WMF have done some nice things around the fringes but ultimately gave more powerful tools to a large group of people incapable of properly using them; instead of diminishing the problem it's exacerbated it. It's extremely deflating to see, especially when I remember all the work I put in during 2011 (at the tremendous expense of other things in my life at that time) and know that if it materialized it would have prevented all of this. To the extent that I can I want to ratchet up the pressure to get this fixed, since I've also spent many thousands of hours (again, to the detriment of other things) trying to make this a better place. The Blade of the Northern Lights (話して下さい) 03:24, 2 October 2016 (UTC)
- Man oh man. Ten thousand barnstars for you both! :D I've read through the the Article Creation Flow talk pages and see you both are were just as frustrated then as you are now. I can't imagine... you are to new articles reform as I am to vandalism studies, I suppose... Only difference is nothing is holding me back. You're patiently waiting for help from the people who are capable of doing it. This is why I just wanted to shed some light that if NPP-related improvements were to get on the wish list it's bound to become a reality :) And Kudpung it doesn't have to be you who requests it, I just thought you'd be interested! The whole wish list process means it's still a long wait, sure. I think ACTRIAL would be a good first step, and that doesn't take time other than convincing, since it's just a configuration change (I think?). I'm not going to pretend to know what I'm talking about, I wasn't around when that was last proposed. I hope I've been the slightest bit of help in showing there are people on the WMF side who care... because I'm one of them :) And I'm going to look more into the landing page. We may not be able to fully replicate what the extension does, but some of the basic things we can do ourselves pretty easily, and I'm willing to put in the work. Let me track down the image of the cute little Wikipedia guy, create some draft interface pages, and I'll get back to you — MusikAnimal talk 04:30, 2 October 2016 (UTC)
- Following MusikAnimal's suggestion, Blade, I've gone ahead (again, why does it always have to be me?) and pre-registered the two major software issues at 2016 Community Wishlist. Having done that however, I reiterate that I have very little faith in that 'Letter to Santa Claus' project because at the end of the day, the WMF still only takes their survey as a basis and chooses what they actually want to work on.
- Also, a quick look at the items on the 2015 list, AFAICS, none of them are of the urgency, gravity, and importance attached to the Wkipedia/Wikimedia global reputation for accuracy and quality. They are all gimmicks and gadgets that might, but not neccessariy, slightly enhance the workflow of editors. What Ryan Kaldari, who has interjected a couple of times with the occasional helpful comment, apparently fails to understand is that the issues we are discussing and trying to motivate here are above and beyond the scope of his project, and need prioritising from the top down and not from the community up. This is something that Katherine Maher should be made aware of because chances are that she isn't - not that she's likely to even take an interest, it's the kind of thing a CEO waves his hand at a minion and says 'Look into his, would you" and promptly deletes it from his mind. In previous times, I at least had the ears of Vice-CEO Erik Möller but all that changed when Tretikov came on board.
- All I can suggest is that we unilaterally enact the huge consensus we had for ACTRIAL, doing it with a local script or filter. The WMF could hardly 'fire' any of us for it. I wouldn't bother though with all the niceties and templates that Blade, Scott, and I spend hours developing for it. Simply restrict page creation in mainspace to all accounts that have less than 10 edits and are less than 96 hours old. That would cut out most of the totally inappropriate new pages. If I knew how to do it I would do it without any hesitation. Perhaps someone here with engineering skills could come up with the necessary local code.
- As for the Landing Page, during the run up to ACTRIAL I had started to completely rebuild the Article Wizard in php but Brandon said leave it to him and he came up with the Article Creation Work Flow (landing page project) which I think is pretty darned good - there was nothing 'half-baked' about it. AS I said above, Brandon is an excellent programmer, understood exactly what I was describing as needed, but he was taken off the project due to some internal squabble at he WMF - probably what led staff like Oliver Keys and Howie Fung to be so rude and demeaning to had-working volunteers during the Wikimania conference in DC in 2012. IMO it shouold simply be continued. Kaldari would tell you where the code is. However, I still think it's totally unreasonable to expect the volunteers to do this kind of thing for free. Chris Schilling (WMF) once suggested to me when I met him in London (and again in Italy) hat one could apply for an individual grant to do it, but that's another story (::sigh::) Kudpung กุดผึ้ง (talk) 05:04, 2 October 2016 (UTC)
- Well, I've already tried to explain the reality of the wish list, but anyway... I'm going to look at the Article Creation Workflow code and see what I can do with it. At the very least, we can create this notice right now, with very little effort. The only problem I foresee is the experienced users might complain about it, and also it probably won't look that great in VisualEditor. I say we give it a try, though. It's not super in-your-face, and hopefully experienced users would understand why it's being used. What do you think? — MusikAnimal talk 05:07, 2 October 2016 (UTC)
- Looks god but I'm being called to lunch. I'll get back to you.Kudpung กุดผึ้ง (talk) 05:32, 2 October 2016 (UTC)
- Something like User:MusikAnimal/New article edit notice. Needs a few styling tweaks, and you might want to do some copy editing. The "I want to create a draft" button currently goes to the article wizard, but it could go directly to a draftspace page with same name — MusikAnimal talk 06:37, 2 October 2016 (UTC)
- And when they search for an article and it doesn't exist: User:MusikAnimal/Article search with no result — MusikAnimal talk 07:09, 2 October 2016 (UTC)
- As for the Landing Page, during the run up to ACTRIAL I had started to completely rebuild the Article Wizard in php but Brandon said leave it to him and he came up with the Article Creation Work Flow (landing page project) which I think is pretty darned good - there was nothing 'half-baked' about it. AS I said above, Brandon is an excellent programmer, understood exactly what I was describing as needed, but he was taken off the project due to some internal squabble at he WMF - probably what led staff like Oliver Keys and Howie Fung to be so rude and demeaning to had-working volunteers during the Wikimania conference in DC in 2012. IMO it shouold simply be continued. Kaldari would tell you where the code is. However, I still think it's totally unreasonable to expect the volunteers to do this kind of thing for free. Chris Schilling (WMF) once suggested to me when I met him in London (and again in Italy) hat one could apply for an individual grant to do it, but that's another story (::sigh::) Kudpung กุดผึ้ง (talk) 05:04, 2 October 2016 (UTC)
arbitrary break
I've had a good look and a think about it, MusikAnimal. You know there's an essay at WP:EI? I'm not sure, but it might raise a stink. You know that even if it does not really bother them at all, Wikipedia users just love to complain about anything they can. I think it would be only justifiable if we were to introduce ACTRIAL, but then for that we already have a list of minor interface changes to make - and Brandon's project would have been a seamless fit. There is too much text on it. Would the buttons be functional? I'm working on something. In the meantime could you please email me, I want to send you a 17-page text file. Nothing secret but far to big to put on Wikiedia.Kudpung กุดผึ้ง (talk) 07:17, 2 October 2016 (UTC)
- Hehe OK, will email you. About the interface pages (at least the edit notice), this is totally WP:IAR by any stretch of the imagination, and we're not even breaking any rules. Those who complain will quickly get over it, add some personal CSS to hide it, or the most simple solution: just scroll down the page to the edit box so you can't see the mildly distracting edit notice (I just changed the background to white). We're otherwise talking about an extra 50px or so in height from the current edit notice, and potentially a profound effect on how new users approach article creation. It's this or spend an incredible and painful amount of time getting the Article Creation Flow extension to work... whether ACTRIAL happens or not, this will help and can be implemented now, and ACTRIAL will be a month away at best, which by your calculations will add another ~7,500 articles to the new pages backlog. Will respond to your next comment in a moment (got an edit conflict) — MusikAnimal talk 07:35, 2 October 2016 (UTC)
While you were doing that, MusikAnimal, I was having my lunch and doing this: File:New_page_edit_warning.png. One of the problems with Wikipedia is that all our alerts and templates are too verbose, however hard we try. This is of course only a temporary measure and what I think would get the least negative comments. Note that the button goes to the Wizard. If you are not familuar with the Wizard, you may wish to take a tour through it - you'll see what I mean about 'verbose'. In fact it's so verbose that some new users give up with it and go back to the editing window.Kudpung กุดผึ้ง (talk) 07:30, 2 October 2016 (UTC)
- I like it, and I totally agree about the verboseness. I have spent many an hour trying to trim down Help pages, which should be the most simple of all. Myself and another editor worked on WP:INTREF (and one for VisualEditor), which is enormously more helpful for newbies than Wikipedia:Citing sources, Wikipedia:Identifying reliable sources or even Help:Footnotes :) It's past my bedtime here in New York, but I'll work on simplifying the interface pages soon — MusikAnimal talk 07:40, 2 October 2016 (UTC)
- @Kudpung: Finally caught up on reading some of the discussions. It looks like you're not sold on using the Wishlist Survey, which is fine. I do, however, disagree with your characterization of the projects that came out of last year's survey as "gimmicks and gadgets". Replacing all the dead links on Wikipedia is pretty central to the quality of the project, and creating a good tool to detect plagiarism (https://tools.wmflabs.org/copypatrol) is also fairly important, IMO. Of course, everyone has different opinions on what the most important projects are, which is why we run a survey. I understand your frustration with the NPP situation, and I would love (probably more than anyone else) to have ArticleCreationWorkflow finished. However, the Engineering teams at the WMF can't just unilaterally drop what they are working on and switch to a different project. It has to go through some sort of existing channel for planning and approval, which basically either means coming from the top down or the bottom up (the Wishlist Survey). In this case, I would suggest pushing from both ends. I'm already working on getting a meeting with Katherine to discuss the current NPP situation (among other things) and if someone decides to propose some of the outstanding requests through the Wishlist Survey I think that would be a good back-up plan. Let me know if there's anything else I can do to help in the meantime. Kaldari (talk) 18:38, 3 October 2016 (UTC)
- Thanks for your input Ryan, it really is very much appreciated, and I do know that in spite of my characterisation of the WMF as a whole, you are personally concerned with the situation regarding the Landing Page. If I can get directly involved with Katherine to quickly outline the situation, I would be happy to do so. I did not want to bother her with it in Esino because her position had only been confirmed during the conference. She is probably not even aware of how these issues are damaging the reputation of Wikipedia on the one hand, and leaving it open for the clever corporate spammers on the other. What you could do in the meantime if possible, is look into unfinished Landing Page with MusikAnimal together and come up with some code - I'll be happy to help with the GUI and texts and Beta testing, as I did with Page Curation, but I can't write the sort of code that's required, and anyway, as you will have gathered, we all here feel that the paid staff should be doing most of the work. Kudpung กุดผึ้ง (talk) 19:24, 3 October 2016 (UTC)
- I've created two tasks out of this discussion: phab:T147224 which includes some easy updates to the PageTriage extension that you requested a while back I think, and phab:T147225 regarding the New Article Flow landing page. The latter would be done with interface pages, as a workaround until we can find the time to work on the actual extension. I saw your recommended changes to trim down the language and will work on that, run it by some other folks, then I think we should seek some quick consensus at another venue. It seems very uncontroversial, as I explained below. This would only help the situation until other improvements or ACTRIAL are implemented — MusikAnimal talk 19:34, 3 October 2016 (UTC)
- Thanks for your input Ryan, it really is very much appreciated, and I do know that in spite of my characterisation of the WMF as a whole, you are personally concerned with the situation regarding the Landing Page. If I can get directly involved with Katherine to quickly outline the situation, I would be happy to do so. I did not want to bother her with it in Esino because her position had only been confirmed during the conference. She is probably not even aware of how these issues are damaging the reputation of Wikipedia on the one hand, and leaving it open for the clever corporate spammers on the other. What you could do in the meantime if possible, is look into unfinished Landing Page with MusikAnimal together and come up with some code - I'll be happy to help with the GUI and texts and Beta testing, as I did with Page Curation, but I can't write the sort of code that's required, and anyway, as you will have gathered, we all here feel that the paid staff should be doing most of the work. Kudpung กุดผึ้ง (talk) 19:24, 3 October 2016 (UTC)
- @Kudpung: Finally caught up on reading some of the discussions. It looks like you're not sold on using the Wishlist Survey, which is fine. I do, however, disagree with your characterization of the projects that came out of last year's survey as "gimmicks and gadgets". Replacing all the dead links on Wikipedia is pretty central to the quality of the project, and creating a good tool to detect plagiarism (https://tools.wmflabs.org/copypatrol) is also fairly important, IMO. Of course, everyone has different opinions on what the most important projects are, which is why we run a survey. I understand your frustration with the NPP situation, and I would love (probably more than anyone else) to have ArticleCreationWorkflow finished. However, the Engineering teams at the WMF can't just unilaterally drop what they are working on and switch to a different project. It has to go through some sort of existing channel for planning and approval, which basically either means coming from the top down or the bottom up (the Wishlist Survey). In this case, I would suggest pushing from both ends. I'm already working on getting a meeting with Katherine to discuss the current NPP situation (among other things) and if someone decides to propose some of the outstanding requests through the Wishlist Survey I think that would be a good back-up plan. Let me know if there's anything else I can do to help in the meantime. Kaldari (talk) 18:38, 3 October 2016 (UTC)
Some ACTRIAL code
As requested, a simple script to implement ACTRIAL:
Please see code here
|
---|
function block_creation() {
if (!(mw.config.values.wgIsArticle && mw.config.values.wgIsProbablyEditable && mw.config.values.wgArticleId === 0 && mw.config.values.wgUserEditCount < 10 && mw.config.values.wgUserRegistration < 345600000 && mw.config.values.wgNamespaceNumber === 0)) {
return;
}
$("#ca-ve-edit").remove();
$("#ca-edit").remove();
$(".mbox-text li:first").html("Use the <a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Article_wizard\">Article Wizard</a> if you wish,\
or <a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Requested_articles\">add a request</a> for it.");
}
function block_creation_at_form() {
if (!(mw.config.values.wgArticleId === 0 && mw.config.values.wgUserEditCount < 10 && mw.config.values.wgUserRegistration < 345600000 && mw.config.values.wgNamespaceNumber === 0)) {
return;
}
$("#editform").html("<div style=\"font-size:1.3em; font-weight:500; text-align:center\">Only registered, <a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org\
/wiki/Wikipedia:User_access_levels#Autoconfirmed_and_confirmed_users\">autoconfirmed users</a> with 10 edits and 4 days of editing history\
can directly create articles. Please use the <a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Article_wizard\">Article Wizard</a> to create\
a draft article and receive feedback on your article, or register (if you have not already done so), make 10 edits, and wait 4 days.</div>");
}
block_creation();
block_creation_at_form();
|
I tested the speed of the two functions and they appear to only take 2-4 milliseconds. — Esquivalience (talk) 15:23, 2 October 2016 (UTC)
- I think this should be in wiki format so any admin can edit it. We currently have a CSS class to show things only to admins, and we could have another for users who don't meet this 96 hour / 10 edit threshold. The notice could be transcluded on the interface page for nonexistent articles, hidden by default, and shown as needed. The other JS we'd still need so we can hide the create buttons. Finally we'd need an edit filter to disallow edits for those who disabled JavaScript, used a direct link to create a new article, or even used the API — MusikAnimal talk 16:00, 2 October 2016 (UTC)
- Wouldn't it be easier to use the title blacklist? Something like
(?! list of namespaces we want newbies to be able to create pages in).* <autoconfirmed|errmsg=ACTRIAL-message>
(Sorry, not down with the regex.) This should prevent article creations and offers the ability to show a message just to non-autoconfirmed users. BethNaught (talk) 17:23, 2 October 2016 (UTC)- One needs to test this, I've got a funny feeling this will block all account creation as well. MER-C 05:31, 3 October 2016 (UTC)
- Yeah... we could try on testwiki I guess, or the beta cluster. I do think if this proves working it is the most ideal solution. No JavaScript required. I tested trying to create a page currently on the title blacklist, and it doesn't even let me try – which is what we want. E.g. I'd hate for the user to write their article then hit save only to find out they can't. This is yet another advantage over the edit filter — MusikAnimal talk 16:59, 3 October 2016 (UTC)
- @MusikAnimal: Re "doesn't even let me try": sadly that is desktop only at the moment—see phab:T145304. At least in some situations the mobile interface won't notice the TB until it's at the point of saving 😞 But this is still better an an edit filter, and community JS can't change the mobile site... BethNaught (talk) 20:06, 3 October 2016 (UTC)
- Yeah... we could try on testwiki I guess, or the beta cluster. I do think if this proves working it is the most ideal solution. No JavaScript required. I tested trying to create a page currently on the title blacklist, and it doesn't even let me try – which is what we want. E.g. I'd hate for the user to write their article then hit save only to find out they can't. This is yet another advantage over the edit filter — MusikAnimal talk 16:59, 3 October 2016 (UTC)
- One needs to test this, I've got a funny feeling this will block all account creation as well. MER-C 05:31, 3 October 2016 (UTC)
- what the customer sees should read 4 days, rather than 96 hours. It's psychological - 4 does not sound as menacing as 96. Kudpung กุดผึ้ง (talk) 23:52, 2 October 2016 (UTC)
- Done — Esquivalience (talk) 00:24, 3 October 2016 (UTC)
- Just a reminder...
ACTRIAL wasn't only about restricting the creation of new articles in mainspace to autoconfirmed users. It was not our intention to hinder the spontaneity of writing an article, so our proposal for WP:ACTRIAL also came with a complete package of template messages and interface mods to offer them the possibility ('force' them) to use the Article Wizard. Kudpung กุดผึ้ง (talk) 20:21, 3 October 2016 (UTC)
Complete list of everything that is needed to conclude this project
I've sent MusikAnimal a copy of the 17-page report I was asked for by the WMF two months ago which still hasn't even been acknowledged. I've left a long(ish) message at [[::m::User talk:DannyH (WMF)]] who replied on my talk page at Meta to my post on the pre-survey letter to Santa Claus, but obviously I'm not holding my breath. They won't even start their survey until November, and then it will take a year before they start working on anything. MusikAnimal is of course free to use or publish all or any parts of my report - there's nothing secret about it. What I do resent however, are the occasional snide remarks from some users that work groups operate as secret cabals.
Also, (@Bluerasberry:), in replying on Danny's talk page I cast an eye over the other messages he has received and frankly I am now even less reassured that our community can have much confidence his project for addressing major critical issues. Perhaps nevertheless he might just take the initiative on our behalf to inform whoever has overall responsibility for such things, but again, I'm not holding my breath there either - the atmosphere within the WMF is that most employees won't take any initiative outside their brief for fear of compromising their paid positions. --Kudpung กุดผึ้ง (talk) 02:16, 3 October 2016 (UTC)
I think I have finally discovered the confirmation I need of the claims I make about the lack of cooperation between WMF staff who are even supposed to be working on the same team. Ajraddatz has deleted the page we were advised to register our requirement on. Danny almost never responds to messages on his talk page. None of this instills confidence and I see the Steven Walling syndrome looming. I think that in spite of his kind help here, we need to ask MusikAnimal to clarify his position. Kudpung กุดผึ้ง (talk) 05:23, 3 October 2016 (UTC)
- I wouldn't be that pessimistic -- all that's needed is to approach the right person at the right time with a persuasive argument (and be prepared to wait). Again, Orangemoody was a lost opportunity. To wit: I bypassed the Community Tech wishlist regarding phab:5233 at m:Harassment consultation 2015; it's now being implemented. MER-C 05:41, 3 October 2016 (UTC)
- @Kudpung: I work for meta:Community Tech. I saw the comments regarding the wish list and wanted to offer some reassurance that it is a real thing that we as a team honour and go by – on my own accord. That's the extent of it... anything else you'd like to know? The landing page implementation I've done (that I think we should move forward with), is completely volunteer, as is anything under this account — MusikAnimal talk 16:45, 3 October 2016 (UTC)
- @MusikAnimal: Is Community Tech willing or planning to accept direct proposals? Voting seems to prioritize what editors want as a very late Christmas present, such as new nifty gadgets or convenience features (such as dead link fixing), while other important software get ignored by the vote. Perhaps the team should get readers involved into the process as well: maybe they want to see better math (equations such as look atrocious on many devices). — Esquivalience (talk) 00:04, 4 October 2016 (UTC)
- @Kudpung: I work for meta:Community Tech. I saw the comments regarding the wish list and wanted to offer some reassurance that it is a real thing that we as a team honour and go by – on my own accord. That's the extent of it... anything else you'd like to know? The landing page implementation I've done (that I think we should move forward with), is completely volunteer, as is anything under this account — MusikAnimal talk 16:45, 3 October 2016 (UTC)
- Esquivalience: Really, the best way to get the Community Tech team to work on something is to propose it in the Community Wishlist Survey. If the project that you're proposing is really important and affects a lot of people, then it should be relatively easy to get a lot of other people to support-vote it to the top of the list. I think saying "I won't bother to submit this important idea for the survey, because the survey never includes any important ideas" is potentially self-defeating.
- We've only done the survey once so far, so I don't know if we can draw any conclusions about what people tend to vote for. What do you think about using the next survey to find out if we could get people to vote for important software? -- DannyH (WMF) (talk) 00:29, 4 October 2016 (UTC)
- @DannyH (WMF): If you cannot see the importance of new page patrol, why should a bunch of random people hanging around meta find it interesting? Is having 15,000 unreviewed new articles at enwiki a problem? Or is it someone else's problem? Johnuniq (talk) 01:02, 4 October 2016 (UTC)
- To further this, my experience putting together ACTRIAL was that editors from places other than en.wiki blithely dismissed the idea because of some pre-conceived notion that it was unnecessary because no one else did it. To a large extent there was complete misunderstanding (which in some cases appeared willful) of the serious problem en.wiki faces, being that it's so much larger and faster moving than anything else, and entailed a series or disingenuous comments about "the community's will", because some people who never actually edit en.wiki are entitled to shut down our consensus while bloviating about their superior understanding of the "real meaning" of the founding principles. Or something. Opening this up to the same degree will get identical results, and result in a lot of wasted time and bytes of text. The Blade of the Northern Lights (話して下さい) 04:09, 4 October 2016 (UTC)
- Okay, it's up to you. You're welcome to participate, if you want. -- DannyH (WMF) (talk) 16:34, 4 October 2016 (UTC)
- I don't underestimate the value of your project Danny, but as we've mentioned now multiple times here and elsewhere, it's not a venue where highly critical and fundamental issues of this magnitude should be listed and their priority decided by the managers of such a wish list. Wish lists imply neither necessity nor importance nor urgency.
- The wish list project was almost certainly never intended to replace or block discussion at higher levels on the need to address major issues, so I am seeking a solution to clearly identify the line of responsibility within the WMF for such requirements. That said, Ryan and MusikAnimal are now working hard to address many of the points on our program and we are now feeling some sense of progress for the first time. With any luck, we'll be able to get this accomplished without the need to publish a moan an groan, gloom and doom article on Signpost.Kudpung กุดผึ้ง (talk) 00:04, 5 October 2016 (UTC)
- Oh, it's absolutely not a blocker; you can raise the issue any way that you like. I'm just saying that there is currently a way to get a share of WMF development resources for projects that contributors think are important. If you don't want to use that opportunity, then you don't have to. But as I said, you're welcome to, if you decide you want to. -- DannyH (WMF) (talk) 00:54, 5 October 2016 (UTC)
- Danny, we will, of course but the scope of the immediate requirements for NPP (few have seen the extent of the actual report) would take up your team's resources for a whole year even if they started now. We wouldn't want to hold up the many requests for convenience tweaks that you are already admirably working through, so we also need to find a way to get some of the rest of the engineers allocated to these serious fundamental issues, or to increase the size of your team. Funds are not an issue - or so I have been told. Kudpung กุดผึ้ง (talk) 02:14, 5 October 2016 (UTC)
- Oh, it's absolutely not a blocker; you can raise the issue any way that you like. I'm just saying that there is currently a way to get a share of WMF development resources for projects that contributors think are important. If you don't want to use that opportunity, then you don't have to. But as I said, you're welcome to, if you decide you want to. -- DannyH (WMF) (talk) 00:54, 5 October 2016 (UTC)
- Okay, it's up to you. You're welcome to participate, if you want. -- DannyH (WMF) (talk) 16:34, 4 October 2016 (UTC)
- To further this, my experience putting together ACTRIAL was that editors from places other than en.wiki blithely dismissed the idea because of some pre-conceived notion that it was unnecessary because no one else did it. To a large extent there was complete misunderstanding (which in some cases appeared willful) of the serious problem en.wiki faces, being that it's so much larger and faster moving than anything else, and entailed a series or disingenuous comments about "the community's will", because some people who never actually edit en.wiki are entitled to shut down our consensus while bloviating about their superior understanding of the "real meaning" of the founding principles. Or something. Opening this up to the same degree will get identical results, and result in a lot of wasted time and bytes of text. The Blade of the Northern Lights (話して下さい) 04:09, 4 October 2016 (UTC)
- @DannyH (WMF): If you cannot see the importance of new page patrol, why should a bunch of random people hanging around meta find it interesting? Is having 15,000 unreviewed new articles at enwiki a problem? Or is it someone else's problem? Johnuniq (talk) 01:02, 4 October 2016 (UTC)
Taking a closer look at the data
I took a look at the data we have for Page Curation, Page Patrolling, and new article creation. Over the past couple years the rates for page patrolling (via the 'mark as patrolled' link) and new article creation have remained relatively flat. The rate for reviewing articles through Page Curation (Special:NewPagesFeed), however, dropped suddenly on May 20, 2016 and has not recovered. I reviewed the commit logs for both the PageTriage extension and core MediaWiki in the week before May 20. The only changes to PageTriage were localization updates and I was not able to find any suspicious core changes during that time (although due to the large number of core commits, I was not able to review them in depth). I will now start looking at the Page Curation logging data in more detail to see if I can figure out what changed then. Any leads would be appreciated. Kaldari (talk) 01:30, 4 October 2016 (UTC)
- @Kudpung, Esquivalience, and BethNaught: ^ Kaldari (talk) 01:34, 4 October 2016 (UTC)
- Kaldari, I've made some suggestions/leads direct on the Phabricator case page. Kudpung กุดผึ้ง (talk) 06:42, 4 October 2016 (UTC)
- I think this has to do with SwisterTwister dramatically decreasing patrolling around that time. Prior to May 20, that user was making over 500 patrols per day. However, between May 20 and June 17 they made fewer than 500 total. See here. The graph shows a peak towards late July, and that user was more active in patrolling at the same time as the peak.~ ONUnicorn(Talk|Contribs)problem solving 15:17, 4 October 2016 (UTC)
- That would account for what looks like a drop of 400-500 on that graph. Has anybody asked SwisterTwister why they stopped patrolling as much? -- DannyH (WMF) (talk) 17:13, 4 October 2016 (UTC)
- Probably a result of this discussion, even though it was closed as no consensus (I had no involvement and make no specific comment on it). The Blade of the Northern Lights (話して下さい) 17:43, 4 October 2016 (UTC)
- I agree it was a result of that discussion, but generally it is not good when a vital process largely relies on one user.--Ymblanter (talk) 20:29, 4 October 2016 (UTC)
- As it was on me circa early 2011, when I originally came up with what became ACTRIAL. It's bad for the user and for the process. The Blade of the Northern Lights (話して下さい) 21:09, 4 October 2016 (UTC)
- I agree it was a result of that discussion, but generally it is not good when a vital process largely relies on one user.--Ymblanter (talk) 20:29, 4 October 2016 (UTC)
- Probably a result of this discussion, even though it was closed as no consensus (I had no involvement and make no specific comment on it). The Blade of the Northern Lights (話して下さい) 17:43, 4 October 2016 (UTC)
- That would account for what looks like a drop of 400-500 on that graph. Has anybody asked SwisterTwister why they stopped patrolling as much? -- DannyH (WMF) (talk) 17:13, 4 October 2016 (UTC)
- I think this has to do with SwisterTwister dramatically decreasing patrolling around that time. Prior to May 20, that user was making over 500 patrols per day. However, between May 20 and June 17 they made fewer than 500 total. See here. The graph shows a peak towards late July, and that user was more active in patrolling at the same time as the peak.~ ONUnicorn(Talk|Contribs)problem solving 15:17, 4 October 2016 (UTC)
- Kaldari, I've made some suggestions/leads direct on the Phabricator case page. Kudpung กุดผึ้ง (talk) 06:42, 4 October 2016 (UTC)
- Yep, looks like SwisterTwister was doing the majority of reviews (see 2nd chart). That would explain the backlog piling up since June. Kaldari (talk) 23:00, 4 October 2016 (UTC)
- It is of course inadmissible, Kaldari, that such an important activity such as NPP, our only firewall against unwanted content, should rely on the work of a mere handful of operators. Some of them have stopped or reduced their participation at NPP because they were told that their patrolling was substandard and causing more problems than if they were to leave the process alone (SwisterTwister).
- Those who have read (should have) the other discussions I linked to, will have noted also that three reasons for disinterest in NPP are: 1) it is a boring, lonely job, 2) there is no vibrant group of 'members' supporting it in the same way of AfC (which has almost even become a social networking project), and 3). there is no headware for the hat collectors - which works as a magical magnet to maintenance tasks.
- I've calculated that we would need ten new patrollers working away at the backlog for 96 days just to get it down to a daily input - without taking into consideration the 850 new pages that are received every day. Kudpung กุดผึ้ง (talk) 23:23, 4 October 2016 (UTC)
- The WMF commissioned an external research a few years ago into NPP. It came up with all the wrong results, but I believe it was established that about 50 patrols, properly done, are about the maximum a patroller can do in one session. I manage about 20-30. Kudpung กุดผึ้ง (talk) 02:22, 5 October 2016 (UTC)
A little bit of progress
The WMF Community Tech Team (which I manage) has completed the following tasks:
- Determine the cause of the recently growing backlog (T146959).
- Request #8: Unreviewed new articles should be marked as noindex (T147544). Note that this code still has to be reviewed, merged, and deployed which may take a couple weeks.
- Request #9: Make sure articles moved to Main namespace from other namespaces are included at Special:NewPagesFeed. This was already fixed actually, but we tested it to make sure.
- Request #23: Update Page Curation maintenance tag list to match Twinkle's (T147544). This is now live and can be configured by administrators with JavaScript knowledge: MediaWiki:PageTriageExternalTagsOptions.js.
In addition, MusikAnimal and myself (on our own time) built a prototype for a new article creation notice: User:MusikAnimal/New article edit notice, which the community is free to use (or not). I realize that these improvements are only a fraction of the changes requested. However, in order to tackle the more substantial requests, either Community Tech or the Collaboration Team (which ostensibly owns Page Curation) will need to set aside significant time to plan and execute this as a real development project. I have a meeting scheduled with Katherine late next week in which we will be discussing the NPP situation (among other things). I'll let everyone know if anything comes out of that meeting. Kaldari (talk) 08:09, 6 October 2016 (UTC)
- Great news about articles being marked as non indexed until patrolled. This means the search engines will ignore rather than mirror them and will reduce the damage done by attack pages and reduce the incentive for spammers. But to make it effective we need a change to the newpage screens so that articles already tagged for deletion can be excluded or selected. Most patrollers will want to exclude them, but admins are likely to want to select them. I suggest marking them in a separate colour in the feed. Another group it would be nice to highlight are people creating an article where their previous article was deleted G10 or G3. These articles need to be prioritised for checking and probably for blocking the author. With vandals we have a progression of warnings that escalates to a block, but the current system lacks that for page creators. Would it be possible to automatically post an AIV report on anyone who had had two pages deleted per G3 & G10 or three deleted G11 in the last 7 days? ϢereSpielChequers 06:54, 14 October 2016 (UTC)
@Kaldari: I'm interested in more information about this noindex thing. Does this also apply to internal searches or is it just external indexing i.e. robots.txt? ~Kvng (talk) 16:43, 18 October 2016 (UTC)
- @Kvng: Noindexing only affects external search engines (same as robots.txt). Our internal search engines don't look at meta tags, so there should be no effect for internal searches. Kaldari (talk) 18:20, 18 October 2016 (UTC)
New edit notice
@Kudpung, Noyster, JohnCD, DGG, The Blade of the Northern Lights, and MER-C: How does this look? Instead of posting at WP:VPR or another venue and having this turn into an unnecessary support/oppose !voting survey, I'm was hoping to attain some rough consensus from you all. This seems mostly uncontroversial, it being a mild distraction with a potentially profound impact on how new users approach article creation — MusikAnimal talk 01:59, 7 October 2016 (UTC)
- It looks fine to me; communicates the message in a polite and pithy manner. I leave any stylistic comments to others. The Blade of the Northern Lights (話して下さい) 02:43, 7 October 2016 (UTC)
- Good, but the description text is too squished. Change letter-spacing to 0.2-0.4px, or change the font-weight to 300 and the font-size to 85%. — Esquivalience (talk) 03:21, 7 October 2016 (UTC)
- Thanks for the ping MusikAnimal - I hope you meant
This seems mostly uncontroversial
... Fine by me, I just wonder if the red button, instead of directing to the main page, could take the new editor to somewhere offering help with whatever they were wanting to do, like Help:Contents: Noyster (talk), 12:04, 7 October 2016 (UTC) - Looks great- I'm delighted that we really seem to be getting somewhere with this. Perhaps there could some button for help- an IRC link perhaps? jcc (tea and biscuits) 16:08, 7 October 2016 (UTC)
- Definitely meant uncontroversial, thanks Noyster! I have implemented all of your recommendations, including a new bullet point with links to get help. Going to deploy this now. Thanks, all! — MusikAnimal talk 17:33, 7 October 2016 (UTC)
- Done! :D — MusikAnimal talk 17:45, 7 October 2016 (UTC)
- It's too in-your-face. KATMAKROFAN (talk) 18:48, 7 October 2016 (UTC)
- It's for new users, so it's supposed to be a bit in-your-face. You can simply scroll down so that you don't see it, if you find it distracting. Or add
#newarticletext { display: none }
to your personal CSS — MusikAnimal talk 18:51, 7 October 2016 (UTC)- "It's for new users"? I've only been here for a few months and I find the new version WP:BITEy. It doesn't need an image, the text is too big, and links are used instead of buttons in most editnotices. KATMAKROFAN (talk) 19:43, 7 October 2016 (UTC)
- It's for new users, so it's supposed to be a bit in-your-face. You can simply scroll down so that you don't see it, if you find it distracting. Or add
- Definitely meant uncontroversial, thanks Noyster! I have implemented all of your recommendations, including a new bullet point with links to get help. Going to deploy this now. Thanks, all! — MusikAnimal talk 17:33, 7 October 2016 (UTC)
- It may be worthwhile to put something to make people think twice about autobiographies/resumes if it can be done without cluttering it up. The other thing is just a personal aesthetic preference. I find the colour scheme is too bright/loud particularly on a bright white background but I prefer duller colours overall so...Great job and thank you! JbhTalk 19:10, 7 October 2016 (UTC)
- Thanks! It's the "cluttering up" part that I'm worried about. Wikipedia:Your first article gives info about autobios, as does the Article Wizard. That's about as far as we can go. The only truly super important thing is to stress the importance of references for BLPs. Beyond that we kind of have to let them figure it out, or else we're back at TL;DR. The loudness I think is also favourable if we want to ensure it is read. I realize experienced Wikipedians aren't going to be too pleased, but hopefully they'll understand the audience it is benefiting — MusikAnimal talk 19:19, 7 October 2016 (UTC)
- Yeah... I can see how bright would be good. With everything going through AFC My First Article is good enough I guess. I was hoping there could be a way to catch all of the "me" "me" impulse/vanity creations since there are a lot of those. I can not think of a non-cluttering way to do it without saying Wikipedia is not the place to write about yourself which is not really the friendly vibe we are looking for JbhTalk 19:49, 7 October 2016 (UTC)
- Thanks! It's the "cluttering up" part that I'm worried about. Wikipedia:Your first article gives info about autobios, as does the Article Wizard. That's about as far as we can go. The only truly super important thing is to stress the importance of references for BLPs. Beyond that we kind of have to let them figure it out, or else we're back at TL;DR. The loudness I think is also favourable if we want to ensure it is read. I realize experienced Wikipedians aren't going to be too pleased, but hopefully they'll understand the audience it is benefiting — MusikAnimal talk 19:19, 7 October 2016 (UTC)
- I think the version I made was probably less cluttered and the buttons less imposing, but that's just my personal choice as a graphic designer. @KATMAKROFAN:, I see absolutely nothing bitey about it at all. It will become clearer when you have addressed the issues with your own editing (and if you need any help with that, don't hesitate to ask me). Kudpung กุดผึ้ง (talk) 23:11, 7 October 2016 (UTC)
- Somebody at Village pump (policy) doesn't like it. I like it. (I see that I can bypass it by entering data in the empty form, also.) I wasn't actually trying to create a new article, but to view the deletion status of a red link. I succeeded in doing that and in seeing it. Robert McClenon (talk) 23:28, 7 October 2016 (UTC)
- The message is now only shown to new users, and for confirmed users the old message is shown :) I don't know why I didn't think of that beforehand, there is user-group specific CSS. This is excellent because now we can look into adding User:MusikAnimal/Article search with no result to MediaWiki:Search-nonefound (once we tweak it to our liking). That message is very in-your-face, intentionally, but in that case too in-your-face for experienced users — MusikAnimal talk 02:56, 8 October 2016 (UTC)
- Somebody at Village pump (policy) doesn't like it. I like it. (I see that I can bypass it by entering data in the empty form, also.) I wasn't actually trying to create a new article, but to view the deletion status of a red link. I succeeded in doing that and in seeing it. Robert McClenon (talk) 23:28, 7 October 2016 (UTC)
- Looks good, though I think stuff about being an encyclopedia should be mentioned somewhere. Is anyone going to obtain metrics to see whether this has the desired effect? MER-C 05:42, 8 October 2016 (UTC)
- I don't think there's a way to do metrics without significant effort (mw:Extension:EventLogging), no. But I can tell you that from my work with abuse filters, big flashy messages definitely help with newbies over simple plain black and white text. Whether they actually follow the advice is anyone's guess, but if we see a spike in AfC submissions it's probably because of the new edit notice.I've created Template:Newarticletext-unconfirmed and am now transcluding it in MediaWiki:Newarticletext (also Template:Newarticletext-confirmed), that way we can work on it without risk of message up the core interface message. Do note the bold red comment in the documentation to keep the message brief. I would argue a sixth bullet point is overdoing it. We're already pointing them to WP:YFA, which explains pretty clearly the do's and don'ts, so I personally feel what we have will suffice — MusikAnimal talk 23:03, 9 October 2016 (UTC)
Idea for technically preventing "blank" AFC submissions
Is it possible to make the AFC "Submit" button available only when the page has reached a specified minimum size? The boilerplate content that is automatically placed on a new draft page (an AFC submit template and a References section with a hidden explanatory note) runs to about 300 bytes, depending on the page title and creator's username. The Submit button could be inactivated until the page is at least 400 bytes long. I believe it's impossible to create an acceptable stub with fewer than 100 characters of actual text. (The previous sentence is 101 characters) Roger (Dodger67) (talk) 17:23, 8 October 2016 (UTC)
- Roger, It's possible to get a script made that if an editor attempts to submit a very short article, it automatically puts an alert:
- Sorry, your article is still too short to have sufficient value as an encyclopedia article. Please expand it, being sure to source the new content, then submit again. Thanks,
- how severe is the incidence of such pages as compared to the arrival of new submissions as a whole? --Kudpung กุดผึ้ง (talk) 04:45, 9 October 2016 (UTC)
- Kudpung "Blank" is consistently in the "top four" decline reasons I use. The AFCH script offers reviewers an automatically sorted "shortlist" of the four most used decline reasons - "blank" has never dropped out of my shortlist. At a rough thumbsuck I'd say they make up at least 10% of all new (GFOO) submissions. Roger (Dodger67) (talk) 06:32, 9 October 2016 (UTC)
- Roger, be brutal. Blank pages are from time wasters. Tag them for CSD A1 or A3 or if you are an admin, delete them summarily. Check with your project that a decline template exists that states: 'Declined and tagged for deletion because your submission had little or no content'. Kudpung กุดผึ้ง (talk) 06:44, 9 October 2016 (UTC)
- The A# speedy criteria are not applicable to Draft or User spaces. I already have a problem with admins refusing blatantly obvious G11 speedy nominations because "it's a draft it can be fixed". However, speedying blank submissions doesn't solve the "time sink" problem of them being submitted in the first place adding pointless "overburden" to the reviewing queue and burning up more reviewer time. As far as possible preventing obvious crap from even entering the AFC queue should be a priority. Take a good look at the "quick fail" criteria in the AFC workflow, trying to automate them as far as feasible would free up reviewers to consider the ones that need actual thought. Of these, the blanks seem to be the lowest hanging fruit, easy to prevent their submission. Roger (Dodger67) (talk) 11:31, 9 October 2016 (UTC)
- Unfortunately, I agree with Roger. It is rare for an AFC submission to qualify for speedy deletion. The A criteria are, as their name implies, for article space. I don't have blank in my top five, but it isn't rare, and it is a timesink. I won't waste my time and that of an admin by tagging blank submissions with A1 or A3, but it would help if automated code would stop the blank or nearly blank submissions. Also, I see blank submissions as good-faith error, at least at AFC, by editors who really don't know what they are doing. They are more good-faith than spam, and a filter would be useful. Robert McClenon (talk) 20:25, 9 October 2016 (UTC)
- The A# speedy criteria are not applicable to Draft or User spaces. I already have a problem with admins refusing blatantly obvious G11 speedy nominations because "it's a draft it can be fixed". However, speedying blank submissions doesn't solve the "time sink" problem of them being submitted in the first place adding pointless "overburden" to the reviewing queue and burning up more reviewer time. As far as possible preventing obvious crap from even entering the AFC queue should be a priority. Take a good look at the "quick fail" criteria in the AFC workflow, trying to automate them as far as feasible would free up reviewers to consider the ones that need actual thought. Of these, the blanks seem to be the lowest hanging fruit, easy to prevent their submission. Roger (Dodger67) (talk) 11:31, 9 October 2016 (UTC)
- Roger, be brutal. Blank pages are from time wasters. Tag them for CSD A1 or A3 or if you are an admin, delete them summarily. Check with your project that a decline template exists that states: 'Declined and tagged for deletion because your submission had little or no content'. Kudpung กุดผึ้ง (talk) 06:44, 9 October 2016 (UTC)
- Kudpung "Blank" is consistently in the "top four" decline reasons I use. The AFCH script offers reviewers an automatically sorted "shortlist" of the four most used decline reasons - "blank" has never dropped out of my shortlist. At a rough thumbsuck I'd say they make up at least 10% of all new (GFOO) submissions. Roger (Dodger67) (talk) 06:32, 9 October 2016 (UTC)
Maybe a bot that monitored new submissions and auto-declined blank ones (and perhaps other types of obviously malformed submissions) with a polite explanation would be more effective than a warning on submission? I have a feeling that if someone is at the point where they're submitting a blank draft to AfC they've already seen and ignored a hell of a lot of instructions. Joe Roe (talk) 01:07, 10 October 2016 (UTC)
- It is in fact ridiculously easy for a completely new user to submit a blank in three easy clicks: 1. Click on the redlink "Sandbox" link in the user menu at the top of the screen. 2. Accept the "offer" to create the page that pops up. 3. Notice the "Submit" button that is prominently displayed on this brand new shiny clean page and click it (just to see what happens). Congratulations newbie editor, you have just added another blank submission to the AFC queue - a bitey canned message (which you will not understand) will be delivered to your Talk page soon. We should really take a good hard look at how the Article Wizard functions, it misleads editors into thinking AFC is the only way to contribute new additions and makes it too easy to (intentionally or unintentionally) add crap to the AFC "machine". Roger (Dodger67) (talk) 09:32, 12 October 2016 (UTC)
- The only thing that's basically wrong with the Article Wizard is that like everything else Wikipedia, it's too wordy. We're soon going to make it harder for IPs, spammers, and troll to create pages, but we need to make it easier for good faith editors. The Foundation isn't going to do anything about Article Wizard or AfC though because they are local projects. That said, some years ago I started to redesign Article Wizard, but when the WMF announced they were working on the development of a new landing page that would channel users to it, I held off, I'm still holding off 5 years later waiting for the new Landing Page from the WMF.
- It should be fairly easy to build a filter to do whatever you want with blank pages. Perhaps not so easy though to find someone to do it. Ideally, one could start an RfC at WT:CSD for a new CSD criterion to cover it, but with only around 100 or so articles arriving at AfC every day, 10%, i.e. 10 pages, would be arguably manually processable. Kudpung กุดผึ้ง (talk) 10:46, 12 October 2016 (UTC)
- I see tons of blank AfC pages in userspace anything to reduce the creation would be very helpful ~~,~
Blank submissions continue to be a problem, as do very short ones. There is no way to accept something less than 4 sentences, and I don't think your average new user even realizes they are submitting a blank or very short effort for someone else to review. I bet a lot of people think Submit = Save. There are over 300 blank declined submissions in User/Sandboxes from the last 6 months. I already CSD G2 all the Blank Draft space ones but sandboxes are G2 exempt. Sometimes I just blank the sandbox with edit message "blank test and AfC submission" but prevention of creatition would be a lot friendlier than getting Decline, then 6 months later Delete messages. Legacypac (talk)
New Pages Feed - access
MusikAnimal. Now that we have the consensus to restrict access to the functions of NPP, could you or one of your colleagues please look at this script User:Ryan Vesey/sidebar.js, and make it only accessible to holders of the new user right? The author Ryan Vesey. Ryan went suddenly AWOL a long time ago and while we sincerely hope he is well, we have no news and it doesn't look as if he's going to be back any time soon. --Kudpung กุดผึ้ง (talk) 04:54, 9 October 2016 (UTC)
- @Kudpung: There are but 10 people who have that script in their personal JS, and apparently you, two sysops and Sam Sailor are the only ones using it. Altering it isn't going to help anything, I believe, and all the script does is add a link to Special:NewPagesFeed in the sidebar. Most people simply go directly to Special:NewPagesFeed, perhaps have it bookmarked. We should wait for the new right to be deployed, and we'll update the Page Curation code itself — MusikAnimal talk 23:09, 9 October 2016 (UTC)
- Hmm wait a minute, there isn't a new user right, correct? We're just removing the "patrol" permission from autoconfirmed, confirmed, and reviewer groups, and moving it to a dedicated user group. It appears Page Curation is already looking for this permission, so no changes are actually necessary — MusikAnimal talk 23:15, 9 October 2016 (UTC)
- MusikAnimal, I think xaosflux in his brave attempts to be helpful that started around User talk:Kudpung/Archive Aug 2016#WP:NPP may have caused some confusion. It certainly confused me. Most people consider 'Reviewer', 'Rollbacker', 'Autopatrolled', and 'Page mover' (have I missed any?) as 'user rights'. Indeed the Special:UserRights/Kudpung page where the are controlled is even called User rights management. Therefore, for us ignorant hard working volunteers the distinction between User Right and User Group not only escapes us, but is not even strictly necessary for us to comprehend. All we want is for a user right/group that prevents unqualified users from accessing the New Pages Feed and the Curation tool, and for whichthe permission requests will be handled through the page at Special:UserRights. Kudpung กุดผึ้ง (talk) 21:12, 10 October 2016 (UTC)
- @Kudpung: Yep, so let me explain: There are two things, user groups and rights. Each user group has a set of rights associated with it, which are listed at Special:UserGroupRights. What you see at Special:UserRights/Kudpung are user groups. The thing that makes patrolling pages possible is a right called patrol, which currently is in the "(auto)confirmed", "pending changes reviewer" and "administrator" groups. So all we need to do is create a new user group, "new page patroller" that has the right patrol, then remove patrol from "(auto)confirmed" and "pending changes reviewer". That leaves us with two user groups that can patrol pages: "new page patroller" and "administrators". This is all done with a simple config change, no code changes to Page Curation are necessary — MusikAnimal talk 21:20, 10 October 2016 (UTC)
- Thanks MusikAnimal. As long as it does what we need I don't think most of the editors driving this NPP reform projet are particularly concerned with the engineering. I'm just surprised (as a very adept administrator of highly granular groups/rights in some other web sites) that people make it all sound so complicated. All it achieves of course is putting logs through the spokes of RfCs and some 'oppose' votes at RfC fthen come from people who are made skeptical and who would have supported if the RfCs were kept on the KISS principle. There is this ridiculous notion held by some people that every Wikipedia editor has to be an IT geek. Kudpung กุดผึ้ง (talk) 21:33, 10 October 2016 (UTC)
- I've updated the title for Special:UserRights to match all of the other recent updates (notice the side bar has changed to "change user groups" recently as well. The terminology can indeed be confusing. — xaosflux Talk 21:37, 10 October 2016 (UTC)
- Nice! If only we could get the proper name Special:UserGroups in place of UserRights. It's true it is confusing... and the core software even conflicts with itself — MusikAnimal talk 21:40, 10 October 2016 (UTC)
- Are you sure you want to remove the patrolling right from Pending changes reviewers? That's a manually assigned user group and seems to align pretty closely with the qualifications you would want from a patroller. I would suggest only removing the right from the (auto)confirmed user group (if any). Otherwise, you're going to start with a very small pool of potential patrollers. Kaldari (talk) 05:01, 12 October 2016 (UTC)
- @Kaldari:Yes, quite sure. PC Reviewer has the lowest threshold of entry of all the Wikipedia user rights - and is supposed to be relatively easy to obtain. It requires (theorectically) so little clue that it was accorded to thousands of users by a bot. Some users have actually opposed our RfC because they feel 90 days/500 mainspace edits is not severe enough. New Page Patroller (or to give it its new name, New Page Reviewer) actually needs a near admin level knowledge of notability and deletion criteria.
- Are you sure you want to remove the patrolling right from Pending changes reviewers? That's a manually assigned user group and seems to align pretty closely with the qualifications you would want from a patroller. I would suggest only removing the right from the (auto)confirmed user group (if any). Otherwise, you're going to start with a very small pool of potential patrollers. Kaldari (talk) 05:01, 12 October 2016 (UTC)
- Nice! If only we could get the proper name Special:UserGroups in place of UserRights. It's true it is confusing... and the core software even conflicts with itself — MusikAnimal talk 21:40, 10 October 2016 (UTC)
- @Kudpung: Yep, so let me explain: There are two things, user groups and rights. Each user group has a set of rights associated with it, which are listed at Special:UserGroupRights. What you see at Special:UserRights/Kudpung are user groups. The thing that makes patrolling pages possible is a right called patrol, which currently is in the "(auto)confirmed", "pending changes reviewer" and "administrator" groups. So all we need to do is create a new user group, "new page patroller" that has the right patrol, then remove patrol from "(auto)confirmed" and "pending changes reviewer". That leaves us with two user groups that can patrol pages: "new page patroller" and "administrators". This is all done with a simple config change, no code changes to Page Curation are necessary — MusikAnimal talk 21:20, 10 October 2016 (UTC)
- MusikAnimal, I think xaosflux in his brave attempts to be helpful that started around User talk:Kudpung/Archive Aug 2016#WP:NPP may have caused some confusion. It certainly confused me. Most people consider 'Reviewer', 'Rollbacker', 'Autopatrolled', and 'Page mover' (have I missed any?) as 'user rights'. Indeed the Special:UserRights/Kudpung page where the are controlled is even called User rights management. Therefore, for us ignorant hard working volunteers the distinction between User Right and User Group not only escapes us, but is not even strictly necessary for us to comprehend. All we want is for a user right/group that prevents unqualified users from accessing the New Pages Feed and the Curation tool, and for whichthe permission requests will be handled through the page at Special:UserRights. Kudpung กุดผึ้ง (talk) 21:12, 10 October 2016 (UTC)
- Hmm wait a minute, there isn't a new user right, correct? We're just removing the "patrol" permission from autoconfirmed, confirmed, and reviewer groups, and moving it to a dedicated user group. It appears Page Curation is already looking for this permission, so no changes are actually necessary — MusikAnimal talk 23:15, 9 October 2016 (UTC)
- NPP has already dwindled to very ssmall pool of active New Page Reviewers - that's why we have the backlog. The person who caused the backlog to drop has serious problems with their patrolling (see multiple ANI cases) and the backlog will now rise again. As with other user rights which are a magnet to the hat collectors (many of them do a really good job though), we are trading on the likelihood that plenty of qualified users will flock to WP:PERM for the hat, and that some former reviewers will return and ask for the bit. The only user group that subsumes New Page Reviewer is Administrator/Sysop (or higher). Kudpung กุดผึ้ง (talk) 09:27, 12 October 2016 (UTC)
- @Kudpung: Can you give me a link to the RfC about restricting the patrol right so that I can file a Phabricator ticket for the change? Kaldari (talk) 17:47, 13 October 2016 (UTC)
- Nevermind, I found it. Should these changes be implemented immediately, or should it wait until the qualifications RFC is finished? Kaldari (talk) 17:50, 13 October 2016 (UTC)
- @Kaldari:, these changes must wait until the RfC has been formally closed. This is Wikipedia policy. en.Wiki RfCs usually run for at least 30 days but can be closed earlier if there is an overwhelming majority one way or another. Also, in anticipation of the result as per the proposal, we are still working on texts for some template messages, a newsletter, some minor interfaace changes which any admin can do, some Lab tools which MusikAnimal and other volunteers are developing, and some additions to the Mew Pages Feed and the Page Curation tool bar that can only be done for us by your team.Kudpung กุดผึ้ง (talk) 00:22, 14 October 2016 (UTC)
- @Kaldari:, I'll just add however, that consensus is already strong, so these fixes all need to be ready to deploy when the consensus is granted. Kudpung กุดผึ้ง (talk) 12:57, 14 October 2016 (UTC)
Compromise proposal
The Foundation and a minority of editors including myself want to keep open editing and a route into the community for the 25% of newbies who start by creating a new article. The majority of the community want some sort of restriction on newbies creating articles. Rather than the ACTRIAL proposal, what do people think of throttling account creation so that if you create one page you can't create a second until your account has been confirmed or your first page has been marked as patrolled? (Once we deploy the new Noindex until patrolled feature we can stop patrolling articles that are tagged for deletion). ϢereSpielChequers 11:34, 14 October 2016 (UTC)
- That does pretty much nothing. A huge amount of articles are done by 'one and done' editors. Puttering around enough to become autoconfirmed is not that huge a burden. Maybe it will even give them time/motivation to read our content guidelines. The number of editors lost by not being able to throw something straight into the encyclopedia will be counterbalanced by the number of editors who do not leave because their first article was quickly deleted. There will be the added benefit of addressing a real world problem which the community has been complaining about for years with a solution overwhelmingly approved by the community.
Ideology/Idealism is well and good but there is a practical problem that is drowning Wikipedia in crap that must be solved. ACTRIAL was put off for years and the problem only became worse. It is past time to try the solution proposed and approved by the community. If it fails, we try to figure out something else but continuing to do nothing or mess about with half measures is, in my very, very strong opinion, neither wise nor sustainable for the project. JbhTalk 11:54, 14 October 2016 (UTC)
- THe NOINDEX is not a new feature. It was introduced years ago on consensus but nobody knew it was broke until I asked the devs to fix it. My fault for assuming someone else would report it.
- Many people are saying now that the ACTRIAL criterion is not strict enough by today's problems. At least the consensus is even stronger than it was then with even some of the former opposers crossing the floor. Let's just not forget that ACTRIAL wasn't just about preventing non autoconfirmed users from immediately creating in mainspace, it actually channeled them through the Article Wizard instead. There are now enough various local technical solutions to deploy ACTRIAL without going through Phabricator, and that's probably what will happen - but not just yet. Let's see if we can get some new page patrollers of the right calibre first. Kudpung กุดผึ้ง (talk) 12:54, 14 October 2016 (UTC)
- @Jbhunley, I'd dispute you on the nothing bit, but I don't dispute it alone would do less than Actrial. However in life sometimes you can achieve more by seeking compromises and solutions that work for both sides. Another step would be to do what the German Wikipedia does and prompt editors for a reference. ϢereSpielChequers 18:26, 14 October 2016 (UTC)
- Maybe not nothing but likely indistinguishable from it. In general I do not see nor do I believe that there are many newbies creating multiple articles in their first 4 days. Rather there are new editors who come in to make an article on themselves, their company, favorite band, company etc. - a single article. That does not include the UPEs who come in and throw up promotional articles in one edit.
Yes, I would love to see new articles required to have a sources. I would go so far as to extend BLPPROD to everything and say it could be validly applied to any new article without an RS supporting a specific claim. This is because UPEs are figuring out that they can put in some crappy ELs and be able to duck a BLPPROD. I really doubt we would get consensus for that but sure, in that case, I would have no problem with immediate article creation. Notwithstanding how unlikely getting consensus on that is, I think it would raise the chance of new editors being discouraged because a huge portion of them would get tagged with an Extended-PROD for lack of RS. JbhTalk 18:25, 18 October 2016 (UTC)
- Maybe not nothing but likely indistinguishable from it. In general I do not see nor do I believe that there are many newbies creating multiple articles in their first 4 days. Rather there are new editors who come in to make an article on themselves, their company, favorite band, company etc. - a single article. That does not include the UPEs who come in and throw up promotional articles in one edit.
@WereSpielChequers: without dragging ourselves back to what went down with ACTRIAL, what exactly are we trying to negotiate? Is it as Jbhunley says a tradeoff between ability for new users to create articles immediately on the one hand and the amount of crap this puts into the encyclopedia on the other? ~Kvng (talk) 16:39, 18 October 2016 (UTC)
- Yes, this particular compromise would be a tradeoff, though I'd rather talk of compromise and seeking alternatives. I actually believe that we can build a happy medium, one that keeps a route open for new editors who start by creating new articles and also reduces the flow of crap and or makes it easier to reject. The frustrating thing about the entrenched positions on this is that what the two sides want to achieve isn't diametrically opposed, it is just their preferred methods of achieving that. If the philosophies were opposed then a consensus position would at best be a compromise that both regarded as suboptimal. But I think it should be possible to achieve something that isn't a tradeoff and instead achieves both sides objectives. The tricky thing is that this would require the WMF not just to be willing to invest in software, they do that a bit, but to invest in software the design of which has been agreed with the community in advance. This is culturally challenging as it conflicts with their self image as the leaders and designers for the movement. ϢereSpielChequers 22:31, 18 October 2016 (UTC)
- I think we're in a fairly compromised position :) with the way things are currently set up. As you say, different people want to solve this problem in different ways and we have multiple solutions active so what's the problem? New articles are either not indexed (NPP) or remain in draft space (AfC) until someone is able to review them. There is a low barrier to creating these. There is consensus that there needs to be review on new submissions. The problem is we just don't seem to consistently have enough qualified volunteer manpower to do these reviews at the rate they're coming in. I challenge the assumption that we need to eliminate the backlog. A long backlog will eventually serve to discourage new contributions and maybe encourage new editors to join the project and the system should reach equilibrium at some point. And if it doesn't, so be it. We'll review new submissions at whatever pace we can sustain. WP:NODEADLINE. ~Kvng (talk) 15:43, 19 October 2016 (UTC)
- There is no need to look for alternatives - ACTRIAL was backed by an overwhelming consensus from one of the lsrgest RfC we have ever known. Those still looking for alteratives are those who are either WMF staff who constantly need to impress the world with a raw statistic for new articles, those who wrongly believe that it would reduce the number of new articles any more than the barrier did that was put in place in 2006, and those who haven't actually done any patrolling of late to appreciate how the profile of the same 1,000 articles per day has radically changed. I've been doing NPP on and off for many years and I can definitely say that there is very little in the New Page Feed these days that is not blatant corporate spam, blatant bio & autobio spam, soccer players, and plain rubbish. I hardly ever get round to actually patrolling a new article as OK because as I have a deletion button I'm deleting pages faster than I review the others in the feed. NPP today is totally boring and it's hardly surprising so few want to work there. Closing AfDs by contrast can be quite entertaining. Kudpung กุดผึ้ง (talk) 16:54, 19 October 2016 (UTC)
- I think we're in a fairly compromised position :) with the way things are currently set up. As you say, different people want to solve this problem in different ways and we have multiple solutions active so what's the problem? New articles are either not indexed (NPP) or remain in draft space (AfC) until someone is able to review them. There is a low barrier to creating these. There is consensus that there needs to be review on new submissions. The problem is we just don't seem to consistently have enough qualified volunteer manpower to do these reviews at the rate they're coming in. I challenge the assumption that we need to eliminate the backlog. A long backlog will eventually serve to discourage new contributions and maybe encourage new editors to join the project and the system should reach equilibrium at some point. And if it doesn't, so be it. We'll review new submissions at whatever pace we can sustain. WP:NODEADLINE. ~Kvng (talk) 15:43, 19 October 2016 (UTC)
NPP backlog getting down
The current backlog is 13,578, which is a bit down from 16K we had two weeks ago. I am not sure though how sustainable it is, and if it is, what is the reason.--Ymblanter (talk) 18:00, 18 October 2016 (UTC)
- I believe that one reason is all the new RfCs that are being made. They are being publicised in many places, which results in more people receiving interest. Dat GuyTalkContribs 18:10, 18 October 2016 (UTC)
- A lot of it is because of poor, and very fast, reviewing by new editors like this one WebCite - Curration log. They do not seem to want to take the hint to slow down either, several complaints and attempts to get through to them are in their talk page history. JbhTalk 16:18, 19 October 2016 (UTC)
- @Jbhunley: That seems like it. Any reason why you nopinged them? Dat GuyTalkContribs 16:37, 19 October 2016 (UTC)
- They made a specific request not to be "bothered" about their patrolling [1] and they have been typically unresponsive. I figured a ping from me is likely to only annoy - they already have lots of "unreviews" from me today. I guess it would be polite to ping them though @WebCite: since they are likely to end up being discussed rather than simply being noted as an example.
I'm just wading through their log as I have time trying to find the worst of the errors. I think they have speedie-reviewed more articles than they have made edits! JbhTalk 17:14, 19 October 2016 (UTC)
- They made a specific request not to be "bothered" about their patrolling [1] and they have been typically unresponsive. I figured a ping from me is likely to only annoy - they already have lots of "unreviews" from me today. I guess it would be polite to ping them though @WebCite: since they are likely to end up being discussed rather than simply being noted as an example.
NOTE: For this kind of discussion which is not directly related to the technical reform project, a new talk page has specifically been created at Wikipedia talk:New pages patrol/Reviewers (the page at WT:NPP now has another purpose). We hope to see this same kind of vibrant discussion over there.
Past RFCs
RfC to create a 'Special:NewDraftsFeed' system for example, maybe others — also essential reading? --Gryllida (talk) 20:05, 20 November 2016 (UTC)
- Interesting reading perhaps, because it does reiterate the purpose of the Draft system. That old RfC has however been made largely defunct by later suggestions that point towards incorporating a Draft feed in the special:Newpagesfeed. --Kudpung กุดผึ้ง (talk) 22:41, 26 November 2016 (UTC)
Integrating NPP and AfC (a bit)
If you'll forgive the intrusion of a talk page lurker, I had a couple of ideas for hopefully quite easily implemented things that could start to bring the NPP and AfC processes more in line with each other:
- Since they have the same requirements, restrict the AfCHelper script to people with the new NPP right rather than maintaining a separate list. The benefit being that AfC reviewers have to be proactively vetted by an admin, rather than retroactively removed from the list if they didn't read the requirements properly. Existing AfC reviewers could be grandfathered in or asking to reapply of WP:PERM, which has the side benefit of making them all aware of NPP.
- Mark drafts that have been accepted through AfC as patrolled automatically. They've already had at least one pair of competent eyes look over them so we might as well ease the NPP backlog a bit. Not sure how technically feasible this is, though.
Then NPPers and AfC reviewers would be in the same 'pool' and there'd be a recognition that they're essentially doing the same task. Anyway, I thought this workgroup would be the best people to run the ideas by. Joe Roe (talk) 04:00, 26 November 2016 (UTC)
- My quick thoughts is that right now at PERM, AfC participation is being used to demonstrate competency for the NPP right- but if this continues and people can "prove" themselves through AfC reviewing, that does presume that things going wrong at AfC with a bad reviewer are more easily spotted and not as important as a bad reviewer at NPP? Let me know if I'm not making any sense. jcc (tea and biscuits) 23:22, 26 November 2016 (UTC)
- Jcc, AfC participation is not being used to demonstrate competency for the NPP right. Because both systems require similar, in-depth understanding of policies, guidelines, and above all, a mature manner of interaction, it is reasonable to assume that AfC reviewers who have clearly demonstrated skill and competency in those respects may well be suitable candidates for NR, and that's why they have been sent an invitation to apply for the NPR right - which does not pre-suppose they will get it.. Administrators never accord user rights on the basis of the minimum numerical requirements alone without also performing significant scrutiny.
- New Page Patrolling is an essential function, nothing else can substitute it. AfC however, is not an essential service; it's a bonus service that policy does not require Wikipedia to provide, and without it, the quality of new mainspace articles would not be affected. That however, is not to belittle the excellent work that some its operatives actually do but ,compared to NPP, it only has a handful of new submissions to process every day. One of its problems us that like NPP, although a very large number of editors like to claim they are regular patrollers/reviewers, in reality the bulk of the work is done by only a tiny fraction of them, and that is what causes the backlogs that users like me and DGG are so acutely aware of and why we are looking for doable solutions.
- The logical step therefore, as suggested by a significant number of users already, would be to combine the functions of the AfC Helper Script into the Page Curaton tool and have both systems running simultaneously from there. It therefore doesn't need AfC to be closed down, which is also what a lot of people want and it would be a win-win solution. Kudpung กุดผึ้ง (talk) 02:11, 27 November 2016 (UTC)
- No need to apologize for posting here, Joe Roe - with accurate observations like these and the concern you feel, you should consider joining our work group.
- Many people are already aware of #1 and all AfC reviewers have already been messaged a while back about New Page Reviewing, suggesting they apply for the new right (which does not however pre-suppose that they;ll get it automatically). On #2, I don't personally agree that this would be a good idea. For the same reasons that NPR is not accorded automatically to AfC reviewers. The standard of AfC reviewing still has a long way to go. I'm one who is monitoring it very quietly in the background and also watching all the additions to the user list. A lot of those are users who have been waiting until they have exactly 500 edits but have no other appropriate experience. Some of them are gaming the system in order to approve their own articles.Kudpung กุดผึ้ง (talk) 01:41, 27 November 2016 (UTC)
- On the subject of marking drafts approved through AFC automatically as patrolled, I have a question. Yesterday I accepted several articles that had been in the AFC backlog into article space. I then looked at the New Page Feed to see if either I needed to mark them as patrolled or if they were already marked as patrolled. They did not show up. Am I correct that this means that they had already been marked as patrolled while they were in draft space? If so, I assume that they had not been indexed, and were not indexed by Google until I accepted them into article space. Also if so, am I correct that new pages in draft space will be on the New Page Feed, but that reviewers will only be validating that they do not need speedy deletion, e.g., as G10 attack pages or G11 spam? Robert McClenon (talk) 02:43, 27 November 2016 (UTC)
- Hi Rob. To your first observation, the current situation is that all drafts that are published to mainspace by an AfC reviewer are supposed to appear in the New Pages Feed along with any pages moved from any namespece to mainspace, where they will be reviewed and which then releases them for indexing by Google. We either need confirmation from the devs, MusikAnimal and Kaldari that this has been checked, processed, and implemented.
- To your second question, this is a more complex issue. It has been suggested that without deprecating the AfC system entirely, that newly created drafts should appear in the New Pages Feed as a reviewer selectable filtered list. At the same time, similar features to he AfC Helper Script would be added to the Page Curation tool. Kudpung กุดผึ้ง (talk) 04:09, 27 November 2016 (UTC)
- Thanks for the responses. I guess my second suggestion is dependant on the first and can really be generalised into the observation that there's something illogical about the fact that if I (for example), as an AfC reviewer with the NPP right, move a draft to mainspace it's still added to queue for someone else to review. Similarly, I suppose that when an NPPer creates an article they're also marked as needing review, even though we trust them to review other people's contributions. So another approach might be to automatically give NPPers the autopatrolled right too? That way potentially problematic AfC reviews are still double-checked while reviews by vetted editors skip NPP. Admittedly this might be far too much effort for a quite small reduction in the NPP workload... Joe Roe (talk) 16:56, 28 November 2016 (UTC)
- I support these incremental improvements to our reviewing policies. ~Kvng (talk) 11:57, 6 December 2016 (UTC)
RFC on hasty tagging at VP
There is a pending RFC at the Village Pump (proposals) to require a 30 minute delay after article creation before tagging an article for deletion under A7 and perhaps other criteria. Individuals interested in that topic should opine there. Regards, TransporterMan (TALK) 22:57, 2 January 2017 (UTC)
RfC on the scrapping of the AfC process
There is an RfC at WT:Drafts asking if the AfC process should be scrapped altogether, which participants of this project may be interested in. Best wishes, jcc (tea and biscuits) 20:20, 22 January 2017 (UTC)
Backlog drive!
I've seen other projects (AfC for example) use backlog drives to increase participation for a defined period of time - do you think the WMF would make available some funds for some prizes? Maybe a couple of Amazon vouchers and a WMF t-shirt? Hell, I'd throw £10 in towards an Amazon voucher for the "winner". Of course, we'd have to make it clear that quality of patrol > number of patrols. Yes we're all volunteers and we do this for free - but prizes are great motivators.. Thoughts? -- Samtar talk · contribs 10:56, 6 February 2017 (UTC)
- Asked some initial questions (just seeing if this would be under grant scope) to the rapid grant guys - need to know if this is something we'd a) want to do in the near future and b) be willing to coordinate together -- Samtar talk · contribs 11:06, 6 February 2017 (UTC)
Proposal to unpatrol moved pages
There is currently a proposal at the village pump that bears directly on new page patrolling:
– Joe (talk) 15:41, 11 February 2017 (UTC)
WMF Report
For those who do not follow the NPR talk page, the Wikimedia Foundation has just issued a report with recommendations as to the future of new pages patrol at Wikipedia:New pages patrol/Analysis and proposal TonyBallioni (talk) 23:18, 31 May 2017 (UTC)
Moving forward
Now that the WMF has issued its report and proposal for the future of New Pages Patrol and editors have had time to review and respond directly to the report, I would like to ask the question in a more general sense of what the next steps are for what I think everyone agrees is a process in need of reform. In particular I see there being three questions critical to this conversation:
- What are the practical measures that are relatively uncontroversial that can be taken now to improve the NPP process?
- What are the people's thoughts of what I perceive as the core proposal of the WMF report: having a end date for the new pages feed when pages would fall of?
- Is there still support to attempt to implement ACTRIAL, and if so, what steps should be taken in regards to it?
I personally think that there have been some good suggestions to the first question on the report talk page and think the answer to number two is that the backlog won't be fixed by pretending it doesn't exist. I also still support ACTRIAL and think that the WMF has made a poor argument against it, especially when their own numbers show that it would stop approximately the amount of page creations that the backlog was growing by (see T149021.) I've posted this here rather than the report talk page so that the conversation can be both about it, but also discuss things not covered by it as needed. TonyBallioni (talk) 00:43, 7 June 2017 (UTC)
- My thoughts on ACTRIAL have been tempered somewhat. Some people write good content with their first registered edit. This does not mean that good content is encouraged by encouraging newcomers at start writing new content immediately. I have three ongoing thoughts:
- (1) Auto-{{welcome}} all new registrants. Possibly give them an opt-out of auto-welcoming in the registration process, but note that registration is public, the new registrant is listed as Special:Listusers. The welcome templates give newcomers a better ordered list of helpful reading and suggestions. Old arguments of the data burden of these seem very outdated, and answer is WP:PERFORMANCE. Auto-welcoming
- (2) Redesign the presentation of the main WP:AfC page. It encourages newcomers to start an article without doing any reading. Go to the page. In your face is "Welcome to Articles for Creation" in really big letters. Then there is a blur of not easy to read find text. Then there is a big blue box with big white text that says "Click here to create an article now!" Its size, and prominence, deman attention and imply that you don't need to read the text above it. When you click on the big blue button, the interface brings up some back-tracking instructions (are you really ready?), but the newcomer has already been put into the wrong mindset.
The best redesign, in my opinion, is that matching Template:Welcome, where the link to new page creation is at the fifth dot point, and it is not made to look more prominant than the dot points above it. I think Template:Welcome is beautiful in its simplicity, and AfC is over-decorated.
- (3) Similar to my comments here: treat new article draft writers more like adult Wikipedians, and less like children newcomers. Talk to them the normal way, per WP:Talk. On the talk page, new signed comments go below the earlier comments. Simple, un-templated, minimal wikimarkup. I guess the current AfC habits derive from when new articles were on subpages of WT:AFC. That was appropriately changed, but changed incompletely. Anyone ready to create an article knows about talk pages.
- --SmokeyJoe (talk) 01:26, 7 June 2017 (UTC)
- the WMF report is insightful and nails exactly why I don't want to accept many pages in NPP. The expected standand is so high, and if you miss the standard you get dragged to ANi and lose the NPP user right. The correct standard should be "Is it elegable for CSD, need to go to AfD or really belongs in Draft space?" If not, let the mass of editors improve the topic already. Legacypac (talk) 01:36, 7 June 2017 (UTC)
- Perhaps we should give their idea a chance. I support a trial of the WMFs proposal by means of the addition of two new features to the page curation tool. Allow reviewers to hide unreviewed articles older than n days and another filter out articles that they have already skipped. Mduvekot (talk) 02:13, 7 June 2017 (UTC)
- I don't think those would be bad features. I would oppose a full scale trial by actually making them disappear, but allowing individual reviewers to control the timeframe they are reviewing more easily by means of filters would be positive. The other filter that would be very helpful in my mind is allowing to filter for pages without citations like we can for orphans and categories. TonyBallioni (talk) 02:19, 7 June 2017 (UTC)
- I love the idea of being able to filter the feed by date. I am strongly against entries dropping off after XX days. I still think ACTRIAL is fundamentally a good idea for reasons I don't think the WMF addressed in its report. I've been following the discussion on the report page, but haven't commented. I'm out of town right now, but will probably comment more next week.~ ONUnicorn(Talk|Contribs)problem solving 02:33, 7 June 2017 (UTC)
- Can we modify the tool to exclude what we skip and filter out over X days? Would we need WMF to do that? Seems like WMF is telling us the solution - lower the approval bar to get out of NPP list and age out stuff that's not been deleted. Anything else is not going to solve the que. Legacypac (talk) 02:55, 7 June 2017 (UTC)
- That assumes the backlog is a problem in itself and not a symptom of the actual problem of not having people checking pages for quality, which is something needed if we want to align with what the WMF has as one of their strategic goals for the next 15 years. I think hiding skipped pages would be a net negative, since what you skip I might find easy to review and vice versa. As for a fall-off date: we already have a page that does that if someone prefers to do pages 30 days or younger: Special:NewPages. TonyBallioni (talk) 13:40, 7 June 2017 (UTC)
- I use Special:NewPages if I want to get to 30 days, but try getting to anything between 8 May 2017 and 14 February 2006 and you're scrolling for a really long time. Those pages in the tail of the log are not sitting there because they're too hard to review, as the WMF seems to think, they're sitting there because they're inaccessible. I just tried scrolling for 5 minutes from the back of the backlog and I'm only at 9 January. Mduvekot (talk) 15:43, 7 June 2017 (UTC)
- Yes, I agree with that. Some sort of filtering by date would be a huge plus. TonyBallioni (talk),
- I use Special:NewPages if I want to get to 30 days, but try getting to anything between 8 May 2017 and 14 February 2006 and you're scrolling for a really long time. Those pages in the tail of the log are not sitting there because they're too hard to review, as the WMF seems to think, they're sitting there because they're inaccessible. I just tried scrolling for 5 minutes from the back of the backlog and I'm only at 9 January. Mduvekot (talk) 15:43, 7 June 2017 (UTC)
- That assumes the backlog is a problem in itself and not a symptom of the actual problem of not having people checking pages for quality, which is something needed if we want to align with what the WMF has as one of their strategic goals for the next 15 years. I think hiding skipped pages would be a net negative, since what you skip I might find easy to review and vice versa. As for a fall-off date: we already have a page that does that if someone prefers to do pages 30 days or younger: Special:NewPages. TonyBallioni (talk) 13:40, 7 June 2017 (UTC)
- Can we modify the tool to exclude what we skip and filter out over X days? Would we need WMF to do that? Seems like WMF is telling us the solution - lower the approval bar to get out of NPP list and age out stuff that's not been deleted. Anything else is not going to solve the que. Legacypac (talk) 02:55, 7 June 2017 (UTC)
My responses to the three questions posed by TonyBallioni:
- NPP should focus on deleting obviously inappropriate material. This will not eliminate the backlog but I beleive it is our best bang for the buck towards keeping the crap out of the encyclopedia.
- Regardless of how I personally feel about it, I don't think it will be possible to get a consensus on the WMF proposal. We need a new proposal.
- I don't support bringing up ACTRIAL again in this context because the report has (despite some flaws in the data) made a reasonable case that ACTRIAL would not fix the backlog issue. Also it's just not gonna happen and further harping on it is divisive and has no benefit.
As I've said on the other page, I am in favor of ignoring the backlog. Some have argued that this is ignoring, not solving, the problem and so it is a non-solution and we are looking for a solution. For those who insist on a solution, we must either improve our ability to patrol and/or reduce the flow of new articles. The WMF has made it clear they're not interested in entertaining the latter. There is no deadline for implementing NPP improvements however the most recent improvements have decreased our reviewing capacity and if we continue with that type of improvement, we will never have a solution. ~Kvng (talk) 18:47, 7 June 2017 (UTC)
- We can't really reduce the inflow. WMF is essentially saying "lower your standards" amd instead of 1500 editors bearing the load, let the entire pool of editors work on it. Legacypac (talk) 21:44, 7 June 2017 (UTC)
- We can reduce the inflow any time we like by locally implementing ACTRIAL. The WMF might not like it but there's nothing they could do about it, The WMF however, sees ACTRIAL as a simply preventing non confirmed accounts from creating articles, but in fact ACTRIAL as planned had a more holistic approach and catered for the good faith creators who had simply not read the instructions, while at the same time the Foundation was supposed to be creating a proper landing page for all newly created accounts. It's quite clear for example, that plenty of accounts get created for the sole purpose of vandalism or deliberteltely creating other types of junk pages - I know, because I've blocked hundreds of them. Kudpung กุดผึ้ง (talk) 15:08, 8 June 2017 (UTC)
- We can't really reduce the inflow. WMF is essentially saying "lower your standards" amd instead of 1500 editors bearing the load, let the entire pool of editors work on it. Legacypac (talk) 21:44, 7 June 2017 (UTC)
Proposal-Approve everything created before March 1/17
It's indexed anyway after either 30 or 90 days. If truly problematic either a NPP caught it already or we are not going to catch it and we rely on the big world to fix it. If we mass approved everything over 90 days we would at least make a dent on the backlog. This is in line with the WMF report recommendations. Legacypac (talk) 17:51, 7 June 2017 (UTC)
- Strong oppose This is the same mistake the WMF is suggesting: solving the problem by pretending it doesn't exist. We need a list of articles in main space that have not been reviewed so that they can be improved. Having them in the feed is beneficial even if they are not marked as reviewed because it gets more eyes on them and more improvements compared to letting them languish untouched for years once they lapse out. The indexing is a concern, but in the end, the quality and integrity of Wikipedia depends on what is currently in the encylopedia, not what is in the Google cache or a mirror Again, if you prefer looking at only pages that option already exists at Special:NewPages. I would support the filtering by date range that has been suggested above and actually think that might be a way to dramatically decrease the backlog by making it easier to view the pages in the middle: namely the pages that would be affected most by this proposal. TonyBallioni (talk) 17:57, 7 June 2017 (UTC)
- The WMF report recommendations are neither necessarily correct nor accurate (and that's why we're having this discussion). Simply mass approving everything that has not been patrolled is a purely cosmetic approach. The reason they have not been tagged is because there is clearly something wrong with them, and to allow them to be simply absorbed into the encyclopedia conflicts very heavily with the Foundation's own insistence that Wikipedia should be a quality product. .
- Furthermore, the downside of such a solution will be met with the following conclusion from the reviewers: 'Oh, heck, there's something wrong with this article and it shouldn't be accepted, but I'm not sure what to tag it with. No matter, it will be patrolled by default after 30 days anyway, so it won't be my fault if the Wiki is full of junk.' In the worst case scenario, reviewers (or potential reviewers) will see the importance of the New Page Reviewing process as having been downplayed, and thus not be worth doing anyway. Kudpung กุดผึ้ง (talk) 23:17, 7 June 2017 (UTC)
- But the vast majority of these pages are patrolled many times, tagged with issues but are just not marked with the check. They are also indexed at 30 or 90 days so effectively the pages are in the encyclopedia already. Unless a NPP is willing to act against the page it defaults to accepted anyway (except it stays on the list). Legacypac (talk) 23:25, 7 June 2017 (UTC)
- Oppose marking old unreviewed articles as reviewed establishes a false equivalence between the hard and difficult work of reviewers and doing nothing. That is an intolerable indignity. Mduvekot (talk) 02:18, 8 June 2017 (UTC)
- Many of us work from the back of the list so the oldest pages have seen a lot of eyes. There is nothing wrong enough to justify AfC or CSD, but they have some issues still. If we approve them, we risk our NPR rights being revoked. If we sendmore than a couple for deletion we risk being dragged to ANi. If the page is not something any of the active NPR wants to fix up, how does it get out of the feed? Legacypac (talk) 18:56, 15 June 2017 (UTC)
- Strong oppose--:Well, I believe this idea of ignoring the backlog is typical BS.This is somewhat akin to a hypothetical situation described below:-
A situation
|
---|
|
- If the proposal is to ignore the backlog, why not ignore the entire backlog(Maybe keep the counter-refresh time a few minutes!)?Won't it be more soothing to our eyes?Problems are meant to be solved; not to be avoided!(esp. when the means are so cowardly as this.)Winged Blades Godric 15:35, 17 June 2017 (UTC)
- Oppose - As you say, it's indexed anyway after either 30 or 90 days... I don't see how, "Making a dent on the backlog" achieves anything useful. ~Kvng (talk) 16:30, 24 June 2017 (UTC)
Deletion statistics
For those who have not yet seen it, we have some numbers based on deletions from the WMF. I've produced the charts based on them. This is based on taking the articles created the first week of November 2016 and checking their status as of 14 June 2017. You can see the data at User:MusikAnimal (WMF)/NPP analysis. WMF is working on getting us more numbers on this, but these also give us a snapshot of what has happened to articles that have all been reviewed. TonyBallioni (talk) 18:06, 15 June 2017 (UTC)
- Wow- it's all starting to happen now. I think that those graphs very clearly show ACTRIAL is still a good idea. One thing I absolutely think we need to do is clarify if we're going for a second RfC or not. Having read Kudpung's comment here I am somewhat afraid if we try and push it on using the now over 5 year old consensus we may blow our chances and allow others to set the narrative. jcc (tea and biscuits) 19:08, 15 June 2017 (UTC)
- (edit conflict) Jcc, I cross posted this here along with at the WMF report because I know some people have only one page on their watchlist, and I think the data is important to see. FWIW, I think this is the appropriate page for discussion of implementation: i.e. to launch another RfC or not. MusikAnimal has said more deletion data is coming.
I'm of the view that an RfC is needed to two reasons. First, when someone floated extended confirmed trial at the village pump in Feb (and tried to launch a hastily done RfC to reimplement ACTRIAL without any planning), the discussion there seemed to be that people expected another go round of consensus gathering, etc. Second: like you said, narrative. If this is implemented with firm consensus the fallout would be a lot more manageable in my opinion. I had been planning on launching a conversation about drafting an RfC literally the day after the WMF came out with the report, and out of courtesy to them didn't. If others are for beginning the drafting process, I think now is the time to start since we are finally getting the data that matters. TonyBallioni (talk) 19:21, 15 June 2017 (UTC)
- User:TonyBallioni Yes, I think there's no harm in starting to draft. As I see it, an equally important thing that would help: getting the AfC backlog down. As I understand it, ACTRIAL proposed sending new users to wanted to start articles to AfC. Right now the backlog is three weeks long and I can imagine many oppose comments being based around the fact that we would be giving people an potentially (given more submissions would result) two month wait for their article to be reviewed which would undoubtedly put off new editors. If we were to make a concerted effort as a group I think it is not unreasonable that we could get the backlog down to reasonable level- I think in the past year we managed to. jcc (tea and biscuits) 19:44, 15 June 2017 (UTC)
There are over 9000 pages counted which is a statisticly significant sample. There is no reason to believe any other time period sampled would give a very different result. Legacypac (talk) 19:27, 15 June 2017 (UTC)
- I'll bet a good portion of the deleted pages by autoconfirmed users were started by inexperienced editors too. That is almost certainly true. 4 days/10 edits is a very low threshold. If some stats could be produced on say, 10 days/25 edits, it would also be very interesting.
- ACTRIAL would cut out 100% of the vandal pages, 100% of the attack pages, 100% of the nonsense and other junk pages and probably 80% of the spampages and paid advertorial and politcial candidate bios. The genuine pages left that would go through AfC would only minimally increase the load on that project, but if the suggestion to merge the AfC and NPP into one GUI were accomplished, the pressure would be reduced for the NPPers and the load could be easily shared. Also, with only 4 days and 10 edits to wait, I'm confident that those who have serious articles to post won't mind waiting till their accounts are confirmed, and they will not need to go through AfC.
- If it is felt that a new RfC for ACTRIAL is necessary, there are a few things that would need to be discussed off-Wiki in great detail by a small work group first. And I do not mean IRC. Kudpung กุดผึ้ง (talk) 20:27, 15 June 2017 (UTC)
- I'm game to eliminate the AfC backlog. I've been chipping away at declined pages to reduce the overall collection of junk in Draft space. I've noticed that often the creators of the better pages just put them in mainspace after submitting to AfC. I also find the real que is only a few hours when I submit pages for review I find that I'd like a second opinion on. Legacypac (talk) 22:49, 15 June 2017 (UTC)
Long-term numbers
MusikAnimal has been kind enough to provide analysis based on the time period of February 15-March 13, and the picture isn't that different. You can see all the data (and it is quite a lot and well done) at User:MusikAnimal (WMF)/NPP analysis, but I'm going to post the pie charts here, because they best compare to the ones I made above. Not much difference at all.
Thanks to everyone who has followed this conversation. TonyBallioni (talk) 14:39, 16 June 2017 (UTC)
- I've just spent 20 minutes reading this whole talk page again, and it leaves me totally stunned that nearly 9 months later the WMF has not made the slightest effort to be of help. All we've got is the set of new data from MusikAnimal which proves once more that his bosses are wrong. See : Is Community Tech willing or planning to accept direct proposals? Voting seems to prioritize what editors want as a very late Christmas present, such as new nifty gadgets or convenience features (such as dead link fixing), while other important software get ignored by the vote... — Esquivalience 4 October 2016.
- I think this all proves that any bending or stretching of the new data will still only conclude that Scottywong's figures were right in 2011, and that ACTRIAL is still the only realistic solution, and that the WMF hasn't really got any intention of providing any realistic, practical help. The Wikimedia Foundation is fast developing the inflexible behaviour patterns of a cult or a sect. Its dogmatic social ideology reminds me of those who believe in Martians or that the Apollo Moon landing were a massive hoax. I think we are sitting near the horns of a dilemma. Someone needs to remind the WMF that out here were trying to write an encyclopedia. Kudpung กุดผึ้ง (talk) 12:55, 17 June 2017 (UTC)
- These pizza slices conclusively prove that the GFOO really exists and that the WMF's opposition to ACTRIAL is completely irrational. IMHO we would be fully justified to unilaterally impose ACTRIAL without the WMF's agreement. These stats prove that they are part of the problem, not the solution. Roger (Dodger67) (talk) 15:44, 17 June 2017 (UTC)
- The WMF is running a colosseum, not an encyclopedia. They've done a good job though at pacifying the editors with all of their prolefeed they write. Esquivalience (talk) 02:51, 18 June 2017 (UTC)
- Esquivalience I wonder if the prolefeed is more soylent green than panem et circenses... Roger (Dodger67) (talk) 15:59, 18 June 2017 (UTC)
Having spent time in AfC, there is zero benefit to letting new editors create pages. The pages that survive include ones where the new user managed by luck to pick a title that survived, while we don't see how much of their content survived. Legacypac (talk) 03:12, 18 June 2017 (UTC)
- No net benefit for sure, in draftspace. AfC attracts to no-idea newcomers who at least feel in their hearts that their topic doesn't belong in mainspace. By chance, some few are suitable, I think Legacypac has a grasp on the ratio. Newcomer pages in mainspace I feel are much better on average than newcomer pages in draftspace. --SmokeyJoe (talk) 04:46, 18 June 2017 (UTC)
- I wouldn't agree with "AfC attracts to no-idea newcomers who at least feel in their hearts that their topic doesn't belong in mainspace". In fact, a lot of AfC users are determined that their draft is notable and part of the problem of the backlog is that users are not being told that their draft subject isn't notable, end of story (although recently that problem is being tackled). jcc (tea and biscuits) 13:43, 18 June 2017 (UTC)
Arbtrary break 1
I can think of better things to do with experienced editor time than delete 7741 newbie articles per month. Can we please have some productive suggestions for improving the quality of content? The WMF report, in this light, is far too focused on addressing the backlog and doesn't step back and think about how to best improve the encyclopedia. As this project ages, it should be obvious to anyone who understand that there are finite number of notable topics in the universe, that we're going to want/need to shift from expanding the encyclopedia to improving existing content. ~Kvng (talk) 12:54, 18 June 2017 (UTC)
- As I have pointed out every chance I get, being the most trusted source of knowledge by 2030 is one of WMF's strategic goals: keeping crap out and improving the things that should be in the encyclopedia are both key to this. You can't achieve that goal without both, and this project is half of that equation. TonyBallioni (talk) 16:03, 18 June 2017 (UTC)
- One of the other strategic goals for the WMF is "Healthy, inclusive communities", and that's where the current concern is coming from. I think there are a lot more notable topics in the world than are currently in the encyclopedia, but they may be on topics that the current body of editors aren't interested in. Ideally, we'd like to see more people join the project, to bring more diverse perspectives, and it's concerning when folks say that the encyclopedia is basically done and now we just need to polish it up. That being said, you all have been working really hard on this process for a long time, without support from the WMF, and it's tough for us to come in x years late to the situation and start telling you what to do. That's why over the last few weeks we've been offering ideas, stats and analysis, so that we can earn a place in the discussion.
- One thing that I'd like to ask about is whether ACTRIAL is still meant as a short-term experiment, and if so, what the definition of success would be. As we've seen lately, getting stats is a pain, and I want to make sure that we've got baseline data that helps everyone make informed decisions. If ACTRIAL is going to happen, then I'd rather be prepared with those baseline stats, so that we can see how it works. The ACTRIAL page has a list of possible statistics to monitor, but it seems like more of a brainstorming list than a complete plan.
- Because these conversations have been happening specifically around the NPP process, that's been the focus -- that ACTRIAL is necessary because of the impact on reviewers and the NPP backlog. So what's the optimal end result for NPP? Obviously, there's fewer new pages to review, which means the backlog number will go down. The chart showing the makeup of the current backlog indicates that 15% of the backlog is made of pages created by non-autoconfirmed users. Some of the users who are motivated to create new pages may go and make 10 edits before creating their page, so the backlog probably wouldn't go down by 15% automatically, but let's say it's in that area.
- That frees up the reviewers to spend their time reviewing more pages created by autoconfirmed users. What's the result that we're looking for there? If the problem is that there are delete-worthy pages created by autoconfirmed users, then having more time would mean identifying more pages to delete. Does a successful ACTRIAL run mean that more new pages are deleted, or is there a better metric than that? DannyH (WMF) (talk) 22:34, 19 June 2017 (UTC)
- The purpose of Wikipedia is not to engineer a "healthy, inclusive community", it is to write and maintain an encyclopedia. Until a user proves that they can write coherently, they should not be allowed to create a new article. Other encyclopedias, all less relied on then Wikipedia, require strict fact-checking before anything is published in their next edition. If they even published one article with the garbage that comes into the new pages feed daily, then their reputation would collapse faster than light. But Wikipedia abuses its reputation for unreliable content by allowing this content, and nobody cares because they've done all the thrashing they needed to do and a garbage article is just another normal. Esquivalience (talk) 23:01, 19 June 2017 (UTC)
- I like pie charts better than bars or lines, so here is the one MusikAnimal did that breaks down the backlog
- That's a lot more than the 15% that enters the daily backlog and the time saving argument makes a whole lot more sense when presented this way than when looking at it on a day-by-day basis. Additionally, as I have pointed out before directing someone to draft space is a whole lot more healthy and inclusive than seeing a speedy deletion template within 24 hours of joining Wikipedia. Since we know that ~80% of articles created by new users end up getting deleted, it is arguably much more in line with the WMF's vision for healthy communities to implement on a trial basis restrictions on page creation. TonyBallioni (talk) 00:01, 20 June 2017 (UTC)
- The purpose of Wikipedia is not to engineer a "healthy, inclusive community", it is to write and maintain an encyclopedia. Until a user proves that they can write coherently, they should not be allowed to create a new article. Other encyclopedias, all less relied on then Wikipedia, require strict fact-checking before anything is published in their next edition. If they even published one article with the garbage that comes into the new pages feed daily, then their reputation would collapse faster than light. But Wikipedia abuses its reputation for unreliable content by allowing this content, and nobody cares because they've done all the thrashing they needed to do and a garbage article is just another normal. Esquivalience (talk) 23:01, 19 June 2017 (UTC)
- That frees up the reviewers to spend their time reviewing more pages created by autoconfirmed users. What's the result that we're looking for there? If the problem is that there are delete-worthy pages created by autoconfirmed users, then having more time would mean identifying more pages to delete. Does a successful ACTRIAL run mean that more new pages are deleted, or is there a better metric than that? DannyH (WMF) (talk) 22:34, 19 June 2017 (UTC)
- @DannyH (WMF): At this point I personally see ACTRIAL as a permanent improvement. I think with the data we're looking at here, it is clear that it will reduce the number of new submissions deleted and I think reducing the amount of deletion is good for the quality of the encyclopedia and it is good for retaining new editors. I would judge it a success if it reduced deletions which, in my opinion, run counter to the "healthy, inclusive community" goal.
- I know you and the WMF are concerned about the "anyone can edit" mission and what contributions we'd be losing by not allowing editors to start creating articles immediately. I think the data clearly shows that the quality of these contributions is not particularly high. I am concerned that we're unable to retain editors if their initial experiences are negative. The best way to have a positive experience in the current Wikipedia environment is to start off small and observe. Creating a new article is not starting off small and the only chance to observe is having your substantial hard work deleted. I appreciate that if we restrict new editors from immediately doing what they want to do (e.g. create an autobiography), they may not sign up or edit in the first place. So I'd be willing to consider ACTRIAL a failure if it accelerated the gradual falloff we've been seeing of the number of contributions (of any kind) from new editors. I'd also be willing to call it a failure if it did not have a positive effect on editor retention. ~Kvng (talk) 16:57, 24 June 2017 (UTC)
I'm not suggesting actually doing this - but it illustrates the point of stopping brand new users from creating pages: Since 80% of pages created by "new editors" get deleted, and 50% of the backlog is comprised of these pages, and we can filter for new users not reviewed in NPP, and reviewers could basically quickly CSD or AfD (or redirect) their way through the entire 11,000 pages in the "new user" side of the backlog. If there is no obvious redirect or CSD to apply, PROD or AfD based on failing WP:N. Even without accepting a single page, such a reviewer would have a better than 80% CSD/AfD acceptance rate which is pretty high indeed. If enough reviewers did this newrly 100% of half the backlog would be gone (deleted or accepted) within a week. Any good stuff would be salvaged with an NPP Accept or Keep votes at AfD. Anything that gets kept at AfD would be accepted and removed from the que. It sounds crazy and very unfriendly but the numbers show we should assume a "new user" article needs to be deleted unless proven otherwise, rather then all articles should be saved unless proven otherwise. The main difference is that 80% of "new user" articles would be deleted in day, week or at most a couple weeks instead of over 4-6 months. Of course stopping the creation in the first place is much better. Legacypac (talk) 02:26, 20 June 2017 (UTC)
- I'm not expecting much from this discussion as the WMF can't even bother implementing proper quality control. I feel that all of these statistics are really a means of delaying ACTRIAL for as long as possible. Call me a cynic, but no, there are enough statistics to suggest that vetoing ACTRIAL has wasted tons of time. If the WMF is serious about Wikipedia as an encyclopedia, then don't try to cough up a chart, but actually look at the evidence and do something about it. Esquivalience (talk) 02:50, 20 June 2017 (UTC)
- What exactly stops us from implimenting ACTRIAL? Can we backdoor ACTRAIL by making a rule "every new page submission from an editor with less then 10 Edits gets a) moved to Draft and subjected to AfC or maybe b) sent through AfD unless qualifies for CSD or redirect or maybe some other quality control. We sometimes move new pages by new editors to draft now, and ACTRIAL would force those pages into DRAFT, so why not implement it by moving anything questionable but not CSD eligible to Draft space as standard practice? Legacypac (talk) 04:03, 20 June 2017 (UTC)
- Nothing stops us from implementing any of the suggested local scripts that will simply prevent non confirmed users from creating new pages directly in mainspace. Our mistake in 2011 was thinking it needed to be done through an intervention to the MedWiki software and asking the devs to do it. What the devs did not understand is that they are not the policy makers. Their current policy however, is to accelerate the eventual demise of Wikipedia as a quality encyclopedia in favour of publishing impressive stats for new article creations of any kind.
- The Draft idea would simply shovel the s*** over the garden wall into the neighbour's backyard, and Wikipedia is already beginning to look like the typical tip of a UK council house garden.
- The other problem is that DannyH (WMF) is neither properly reading up on what ACTRIAL was actually all about and what was actually prepared, and not fully following the talk page threads that have ensued from the WMF's own essay. Current essential reading: WT:NPR, this talk page, WP:CANCER, and WP:KNPP. Danny, draw up a comfy chair, make yourself a nice cup of tea, and please do some concentrated reading.Kudpung กุดผึ้ง (talk) 11:25, 20 June 2017 (UTC)
- Hi -- sorry, I was away for a few days and couldn't respond to the conversation. I want to figure out what stats could help to make decisions here -- if folks are determined to try ACTRIAL, then I think it's worthwhile to establish baseline stats that we'd compare against. That's something that we can currently offer help with, so I'm focusing on that at the moment, rather than promise something I can't deliver on. If ACTRIAL is an experiment to try out, how would we determine success vs not? Is it just the size of the NPP backlog, or are there other measures?
- Also, Kudpung: I've read those pages, and I don't understand what part you're referring to. One of those pages isn't even related to ACTRIAL; it's about WMF budgeting. If there's something important that I don't understand about ACTRIAL, can you help me out and tell me what you think I'm missing? DannyH (WMF) (talk) 22:09, 23 June 2017 (UTC)
- We, the community, do not allow our employees to be away for a few days. Absenteeism is grounds for firing. Please ensure that you remain at our beck-and-call 24/7. The reading of the essay by Guy Macon was recommended in order to demonstrate how dysfunctional the WMF actually is and how it fails to address the needs of its stakeholders: the readers, the writers, and the maintenance workers. In short, it has no proper leadership or any staff who are qualifed in general staff management or HR. Macon is a respected editor, is highly experienced in his field of management and his essay represents the views of a large force of volunteers who greatly outnumber even the 300 WMF employees. Macon "...(has) been around long enough to recognize the smell of good developers and good middle managers working hard and getting bad results because of bad top management decisions."
- ACTRIAL: What the Foundation is missing is that for the trial, everything was planned down to the last nut and bolt. Including the required stats for comparison. Now that your people have found out how to get stats, all that is needed is to look at the list of required stats and compare the 6 months of trial with the preceding 6 months and one month after it. Required stats: Please see WP:ACTTRIAL yet again for the section you missed at Wikipedia:Autoconfirmed_article_creation_trial#Statistics. However, I think perhaps if the WMF is interested in what's going to happen when we roll out ACTRIAL, they should know already what stats will be required without us having to do their homework for them. When you have your suggestions for stats we can compare notes. For our list please see Wikipedia talk:New pages patrol/Reviewers#Comments on Reviewing and Institutional Cultural Disconnect (New Editors), which demonstrates again that despite my persistent begging, you are refusing to read the pages I have linked you too. The paradox is that if Jorm had been allowed to complete his development of a proper landing page, all this today would probably not be necessary, and even if Kaldari picked up the pieces today, you will will refuse him the time and the budget, and another 6 years down the line we will still be where we are today and worse: Imagine a world where all the new page patrollers went on strike - please remain seated with your computers on until Wikipedia comes to a complete stop.Kudpung กุดผึ้ง (talk) 03:30, 24 June 2017 (UTC)
- BTW, it appears that interest in your essay is possibly on the wane already - perhaps due to little positive response from the WMF on the very subject they began the discussion on. It seems that the only result to date has been the albeit very welcome updates to the stats Scottywong provided in 2011 - which ironically prove once again that we are right to be rollling out ACTRIAL. Kudpung กุดผึ้ง (talk) 03:30, 24 June 2017 (UTC)
- Kudpung: The essay was intended to be a step in a continuing discussion about how to deal with the NPP backlog, and open up more dialogue between the WMF and the NPP community. I think that it's fairly obvious that having the WMF involved in identifying and helping to solve problems is a positive step for everyone involved. It's also obvious that you personally are not interested in talking to me, which is okay. I'm going to continue to read and think and talk about these issues, and work with the people who don't share your scorched-earth philosophy. DannyH (WMF) (talk) 03:47, 24 June 2017 (UTC)
- A positive step, yes, Danny, but not when you keep finding reasons to constantly tell the huge community they are wrong, or pretend you don't understand what they are saying. Your essay was clearly a panic measure in view of what your people are calling a 'threat' which was in fact none other than a suggestion made due to your refusal to come up with the goods and find out what causes these backlogs. All we have up to now are updated stats and still no explanations. BTW, I suggest you look up a dicdef of Scortched earth. If you intend only to work with people who support your personal views, that's up to you, I can understand why I am an embarrassment to you; of course I'm interested in talking to you , otherwise I wouldn't still be on these pages, but it's difficult when you keep turning away and pretending you didn't hear. It would be nice if you would stop blocking development in the meantime of some of the features that have been requested. Excuses such as no time, no personnel, no money, tend to wear thin after 6 years, and the WMF will ultimately be responsible for the project's own demise. We, the unpaid volunteers, are the ones trying to prevent it from happening, while the WMF is throwing its baby out with the bathwater and has absolutely zero respect for the thousands of free hours the community provides without any compensation whatsoever. Kudpung กุดผึ้ง (talk) 04:10, 24 June 2017 (UTC)
- Kudpung: The essay was intended to be a step in a continuing discussion about how to deal with the NPP backlog, and open up more dialogue between the WMF and the NPP community. I think that it's fairly obvious that having the WMF involved in identifying and helping to solve problems is a positive step for everyone involved. It's also obvious that you personally are not interested in talking to me, which is okay. I'm going to continue to read and think and talk about these issues, and work with the people who don't share your scorched-earth philosophy. DannyH (WMF) (talk) 03:47, 24 June 2017 (UTC)
- It is disappointing that the WMF refuses to do something because of personal feuding. Esquivalience (talk) 04:35, 24 June 2017 (UTC)
If you liked the way that the WMF failed to act regarding financial transparency after I posted WP:CANCER, you are going to love the inevitable refusal to act after Wikipedia:Village pump (policy)#RfC: Wikimedia referrer policy closes next week. --Guy Macon (talk) 07:08, 24 June 2017 (UTC)
- DannyH (WMF), with all due respect, it's not a "dialogue" if your report begins with an out-of-hand dismissal of the community's long-held consensus on this issue (that new article spam is fuelling the backlog and needs to be brought under control), and then comes up with its own entirely new narrative. The data you guys have provided is very welcome, but as many people have pointed out on the report's talk page, your conclusions bear only a tangential relationship to it. Now you refuse to talk to the one person who has done more work on this problem than anyone else (Kudpung) – is that dialogue?
- I've been following this issue with interest for a while. What I've seen is that the community (Kudpung especially) have been asking the WMF for help with three very specific, very straightforward tasks: an ACTRIAL-like restriction on new page creations, an improved 'landing page' for new editors creating an article, and continued development of the page curation tool the WMF started in 2012. And they've been asking for them for six years. I've seen multiple WMF employees breeze by with vague promises that they will happen, but they don't materialise. Instead we get a report telling us that we're all wrong and we should just ignore the backlog. In fact, it's our fault the backlog exists in the first place. Surely you can see where the frustration on this talk page is coming from? – Joe (talk) 18:37, 24 June 2017 (UTC)
- Joe Roe: Yes, I absolutely can. I apologize to Kudpung for making this personal on my end. When discussions get heated, it can be difficult to step back and just hear the ideas, but that's my problem, and not his.
- I understand and agree with the frustration over the Foundation's lack of investment in issues like this. That's something that's changing, but it's changing slowly, and the Community Tech team talking and thinking about this issue is a step in what I believe is a more positive direction. I'm trying to be mindful not to promise things that we're not sure we can deliver; that's why our team has been focusing on digging in and learning more about this situation, making small improvements, sharing thoughts and ideas, and gathering stats that will help us see the full picture of what's going on.
- Unfortunately, the three tasks that you reference are actually not straightforward. :) They're big projects that require a lot of investment from a product team, if we're going to do them well, and I don't have that kind of commitment from the Foundation yet. So our team -- me, Kaldari and MusikAnimal -- are doing what we can with the resources that we currently have.
- I knew that some people would agree with the conclusions in the report, and some people would very strongly disagree. The main point I'm making in that piece is that the changes that have taken place in the NPP process over the last couple of years have contributed to the growth in the backlog, and that (in my opinion) doubling down on those changes will not make the situation better. I'm not trying to insult people who are doing really important work for the encyclopedia. I'm suggesting another way to approach the current problem which I think would be more effective long-term. -- DannyH (WMF) (talk) 20:01, 24 June 2017 (UTC)
- Respectfully DannyH (WMF), is there someone else at WMF who we should be liaising with who will not color our well-thought-out requests with their own personal opinions. We need an ambassador who will advocate for our needs, not someone who has (apparently) never patrolled newly created articles and who dismisses our legitimate concerns. - MrX 22:26, 25 June 2017 (UTC)
- I was personally very sympathetic to the ideas in the report, the problem is that Wikipedia is supposed to be run by a consensus of the people who work on it. The consensus is clearly counter to these ideas and that means that DannyH (WMF) and I are unlikely to get what we want and we need to find a way to realign to that. The best way I've found to do that is to actively participate in the processes we're talking about. I encourage you and your fellow employees to spend some time at WP:AFD, WP:NPP, WP:AFC, etc. Big data is certainly helpful towards understanding what's going on here but so is the day-to-day small data. The consensus to add additional restrictions to WP:NPP and some of our other processes comes from the people who work on it every day. You can't come in and tell them they need to change how they're doing it without first getting down there and seeing what exactly we're dealing with. ~Kvng (talk) 12:54, 26 June 2017 (UTC)
Arbtrary break 2
- Commitment from the Foundation - the problem is, Danny, when you speak, you make it sound as if you are the Foundation, leastwise that you personally are deciding he policies as to what issues will be technically addressed. If you are not, then we need to escalate to your superiors and make a case for more of the glut of 300 employees to be drafted in to resolve these issues - either to your team or to another one.Better still, with the huge surplus of funds, create a special team to do it, and I would vote for Kaldari and MusikAnimal to run it. Speaking of which, what happened to Wes Moran and the 1 hour conference Kaldari and I had with hum? Did he walk out or was he fired? Who is in charge of the circus right now? Someone else who needs a whole year to get up to speed? How do we get an audience with Maher and make her understand what's going on? At least Gardner was showing an interest in these issues. Kudpung กุดผึ้ง (talk) 20:29, 24 June 2017 (UTC)
- Kudpung: There is a team that Kaldari, MusikAnimal and I run: the Community Tech team. I'm the product manager, Kaldari is the engineering manager, and MusikAnimal is one of the developers. We have the responsibility to determine what our team works on, given the current parameters: 75% Community Wishlist, 25% Community Engagement requests and projects for smaller groups, plus a subteam that's working on Anti-Harassment Tools. We don't have the resources right now to take on the landing page or major Page Curation Tool work. We may in the future, I just can't promise right now because I'd want to be sure we could deliver. Our team has grown a lot in the two years that it's existed, and I'm hoping it continues to grow this year.
- We were asked by our bosses if we'd be willing to take on a small-scale project that started at the Wikimedia Hackathon last month, to look at the NPP problem and figure out what could be done in the short-term and the long-term. We were given the responsibility to figure out what that short-term work would look like, and the results so far are the bug fixes that Kaldari and MusikAnimal did, the report that I compiled, the stats that we're putting together, and the discussions that we've been engaged in. I'm not sure if we'll get the resources that would allow us to work on a more long-term solution; it's only been a month, and resourcing decisions can take a long time. If you feel like escalating that you want Community Tech to get more resources, that is absolutely fine with us. :)
- Wes Moran left the Foundation at the end of February. The interim VP of Product is Toby Negrin, who's been overseeing the Readers and Community Tech teams; he's been with the Foundation since 2013. Toby organized the Community Tech team, and he's very supportive of the work that we're doing. For the rest of the circus, you can see the Staff and contractors page on the wikimediafoundation wiki. -- DannyH (WMF) (talk) 21:50, 24 June 2017 (UTC)
- Landing pages are not hard to program. I have designed a basic yet functional one using only templates at User:Esquivalience/LandingPage. The design of the proposed workflow is described at mw:Article Creation Workflow, and the WMF doesn't need a whole team to program such a trivial function. Esquivalience (talk) 03:18, 25 June 2017 (UTC)
- Esquivalience: When my team takes on a new project, it requires research and design work. For the landing page, that would require digging into the problem to make sure we understand the right way to approach it, and that this proposed solution is the right way to achieve the goal. In this case particularly, I'd want to do user testing to make sure that the new feature actually results in more good pages and fewer bad pages. This is a very important workflow, I'd want to make sure that we'd do it right. I know that's frustrating because there's already an existing spec, but that's the way my job works. I don't think you'd find any product manager in this kind of team who'd pick up an old spec and just start building it. -- DannyH (WMF) (talk) 18:04, 25 June 2017 (UTC)
- It's quite obvious that when Wikipedia tells people how to create articles, they'll create good articles. A landing page is not an entire product that requires a fifty-page PDF, it's an incremental addition. I know of many open source projects where discussion and a short plan is all that is needed to add features more wide-ranging than a landing page. And for the projects who do need plans (like Python Enhancement Proposals for the Python language), they don't make it seem like writing blueprints for a nuclear power plant. And the "old" article workflow design works just fine with a few modifications. There is nothing broke and little to improve about it. Finally, it is quite absurd really that the most-used reference work in the world does not tell those who creates its entries how to create good entries. That's recklessness on another dimension. Esquivalience (talk) 21:27, 25 June 2017 (UTC)
- Esquivalience: When my team takes on a new project, it requires research and design work. For the landing page, that would require digging into the problem to make sure we understand the right way to approach it, and that this proposed solution is the right way to achieve the goal. In this case particularly, I'd want to do user testing to make sure that the new feature actually results in more good pages and fewer bad pages. This is a very important workflow, I'd want to make sure that we'd do it right. I know that's frustrating because there's already an existing spec, but that's the way my job works. I don't think you'd find any product manager in this kind of team who'd pick up an old spec and just start building it. -- DannyH (WMF) (talk) 18:04, 25 June 2017 (UTC)
- DannyH (WMF) we know when Moran left. I had a 1 hour Skype conference with him just before he did - remember? What you have done yet again characteristically, is no-too-subtly avoided the question: Why did he go?. Did he go because he was fed up with the chaos, or was he fired, or did he go after a better offer elsewhere? All answers would be understandable. The only other person I know of who is so good at dodging question is Theresa May. Kudpung กุดผึ้ง (talk) 06:56, 25 June 2017 (UTC)
- Kudpung: Oh, I can't answer that question. We're not allowed to comment on someone else's employment like that. I think that's a pretty standard HR rule for any organization. -- DannyH (WMF) (talk) 17:19, 25 June 2017 (UTC)
- DannyH (WMF), Wes Moran's departure is cloaked in mystery. It will come out somewhere sooner or later if not on Wikipedia, on one of its detractor forums. The very fact that nothing is being said gives rise to conjecture of a negative sort - it's human nature, so for the time being, we'll assume what we will assume, which underlines one more how disorganised and dysfunctional the Foundation actually is, and why we're not getting any cooperation from anything you are apparently in charge of. Perhaps it's because your superiors won't let you help us - we just don't know. But it proves once again what a waste of time the Skype conference with him and Kaldari was. And you've already stated that you are not prepared to work with me, which is a great shame. Kudpung กุดผึ้ง (talk) 06:06, 26 June 2017 (UTC)
- DannyH (WMF), is 2016 Community Wishlist Survey/Results an accurate reflection of your team's priorities and is there master plan that shows how each of these is resourced, progress to date, projected release, etc.? It seems like some of the items on that list are maintenance related and that your team would presumably work of several items concurrently. Insight into how our needs are being handled by WMF would probably reduce the amount of consternation that you are witnessing here. What would have the opposite effect is comments like
"We don't have the resources right now to take on the landing page or major Page Curation Tool work. We may in the future..."
. As far as I can tell, these issues have been simmering on the back burner for several years. I hope you can appreciate that we don't want to keep hearing mañana.- MrX 22:01, 25 June 2017 (UTC)- MrX I'm preparing a mid-year report on the Community Wishlist progress. It isn't done yet, but the thumbnail sketch is: two of the top 10 wishes are complete (#9 Mr Z-bot's popular pages reports, and #10 User rights expiration), and three of the top 10 will be released within the next few weeks (#5 Rewrite XTools, #6 Wikitext editor syntax highlighting, #7 Warning on unsuccessful login attempts).
- You have all been waiting a long time for the Foundation to give this any attention, and right now you're mostly getting me talking rather than anything that looks like progress. I'm trying to be careful not to promise things that we're not sure we can deliver, but yeah, the "we may in the future" is half-doing that anyway. I may just be frustrating people even more by keeping these conversations going. I hope that I'm not. I'm learning a lot from these conversations. -- DannyH (WMF) (talk) 18:27, 26 June 2017 (UTC)
- Kudpung: Oh, I can't answer that question. We're not allowed to comment on someone else's employment like that. I think that's a pretty standard HR rule for any organization. -- DannyH (WMF) (talk) 17:19, 25 June 2017 (UTC)
- Landing pages are not hard to program. I have designed a basic yet functional one using only templates at User:Esquivalience/LandingPage. The design of the proposed workflow is described at mw:Article Creation Workflow, and the WMF doesn't need a whole team to program such a trivial function. Esquivalience (talk) 03:18, 25 June 2017 (UTC)
DannyH (WMF) When my team takes on a new project, it requires research and design work. For the landing page, that would require digging into the problem to make sure we understand the right way to approach it, and that this proposed solution is the right way to achieve the goal. In this case particularly, I'd want to do user testing to make sure that the new feature actually results in more good pages and fewer bad pages. This is a very important workflow, I'd want to make sure that we'd do it right. I know that's frustrating because there's already an existing spec, but that's the way my job works. I don't think you'd find any product manager in this kind of team who'd pick up an old spec and just start building it.
This is tantamount to saying that you will only develop what 'you' want to develop, which is the common WMF policy we are used to, and is only yet another delaying tactic. More importantly, it is contrary to the bold statements you and your colleagues have been making about wanting to work together with the community. Anything would be better than nothing, and if we wait for you we'll be waiting for another six years. You are treating the thousands of volunteers as idiots who don't have clue about communication and software development where we probably outnumber the Foundation on these competencies 10,000:1. Just because you are paid for what you do doesn't mean you are any better. I am telling you that 99% of the conceptual design of Jorm's project was accurate and complete, would perfectly address the urgent and immediate need of today, and just needs a couple of days to write the code. And if you won't do it, you'll only give the community even more reason to go ahead with ACTRIAL without it, demonstrating once more that the Foundation's ultimate goal is to undermine, rather than encourage, the community's volunteer spirit. Kudpung กุดผึ้ง (talk) 06:29, 26 June 2017 (UTC)
Landing page
The 'other half' of the Page Curation project was to create a proper landing page (see the link on the main page) to assist those genuine creators who under ACTRIAL would have to wait 4 days and 10 edits. Kaldari tells us that development was shelved because Notations was more important. Strange however, because even Sue Gardner was bubbling with enthusiasm for it and even remarked what a wall of text the current Wizard is [2]. Kudpung กุดผึ้ง (talk) 12:22, 24 June 2017 (UTC)
- Commons' upload wizard is amazing and simple to navigate in my opinion. Would it be possible to piggyback of their design for something like this? TonyBallioni (talk) 13:03, 24 June 2017 (UTC)
- The thing is that a few hundred lines of code would be enough to implement such a landing page, and the WMF is treating it like the Manhattan Project. Esquivalience (talk) 15:28, 24 June 2017 (UTC)
- "A few hundred lines of code"? Have you seen the workflow? We already wrote over 1000 lines of code back in 2012, and it was half finished at best. I would certainly love to finish this project (although it would mostly have to be rewritten from scratch at this point), but there are lots of competing priorities :( Kaldari (talk) 18:05, 26 June 2017 (UTC)
- If you guys spent 1/10th the effort you've spent criticizing the WMF on convincing people to vote on the Wishlist Survey proposal instead, the Landing Page would be finished and we wouldn't be having this discussion. Instead you guys just dismiss the survey as a useless distraction, and none of you even bothered voting for the Landing Page proposal that Kudpung created. If the proposal had received 7 additional votes, it would have made the Top 10 and we would have done it already, and yet none of you even voted for it. You can't complain that the WMF won't listen to the community, when we've provided an open, transparent means of letting the community prioritize the work of the WMF, and yet none of you (besides Kudpung) has chosen to use it. Kaldari (talk) 18:05, 26 June 2017 (UTC)
- Kaldari, that is simply not true. If you look at that proposal, you would see that @MrX, Chris troutman, Jbhunley, DGG, BU Rob13, Onel5969, Esquivalience, Blue Rasberry, and Jcc: and myself all voted for it and supported it. That's 10 people who are either NPP/NPR regulars or are regulars to the reform discussions. Everyone who has commented thus far in this section is on that list. TonyBallioni (talk) 18:21, 26 June 2017 (UTC)
- You're right Kaldari. We should have campaigned our asses off to get this pushed to the top of top ten list of piddling maintenance tasks. I read the 2016-17 plan, and it's obvious that WMF has no intention of allocating anything beyond minimal resources to maintaining the technology platform in a way that supports contributors trying to prevent the encyclopedia being overtaken by spam.- MrX 18:35, 26 June 2017 (UTC)
- If you guys spent 1/10th the effort you've spent criticizing the WMF on convincing people to vote on the Wishlist Survey proposal instead, the Landing Page would be finished and we wouldn't be having this discussion. Instead you guys just dismiss the survey as a useless distraction, and none of you even bothered voting for the Landing Page proposal that Kudpung created. If the proposal had received 7 additional votes, it would have made the Top 10 and we would have done it already, and yet none of you even voted for it. You can't complain that the WMF won't listen to the community, when we've provided an open, transparent means of letting the community prioritize the work of the WMF, and yet none of you (besides Kudpung) has chosen to use it. Kaldari (talk) 18:05, 26 June 2017 (UTC)
- "A few hundred lines of code"? Have you seen the workflow? We already wrote over 1000 lines of code back in 2012, and it was half finished at best. I would certainly love to finish this project (although it would mostly have to be rewritten from scratch at this point), but there are lots of competing priorities :( Kaldari (talk) 18:05, 26 June 2017 (UTC)
- The thing is that a few hundred lines of code would be enough to implement such a landing page, and the WMF is treating it like the Manhattan Project. Esquivalience (talk) 15:28, 24 June 2017 (UTC)
Basic question: Who is in charge here?
I have managed hardware and software projects for many, many years, and I can say from experience that there is one development method which inevitably leads to disaster. It is commonly called the "throw it over the wall" method.
This method involves not having a customer who can reject the product if it does not meet the customer's needs. Any time that you have software developers who think they know the needs of the people who will be using the system better than the customers themselves know their own needs you have the beginnings of a disaster. Add the ability for the developers to say "you get what we decide you will get, and no amount of complaining will change this; we are in charge here" and the disaster becomes a certainty.
Back in 2014 the Wikimedia Foundation implemented "Superprotect" -- a new user right that enabled the Foundation's paid staff to overrule Wikipedia administrators. The Foundation then immediately used Superprotect to unilaterally enforce the rollout of the Media Viewer software on the German Wikipedia.
This resulted in a Letter to Wikimedia Foundation: Superprotect and Media Viewer[3] with roughly a thousand signatures. (The talk page for that letter is also quite insightful) BTW, this wasn't the first petition on this general subject; see this one from 2008:[4]
Yet still we have WMF developers insisting that they are our bosses and that we must obey them.
So, who is in charge here? Is it Wikipedia or the Wikimedia Foundation? And will it require something like User revolt#Wikipedia to change that? — Preceding unsigned comment added by Guy Macon (talk • contribs) 02:24, June 25, 2017 (UTC)
- The problem is that the WMF software department is like a playground where pointless programs are written so that the WMF's own Ministry of Truth reports don't seem so implausible to the donors (compare shareholders). If the WMF pretends that they're making progress, then couple with sob stories about how the WMF's kitty is gone and they got themselves a steady stream of revenue. Esquivalience (talk) 03:30, 25 June 2017 (UTC)
- Esquivalience, did you synthesise your post from the comments I've been making over the years and recently? If not, and you wrote it from the top of your head, I've already given you a barnstar for it! Kudpung กุดผึ้ง (talk) 07:18, 25 June 2017 (UTC)
- I agree wholeheartedly with the above. I have also managed software development and systems integration teams, and I'm not accustomed to developers dictating requirements. Moreover, I'm concerned that we have been going around in circles for years trying to move this forward to no avail. Perhaps it is time for something on the order of a revolt to get this going in a positive direction.- MrX 21:41, 25 June 2017 (UTC)
- I just could not stand the countless Newspeak excuses for the simplest problems. It's hard not to make a carbon copy of all the editors who have criticized the WMF in the past, it's not failure for specific reasons, it's failure on all vectors, they specialize in failure. Esquivalience (talk) 22:00, 25 June 2017 (UTC)
- I don't want to be one of the WMF-bashers because relationships are important, even on the internet. But it's becoming increasingly evident that nothing meaningful will be done to address the substantial issues raised about new page creation. I not sure what more we can do to try to convince WMF that we have serious problems and we really need WMF's help.- MrX 22:10, 25 June 2017 (UTC)
- it seems to me that one of our current problems is the amount of time people interested in doing NPP spend in debating how to go about it. From what I see here, it seems obvious that there continues to be a consensus for Actrial. I do not think it will solve all our problems, but based on the figures given, it may give a 5 to 10% smaller backlog. It would seem simpler to me to implement it and see, rather than keep discussing. I do not see that the WMF currently would actually oppose it. I think they;re more inclined to help than to argue, and I hope that's true of us also. DGG ( talk ) 03:54, 26 June 2017 (UTC)
- MrX, ACTRIAL can be easily implemented without any help from the WMF. You either flip the switch through the blacklist or through edit filters and boom, its here locally. WMF help on the landing page is needed and would be quite welcome, but the part of the project that gets the most attention can be technically implemented without them. Its a question of if consensus still exists for it, which method we prefer, and when to flip the switch if a consensus still exists. TonyBallioni (talk) 03:59, 26 June 2017 (UTC)
- Dummy edit. Kindly ignore this comment, but let it remain here. —usernamekiran(talk) 04:15, 26 June 2017 (UTC)
- TonyBallioni, it's looking like we will have to do it locally since we're getting almost no cooperation from the WMF and I don't see that changing in the foreseeable future. I shudder to think what a kludge a local solution will be, but it will certainly be better than the status quo.- MrX 11:43, 26 June 2017 (UTC)
- MrX, ACTRIAL can be easily implemented without any help from the WMF. You either flip the switch through the blacklist or through edit filters and boom, its here locally. WMF help on the landing page is needed and would be quite welcome, but the part of the project that gets the most attention can be technically implemented without them. Its a question of if consensus still exists for it, which method we prefer, and when to flip the switch if a consensus still exists. TonyBallioni (talk) 03:59, 26 June 2017 (UTC)
- it seems to me that one of our current problems is the amount of time people interested in doing NPP spend in debating how to go about it. From what I see here, it seems obvious that there continues to be a consensus for Actrial. I do not think it will solve all our problems, but based on the figures given, it may give a 5 to 10% smaller backlog. It would seem simpler to me to implement it and see, rather than keep discussing. I do not see that the WMF currently would actually oppose it. I think they;re more inclined to help than to argue, and I hope that's true of us also. DGG ( talk ) 03:54, 26 June 2017 (UTC)
- I don't want to be one of the WMF-bashers because relationships are important, even on the internet. But it's becoming increasingly evident that nothing meaningful will be done to address the substantial issues raised about new page creation. I not sure what more we can do to try to convince WMF that we have serious problems and we really need WMF's help.- MrX 22:10, 25 June 2017 (UTC)
- Esquivalience, did you synthesise your post from the comments I've been making over the years and recently? If not, and you wrote it from the top of your head, I've already given you a barnstar for it! Kudpung กุดผึ้ง (talk) 07:18, 25 June 2017 (UTC)
- Show that it is a top priority for the community and the WMF will be happy to make it their top priority as well. (Getting 70 editors to vote for a Wishlist proposal should be much easier than organizing a revolt.) Kaldari (talk) 07:40, 26 June 2017 (UTC)
- Getting them to include your idea and put it up for a vote, not so easy.[5][6] Unless you can find a place where my idea was put up for a vote along with the other Community Wishlist items, of course -- I might have missed it somehow. --Guy Macon (talk) 08:08, 26 June 2017 (UTC)
- What Danny does not (or does not want) to understand, Ryan, is that what we have here is a major critical issue that could well end in a revolt that would be easier to organise. This is not for what I call the users' annual letter to Santa for bots, gadgets and other convenience features. We're talking here about something that affects the very fabric of Wikipedia and its reputation.
- None of the 265 items on that list came anywhere near causing so much discussion and polemic or driving a cast iron wedge between the community and the WMF. Eight of the top ten on that wish list have still not been completed or addressed and we're rapidly approaching the 2017 list.
- If your team is saturated, what you guys need to do, as you are too low on the pecking order to decide for yourselves, is to lobby the very top for more people or as I said somewhere else, create a dedicated team of devs to work on the things the stakeholders demand rather than what the devs want to do. But even there, chances are they (she) won't understand and with a wink of a wrist will simply say vaguely "Oh, I think I heard something about that. Look into it will you" like she did last time you spoke to her about it. WMF is getting so big now that it's as difficult to get an audience with the top person as it is with the Queen - but at least her Maj still goes on a walkabout and shakes a few hands. When the revolt comes, it's going to be more than hands that will shake. Kudpung กุดผึ้ง (talk) 11:03, 26 June 2017 (UTC)
- Getting them to include your idea and put it up for a vote, not so easy.[5][6] Unless you can find a place where my idea was put up for a vote along with the other Community Wishlist items, of course -- I might have missed it somehow. --Guy Macon (talk) 08:08, 26 June 2017 (UTC)
- Kaldari - I'm sure I can collect at least 70 votes (actually, it looks like only 29 votes would make the project highest priority]) from users who will agree with me that defending the encyclopedia against the constant flood of spam articles is far more important than syntax highlighting (already a capability via javascript). Before I do though, I have two questions:
- 1. If the Community Wishlist Survey is the mechanism for process for getting development projects prioritize, how is it that the 52nd item on the list with 29 votes is done, while New User Landing Page with 69 votes doesn't even have an owner?
- 2. Does your position in the WMF give you the authority to re-prioritize the development of the landing page project once I collect those votes, or are you speaking for someone else with that authority?
- Thank you for your help with this.- MrX 11:25, 26 June 2017 (UTC)
- Don't be so sure that you can collect at least 70 votes when the WMF is free to refuse to put your suggestion on the ballot simply because they don't like it.[7] --Guy Macon (talk) 15:51, 26 June 2017 (UTC)
- I have no intention of waiting for next year's wish list. This needs to be addressed now, and if we need 29 more people to say so, I can easily find them. I also want to know who is the person at WMF responsible for prioritizing development work, how those decisions are made, and who at WMF is responsible for making sure the work gets done and reporting back to the community. We need transparency, and an open channel of communication that leads to productive results. It hasn't happened yet.- MrX 16:18, 26 June 2017 (UTC)
- @MrX: The process for prioritizing the items from the wishlist is documented at meta:Community Tech/Community Wishlist Survey description. The short version is that the Community Tech team takes the top 10 items and works on the easiest ones first. Last year we finished 8 of the 10. This year I think we'll finish 7. Volunteers or other teams are welcome to work on the other proposals. The 52nd item was completed by a volunteer. All of the development teams at the Foundation already have their priorities largely defined for the next year except for the Community Tech team since our priorities are defined by the annual Community Wishlist survey, rather than the annual planning process (which is informed by the community strategy consultations). If a proposal for a New User Landing Page makes the Top 10 this year, I personally guarantee it will be completed. Kaldari (talk) 17:15, 26 June 2017 (UTC)
- Kaldari, thank you for answering one of my questions. If I understand correctly, any development requested by the Wikipedia community will not occur unless is one of the top 10 most popular requests (including maintenance requests), requested by users, including developers, across all Wikimedia projects. With nearly 277 employees and a budget of more than $60mm, ten community-requested development projects are allocated for all Wikimedia projects for the entire year.- MrX 18:15, 26 June 2017 (UTC)
- @MrX: No, maintenance requests and bug fixes are handled through Phabricator requests, and despite what everyone here keeps claiming, the WMF has done significant maintenance work and bug fixes on Special:NewPagesFeed and the Curation Toolbar in the past year (26 non-localization-related patches since January). Kaldari (talk) 18:55, 26 June 2017 (UTC)
- Kaldari, thank you for answering one of my questions. If I understand correctly, any development requested by the Wikipedia community will not occur unless is one of the top 10 most popular requests (including maintenance requests), requested by users, including developers, across all Wikimedia projects. With nearly 277 employees and a budget of more than $60mm, ten community-requested development projects are allocated for all Wikimedia projects for the entire year.- MrX 18:15, 26 June 2017 (UTC)
- @MrX: The process for prioritizing the items from the wishlist is documented at meta:Community Tech/Community Wishlist Survey description. The short version is that the Community Tech team takes the top 10 items and works on the easiest ones first. Last year we finished 8 of the 10. This year I think we'll finish 7. Volunteers or other teams are welcome to work on the other proposals. The 52nd item was completed by a volunteer. All of the development teams at the Foundation already have their priorities largely defined for the next year except for the Community Tech team since our priorities are defined by the annual Community Wishlist survey, rather than the annual planning process (which is informed by the community strategy consultations). If a proposal for a New User Landing Page makes the Top 10 this year, I personally guarantee it will be completed. Kaldari (talk) 17:15, 26 June 2017 (UTC)
- I have no intention of waiting for next year's wish list. This needs to be addressed now, and if we need 29 more people to say so, I can easily find them. I also want to know who is the person at WMF responsible for prioritizing development work, how those decisions are made, and who at WMF is responsible for making sure the work gets done and reporting back to the community. We need transparency, and an open channel of communication that leads to productive results. It hasn't happened yet.- MrX 16:18, 26 June 2017 (UTC)
- Don't be so sure that you can collect at least 70 votes when the WMF is free to refuse to put your suggestion on the ballot simply because they don't like it.[7] --Guy Macon (talk) 15:51, 26 June 2017 (UTC)
- As a developer and technical manager, I just want to say that this whole discussion makes me a bit ill. I understand that the Wikipedia community could collectively be accurately described as the customer from hell but it seems like the WMF's response has been to create the technology development organization from hell. Someone's got to be the bigger man here and it is unlikely to be the chaotic Wikipedia community of unaffiliated volunteers. ~Kvng (talk) 16:27, 26 June 2017 (UTC)
- Flip the Switch Already. If implimenting ACTRIAL can be done locally with edit filters and blacklist then do it already. There is near universal support from all involved in NPP. I don't see fighting over this with WMF as productive. Let them work on what they prioritize and let the active NPP group do what we NEED to do to slow down the Flood of Crap. While we are at it, implement a "near blank" new page filter like the link blacklist one. No saving a new page with almost no content (unless it's a #REDIRECT). That will cut way down on errors, tests, and nonsense pages we process. Legacypac (talk) 17:59, 26 June 2017 (UTC)
ACTRIAL as a research experiment
As I mentioned over the weekend, I met today with some WMF folks interested in New Page Patrol & ACTRIAL: Kaldari and MusikAnimal from Community Tech, and Aaron Halfaker and Jonathan Morgan from Research and Data. The people we've been talking to, here and on related pages, have made a lot of good arguments in favor of ACTRIAL. So we're interested in running ACTRIAL as a research experiment, so that we can look at the impact on new user retention and productivity, as well as the impact on page creation and reviewing.
This is a new plan, and we need to run it by a few people -- both at WMF, and here, with you. I'll describe the current outline of the plan, and we're interested to know what you think.
This week, Aaron is going to do a statistical power analysis, which will help us understand how long the trial would have to be, in order to get statistically significant results. We'll share that analysis with you next week, once Aaron's done. We've done similar experiments before on the Articles for Creation workflow and the Wikipedia Adventure, and we've been able to get statistical significance within two to four weeks on those. But this is a different case, and Aaron's analysis will tell us more. We also need to make sure that we've got resources to run the analysis for the experiment; we're working on that now, and we hope to have that settled by next week as well.
Once we've got that settled, our idea is to propose the trial as an RfC, to make sure the community is okay with WMF making the change. As part of that process, we'll put together a set of metrics to evaluate, with your help. (We'll use the ACTRIAL questions as a guide.) Then we'll make the change, which will probably be sending non-autoconfirmed users to the Article wizard to create their article in draft space. Once the trial's over, we'll turn it off, the analyst will crunch numbers, and we'll present the results for everyone's discussion.
I hope this idea comes as good news for everyone here. :) Either way, I'd like to know what you think. -- DannyH (WMF) (talk) 22:14, 26 June 2017 (UTC)