Wikipedia talk:New pages patrol/Archive 3

New page patrol report

I have noted with interest the instructions on the New Pages Patrol project page that "Working from the back of the queue eliminates complaints from editors that you tagged their page for deletion only two minutes after its creation. This should give the creating editor enough time to improve a new page before a patroller attends to it..." I have been monitoring the New page patrol report several times a day for the last few days to see if patrollers are really patrolling from the back of the queue. Typically, there are always 7 or 8 patrollers on line, but in the last three days, I have seen exactly 1 patroller ever editing from the back of the queue.

Now, if you open the New Pages Feed, right now it shows that there are currently 25439 pages in a filtered list, but it opens automatically sorted by "newest first". Now it could be that it is all the reviewers' fault and that the reviewers just need more clue, but I am puzzled about how it is possible to edit from the back of the queue using this resource? If I switch the view and select "sort by oldest" I see a list that has all the articles already reviewed.

—Neotarf (talk) 04:38, 24 January 2013 (UTC)

Click on the left side of the gray bar, where it says "Set filters". Then, uncheck the box that says "Reviewed pages". VQuakr (talk) 04:44, 24 January 2013 (UTC)

So they have to do that every time they start, plus they are supposed to click "sort by oldest"...—Neotarf (talk) 04:49, 24 January 2013 (UTC)

If they are editing from the back of the queue. Reviewers working from the front of the queue can still avoid the "two minutes after its creation" issue as long as they do not tag good-faith articles that are a few seconds or minutes old. Furthermore, merely reviewing a page does not cause edit conflicts - tagging or otherwise editing the page does. So if an article is created in excellent shape, it can be instantly reviewed without impact to the page creator's follow-up edits. VQuakr (talk) 04:54, 24 January 2013 (UTC)

It's not only edit conflicts. The page states that "care should be taken to ensure that the author has finished the initial version before you evaluate the page" and also that "The {{construction}} tag may be placed on a new page by a creator to inform new page patrollers and other editors that the article is still being constructed, and its early revisions may not meet Wikipedia's standard for inclusion. If the creator has not placed it there him/herself, you may want to place it there yourself." —Neotarf (talk) 05:14, 24 January 2013 (UTC)

To address that, how about another line near the "review" button on the entry for each article, indicating the elapsed time since the article was last edited? That seems like a technically feasible upgrade, and an uncontroversial one since it simply provides more information for the reviewers. VQuakr (talk) 06:31, 24 January 2013 (UTC)

That sounds perfect. What about some feedback from reviewers? Maybe they have some insight about how these things are happening. They might also be able to say whether they are being given enough information about avoiding these conflicts. And how would you measure the effect of any change, if editing from the front of the queue is not always a problem?

And what about something from the article writers' end. It seems the most common reasons for tagging have to do with internal linking and/or citations. I usually start new translations from the foreign language article, but starting it from a redlink in another en.wiki article would avoid the orphan issue. The construction tag seems to be a useful idea as well, assuming the reviewers know about it. The wiki software must have some way of knowing when a new article has been created; is there some way to display small informational message when that happens? —Neotarf (talk) 06:56, 24 January 2013 (UTC)

I started a section at Wikipedia_talk:Page_Curation#Request_for_addition_-_time_since_last_edit (where this whole thing started) to request the upgrade. I dropped a note on the NPP report owner's talk page to see if he is interested in upgrading the report with some queries that might help track the creation-to-patrol times over the longer term. The new page feed is precisely that - a list of newly created articles. Or am I misunderstanding your second paragraph? VQuakr (talk) 08:33, 24 January 2013 (UTC)

Nicely done. By the second part I meant something to provide some kind of info to the editor about what their newly created page would be scrutinized for. For instance, if editors knew there was a program that was checking for refs within the first hour of page creation, they could add refs early in the process. It could save work for everyone. —Neotarf (talk) 08:58, 24 January 2013 (UTC)

Ah, that makes sense. Collecting sources, for example, is #4 in the lede section of WP:YFA; I do not know how practical it would be to condense that help page into a splash screen when someone tried to create a new article though. VQuakr (talk) 19:37, 24 January 2013 (UTC)

A wide range of topics on that page: what is an encyclopedia, how to avoid plagiarism, how to find the chat rooms for newcomers, how to search Wikipedia, how to register an account. The part about new page patrol just links to the tutorial for new patrollers. It isn't really written for someone starting an article.

At this point I'm going to be unavailable for WP for some time, probably for several days at least.—Neotarf (talk) 22:03, 24 January 2013 (UTC)

Initial version of user NPP report is online

The user NPP report is now online, many thanks to Scottywong for his prompt development! VQuakr (talk) 04:48, 26 January 2013 (UTC)

AfC Backlog

Could any New page patrollers who are sitting around twiddling their thumbs with not a lot to do (!!!) cast their eyes over the Articles for Creation submissions queue. There's a substantial backlog in there, and editors are starting to complain or wonder if they've made a mistake because stuff just isn't getting processed quickly enough. Ritchie333 ^{(talk) (cont)} 16:45, 27 February 2013 (UTC)

New Pages Queue

Okay, this is getting ridiculous. The New Pages DEFCON has been at 1 for 16 days. To get anything done here, we need to organize this patrol. We need ideas. If you have any, please reply to this post. 1. First of all, we need to crack down on the backlog. Spring Break just started, so I'll have time in doing that. But I'll need help from you guys. 2. Second of all, whenever I am patrolling, I always wikify the new article or do basic copyedits. I suggest others do the same. 3. Lastly, for this post, I had an idea: Organize the patrol in shifts, so we will always have someone on duty. If you have any other suggestions, PLEASE post them below. Thank you. Revolution1221 (talk) 02:39, 23 March 2013 (UTC)

Admins want to be patrolled?

There is a proposal to increase your workload and backlog at the Village pump by removing the autopatrolled right from all admins (who IMO ought to know better than to create a CSD-able article). At a quick glance, it appears that no NPPers have been involved in or informed about this discussion, even though you're the ones who will be most affected by it. WhatamIdoing (talk) 19:37, 23 March 2013 (UTC)

It's good that you provided this notice, but "removing the autopatrolled right from all admins" does not match my reading of the proposal. (Clarifying that is probably best done over there, rather than here.) --j⚛e decker^talk 19:54, 23 March 2013 (UTC)

Just so you know, I do a lot of NPP myself; it was a substantial majority of my work before becoming an admin and is still a significant part of what I do, so yeah. Writ Keeper (t + c) 21:11, 23 March 2013 (UTC)

Then you should've known better. ‑Scottywong| converse _ 13:55, 27 March 2013 (UTC)

Known better about what? This won't actually add to the NPP backlog, since we can have an adminbot go around and re-add the autopatrolled right to current admins manually and let them remove it if they don't want it. Writ Keeper (t + c) 14:00, 27 March 2013 (UTC)

There are newpage patrollers who are well aware of this proposal and have no problem supporting it. I'm an admin who has patrolled lots of articles, appointed scores of autopatrollers and even created a handful of articles. No one disputes that there are plenty of admins who got the autopatroller flag before they became an admin and even some who didn't but have created lots of articles afterwards. If the proposal was that all admins would lose the Autoparoller flag then I and others would have opposed it, but if those admins who have rarely if ever created articles were to lose the Autopatroller flag it would make little difference to newpage patrol. Personally I'm probably below the normal threshold for autopatroller and only have that flag as part of the admin bundle, so my couple of new articles per year would likely cease to be autopatrolled. I doubt that would swamp the newpage patrollers, and if it did we should consider lowering the threshold for autopatrol or just doing a drive to appoint more of our fellow editors who have created 50 articles as Autopatrollers. ϢereSpielChequers 14:19, 27 March 2013 (UTC)

Backlog

I've patrolled new pages for quite a while but until recently, I hadn't paid much attention to the size of the backlog. I noticed that for a few weeks now, the back log has been 30+ days large (long?). Does NPP every do any type of drive that asks editors to pay more attention to NPP to help reduce the backlog? I realize that patrolling new pages is something that we would want just anyone doing but it seems that we may need to actively find a way to reduce the ever-growing backlog of new pages that need patrolled. Have drives occurred in the past? Maybe someone with more experience can let me know what NPP normally does when the backlog gets this bad. OlYeller21^Talktome 23:28, 6 April 2013 (UTC)

No, I do not think we had any drives in the past.--Ymblanter (talk) 08:27, 7 April 2013 (UTC)

Userbox image

I've started a discussion about the image on {{User wikipedia/NP Patrol}} on the village pump. Opinions would be appreciated. — Scott • talk 11:24, 3 May 2013 (UTC)

Formatting

The heading "Patrolling new pages" has been pushed to the right by the "NewPages Defcon 1" box. Does this need to be sorted out? George8211 (talk) 18:10, 21 June 2013 (UTC)

looking for research on new article fates

Hi, can you all direct me to any research on new article fates? Maybe

• overall percentage deleted by some time point
• number of PROD, SD, AFD and % outcomes
• changes before/after AFC submission process was widespread
• percentage acceptance of AFC submissions to new articles

Thanks in advance and I realize different people may structure the questions differently, so whatever is out there, appreciate it.

TCO (talk) 06:31, 8 July 2013 (UTC)

Bump.TCO (talk) 19:32, 13 July 2013 (UTC)

I thought Visualizing Deletion Discussions on Wikipedia was interesting, but probably not quite what you're looking for. Stupid question: Have you tried Wikipedia:Research, Wikipedia:Reference desk, or Wikipedia:Help desk? Braincricket (talk) 06:45, 14 July 2013 (UTC)

User pages

Are User: space (and User talk: space) pages subject to patrol? If so, who patrols? What are the criteria? Thanks. StevenJ81 (talk) 22:43, 12 July 2013 (UTC)

I don't understand at all.

Firstly, see here.

Can someone explain to me why new page patrolling is a right every user has access to? It strikes me as a strange right to grant automatically. It apparently does not require any level of trust to be a new page patroller, unlike other user rights. It's also just a bit odd to assume that all users can be trusted with determining what sort of pages are appropriate, but then not logically extend that trust by making them autopatrolled. Making all users autopatrolled, however, would obviously not be quite right; and neither, I think, is making all users able to patrol pages, for the same reason.

I have exercised this right a few times because I think I know what sort of pages Wikipedia should include. But I will probably never be autopatrolled because I have created so few pages myself, and for this reason I do not think I should be able to patrol new pages until I earn some clearly defined level of trust.

I actually thought this was a bug of some sort when I first began seeing the red exclamation marks in Special:RecentChanges that I was already familiar with on other wikis but never expected to see here. It just seems so unintentional to do things this way. Cathfolant (talk) 02:44, 13 July 2013 (UTC)

I have no knowledge of why this is as it is, but I have some educated guesses. Not being able to patrol your own pages is an anti-spam measure, granted it would be possible for spammers to team up with each other and patrol each others pages, but unlikely. As far as every user having this right, it really does no harm. There is no real difference to a reader between a patrolled and an unpatrolled page. Patrolling is just a way to look for spam and vandalism, and anyone who takes the time to patrol pages is likely to try to do well enough. Just some thoughts. —    Bill W.    (Talk)  (Contrib)  — 03:30, 13 July 2013 (UTC)

At a minimum, pa-trollers should have significant experience making their own articles. There are a few like SLR9 or Kudpung who do have that and are pretty overall grown up and experienced. But there is definitely a tier of young kids playing video game arcade...who don't have the experience writing their own stuff.TCO (talk) 03:43, 13 July 2013 (UTC)

• Thanks for pointing this out and reiterating crucial issues. But you are both rather late to the party as the archives of this talk page will show. Nevertheless, the community needs to be reminded of them. Kudpung กุดผึ้ง (talk) 03:40, 13 July 2013 (UTC)

• Wikipedia maintenance areas are a magnet for young and inexperienced users. They are all wanting to be helpful, some are wanting to get noticed, some are bored and looking for something to do during the school holidays - and this is where the good faith disruption peaks. Most people in the 12 - 16 age group will probably not have been on Wikipedia long enough to gain significant experience, and it is human nature for most of them not to have reached a level of maturity of that of the older editors who gnome away editing piles of content without ever getting noticed at the drama boards or getting things wrong at NPP or AfC. Kudpung กุดผึ้ง (talk) 04:39, 14 July 2013 (UTC)

  Can you provide any evidence of, well, any of those arguments? As you well know, the vast majority of NPPers are well into adulthood. And sure, there is no evidence that people who contribute without coming to metapedians' attention do things wrong, while there is lots of evidence that people who come to metapedians' attention by doing things that are wrong do things wrong. I'm not sure that's something we can take useful information from, however. Ironholds (talk) 15:49, 10 August 2013 (UTC)

  Firstly there is no contradiction between the view that a minority of patrolling is done by people who lack the experience to do it properly and the stats that a majority of patrollers who filled in a certain survey are old(er), experienced and accurate. I may not agree with Kudpung's view as to the age of our inexperienced patrollers, but I know he's correct in observing that New page patrol is a magnet for a steady stream of inaccurate patrollers. To be frank we've known since WP:NEWT, if not before that we get a worrying amount of incorrect Newpage patrolling. As for asking Kudpung for facts, Meta:Research talk:New Page Patrol survey is the place to discuss the necessary crosstabs. Though I suspect at some point we'll have to do a fresh survey without the WMF having a veto as to which fields can be crosstabulated. ϢereSpielChequers 17:06, 10 August 2013 (UTC)

  I'm unaware of any veto on cross-tabulation; what are you referring to? And sure, you get inaccurate edits. That's not because NPP is special, it's because humans are fallible, and new editors are human. People are always going to screw up things they're new to. I would love to know what the degree of inaccuracy is in other maintenance areas for newcomers so we have a point of comparison. I don't think I said anything about a contradiction between those views; my point was more that "people who are at NPP and AN/I screw up more than people we don't see" is not valid, even as qualitative data, since by definition we don't get to validate or check the edits of users whose edits we don't see - and the "drama boards", by definition, are the natural home of reports of incorrect edits. Ironholds (talk) 17:30, 10 August 2013 (UTC)

  OK if it isn't a veto then consider yourself reminded about the requested crosstabs from last year. As to whether we have a higher proportion of mistakes than other areas; My own favoured comparison would be with recent changes, in my experience patrollers rarely make mistakes as to whether an edit is vandalism. I think they are too hasty to revert unsourced edits and would prefer that they applied {{fact}} tags more often. But currently it is within policy both to allow shedloads of newbies to make unsourced edits and to have a bunch of patrollers revert them as unsourced. If v/e hadn't been rolled out too early then perhaps we could have pondered the issue of whether it was wise to recruit lots of new editors without first warning them that they were expected to cite every addition, and prompt them in the editor for that cite. ϢereSpielChequers 05:50, 13 August 2013 (UTC)

  I thought that applying tags was the reason Wikipedia had an editing problem? ;). I'm not entirely sure how you got from "Oliver forgot something" to "the Foundation has actively vetoed a task"; to be honest, that seems a bizarre jump to make. Ironholds (talk) 07:34, 13 August 2013 (UTC)

  Tags vary greatly as do the alternatives to them. Over hasty or overly deletionist deletion tags, and the general tide to tag things rather than fix them is a problem. Wikipedia would be a much better place if some people put as much time into fixing a few problems rather than tagging a larger number of problems for others to fix. But simply reverting unsourced content is much bitier than tagging it with [citation needed] of course the ideal thing would be to actually reference unreferenced material, or at least enough to decide whether a newbie is adding good if unsourced material or is a complete fantasist. But getting people to move from reverting unsourced content on sight to tagging it with [citation needed] would be a step in the right direction. As for the crosstabs that I have been requesting for quite some time now, the offer of crosstabs was after Kudpung and another of the people who initiated that research were unable to get a copy from the WMF of the actual results dataset. So what started out as the WMF supplying technical assistance to do a survey would up with the initiators of that survey being unable to do the crosstabs that we wanted. ϢereSpielChequers 15:50, 18 August 2013 (UTC)

  I'm sorry; no, it didn't. Kudpung was sent the raw data - you were offered the raw data but refused it. Ironholds (talk) 16:36, 18 August 2013 (UTC)

  That doesn't fit my memory of the saga or my rereading of this thread. In my particular case I never requested the raw data, I only requested certain crosstabs after it became clear that there was an impasse in the WMF dialogue with Kudpung. My taking up that offer by filing some cross tab requests was initially an attempt to break the WMF/Kudpung impasse, but after 18 months I'd have to say that my experience rather echoes that of Kudpung. If an anonymised version of the raw data really is available then please load it up on wikidata. ϢereSpielChequers 02:22, 19 August 2013 (UTC)

  To my knowledge, it doesn't; I don't think I said it was, merely that Kudpung has (or had) a copy of the data. Ironholds (talk) 02:24, 19 August 2013 (UTC)

I was provided with some of the data (which made a mockery of the demand for an NDA that was made on me), and not without repeated requests over a protracted period, by which time it had become clear that the Foundation (or its representative) was determined to publish the first report although the entire exercise (except for the request for legal and technical help) was originally intended to be a volunteer community initiative. That said, the whole thing is now moot and it's probably time to give it a rest and now work optimistically towards new solutions for the quality of NPP (and AfC), and an improved collaboration with the Foundation. Kudpung กุดผึ้ง (talk) 12:53, 19 August 2013 (UTC)

• It's time to place a little less relevance on stats and data that could possibly be interpreted and published in a number of different ways by any one individual - and that was the reason the NPP survey project summary was intended to be a community teamwork and I will remind again that the NPP survey group only asked the Foundation for legal and technical help and was part of the search for an acceptable solution in the aftermath of WP:ACTRIAL. What happened was that a 'coordinator' was assigned to the project which somehow mutated into a Foundation initiative.

If anyone would like a comparison for my claims of young and/or inexperienced editors being drawn to meta areas, they only need to take a look at the mess AfC is in - which has now become a serious priority for some reform or improvement. In the light of the urgent rethink that is required for AfC, we can probably live with NPP for the time being. I am extremely pleased to say that in Hong Kong I was able to address these issues in some in-depth side discussions with a group of senior Foundation executives who are now ready and willing to work together with us to address these issues of new article quality in a manner that will restore the community's confidence in the Foundation and aim for solutions that will be the fruit of collaboration rather than an 'us vs. them' conflict. Kudpung กุดผึ้ง (talk) 11:08, 13 August 2013 (UTC)

Really? Who, and what did they suggest? Ironholds (talk) 13:26, 13 August 2013 (UTC)

Kudpung, that's great news. Though my personal preference is for reforming both simultaneously by rebranding unpatrolled articles as "articles for improvement". Do you think there is any chance of getting them to stop experimenting with EN wiki and only implement things here after they have been successfully deployed on a smaller wiki? As for NPP I still think that the lowest hanging fruit is to make the place less bitey by resolving more edit conflicts. It should be a fairly minor fix to stop the addition of a maintenance template or a category counting as an edit conflict; And with the unfortunate mistake of deploying visual editor too early, these are edit conflicts where it is almost always going to be the newbie who gets bitten especially as v/e is so much slower than the classic editor. ϢereSpielChequers 15:50, 18 August 2013 (UTC)

A couple of things that are outside my knowledge/competence: There is very little I can do to influence how the Foundation actually goes about developing and/or implementing new solutions, and I've always stayed out of discussions about the VE. However I do believe that having discussed the issues surrounding the quality of AfC and NPP reviewing, that the Foundation is now aware that something needs to be done and we may see some serious priority being accorded to it. Some interesting ideas were put forward by the WMF and I believe these ideas should now be drafted into a dedicated RfC that does not contain an over abundance of separate alternative suggestions to be discussed; and as always, to reduce background noise, I feel that such an RfC should be carefully drafted by a small dedicated team, and then offered to the community. If consensus is reached, I'm sure the Foundation would be happy to do the necessary minor tweaks to the Wiki software. I don't think there is much risk of it being a failed experiment - at this stage anything that can be done to discourage newbies from reviewing AfC and patrolling new pages would be a major improvement, especially the fast picking of the low hanging fruit; while I was in HK I actually had to unblock a major member of the Wikimania London 2014 organisation team who was blocked following a too rapid, unresearched tagging of his user page for deletion. Kudpung กุดผึ้ง (talk) 11:39, 19 August 2013 (UTC)

Why are my articles unpatrolled?

Is there some reason that the articles I write wind up unpatrolled? For example, it took almost two months for someone to patrol Ten Standard Firefighting Orders . I am told patrolling takes only a second or two, so why would a stub like Gephyrocapsa oceanica not be patrolled? There are articles that are 450 days old that have not been patrolled. Although no one is questioning the quality of any of my articles, apparently they are deficient in some way that requires another editor to look over and okay them. Okay, then what's a matter with them that no one is okaying them? I'll be glad to fix that. --AfadsBad (talk) 23:55, 28 August 2013 (UTC)

Actually, among the 12,000+ unpatrolled articles there are ones that go back 4 years! AFAICS, there is nothing wrong with your stubs (I've checked them all), so when you have made 50 you may wish to apply (again) for Autopatrolled. The problem at NPP is one of experience; many patrollers only go for the low hanging fruit and unpatrolled articles 'fall off' the list visible in the Page Curation window. Kudpung กุดผึ้ง (talk) 00:07, 29 August 2013 (UTC)

What difference will 50 make, if there is nothing wrong with the articles I am writing now? If mine don't need checking, there is no point in adding them to the list of pages that require patrolling. All of my plant articles will be checked by plant editors when posted on the article alerts, and the only other articles I create are from red links. They are sourced, notable, categorized, linked. --AfadsBad (talk) 00:15, 29 August 2013 (UTC)

Fine, then that's not a problem - you'll get the autopatroll right when you've reached 50 creations. After all, 'Autopatrolled' is not an award and it confers no advantages to the creator. We're going to do something about the quality of patrolling however. Kudpung กุดผึ้ง (talk) 00:34, 29 August 2013 (UTC)

I did look at other requests before posting mine. All the ones denied were either new users without any edits or denied for specific problems with article creation. You said there are no problems with my articles, no one is bothering to review them, so they're just adding to the line of unpatrolled articles without any benefit to Wikipedia and article creation. I did not ask for it as an award or to my advantage, simply to remove my articles, which are fine in all ways listed, from being added unnecessarily to the queue. If there is no reason to patrol them, not for notability, not for copyvios, not for missing references, or anything, and they sit in the queue for two months, then adding them to the queue until I get "50" is without value. I won't be back at 50; too many other things without value to not be done on Wikipedia. --AfadsBad (talk) 02:41, 29 August 2013 (UTC)

I'll be watching your edits and when you reach 50 creations you won't need to ask - I'll do it myself. If you would like to do something about the unpatrolled articles, you could make a list here and hope that someone will search the queue for them and patrol them. That's the kind of thing this talk page is also for. 02:52, 29 August 2013 (UTC)Kudpung กุดผึ้ง (talk)

You know, there is so much done on Wikipedia that has no purpose. I will just ignore my new articles, or send them to AFC so I don't need them patrolled, or stop creating them, and I would rather pass on a reminder of this exchange. --AfadsBad (talk) 02:57, 29 August 2013 (UTC)

Page Curation - a year-and-half down the line

Page Curation is an excellent tool that was introduced well over a year ago after long and careful development by the Wikimedia Foundation, and by now all patrollers should be using it. However, the tool has not addressed one of the primary issues with patrolling: patroller experience.

Patrolers needed

We need patrollers, and we need more patrollers - the backlog still hovers at around 12,000 pages and some go back a very long time. However, it is essential that patrollers know what they are doing, and it's therefore not a task for new users and raw beginners.

Trainers needed

We're going to step up the campaign to find more patrollers, but we need the help of the experienced ones: please consider making yourselves available as trainers at the New Page Patrol School.

Thanks. Kudpung กุดผึ้ง (talk) 00:24, 29 August 2013 (UTC)

Oldest Pages Still Broken

I'm currently doing my level best to help with the HUGE backlog of new pages that have yet to be patrolled. I was using the New Pages Feed tool to help reduce the backlog, but it's now impossible to look at the oldest pages first. If the article has existed for 3 months (the current backlog), there is a small (but not zero) chance that they are totally unacceptable for inclusion. So these are the easiest and fastest pages to get through. But the tool that makes it possible, doesn't work. —    Bill W.    (Talk)  (Contrib)  — 03:37, 29 August 2013 (UTC)

Keep plugging away at Bugzilla. Kudpung กุดผึ้ง (talk) 06:11, 29 August 2013 (UTC)

Is it even possible to access pages that are more than 30 days old? --TKK! bark with me if you're my dog! 04:59, 5 September 2013 (UTC)

You should all be using WP:Page Curation and not the old new pages system. In New pages Feed, select 'Sort by oldest' - it's in the top right hand corner of the page. Kudpung กุดผึ้ง (talk) 07:50, 5 September 2013 (UTC)

I have been, but even then it still only shows pages ~35 days old (when it's not, you know, broken) --TKK! bark with me if you're my dog! 14:48, 5 September 2013 (UTC)

New pages feed - scrolling vs jumping

The Special:NewPagesFeed is pretty nifty. I'm starting from the back and moving forward. The problem is I want to pick up again where I left off, it takes forever to scroll forward to a certain date. Is there a way to jump to a date? Otherwise the pages between the end and the start of the list are very inaccessible, requiring many scrolls and minutes to reach. Thanks, -- Green Cardamom (talk) 15:52, 29 September 2013 (UTC)

"Mark as patrolled" link not showing up?

Yesterday I tried doing some NPP for the first time since AFC was slow, and most all the articles I opened had a "mark as patrolled" (or "relue" since my default is French), so I could click that on pages that needed no other tagging.

However, today all of a sudden I see no such link at the bottom of any of the NPP pages, but on one of the pages I somehow clicked something and a gray menu bar popped up at the side of my screen, which had cartoony icons, one of which was again "relue" (patrolled), but I can't figure out why that popped up or how to do it again.

The NPP instruction page is good overall, but it is not very clear about how to mark "patrolled" on pages other than incidentally as part of using Twinkle to tag them.

I didn't change anything about my computer/account/browser, so why am I not seeing the "patrolled" link at bottom? Thanks for any clarity, MatthewVanitas (talk) 15:53, 9 October 2013 (UTC)

When you open pages through Special:NewPagesFeed, you will get the page curation sidebar which allows you to, among other things, mark pages as patrolled with one of the buttons. If you close the page curation toolbar (by clicking the minimize button first and then clicking the close button), the bar will disappear and the "mark as patrolled" link at the bottom will reappear. If you want to go back to the page curation toolbar after closing it, there is a link under the toolbox heading in the left bar. The mark as patrolled link has the same effect as the checkmark button on the bar (without the extra comment field, obviously).  — daranz [ t ] 16:54, 9 October 2013 (UTC)

Deletion discussions marked as unpatrolled

Apologies if this has come up before, but it really seems to be a nuisance that new pages for deletion discussions (AfD and MfD) can be marked as unpatrolled. Yes, editors do occasionally err in creating these, but they're almost always legitimate. Is there any practical way to exempt such pages? I realize some degree of scrutiny may still be necessary, such as for misplaced new articles that end up in W space. --BDD (talk) 17:50, 8 October 2013 (UTC)

• Perhaps no one knows. I'm not watching this page any more, but please do drop me a line if you have an answer. --BDD (talk) 20:44, 15 October 2013 (UTC)

Request for comment

A discussion is taking place at Wikipedia:WikiProject Articles for creation/RfC for AfC reviewer permission criteria. Participation is welcome. Kudpung กุดผึ้ง (talk) 04:14, 18 October 2013 (UTC)

The biggest problem with new pages

is the huge gap between what new editors create and what is needed. I try to educate with welcome templates. It does not seem to help. Is there a welcome template that is more successful than others in getting new editors past WP:BeBold and into WP:42? Dlohcierekim 19:09, 2 December 2013 (UTC)

I don't think there is much to be gained for the improvement of New Page Patrolling by examining the welcome templates. As you know (because I have reviewed your recent edits), by the time new users are welcomed the damage is already done. There are several standard welcome templates offered by the Twinkle dropdown. These usually add a welcome when a user is warned for the first time and has not been previously welcomed. There are however dozens of user-created custom welcome template that may not be triggered by Twinkle. One thing we need to train NPPrs in is better use of the message feature that is built in to the Curation toolbar. This is especially important when new pages are tagged for maintenance issue; only deletion templates (CSD, PROD, AfD) leave a message automatically on the user's talk page.

I made a suggestion a couple of times a long while ago, that when new articles are tagged for maintenance by a patroller, the Curation tool should should leave this message: Thank you for creating [this article]. A page patroller has tagged the article for some things that need to be fixed. You may wish to return to the article and address these issues if you can. On the other hand however, this being to easy for the patroller would possible mean even less use of custom messages through the message box. A dilemma indeed; Kudpung กุดผึ้ง (talk) 06:59, 3 December 2013 (UTC)

I think the answer to that is the answer to the question "are semi-automated messages better or worse than no messages at all?". If they're better, then in the absence of a willingness to consistently use custom messages, they should be preferred. Ironholds (talk) 07:14, 3 December 2013 (UTC)

I suppose it could be tried if the software tweak is not too complicated; it would need to be automatically overridden if someone does use the message field. Although I suggested it, it doesn't mean that I'm wholly in favour of automated messages - I leave a lot of custom messages through the message box, but at the end of the day, I'm open to anything that will improve NPP. Kudpung กุดผึ้ง (talk) 10:25, 3 December 2013 (UTC)

. Kudpung, I think that's a good idea. Dlohcierekim 15:47, 3 December 2013 (UTC)

@Kudpung's idea is good one. Unfortunately, it won't help in my NPPing because I use Twinkle. If implemented, tt should probably be opt-out-able using nobots, or equivalent. - MrX 19:27, 3 December 2013 (UTC)

If it were available in Twinkle that would help me,, too Dlohcierekim 22:04, 3 December 2013 (UTC)

New Twinkle features can be requested any time at Wikipedia talk:Twinkle. Kudpung กุดผึ้ง (talk) 01:03, 4 December 2013 (UTC)

An exodus from Page Curation?

I've come across several users recently who say they are still using the old page feed and Twinkle. This raises the question if the amount of patrolling/number of patrolers is on decline because editors find the feed and the curation tool too difficult to use - or again, the instructions too daunting. I have always said very strongly that the the new system is one of the best things on Wikipedia since sliced bread, so I would be curious to know why not everyone is using it. Kudpung กุดผึ้ง (talk) 01:10, 4 December 2013 (UTC) not

I was using Twinkle long before PageCuration came along. It works for me and I'm to OCD/AS to change. Dlohcierekim 01:15, 4 December 2013 (UTC)

I use the new feed, but several months ago decided to use Twinkle instead of the curation toolbar tagging. I vaguely recall that it was because there were some missing templates, or something like that. For the record, I do think the new system is very good. If the tool bar would stay where I drag it, I would give it 5 stars.- MrX 02:05, 4 December 2013 (UTC)

• Although I use Special:NewPagesFeed exclusively, I've only used the Curation Toolbar (to do anything other than "Mark as patrolled") once or twice -- when it was first introduced. Twinkle works for me, like Dlohcierekim, and I saw no need to switch. Theopolisme (talk) 03:09, 4 December 2013 (UTC)

Thanks for your input, guys. Any thoughts as to how challenging the use of the new page feed/curation toolbar might be to other users? Kudpung กุดผึ้ง (talk) 04:39, 4 December 2013 (UTC)

I find the new pages feed rather intuitive, particularly the fact that you can do everything without leaving the page you are patrolling (i.e. post a message to the writer's talk page). I cannot speak for others, but I like it. Go Phightins! 11:34, 4 December 2013 (UTC)

I think the new page curation tool is very intuitive and easy to use. I can't imagine that many users would not understand how to use it.- MrX 00:24, 5 December 2013 (UTC)

I am using the new one, it is easier for templating articles (in those cases I decide to template and not to expand).--Ymblanter (talk) 19:47, 4 December 2013 (UTC)

Proposal to channge duration of WP:BLPPROD from 10 to 7 days

If you would like to comment, please see: Wikipedia:Proposed deletion of biographies of living people/RfC: Change duration from 10 to 7 days. Kudpung กุดผึ้ง (talk) 02:14, 5 December 2013 (UTC)

Thanks for the heads up! VQuakr (talk) 07:54, 5 December 2013 (UTC)

Lack of patrollers?

The last two times I checked on patrolling, there was one editor patrolling, and today (11/29/13 03:14:59) there are none. 14,400 total unreviewed pages (oldest: 184 days). Only 677 pages reviewed this week; this is far too few considering the number of daily creations. Clearly some motivation is required, but what? A hat to collect? Kudpung กุดผึ้ง (talk) 03:18, 29 November 2013 (UTC)

Well, you could just message old patrollers asking them to come back; I suspect that some errors with NPF in July dropped the numbers substantially. Hats are unlikely to be helpful, although I try to give out barnstars where I see decent patrolling. Ironholds (talk) 04:37, 29 November 2013 (UTC)

In all honesty, page patrolling is a rather mundane task that, given the choice, I think most would prefer not do. That said, it is important, and I just spent roughly about an hour and a half knocking out probably 75 pages or so, but with a backlog this long, it is a drop in the bucket. The backlog is a self-perpetuating problem ... people see there is a long backlog, think there is nothing they can do, ignore it, and thus the backlog only gets longer. I am really not sure how to entice people to help out in reducing it, other than perhaps a blast on the major noticeboards pleading for everyone to take a half-hour and review 10-20 pages from either the NPP backlog or AfC. Maybe that would temporarily work, but I don't know ... short of somehow having an automated reviewing process, I just don't see enough willing reviewers to take on such a constant endeavor. I am the first to admit I do not always help out with backlogs as much as I should, preferring to write and improve articles, but ultimately, backlogs are a big problem that we, as a community, need to address, and I think the best way to do so is everyone chipping in what they can when they can. Go Phightins! 05:38, 29 November 2013 (UTC)

I try to patrol when I have a chance, but frankly I often find that the limited time I have to work on Wikipedia-related endeavors is spent writing code, not reviewing new pages (due in part to the fact that I find programming infinitely more satisfying). I'll try to devote a bit more time to it, though. Theopolisme (talk) 05:43, 29 November 2013 (UTC)

• I think what we may be looking at here is yet another example of the aging Wikipedian population - we have fewer newcomers, and experienced users who previously had time on their hands find they no longer do (I'm with Theo - writing code is more fun than NPP). As expected, in both cases the cost is felt in the most onerous and mundane areas. Ironholds (talk) 08:32, 29 November 2013 (UTC)

I used to be very active in patrolling. I got sick of dealing with the complaints. From both article creators and random inclusionists complaining about deletionists. Plus, I hate the new (new? how old is the new now) method of patrolling. I should probably get back into it a bit more... --Onorem (talk) 08:43, 29 November 2013 (UTC)

I do more RCP than NPP. JianhuiMobile ^talk 10:42, 29 November 2013 (UTC)

I indeed was somehow put back last time there were problems (in July?), and before that I was doing several pages from the back of the queue per day. What actually can help is what we usually do for drives: An automatically updated (once per day, or more often) table showing the progress.--Ymblanter (talk) 20:15, 29 November 2013 (UTC)

You're probably right about there not being enough patrollers, but be careful when going by the toolserver tool. It seems to me like it's underreporting lately. I'm not sure what the deal with the Toolserver is these days, but whatever it is it seems to be the cause.  — daranz [ t ] 20:39, 29 November 2013 (UTC)

I don't think there is any need for those of us who have done our fair share of patrolling to be self-recriminating, especially where we have found our niche in other areas. There has been a lot of research made into NPP, but apart from the creation of the excellent New pages Feed and the Curation Toolbar, the core issues have not been addressed. . What we possibly need to do is to get some new blood on board from among editors who are suitably experienced and who are as interested in NPP are as are, for example, recent changes and vandalism patrollers. AFAICS, those two departments seem to do reasonably well, but they do have hats... Kudpung กุดผึ้ง (talk) 02:07, 30 November 2013 (UTC)

One thing I noticed yesterday/the wee hours of this morning was that many of the articles I came upon was that others, namely Fram on many occasions, that articles already had tags and some had been tagged by multiple users, but had not been marked as patrolled. Is there any way that automatically, once tags are on an article, it is marked as patrolled. As for a hat, maybe that would help ... I think perhaps one of the issues is lack of appreciation for NPPers - it is a thankless job, unlike vandal reversion, which someone is likely to see on a watchlist and often thanks the "reverter" with a barnstar or something, whereas on NPP, no one has the pages watchlisted, and as such no one seems to care unless the NPPer screws up, in which case, as I once experienced first hand over inadvertently patrolling from the front of the log and fixing a page that had a malformed title, edit conflicting with the author, all hell can break loose, and I was called incompetent and the like ... needless to say, that was not a terribly pleasant experience, so I found something to do with my on-wiki time that was more pleasant. I am not the only one who has had this experience, I'm sure. As has been said above, NPPing is not all that fun, or always that pleasant, or that glorious, or that appreciated. So you're right, maybe a hat would mitigate the negative aspects of it. It is not that bad, but there undoubtedly are unpleasant aspects, disproportionately more so than in other areas of the encyclopedia. Go Phightins! 03:27, 30 November 2013 (UTC)

I think it's appropriate that articles can be tagged without necessarily being marked as patrolled - this demonstrates that the patroller is unsure but doing his/her best, and it ensures that there will be more eyes on the page.

I've resisted calling for a hat for patrollers for a long time, but it does seem to me that this may be one of the main reasons why so few are intertested in doing it. Reviewer and Rollbacker which effectively require much less knowledge and experience (and which are, I believe, mostly carried out by newer editors who haven't got ideas for content contributions on a large scale yet) do have hats. As a regular admin working at WP:PERM for a couple of years, I can't discount the fact that many applications for those rights come from hat collectors, but the admins are generally able to filter those out.

Perhaps NPP also needs to be more project-oriented like some clean up projects such as the WP:GOCE etc., and organised drives (without attracting less experienced editors to do things in a rush). Perhaps the feeling of being supported by an active project would be motivating. What we have at the moment is simply the main page at WP:NPP which is a tutorial, this talk page which only sees rare bursts of activity, and the WP:NPRSCHOOL which I created but never gets used.

The WMF gave us the New Pages Feed/Curation Toolbar (which was quite remarkable) and Oliver worked hard to coordinate its development - now is the time to see it being used more, used properly, and by users with the right experience. Kudpung กุดผึ้ง (talk) 04:06, 30 November 2013 (UTC)

Backlog elimination drives are not a bad idea, but whenever you have drives, quality is at risk, as people want to get the most, which is conducive to rushing. While I stipulate that not marking something as patrolled yet adding tags proves someone is unsure but doing his or her best, I have to wonder if someone feels strongly enough about something to leave a tag, yet does not feel strongly enough to mark the page as patrolled, whether they should be adding the tag in the first place? I am not sure, and would have to ponder that for sure. I agree with your last two points as well, but am a little skeptical of a hat. I don't know - hats draw hat collectors, and hat collectors are (often) for those more interested in collecting more hats than doing quality work, and doing quality work is crucial at NPP ... the kind of people we want reviewing at NPP are the kind of people who do not want/need hats for their own edification. Go Phightins! 04:30, 30 November 2013 (UTC)

Glad to see you concurring but your last statement gives me pause although basically a relevant argument. There are indeed hat-collectors, and some who see the hats as stepping stones to higher office for their own edification (RfA sorts that out pretty well).

We're in the process of introducing a set of measures for minimum experience to review submissions at AfC which is a parallel process in almost every respect, except that the actual process differs, and the number of daily article arrivals at NPP is much higher. As side note, I would ideally like to see the NewPagefeed/Page Curation tool cloned (technically possible) for use at AfC on the new 'Draft' mainspace that is being created mainly for use at AfC.

Both AfC and NPP suffer from exactly the same problems: too few reviewers, too little experience, and inconsistency. It's kind of hoped that by introducing a permission will attract those who prefer to have some formal recognition for what they are doing, and as a measure of their competency. What we have to instill upon users however is that all these minor permissions or user rights are not a meritocracy system - except maybe for barnstars for exceptionally good committment. Difficult I know, but we need to look at the possible net benefit of a user right or a user permission. Kudpung กุดผึ้ง (talk) 05:47, 30 November 2013 (UTC)

I'm personally not seeing the net benefit of a userright. It'd be nice if we had some data on it (I don't think this exists, alas, but I can think of an obvious way for testing for it. Hmn.) Ironholds (talk) 18:46, 30 November 2013 (UTC)

So, what I'm thinking of, off the top of my head: we take two groups, anti-vandalism patrollers and article creators, and see how the granting of rollback or autopatrolled impacted the frequency of their work. The important difference is that rollback is an actual improvement in the speed at which you can do the task, and autopatrolled isn't, so we can normalise for tangible benefits of the right (it improves my ability to do taskX) versus non-tangible (I get appreciated). This would be useful baseline data, although it wouldn't solve for my main objection around a user right, which is that it excludes people from performing the task. FWIW I've seen some poor NPPers, but very few, and the data I gathered when this same issue came up last year suggests that there are very few of them. In such a situation social solutions (actually talking to them) are probably better than user rights. Ironholds (talk) 18:53, 30 November 2013 (UTC)

I agree that seeing how being granted Reviwer and Rollbacker has impacted on the frequency of those patrols by those users would be useful. I would rather leave Autopatrolled out of the equation because this is not a 'right' per se - although plenty of requests at WP:PERM for it clearly appear to suggest a misconception of it being an award of merit for having created over 50 articles.

Since late 2010 I have issued 435 social requests to editors (without being in the slightest bit bitey) to improve their patrolling and I believe this to be only the tip of the iceberg, especially as my results come mainly only from discovering wrongly tagged CSDs, or following up on inappropriate PRODS or AfDs. I certainly don't catch them all. I have a sneaking suspicion that the frequency/number of patrollers has actually dropped since the introduction of New Pages Feed/Page Curation Tool, and it would be a great disappointment if this were the case. There isn't a Category:Speedy deletion declined, but if there were, or if there were some way of recovering such stats, that may also provide some clues.

I would be interested in seeing some basic stats of who, and how often, patrollers have been patrolling over, say, the last 12 months. However, the ToolServer is now lacking maintenenace, and Scottywong who was extremely helpful in providing many of the stats for us in the past has now semi-retired. Gathering such stats seems easy enough to do for someone who has a good knowledge of regex and/or Toolserver/Labs access and I would do it if I could, but I can't, so I can't. Kudpung กุดผึ้ง (talk) 01:39, 1 December 2013 (UTC)

Well, you don't need regular expressions, you just need basic SQL; I can try and look into things if and when I get some free time. You may have misunderstood the point of the research, though.

If you're trying to measure whether userrights have an impact on the willingness and enthusiasm people have for a task, there are two factors to measure. The first is whether granting a userright increases enthusiasm, or grants some kind of status or responsibility someone wishes to live up to. The second is that sometimes userrights are simply required, or tangibly make the task easier, which of course is likely to increase the chances of someone performing that task. Simply using reviewer and rollback is a problem for precisely this reason: we could find that people given reviewer permissions are 30 percent likelier to review pages, or that people given rollback revert 20 percent more vandalism than they did before they had this right, but that's useless data for justifying a new user right because reviewer is a requirement to review pages and rollback makes reverting vandalism faster. Autopatrolled is worth including precisely because it doesn't make page authorship faster, or particularly easier: for people writing good articles it's merely a badge.

So what I'd do is take rollback (a right that grants a tangible benefit) and autopatrol (a right that doesn't) and look at a user's willingness to engage in activities associated with that right before and after gaining it, and see if there's a gain in enthusiasm with rollback that's independent of the fact that it makes reverting easier. If there is, there's an argument that user rights are valuable as a status symbol. If there isn't, then the only reason people might be more willing to do taskX after getting a userright is that the task is now easier, or possible, because of that userright (which is not an argument for introducing an NPP right at all, since NPP access is the status quo).

Gathering good statistical information about the efficiency of our current patrollers may be tricky. We could, perhaps, measure the amount of declined speedy deletions. We could also probably measure the amount of accepted speedy deletions (although that would mean dipping into deleted pages). How do we, however, determine whether the CSD tagging was done by someone trying to do new page patrol, or by someone doing something else? Another issue is, how do we statistically determine good patrol behavior, when it doesn't involve CSD? If an article doesn't get deleted, and someone marked it as patrolled in the past, does that mean they did a good job? What if the article had some obvious problems but wasn't tagged before being marked as patrolled? What if it was mistagged? For that matter, what if the article was deleted through AfD 6 months after being patrolled—does that mean the patroller did a bad job?

All of these problems make it difficult to gather hard data on whether or not we need a hat to control who gets to do NPP. Personal experiences are also problematic, as we're more likely to notice bad patrolling than good patrolling. We have no meta-patrolling in NPP, and rightly so—we can't even keep up with the new pages queue.

Of course, general data on number of patrollers may be useful, if only to serve as another "oh shit" graph.  — daranz [ t ] 12:19, 1 December 2013 (UTC)

Agreed; I can look into that. Actually we do have some meta-patrolling (I've done it myself) but you're right - it's never going to be perfect until we've actually got the queue under control. How about this:

1. I get a list of patrollers who haven't patrolled in a while, filtered for recent activity level;
2. We message them and ask them to come back, asking them to drop us a note here if there are particular things that drove them away;
3. We see if that improves things. If it doesn't, we can talk about user rights or training schools or all the rest, but when the raw problem is "we don't have enough people", as Daranz astutely points out, we're never going to have the time for meta-tasks without leaving the queue to rot. Ironholds (talk) 18:47, 1 December 2013 (UTC)

The list will be very informative, but I am not sure we want absolutely everyone who has previously done this patrolling to return, unless they have learned more about Wikipedia since they started. I strongly support Kudpung's repeated suggestion that the roles of NPP and AfC are very similar, and require the same sort and level of judgment. I am not at all sure which is the easiest, or where a person should begin, and I look forward to uniting the processes, where we give similar attention and advice to all incoming articles, regardless of the method. I'm not at all sure of the workflow pattern that will be best here, but the purposes are the same:

• keeping the one-third of acceptable articles while making sure they get the necessary attention for future improvements and for minor fixes of format and WP convention ,
• removing the one-third of hopeless articles that will never with any reasonable improvement, add to the content of the encyclopedia --while simultaneously trying not to alienate those who submit the articles in good faith
• the hardest part, showing the people who write the articles that will possibly or probably be acceptable with improvement how to improve them, encourage them to continue, and take care that even if they themselves do not, that the most potentially valuable article submissions that need rewriting get rewritten-either by competent editors here, of by some sort of requested article process.

The skills necessary for these are not just to know what makes an acceptable Wikipedia article, and the more difficult skill of knowing what to do to improve them with the necessary sources--any WPedian with a modest experience in article writing should be able to do these. It also requires the skills of being able to guide the users to actually do the work without getting discouraged by trivial or technical problems. Some people are better at this than others, but the skill can be developed. This is where we principally need more people, for nobody can do this properly for more than a small number of articles a day.

Where can the work of the most experienced people here with the best experience be most utilized? For some, it will be designing these processes. For some, it may be double-checking on key factors that require particular knowledge and experience, such as proper copyvio checking. For others, it will be not primarily directly working with the articles, but instructing the reviewers--not just to do basic review, but to work with the new editors. DGG ( talk ) 06:20, 2 December 2013 (UTC)

Well, the quickest way to unify the workflows is to allow anyone to create a page, but somehow I suspect that'd be opposed. More seriously; while the above text is fascinating, we seem to be talking about two different things - how to help in the short-to-medium term, and how to help in the long term.

Obviously the ideal outcome is to have a easy-to-use, easy-to-review set of workflows that can handle both sets of tasks (really, this is the ideal for...pretty much anything on Wikipedia). Building that as an AfC/new article-specific thing is going to take a while; building it as a general system that can be applied to this specific area is potentially going to take longer (it would be dependent on Flow's workflow module, presumably).

Until that happens, they are two different skillsets because they're aimed at two different tasks. The task of a patroller is to identify truly unsalvagable articles and mark them as such for admins to review, identify articles that need improvement and mark them for other users (including the page creator) to review, and passing the remainder. AfC users seem to have the task (or been set the task) of making sure something ticks all the boxes before it even sees the article namespace This may be inaccurate, but that's certainly how it looks from the outside. There's added complexity and far more nuance in the interactions between a user and a reviewer. Obviously, if/when it does happen, we can synthesise the two areas and hopefully reach a nice middle ground.

In the meantime, we have the short-to-medium-term solution, which is try to encourage existing patrollers (through things like barnstars) and grab in people who have forgotten about the task, left with the outage in July, whatever. Obviously, as you say, not all of them will be people we want back, but it'd be pretty trivial to identify those people and exclude them from the messaging. It won't solve the problem forever, but it won't be on an uncertain (and long!) timeline, either. Ironholds (talk) 07:38, 2 December 2013 (UTC)

One of the problems getting users to patrol new pages may be related to the sheer complexity of the instructions at WP:NPP and Wikipedia:Page Curation which both need to be read carefully and understood; this may be offputting to some users who wish to dive in and patrol, but that may in fact in itself not be a bad thing - NPP is definitely not an area for new and/or inexperienced users. Kudpung กุดผึ้ง (talk) 07:02, 3 December 2013 (UTC)

Indeed, but we can look at simplifying the both of them - and perhaps unifying them? If NPF is the recommended tool these days, it seems to make sense to integrate the two together. I wonder what would be required to have a guided tour of page curation... Ironholds (talk) 07:20, 3 December 2013 (UTC)

It does indeed make sense to combine them. However, I would like to see the sense of a supportive, active project not being lost. So there are still three distinct sides to it: The tutorial at NPP on how to treat new pages, the tutorial at page Creation on how to use the tools, and the support for patrollers. I rewrote a lot of WP:NPP a couple of years ago with a lot of help from Scottywong. When we were basically finished with it, looking back at it, we were both actually quite amazed at the amount of knowledge required to do it properly. It's hard to see how it can be slimmed down. Of course, anyone with sufficient experience and a near-admin knowledge of policies, deletions, copyvio, etc, would have learned it all over the years, just as we admins gained our knowledge without having to follow tutorials, but what we are looking at with many such semi-admin areas is one of those tasks that are traditional magnets for new and inexperienced editors.

Wading through all the instructions is something that perhaps younger users don't don't have the patience to do unless it were subject to the acquisition of a user right (or permission). IMO, anyone who does accept the challenge to read and learn it all deserves a hat to wear! Kudpung กุดผึ้ง (talk) 11:34, 3 December 2013 (UTC)

Not sure when we started talking about younger users; again, whether a userright has an actual impact on the willingness of people to work in an area is still an unknown :). I'll take a look at the documentation this weekend and set up a sandbox where we can play around with merging it. Ironholds (talk) 19:14, 3 December 2013 (UTC)

I don't think there is any doubt that such activities as PC patrolling, vandalism patrol, and NPP are caried out by a significant number of younger and/or inexperienced users. These rights and/or functions apper to be clearly a magnet for many of them but of course i agree that tis would not be easy or practical to prove through stats alone. When looking for solutions, we have to assume that we will be addressing users of all cognitive levels and Wikipedia experience.

I would be happy to work with a rewrite/merge of all the instructions. It could be set up at, for example, Wikipedia:New pages patrol/instructions (development) and then moved when complete. Kudpung กุดผึ้ง (talk) 01:01, 4 December 2013 (UTC) Kudpung กุดผึ้ง (talk) 01:01, 4 December 2013 (UTC)

There is significant doubt; we did a survey which showed that statement to be false. You should know - you helped write it. Again, it's very easy to prove through stats (I have a plan to test just that). I'll start work on the instructions tomorrow. Ironholds (talk) 02:26, 8 December 2013 (UTC)

Comments on the NPP interface

OK, seeing all the above anguish about lack of NPPers I thought I'd come and do a stint of it, from the oldest end of the queue. I'm used to sorting stubs and doing quite a bit of cleanup where necessary, and I use Twinkle. Four things I've today found frustrating about the NPP structure:

• Tags which have different names here and in Twinkle: I look for "link rot" and find it under "bare url".
• No sign of "{{coords missing}}", which I often add for geog entities.
• No way to see whether an appropriate DEFAULTSORT has been added, short of opening the article to look at the code. I reckon it's worth doing at this stage (eg for "forename surname" people, or titles starting "The ", or titles with accented letters), but it's a hassle to have to open up the article as if to edit it, just to find that someone's already done the job.
• I can tick "Notable" but it doesn't then offer me the specific classes of (lack of) notability, as Twinkle does: I've just tagged an album but only been able to add the tag which says it doesn't meet the GNG. It would be more helpful for the editor if I could have easily added a link to WP:MUSIC for them to see why it doesn't meet those criteria.

But I'll try to drop back here from time to time and do a bit of chipping away at the backlog. PamD 18:04, 6 December 2013 (UTC)

There also doesn't seem to be a "BLP unsourced" tag available. PamD 18:16, 6 December 2013 (UTC)

Specifically related to that point, WP:BLPPROD is what we use for unsourced BLPs these days - all must have reliable sources, and those that don't get deleted. Go Phightins! 03:56, 8 December 2013 (UTC)

Thanking PamD for her feedback, I must admit that although I'm a firm proponent of the use of the new sytem, I also find my self often flipping back and forth to Twinkle to use more granular options. Kudpung กุดผึ้ง (talk) 08:41, 8 December 2013 (UTC)

Suggestions for improvement of NPP: visibility and accessibility of NPP and NPRSCHOOL; possible NPP-issues noticeboard

It seems to me that our conversation above is getting further and further away from the original subject, so I figured I might as well make a new heading for it. This is a continuation of the conversation above.
A quick summary of the points mentioned so far:

• Improving visibility/accessibility of NPP for new (and older) editors. Suggestions so far include: linking from Template: First Article; linking from Tutorial; looking into an automatic addition to edit summaries in the form of (NPP), with NPP linked to the project page, for edits made through New Page Curation; adding a line to the declined-CSD template.
• Improving visibility/accessibility of NPP School for new and older editors, as well as patrollers. Suggestions so far include: giving the link a more prominent place on the Project's main page; implementing a tabbed structure on the Project's main page; adding a link in abovementioned line to the declined-CSD template.
  • Tabbed structure: See User: Example; WP:T. Suggestion for the tabs so far include: Mainpage is NPP-proper; other tabs would include a link-as-tab to the talkpage (see Main Page tab on User:Example); a tab for the NPP school; a tab for the NPP Noticeboard/Feedback page if it is decided to create such a page (see next bulletpoint); a tab for a short overview of what NPP is and does, possibly with a FAQ if necessary.
• NPP Noticeboard/feedback subpage. Suggestions so far include: addition to proposed tabbed structure mentioned above; keeping the process informal and easy to access (see suggestions for improving visibility and accessibility on earlier points) along the same lines of Third Opinion, with option to escalate to formal noticeboard if necessary; provide feedback and/or advice to the patroller in question if necessary and/or provide feedback and/or advice to editor raising the issue if necessary. AddWittyNameHere (talk) 07:29, 19 January 2014 (UTC)

I like the ideas. In fact they address what I suggested somewhere further up this page a short while back that NPP has never had a proper 'project' (such as for example WP:AfC) . Thing is, who is going to take the initiative to do it? It doesn't need community approval through an RfC. If it were started, I'm sure that others here would chime in and make any necessary tweaks. Kudpung กุดผึ้ง (talk) 07:54, 19 January 2014 (UTC)

I suppose it would depend on the feedback these suggestions get, there still are a lot of details that ought to be worked out as well. However, so far, only three people have commented, which I believe is too soon to start such an overhaul of the way this works, though I believe that an Overview page with an FAQ can be started already, as I believe neither are likely to be opposed, can so far as I can tell do no harm to the project. I believe that starting the Noticeboard/Feedback page should not yet be done until more opinions are heard and it's more clear what it is expected to do. Adding the line to the CSD-declined template should probably be discussed on that template's talkpage; adding a mention to Template:First Article should be discussed on that template's talkpage (and I'd suggest waiting with that one until the Overview page is written, because right now this page is a chaos to the average new editor) and adding a mention of NPP to the tutorial should be discussed on the Tutorial's template, (with the same suggestion as above). I think the overhaul of the main NPP page should wait until more discussion has happened here, even just the addition of the tabbed structure (which also depends on the Overview/FAQ page which should first be written).

So basically, I believe the first step ought to be writing an Overview page for the NPP. I'll also make a sandbox-page in which I'll experiment with ways the NPP page could look. Might make it easier for people to comment, when they have a rough idea of what things will look like.

Kudpung, do you have the time to help me with an Overview/FAQ page for the NPP, or at least give me a list of points you feel should be mentioned? AddWittyNameHere (talk) 08:14, 19 January 2014 (UTC)

Not really, because I have spent literally 100s of hours over the last 3 years trying to get NPP improved and I've since shifted the focus of my work to other meta areas. Most points have been covered in this talk page and its archives. I'll happily review anything you develop in your user space though (which is a good place to start). Kudpung กุดผึ้ง (talk) 08:55, 19 January 2014 (UTC)

Understandable. I'm currently working on some things, see User:AddWittyNameHere/sandbox/NPP and User:AddWittyNameHere/sandbox/NPPOVERVIEW. The latter does not have any actual content yet, just a header and the tabbed structure, but it's the part that I will start working on soonest. The first also mainly has the structure, with very little actual content so far. However, that one is second priority to me atm. AddWittyNameHere (talk) 09:16, 19 January 2014 (UTC)

I took a swag at a noticeboard draft. I'd appreciate feedback. VQuakr (talk) 21:08, 19 January 2014 (UTC)

Suggestions:

• How to list a request:
  • Maybe one more point, as third bullet, requesting the name of the relevant article or articles?
  • "Provide your question or comment, and any other information that may be relevant to the person reviewing your post." - perhaps a mention of "including a short explanation of why you would like an uninvolved editor to look into this"?
• Providing a NPP review:
  • "Review the relevant article(s) history; the requesting editor's contributions and talk page history; and the reviewer's page curation log, talk page, and contributions." - requesting editor's recent contributions and talk page history; reviewer's recent page curation log, talk page, and contributions? Perhaps a specific number of them or within a specific time-span. Leaving it open like this means that some very old cases in a reviewer's page curation might keep popping up. Article(s) history - other pages than articles may pop up as well. Page(s) rather than article? Also, I believe the proper plural forms here would either be "page histories" if treating "page history" as a single phrase or "pages' histories" if using it in the meaning of "history of the page". In that case, the singular form should probably also denote a possessive--page's history.
  • If you receive feedback from another editor that your review was not adequate, please consider whether it is a good idea for you to continue performing reviews. - some clarification. The reviews mentioned here are the ones taking place on the noticeboard, not the "reviewing" (AKA "patrolling") of new pages, yes? Suggested rewording: "that your review of an issue listed here" in place of "that your review".
• Common NPP outcomes.
  • Escalate the issue - if the patroller's actions are particularly onerous or ongoing, escalation to more formal means of dispute resolution may be necessary. - onerous - involving a great deal of effort, trouble, or difficulty. Not necessarily incorrect but somewhat ambiguous. May I suggest erroneous instead?; or ongoing -> or show an ongoing pattern of problematic actions.
  • Remove the request - NPP review requests should be removed if they are clearly abusive. Closed good-faith requests will be archived after a period of time. - addition after clearly abusive: and if necessary (such as repeated vandalism, personal attacks or threats), reported at the appropriate venue.

Otherwise, it seems good to me. Perhaps a change of parts of the page's appearance if it is decided to indeed go with a tabbed structure, banner and/or both. That's not an issue for now, however. One more suggestion: Perhaps add a note in the review requests sections that this page is currently not (yet) active? AddWittyNameHere (talk) 21:45, 19 January 2014 (UTC)

I made some of the changes you suggest. I skipped some of the expansions as I am not certain they are necessary and I wanted to keep it simple. Feel free, of course, to make bold improvements without discussion, and it may be more productive to have discussion of noticeboard-specific improvements to Wikipedia talk:New pages patrol/Noticeboard. Since there is no formal event that needs to happen for this page to become active I do not think a disclaimer is really necessary - someone will eventually be the first to post a request there. VQuakr (talk) 23:18, 19 January 2014 (UTC)

Indeed, and if experience shows us that they end up being necessary after all, they can always be added later. The only suggestion I made that you did not take me up on, but that I feel would be better off with a change is the "or ongoing" part, because that currently has a different meaning than what I believe it should have. Right now, its literal meaning is "escalate the issue if the editor has ongoing actions of any kind, whether negative or positive". However, I admit that my suggestion was perhaps overly long. I do not have a better suggestion at the moment, however, and I suppose the intended meaning is clear enough. If I think up a concise but in my opinion better way to state it, I will be bold and do so myself. This is the last post of noticeboard-specific improvements I will be making here; any further comments will, as you suggested, be placed on the noticeboard's talkpage. AddWittyNameHere (talk) 00:20, 20 January 2014 (UTC)

What I see just looking in the window...

I want to start by being very clear that I am only commenting on the instructional text on the project page, not on the project itself (which I actually think quite highly of)...

Hi. I am a long time lurker and relatively new editor. I recently learned about NPP and wanted to offer an observation from a new set of eyes: As I read the project page what struck me was that (A) this project is a vital function for Wikipedia, and (B) the project instructions leave a strong perception that they are heavily unbalanced against Deletion_is_not_cleanup. I make this bold statement by observing a simple hard fact:

• Count of the string "improv" on the project page: 15
• Count of the string "delet" on the project page: 82

I do realize that statistically NPP will most likely find abusive and/or garbage pages yet the "taste" (if I can use that word) that this project page leaves in one's mouth is that NPP is pretty much a place designed for WP:Deletionists to get their kicks work. Having also read the discussion on this very talk page it strikes me that perhaps, just perhaps, one of the reasons you are having trouble getting and/or keeping active helpers in this project is because of such an imbalance. Perhaps if the project page instructions are made more affirmative in promoting taking actions to improve new pages (and again I do understand the realities of what you encounter) and to improve (train) new users you might be able to see your ranks grow with some possibly here-to-fore alienated Constructionists. Just a thought to consider. F6697 ^{FORMERLY 66.97.209.215} _TALK 22:09, 4 January 2014 (UTC)

Note: A previous related discussion may be found here. ~ benzband (talk) 23:48, 4 January 2014 (UTC)

• Comment For my part, I exercise WP:BEFORE (which in my opinion should revert to a stand-alone, not be a section of a guideline) before I reluctantly accede to speedily delete an article. I then lay a template message on the creator's talk explaining article requirements. I believe that we must remind ourselves that deletion is to be undertaken only as a last resort. At CSD, that means the article must be obviously and irredeemably unsalveagable. Dlohcierekim 01:00, 5 January 2014 (UTC)
• Wow. I'll be quite clear; from my perspective, anyone put off by the faint-inducing idea that sometimes some pages might need to be deleted isn't anyone I want. NPP is fundamentally about getting rid of things like copyright violations and attack pages - this is a substantial chunk of what we do. An alternate hypothesis might be that NPPers are put off by members of the community who conduct breaching experiments in the hope to catch them out, people substantially under-appreciating what they do, and, dare I say it, belittling their entire workload and project as an excuse for deletionists to 'get their kicks'. Ironholds (talk • contribs) 02:49, 5 January 2014
• I agree with Ironholds—thanks to those who undertake the Augean task of NPP. The phrasing in the OP is misguided and offensive. Johnuniq (talk) 03:15, 5 January 2014 (UTC)

<<ec>>comment Very view of the articles reviewed meet the criteria for CSD and are tagged for it. There are many, many more articles that are tagged for improvement. There are some articles such as unsourced BLP's and articles about non notable subjects that are tagged accordingly. Many of them are improved to marginal standards and stay, though the articles might or might not survive AfD. I don't know how to respond to the "get their kicks" canard. (Don't say you struck it through. It could have as easily been removed. You meant us to see it.) All I can say is it just shows how little you know me. Can't speak for the others, but I imagine their goals are as mine, to improve the encyclopedia even if it means removing that which is unsuitable. Dlohcierekim 03:18, 5 January 2014 (UTC)

Pretty much agreed. I'm amused to be implicitly described as a destructionist (if that's a thing) given the number of articles I've written. Ironholds (talk) 05:19, 5 January 2014 (UTC)

<<ec>>@Ironholds: <<sotto voce>>Right-e-o. Though I for one am not a great article builder, I do my best. So this has a surrealist aspect to it. It's like someone asking you if you've stopped beating your wife. Ocassionally, a Psych major comes through the project poking at us with sticks and measuring our squeals with a decimeter. That's what this feels like. Dlohcierekim 06:26, 5 January 2014 (UTC)

Hey, I'm also a researcher! :P. I find the best response to "When did you stop beating your wife?" is "When you stopped beating yours". Not sure how applicable that is to this situation, but it amuses me as a comeback. Ironholds (talk) 06:41, 5 January 2014 (UTC)

My choice to use the struck out phrase was a bad choice and I sincerely and wholeheartedly apologize for my words. Please forgive me, it was a misguided attempt at humor and I will not do it again. Apparently my stupid one-liner has caused the rest of my words to be misunderstood, I have shot myself in the proverbial foot while trying to accomplish something I hoped to be beneficial for the community. I hope you will forgive me and listen to the rest of what I have to say:

I am glad to hear that the real-life practice of NPP includes "many, many more articles that are tagged for improvement". I am not challenging or questioning these practices or the project itself. I agree with them both and I respect the necessity and the work done. I am concerned with seeing the instructional text having a 5-to-1 ratio of instructions for how-to-delete versus how-to-improve. If the existing text of this article was reformatted as two columns, one for removing content and the other for fixing content, one of those columns would be woefully shorter than the other. It just seems to me that new and inexperienced Patrollers might read these instructions and misunderstand this imbalance to subtly suggest that deletion is preferable to construction and improvement. Allow me to quote the more informed opinion of a better Wikipedian than myself:

"... it’s a lot easier to optimize for one thing (no bad edit should survive for very long) than for many things (good edits should be preserved and built upon, new editors should be welcomed and coached, etc.). So I don’t think it’s an attitudinal problem, but more an issue of focusing energy now on re-balancing to ensure our processes for patrolling edits, deleting content, etc. are also designed to be encouraging and supportive of new people."

What I am suggesting is that these written instructions for these "processes" need to be "re-balanced" for the sake of all future Patrollers who may read them. If existing Patrollers are indeed tagging more articles for improvement than for deletion that is great. I am simply proposing that these instructions should be reworded to reflect and "ensure" that reality going forward. F6697 ^{FORMERLY 66.97.209.215} _TALK 06:16, 5 January 2014 (UTC)

I don't see an actionable suggestion. It's great to have a positive attitude, but NPP is where reality hits hard, and the instructions reflect that reality. Deleting stuff is contentious and tricky—it's an area where the boxes have to be correctly ticked, but "rules for deletion" are not part of most editor's experience because most established pages never need deletion. By contrast, improving articles is bread-and-butter for experienced editors. Many wonderful ideas come from on high, but they are not necessarily based on reality. Johnuniq (talk) 06:35, 5 January 2014 (UTC)

If you read up you'll see there is actually a plan to rewrite a lot of the instructions - I'm looking forward to it, and can't wait until I have the time to start it - and some rebalancing is probably a part of that. But your evidence that extensive rebalancing is necessary is...hardly conclusive; "delet" could be part of the sentence "be careful what you nominate for deletion" or "please follow WP:BEFORE before nominating something for deletion", or..... As someone who analyses data for a living, I can tell you in advance that the accuracy of sentiment analysis is very spotty. Ironholds (talk) 06:40, 5 January 2014 (UTC)

We do actually have the problems (and others) that the OP presented. It's just that the people here, on this page, aren't the ones generating those problems. We have people who pounce on articles seconds after their creation, without giving people a chance to finish typing a paragraph. We have people who tag bomb. We have people who CSD perfectly good stubs. But (a) it's not the folks watching this page and (b) WP:Nobody reads the directions anyway, so I'm not sure that changing the amount of material about deletion vs improvement would help in the short-term. WhatamIdoing (talk) 19:09, 18 January 2014 (UTC)

Exactly @WhatamIdoing:. We also have some admins who follow up bad wp:CSD nominations with a deletion and then telling those who complain about it to take it to review. Please check here, here and here for more discussion XOttawahitech (talk) 16:18, 22 January 2014 (UTC)

@Formerly6697: going back to your original post, I note that your string counts include phrases such as the existing "Please do not be too hasty with certain speedy deletions..." and "rather than tag an unpromising stub for deletion..." as deletionist. So probably not a very valid analysis. NPP is always going to have a great deal, probably the majority of deletions, and while we strive not to bite, speedy deletion is an inherently bitey process. When it becomes unnecessarily so by over tagging and spurious speedy deletion noms, the correct way to address it is by counseling the individual editor - not by adding "improve" more times to the instructions. VQuakr (talk) 19:30, 18 January 2014 (UTC)

• I wholly concurr with this statement by Ironholds: I don't see an actionable suggestion. It's great to have a positive attitude, but NPP is where reality hits hard, and the instructions reflect that reality. Nothing will change much until either a proper landing page is created for new users who start by creating pages or a user 'permission' is introduced for page patrolling. The correct and quickest way therefore to address the current situation would be to counsel the patrollers. Still not a prcatical solution however, because we do not actually know who is doing the patrolling and any issues are reported to the individual patrollers' talk pages and not to a NPP noticeboard or here. Kudpung กุดผึ้ง (talk) 04:01, 19 January 2014 (UTC)

@Kudpung: of course, it is possible to review the page curation log at Special:Logs, and if someone were so inclined they could follow up on a random sampling of them to back check curation work. Sounds like an even worse task than patrolling to me, though. VQuakr (talk) 05:56, 19 January 2014 (UTC)

You can also see currently active patrollers at http://toolserver.org/~snottywong/cgi-bin/patrolreport.cgi Anyone who wants to know can get a pretty good idea of who does this by clicking on the links. WhatamIdoing (talk) 16:33, 22 January 2014 (UTC)

• Comment/Question: Would it be technically feasible to automatically add something like (NPP) at the end of the edit summary the same way (TW) is added for edits made through Twinkle, perhaps with NPP linked to the project page? That would at least partially eliminate the "we do not actually know who is doing the patrolling" part. If the Project page would also have a big notice on top along the lines of "Click here to report an issue with recent patrolling" leading to a NPP noticeboard, it would at least bring some of the issues to a central place. Of course, there may very well be good reasons against this (technically not feasible, not enough manpower to monitor such a noticeboard and solve the issues there, too much false reporting by people who are unhappy "their" article was tagged with something), but I figured I'd throw it out in the open here. AddWittyNameHere (talk) 04:17, 19 January 2014 (UTC)

Very good suggestions, AddWittyNameHere, and worth looking into. I'm sure that editors such as me and Ironholds who continue to monitor NPP fairly closely would be part of a rapid response team. I appear to be the only editor who frequently pleads with patrollers to pull their socks up, but I believe WereSpielChequers and DGG are also active when anything comes to their notice. Kudpung กุดผึ้ง (talk) 05:01, 19 January 2014 (UTC)

I have provided feedback once or twice when I have seen an overenthusiastic or otherwise incompetent patroller. I am a little skeptical of the "noticeboard" idea for about the reasons User:AddWittyNameHere lists, but it could be worth a try. I imagine it being something very informal, possibly modeled after the third opinion system, where an uninvolved patroller would review and immediately close, provide feedback to the patroller, or escalate to a noticeboard as appropriate. VQuakr (talk) 05:56, 19 January 2014 (UTC)

VQuakr: I also believe it has the plus of making it faster to find systematically problematic patrollers (as in, those who frequently and/or severely mis-tag articles, are commonly too quick in CSD/AfD'ing or tagging a new article or repeatedly mark pages as patrolled without tagging for the issues present), assuming the noticeboard would actually get used.

I do agree that keeping the process informal would likely be best. As you say, if appropriate it can be escalated to the correct formal noticeboards, if correctly tagged but problematic (such as tagging an article as nocat, orphan, norefs, stub and bare-urls, all within two minutes of creation) it can be settled with the patroller or escalated to formal noticeboards if it's part of a pattern and the patroller doesn't accept feedback, and there is no need for a long, formal process when it comes to "Wah! Why did you tag my article about myself and my self-published book for speedy deletion? It's absolutely unfair! I -am- notable, I just don't have refs to prove it! You're censoring me!"-type complaints. AddWittyNameHere (talk) 06:13, 19 January 2014 (UTC)

Kudpung: I'm happy to hear you believe it's worth looking into. There currently doesn't seem to be any system that specifically deals with NPP issues, despite them being from what I gather somewhat frequent. Allowing for a way to get such complaints looked at without immediately starting a long, formal procedure, while still getting an uninvolved editor to look into it might also help with editor retention. Again, it all depends on if the noticeboard would actually get used and if editors, especially new editors, would actually manage to find it. On the other hand, they tend to either find the patroller's talkpage or a place like the Village Pump just as well. AddWittyNameHere (talk) 06:19, 19 January 2014 (UTC)

(edit conflict)I am trying to put together how this would be made to work. If we create a board at, for example, Wikipedia:New pages patrol/Feedback with instructions and maybe a form to fill in, how would a new editor with <10 edits know it existed and be able to find it? Of course there could be a banner at WP:NPP, but that only helps if the editor finds the NPP main page. What would direct newbies to the right place from the disparate sources of CSD, article tagging, and user talk page warnings? This place is quite confusing to many newbies already. VQuakr (talk) 06:36, 19 January 2014 (UTC)

One part of that would be a linked (NPP) at the end of edit summaries, just like Huggle and Twinkle do. Part of my original proposal above. 'course, that alone is not enough, but it ought to help somewhat. Other places to mention it have been covered by you, Kudpung and I below, so I'm not going to unnecessarily repeat them here if ye don't mind. AddWittyNameHere (talk) 07:09, 19 January 2014 (UTC)

IMO, the overall standard of patrolling is far too low, but irrespective of their experience most patrollers seem to be working in good faith and the need for escalation and/or sanctions is extremely rare - in extreme cases usually a friendly but firm request to stop patrolling until they have more experience with general editing normally does the trick. I created Wikipedia:New pages patrol/School just over a year ago but it doesn't appear to have attracted many takers, maybe because not enough people are aware of it. Maybe the addition of If you are new to patrolling, please see WP:NPP, and WP:DELETION - you may also wish to consider enrolling at the WP:NPRSCHOOL. to the Twinkle 'declined CSD' template message might be a start. Perhaps creating New pages patrol/Noticeboard as a fulcrum for tagging-review requests would indeed be worth a try (not to be confused wit contesting CSD and/or PROD) , but a way of linking to it would need to be figured out. Kudpung กุดผึ้ง (talk) 06:39, 19 January 2014 (UTC)

Adding an appropriate link from Template:first article would provide a one-click path for folks who were brand new. It might cover a lot of the cases. VQuakr (talk) 06:52, 19 January 2014 (UTC)

Yes, adding WP:NPRSCHOOL to the template might be an option. I also agree with VQuakr's suggestion. Perhaps a mention in the Tutorial at some point might also be useful. Otherwise, giving the link on a more prominent place than the in-a-nutshell template might also be a good idea. I'm suspecting that with the multitude of templates on top of pages, people are starting to become somewhat Template-blind, at least for those that aren't huge and "in your face", as to say. Maybe a tabbed structure like is also used on some userpages and other places--see User:Example/tabs; WP:Introduction--would be useful? It has the plus of fitting in with the structure new editors are used to seeing from places like Introduction and Tutorial. It's especially useful if we're going to deal with multiple subpages. I'd personally imagine such a tabbed structure would have the NPP page proper as main page, the talkpage (or rather, a link to the talkpage in the form of a tab, same as the "Main Page"-tab on the first example above), a tab for the NPP-school, one for the NPP-noticeboard if such a thing would come to be and maybe a page that gives a short overview of what NPP is (a bit like the current "In a nutshell"-template, except slightly more detailed. Short overview of what NPP is, what its goals are, why it is important and where/how to learn more. Maybe a link to an FAQ if we have one or if someone's willing to write one. Might be useful for new editors who just see NPP used repeatedly as part of the alphabet soup. Current main page is a bit scary in how long it is, especially for new editors, yet In a Nutshell doesn't really give a good overview. It's more like the summary of a summary, to be honest). Again, just throwing ideas out here. AddWittyNameHere (talk) 07:05, 19 January 2014 (UTC)

Let's be sure to differentiate the needs of our two very different audiences, though. A working knowledge of how Wikipedia works is a prerequisite to being a competent NPPer, so anyone interested in patrolling shouldn't have any issues with digesting the NPP main page. Our other potential audience of very new editors trying to understand what is going on is a very different story. They just need the high-level, potentially some feedback on any pressing issues with their very first contributions, and direction to the teahouse or tutorial to help them get more acclimated. I do not see any benefit in linked to NPP from the general Wikipedia tutorial, for example. VQuakr (talk) 09:18, 19 January 2014 (UTC)

The main benefit I see in this is that it might gain people interested in becoming a patroller at some point, and in finding the whole cluster of pages, including the possible future noticeboard and overview page of NPP. I suspect that if such an overview page of NPP comes to happen (I am currently working on a sandbox version of one to see what people think of it), that would be the more appropriate one to link to than the main page. However, I do acknowledge your point that there are perhaps better places to link to NPP from than the Tutorial. As to the main page... no, it should not lead to them having any issues digesting it, but it would not surprise me if it does. The structuring seems, at least to me, to be slightly chaotic. Furthermore, I believe there is a third audience, namely those of various levels of experience who want to find out more about NPP to decide if they are interested in becoming a patroller. AddWittyNameHere (talk) 09:25, 19 January 2014 (UTC)

Andrea Villegas

If you see an article about or referencing Andrea Villegas, check the references and creator nick carefully. You will likely find that none of the links or ref's add up, that it is a hoax by a sock of Katrina Villegas (talk · contribs) Dlohcierekim 18:18, 29 December 2013 (UTC)

It has been salted ten days ago.--Ymblanter (talk) 18:47, 29 December 2013 (UTC)

It's not just one article. ErikHaugen (talk | contribs) 05:58, 30 December 2013 (UTC)

But is there a pool of articles it tends to me? Salting may not be a perfect solution, but presumably it increases the barrier to block evasion and inserting such information. Ironholds (talk) 06:41, 30 December 2013 (UTC)

An unbelievable array of names. The common thread will be Andrea and Villegas in the name of a Filipina child star. The article at first blush will look amazingly notable. The sources will be dead links or to non related subjects. A real article may be tacked on to make the hoax article look more notable. She cannot use Andrea Villegas anymore. The latest I saw was the name "of an upcoming movie" starring Andrea Villegas. The article name may be a variant on the names of the accounts at Wikipedia:Sockpuppet investigations/Katrina Villegas/Archive. The user ID may be a variant on those listed at Wikipedia:Sockpuppet investigations/Katrina Villegas/Archive. Dlohcierekim 08:52, 30 December 2013 (UTC)

And the predicted hoax article has appeared tonight at Villegas Andrea. Thanks, Dlohcierekim, for confirming my suspicions about the article, though it was becoming increasingly obvious to more I looked at it that it was an elaborate construct and synthesis of other articles' copy, other people's accomplishments and utter nonsense. Dwpaul ^Talk 04:43, 1 January 2014 (UTC)

U R welcome. And thank you for placing your G3 rationale on the talk so others would uderstand. Dlohcierekim 04:50, 1 January 2014 (UTC)

As of today, I think we've managed to delete and salt all the articles and block all the accounts. But let's keep our eyes open.Kudpung กุดผึ้ง (talk) 13:12, 1 January 2014 (UTC)

@Kudpung:eto na naman "This has all happened before. And it will happen again." Dlohcierekim 15:03, 1 January 2014 (UTC)

I've just been directed here following a note on my talk page after I declined the speedy deletion nomination of Casey Da Silva, which was tagged as G3 with no explanation in the edit summary and a cryptic "WT:NPP" on the talk page which does nothing to explain the speedy deletion nomination to those people not familiar with the history of this user. The page is not, without the context provided by being aware of previous articles by this user, a clear example of vandalism or of a hoax. In future, I recommend mentioning in the edit summary and on the talk page why the page is believed to be a hoax, with an explicit link to where the reviewing administrator can obtain the necessary knowledge. Additionally nominating them under criterion G5 (creation by a banned or blocked user) is an explicit pointer that the creator's history needs investigating. Thryduulf (talk) 15:46, 1 January 2014 (UTC)

That seems reasonable; pointing admins to a talk page from the talk page is liable to lead to some confusion. Ironholds (talk) 23:32, 1 January 2014 (UTC)

reply Cryptic? Perhaps. However, all that was required was to follow the link on the talk page. I was reluctant to tell Katrina how I was able to recognize her work. Her pattern is shifting. Frankly, I never saw anything like it. Perhaps there are many such on Wikipedia and it's only because of the new tool that I'm aware of this one. She has the ability to recreate the thing shortly after we delete it. Salting only induces her to change titles, and the current one is unlike the one's I saw before. Dlohcierekim 17:17, 2 January 2014 (UTC)

Apparently, we are now copy editing for her. Dlohcierekim 17:20, 2 January 2014 (UTC)

the user id is new. Dlohcierekim 17:25, 2 January 2014 (UTC)

this may be a hallmark Dlohcierekim 17:30, 2 January 2014 (UTC)

Kathryn Bernardo's legit, well since she's well known in the Philippine showbiz scene (*cough* *cough*, *insert incessant tween squee*). It's the Villegas crap that's a complete hoax. Blake Gripling (talk) 03:18, 3 January 2014 (UTC)

Oh and I forgot to note that Casey Bacayo/de Silva also appears to be a legit actress, as she's a cast member of the children's sketch comedy show Goin' Bulilit. Other than that and a few other roles (hxxp://www.starmometer.com/2013/06/05/ai-ai-delas-alas-goes-heavy-drama-in-mmk/), she doesn't seem to be notable enough to have her own article unlike the more top-billed ones like Xyriel Manabat. Same case with Bea Basa, who also appears to be a fellow GB cast member. Blake Gripling (talk) 03:34, 3 January 2014 (UTC)

Kathryn Bernardo is legit. Adding content about her to Andrea Villegas articles is part of the pattern. Dlohcierekim 03:44, 3 January 2014 (UTC)

Caseey Da Silva created by Ang pangit pangit moh (talk · contribs) 220 of ^Borg 15:52, 6 January 2014 (UTC)

(arbitrary space break) For background,

please see Category:Suspected Wikipedia sockpuppets of Katrina Villegas and User:Dlohcierekim/working/x. Should there also be a mention at WP:AN? Dlohcierekim 01:09, 7 January 2014 (UTC)

Would it also be alright to put up an LTA subpage, or perhaps a community ban proposal, given her persistent and recurring hoaxing being a nuisance? Blake Gripling (talk) 13:49, 4 February 2014 (UTC)

Waste of everyone's time. Just keep blocking until they bored with their hobby. Kudpung กุดผึ้ง (talk) 13:20, 5 February 2014 (UTC)

Right. She is effectively banned for disruption and socking. Unfortunately, she uses a dynamic IP. I hope it's just a hobby. Dlohcierekim 14:13, 5 February 2014 (UTC)

Maybe, but based on what we ended up with Henry Applegate and Bertrand101 he/she might as well find it a recurring and persistent habit for months or even years on end. Blake Gripling (talk) 07:00, 6 February 2014 (UTC)

New iterations

• Samantha Clacenal
• Xyriel Villegas
• Xyriel Villegas (talk · contribs)
• MariMar forever (talk · contribs) Dlohcierekim 14:55, 24 January 2014 (UTC)
• Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Xyriel Villatez (deleted)

Hey! What's with patrolling my userspace?

Why are pages in my sandbox being reviewed? These ought to be pages I can exercise some ownership over; additionally theoretically these may host all manner of content which may be used in preparing articles, which will be cumbersome and somewhat ridiculous to explain to a reviewer. Why are they being reviewed? Will discussion pages be reviewed next? --LT910001 (talk) 11:24, 28 January 2014 (UTC)

Which pages? Dlohcierekim 14:46, 28 January 2014 (UTC)

This page User:LT910001/sandbox/Anatomical terms describing muscle, this page User:LT910001/sandbox/Anatomical terms describing bone, and a user page on my watchlist, User:Epiphanize101. Why are these being reviewed? --LT910001 (talk) 14:49, 28 January 2014 (UTC)

No idea. Review log does not show a review for /Anatomical terms describing bone or of /Anatomical terms describing muscle, so I can't see who did it. Hopefully the reviewer will see this thread and respond]. As far as I'm concerned, unless a userpage is being used for spam or disparagement or some WP:NOTHERE purpose, then it is of little interest if any. Dlohcierekim 15:27, 28 January 2014 (UTC)

Two of my sandbox pages were reviewed a few days ago as well. Well, slightly over a week ago. Reviewer was User:DragonflySixtyseven in my case. I don't mind, I just was like "Hm... since when do people review sandbox pages? Must be something new" when I got the notification. AddWittyNameHere (talk) 15:56, 28 January 2014 (UTC)

With all the unreviewed articles in mainspace. Dlohcierekim 18:54, 28 January 2014 (UTC)

Only now noticed I missed part of the username. I meant DragonflySixtySeven, of course. In my case, it was just "reviewed", no tags, etc. DragonflySixtySeven is an admin. Going by their log, they're active in checking (sub)pages in the userspace, probably to find problematic pages there. Good thing someone is doing that, as I suppose a lot of promo- and attackpages in userspace would be detected rather late. I might be off, though, I can only look at the data, not their thoughts. I can, however, ping them. (@DragonflySixtyseven:) AddWittyNameHere (talk) 19:11, 28 January 2014 (UTC)

@LT910001: you are right, getting a notice that your user space has been reviewed is annoying and unnecessary. The review itself is needed, however, since copyright violations, spam, BLP violations, etc cannot exist in user space. Until recently, this action was completely transparent to good-faith editors such as yourself; the author would never even be aware of the patrol unless they had created prohibited content in their user page or subpage. There is a discussion and associated long-ignored bugzilla report at WP talk:Notifications regarding this issue. VQuakr (talk) 05:10, 31 January 2014 (UTC)

Thanks for your reply. Why can't they exist in userspace? Let's say, hypothetically, I've copied some resources to my userspace for easy access, is that not a legitimate use of space given to the user proper? LT910001 (talk) 02:21, 5 February 2014 (UTC)

That would be fine as long as the "resources" are not material that violates WP:UPNOT such as copyright violations. VQuakr (talk) 04:37, 5 February 2014 (UTC)

Ah, I wasn't aware of that. LT910001 (talk) 12:29, 6 February 2014 (UTC)

Discussion that folks here might be interested in contributing to

See Wikipedia:Village_pump_(miscellaneous)#Reversion_of_vandalism_compared_to_five_years_ago. Cheers, Cas Liber (talk · contribs) 14:28, 7 June 2014 (UTC)

Leaflet For New Pages Patrol At Wikimania 2014

Hi all,

My name is Adi Khajuria and I am helping out with Wikimania 2014 in London.

One of our initiatives is to create leaflets to increase the discoverability of various wikimedia projects, and showcase the breadth of activity within wikimedia. Any kind of project can have a physical paper leaflet designed - for free - as a tool to help recruit new contributors. These leaflets will be printed at Wikimania 2014, and the designs can be re-used in the future at other events and locations.

This is particularly aimed at highlighting less discoverable but successful projects, e.g:

• Active Wikiprojects: Wikiproject Medicine, WikiProject Video Games, Wikiproject Film

• Tech projects/Tools, which may be looking for either users or developers.

• Less known major projects: Wikinews, Wikidata, Wikivoyage, etc.

• Wiki Loves Parliaments, Wiki Loves Monuments, Wiki Loves ____

• Wikimedia thematic organisations, Wikiwomen’s Collaborative, The Signpost

For more information or to sign up for one for your project, go to: Project leaflets — Preceding unsigned comment added by Adikhajuria (talk • contribs) 15:40, 12 June 2014 (UTC)
Adikhajuria (talk) 15:44, 12 June 2014 (UTC)

NPP discussion at Village Pump

I've just started a discussion at the Village Pump idea lab concerning the overlapping terminology used at NPP and AfC. Opinions would be appreciated. Sam Walton (talk) 11:24, 31 August 2014 (UTC)

Individual Engagement Grant Proposal - Automated Notability Detection

Hi, Everyone, I've posted an IEG proposal for a project to build a tool that will automatically determine whether or not an article is notable. The tool would produce a score that would be incorporated into some of the NPP/reviewing tools to help patrollers and reviewers make more informed, easier decisions. If this is something you're interested in, please come over and show your support, and let us know what you'd like to see in such a tool. Applications close September 30. Thanks, Bluma.Gelley (talk) 14:17, 18 September 2014 (UTC)

Wikiproject tags

Is tagging new article talk pages with Wikiproject tags a worthwhile thing to do? Oiyarbepsy (talk) 01:23, 1 March 2015 (UTC)

Absolutely! Ironholds (talk) 02:14, 1 March 2015 (UTC)

@Oiyarbepsy: to expand on my comment; Wikiproject tagging increases the audience of editors who can review and improve an article, which makes it crucial to expanding the content and fixing any problems the page has. So it's a Good Thing to do (as evidenced by the fact that your question makes Kudpung and I agree, which happens once in a blue moon ;p) Ironholds (talk) 15:00, 1 March 2015 (UTC)

Essential. --Kudpung กุดผึ้ง (talk) 04:35, 1 March 2015 (UTC)

I kinda figured so, until I encountered WP:Wikiproject Math and their tags, which requires me to rate new articles that I don't understand a single word of, but they apparently have bots that handle their taggings. I will continue adding the tags, and maybe add it to the checklist. Oiyarbepsy (talk) 16:55, 1 March 2015 (UTC)

Discussion at Wikipedia:Village pump (proposals)

There is a discussion at Wikipedia:Village pump (proposals)#Discouraging biting the newbies which may be of interest to people involved in this project.  SchreiberBike | ⌨  17:32, 6 April 2015 (UTC)

Greetings

Hi. I saw that you were looking for some help in getting the backlog down. I can put some time in, but I would like some direction. If someone could check the pages I've "reviewed" and let me know if you see any issues with what I've done. I'm not even sure this is possible, since if I simply mark a page as "reviewed", without any other action on it, it doesn't show up on my contribution page. Anyway, I don't want to do too many if I'm screwing it up, so any comments/criticism would be greatly appreciated.

Also, if I click the review button, and the article has already been tagged for multiple issues, but is still listed as "unreviewed", if I have nothing to add, should I simply mark it as reviewed? I noticed that if I place tags on an unreviewed article it automatically gets tagged as reviewd. Again, thanks. Onel5969 (talk) 23:15, 10 April 2015 (UTC)

Thanks for working on the backlog, Onel5969! I had a look at your recent patrols, and I think you are doing great. I do have some feedback, though: this was a mistake since A3 excludes soft redirects; live and learn. You might also consider whether the notability tag is helpful for improving an article; for example this article is about a complex of three national parks and other area, and is a large enough geographical area that it seems unlikely it would be deleted for lack of notability. Similar story here. To answer your questions: you can review anther editors patrols by looking at the patrol log, ie here. Yes, if the article is tagged and looks ok to patrol, it is fine to just review it. A previous editor might have added the tags but been unsure if it was ready to be marked as reviewed. Similarly, it is fine to review an article without adding tags if none are needed. VQuakr (talk) 18:48, 11 April 2015 (UTC)

Thanks for the response, VQuakr - now you can see why I wanted someone to take a look at what I've done. Any other editors feel free to also give me critique here or on my talk page. Just trying to find my way here. Onel5969 (talk) 18:52, 11 April 2015 (UTC)

It is more important to patrol accurately than to patrol for quantity. Onel5969 (talk · contribs) You have been labeling pages for speedy deletion as A7 even when they are articles that do not meet the A7 limitations , you have been adding notability tags to articles that clearly meet the relevant standard such as WP:CREATIVE , you have been omitting to nominate unreferenced articles on living people for BLPPROD. Please re-read WP:Deletion Policy before you continue.When you make errors, it takes more time to fix them than it takes to review properly in the first place, and it discourages newcomers. DGG ( talk ) 22:59, 11 April 2015 (UTC)

Thanks DGG - I appreciate your kindness. I'll just stop attempting to help here. My intent was definitely not to create more work. My apologies. Good luck with the backlog, guys. Onel5969 (talk) 23:31, 11 April 2015 (UTC)

((User|Onel5969}}, the way to learn ,is to first read the rules in detail, then try one or two, and wait for a reaction, correcting yourself according to the feedback, and then continue in small batches a few at a time each day, as you get confidence. Even when you are sure, don't do too many at a time--I find that if I do more than 10 or so a day I get careless. DGG ( talk ) 00:16, 12 April 2015 (UTC)

Largely agreed with DGG - although I dispute the "clearly". We do not and should not expect users to instantaneously know as much as someone who has been here for about a decade. @One15969:, I for one really appreciate your willingness to help out, here :). Ironholds (talk) 00:18, 12 April 2015 (UTC)

Thanks Ironholds, but after this I'm pretty much done with NPP. Take care. Onel5969 (talk) 04:39, 12 April 2015 (UTC)

RfC:"Defcon" and "DEFCON", and the meaning of 1-5

The following discussion is an archived record of a request for comment. Please do not modify it. No further edits should be made to this discussion. A summary of the conclusions reached follows.

No consensus for any change. That said, though, I find it highly unlikely anyone will actually object if you were to just go to the page and add a sentence that explains what the numbers in the graphics mean. That's called WP:BOLD, and is a keystone of the project. (If someone does object, then don't edit war over it, of course.) --GRuban (talk) 20:31, 27 May 2015 (UTC)

---

New Pages Patrol Project page currently has two "Defcon" boxes towards the top, one for NewPages and one for CSD. Should the word be changed to DEFCON and should the corresponding numbers be explained somewhere on the page? KDS4444^Talk 23:47, 23 March 2015 (UTC)

The abbreviation, which I am assuming in its use here has drawn mainly from the 1983 film WarGames, is usually written DEFCON for "defense readiness condition"... which isn't really what is being meant here anyway, though it does convey the idea of "relative sense of urgency over something". I see no need to change the abbreviation altogether, just to write it correctly (all caps). Secondly, I would like to modify the page so that the DEFCON numbers are also briefly explained. I myself had to look up the DEFCON article to see whether 1 was more or less urgent that 5 (it is more urgent— and I am so old that I saw the film when it first came out, so I should remember these things, yet I do not). I would boldly edit the project page myself but feel presumptuous messing with it in this way before getting input from other editors, hence this RfC. Please give your thoughts, and thanks! KDS4444^Talk 23:55, 23 March 2015 (UTC)

• Defcon was not invented in a cheesy 1980s film. I don't really see any reason to change anything. It's fine the way it is. NinjaRobotPirate (talk) 00:11, 3 April 2015 (UTC)

• NinjaRobotPirate: Do you believe that the difference between a "defcon" 1 and a 5 are intuitive? And that "5" is "least urgent"? (and while I fully understand that the term was not invented by the film, I was suggesting here that its USE on this page was derived from the film... Was I not clear on that?). My intention was to propose that the page be made more user-friendly by offering some explanation of what the relationship between defcon numbers means, and by capitalizing its use. For new editors, the term "defcon" may also seem like a unique Wikipedia abbreviation (of which there are hundreds, and which it is not). I understand you do not see any reason to change anything. Do you understand why I have proposed the changes I have? Because I don't get the sense from the above that you do, and if I did make the changes I proposed, do you believe the project page would be worse off in some way? KDS4444^Talk 08:37, 6 April 2015 (UTC)

• Honestly I'd just say we remove it. If you want to see how bad the NPP backlog is, go to "oldest first". Ironholds (talk) 16:06, 6 April 2015 (UTC)

• Yeah, that's where I go to patrol sometimes. It's bad. Though one thing: I've noticed that there are often pages there which I review but which have no option to check as patrolled (I am thinking of the article Indigenous Opposition to the Northern Gateway Pipelines, which is very old and has been patrolled but still shows up on the list). There must be some kind of system error there... Ironholds, I suspect you are in a position to maybe fix it?? :-) Maybe the backlog is not as bad as it looks. KDS4444^Talk 20:13, 7 April 2015 (UTC)

• Well, are your settings set to "show me stuff that's been reviewed"? Ironholds (talk) 20:32, 7 April 2015 (UTC)

• Honestly, I do not know which settings you are referring to (please tell me where I can find said settings so as I can verify). I know that many articles on the new pages list appear (to me) to have the option to be marked as patrolled, while others, like the one I mentioned, do not appear to have this same option (I mean "appear" as in "visually see", not as in "have a vague sense of"). If my settings were not set to "Show me stuff that's been reviewed", would I be seeing both types of articles in the New Pages list? Because I assumed this list was generated from all pages which had not been patrolled by anyone and would look the same to anyone, regardless of any settings they might have. Thanks for your help! Though we are getting off topic, and I, too, wouldn't mind having the whole defcon thing go, though I think it does have some usefulness and would have more so if it were better explained. KDS4444^Talk 22:38, 7 April 2015 (UTC)

The discussion above is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.

Proposal for a "wait" tag

The following discussion is an archived record of a request for comment. Please do not modify it. No further edits should be made to this discussion. A summary of the conclusions reached follows.

There is consensus against the creation of a "wait" tag, mainly because {{uw-hasty}} already exists and alternatives to deletion such as userification and incubation can be performed instead of temporarily retaining unsuitable articles in mainspace. However, a proposal by WereSpielChequers has been brought up here, which can be discussed in a new RfC or the village pump. Esquivalience ^t 21:51, 30 May 2015 (UTC)

---

Often, new page patrollers hastily tag articles for speedy deletion without giving creators time to improve the article. I must admit that I have done this myself, but in light of this thread at the Village Pump, I no longer intend to do that. I propose that we create a "wait" notice, which we can put on articles when a patroller tags an article too quickly. Obviously, this tag would not apply to articles that must be deleted immediately, such as hoaxes, attacks, etc. The tag would tell patrollers to wait for a set period of time before tagging the article, so as to allow time for improvement. The details on what the period of time would be can be discussed later, but all I want now is to see if there would be general consensus for such a notice. We could then tell the creator about the concerns with the page. I've created a possible template for that here; it's intended to be a friendly-sounding template with room for personalization.

Thanks in advance for your input. --Biblioworm 02:02, 7 April 2015 (UTC)

Discussion

Before I vote, I would like to better understand what this would accomplish is actual practice. It seems like another process that would merely interfere with new page curation, which is severely backlogged at the moment. As an alternative, I would suggest (as I have been doing), moving articles to draft space if they seem to have any potential at all. The benefit of moving to draft space is that the newbie has six months to flesh out content and add references. - MrX 02:26, 7 April 2015 (UTC)

This is better handled as a behavioral issue by counselling the patroller than by tagging the article itself. We have Template:uw-hasty for this purpose. I will weigh in on the village pump discussion; cleanup templates are not nearly as bitey (if at all) as speedy deletion and it is silly to lump the two together. VQuakr (talk) 02:38, 7 April 2015 (UTC)

The problem is that this is very inconvenient and could consume a large amount of time. A notice such as the one I'm proposing would alert all patrollers that it's too soon to tag the article; not just one. --Biblioworm 02:51, 7 April 2015 (UTC)

All patrollers are already notified, here. uw-hasty is available in Twinkle and requires just a click or two to use. VQuakr (talk) 03:01, 7 April 2015 (UTC)

Support

1. We could do something useful here, though it would take some programming at NPP. We already have rules that people are not supposed to tag articles as A1 or A3 in their first few minutes, but as this is a rule not part of the system it sometimes isnt followed and it complicates NPP. For an efficient NPP we need to be able to process articles as fast as they are being created, but the creators of some of those articles need not know about the processing. As well as deleting articles per G3 or G10 I would like to be able to tag brand new articles with a "delayed action" A1, A3 or A7 tag. Other patrollers would leave those articles as they would be in the deletion process, and if after 24 hours the article had not been further edited then the tag or deletion would take effect. But the delayed action tag would not cause edit conflicts or even be visible to the creator for 24 hours. Combine that with only showing unpatrolled articles to registered editors and we have a solution that could work for everyone. ϢereSpielChequers 22:02, 26 April 2015 (UTC)

   I like the delayed action tag, but I'm not sure why (or technically how, for that matter) the article creator wouldn't be able to see it. If we make a delayed action tag friendly (sans giant red scary box), it can constructively get the problem across to the article's creator, provides resources for doing so (help pages, Teahouse, etc.), gives them adequate time to make corrections, all while letting the new page patrol quickly tag articles without having to worry about anything extra in the process other than the initial tag. ~SuperHamster Talk Contribs 22:12, 26 April 2015 (UTC)

   You could set the code similarly to the unpatrolled tag - you don't get shown that tag for articles you created. As for the helpful side of tags, you'd still get that, but not for 24 hours after you start your article, and if unpatrolled articles were only visible to logged in editors then you could turn all goodfaith speedies into sticky prods, so you'd get 7 days to fix your A7 - the deletionists would be happy as my new garage band would never be "published" as a Wikipedia article visible to unregistered readers. But the inclusionists would be happy as the editors involved would have time to work on it. ϢereSpielChequers 22:48, 26 April 2015 (UTC)

Oppose

1. oppose per VQuakr. Ironholds (talk) 02:48, 7 April 2015 (UTC)
2. Oppose, as more bureaucracy. If a page isn't OK for mainspace, move it to draft or CSD! Grognard Extraordinaire Chess (talk) Ping when replying 02:12, 18 April 2015 (UTC)
3. Oppose. Well-meaning, but not needed in light of WP:NPPNICE and Template:uw-hasty. In fact, perhaps we should instead give WP:New pages patrol 'official guideline' status and make it required reading for all NPP'ers? -- œ^™ 03:04, 24 April 2015 (UTC)
4. Oppose, per above. I do like some of the ideas brought up at the Village Pump, and this isn't inherently a bad one, but it's just too much red tape that I don't think new page patrol can or should deal with. As I see it, we don't have to be more lenient with articles, we only have to change our attitude. If a new article needs some more time to become acceptable, it can be moved to a draft or sandbox, with a kind, explanatory message placed on the creator's talk page, along with invitations to the Teahouse and the new co-op program. I don't see the problem going away through the addition of templates and processes; we need to change editors' bitey attitudes themselves. Otherwise, we'd have still-bitey editors who now have to deal with an extra template. ~SuperHamster Talk Contribs 20:12, 26 April 2015 (UTC)

The above discussion is preserved as an archive of the debate. Please do not modify it. No further edits should be made to this discussion.

Discussion at Wikipedia talk:Did you know

New page patrollers might like to comment on the discussion I have initiated here. ~ ONUnicorn^{(Talk|Contribs)}problem solving 17:43, 4 June 2015 (UTC)

Redirects

Do redirects require patrolling? I frequently create redirects, and do not wish to burden new-page patrollers with having to review each one. Bwrs (talk) 11:37, 14 July 2015 (UTC)

Bwrs, NPPers who are using the Curation Tool properly, will see at a glace if the redirect has been created by an established editor or a troll. --Kudpung กุดผึ้ง (talk) 13:18, 14 July 2015 (UTC)

Community desysoping RfC

Hi. You are invited to comment at RfC for BARC - a community desysoping process. --Kudpung กุดผึ้ง (talk) 07:56, 24 July 2015 (UTC)

Issues

Several issues regarding moves:

• A redirect created from a page move cannot be patrolled
• When a page with title A was created, moved to title B, and then B is patrolled, the patrol log will show the original title A
• When a redirect created from a page move has been deleted, [1] no longer recognizes it as one of the pages created by the mover

GeoffreyT2000 (talk) 17:03, 6 August 2015 (UTC)

Patrolling of non toxic older pages

I notice recently (perhaps it'a always been so) that several editors spend their time trawling through user sub pages and pages of Wikipedia projects to list any at XfD that simply don't appear to have been updated or edited for a long while. More specifically I mean user sub page drafts that are not in need of immediate deletion for COI, Spam, COPYVIO, Attack, etc, and pages that are part of the research carried out by projects, such as for example, say, the pages in Category:WikiProject Worcestershire which although required might not have been updated for years. I've even had someonetry to tag the entire WP:WORCS project for deletion!

The intentions of such taggers are appreciated but I feel their time could be better spent by working through categories of really urgent pages such as unreferenced BLPs, or even straight New Page Patrolling. Is there a way we can identify these users and reach out to them in an attept to channel their activities in to areas that really matter? --Kudpung กุดผึ้ง (talk) 02:54, 25 August 2015 (UTC)

NPP DEFCON

Is the {{User:Snottywong/NPPdefcon}} really required on the project page? I've changed it a couple of times to try to reflect the actual backlog, but Noyster raised a good point on my talkpage regarding it's necessity. I propose it's removed until a better way of updating it is agreed upon, or an automated method is developed. Samuel Tarling (talk) 10:24, 24 August 2015 (UTC)

@Samtar:, @Noyster: Those defcons were created in good faith by Scott back in the days (many years ago) when the bcklog at NPP was often 60,000 pages or more and he and I completely rewrote the NPP project. I think they are now superfluous and a scar on the landscape. I've been witing patiently for a long time for someone else to suggest they should be retired (or placed somwhere less obtrusive). --Kudpung กุดผึ้ง (talk) 11:50, 24 August 2015 (UTC)

@Kudpung: don't get me wrong, they're a great idea and they look interesting - but I think that's all they've become. I believe the CSD DEFCON should remain (prehaps elsewhere), but I fully agree that the NPP one should be retired. I'll wait for further opinions before actioning anything. Thanks. Samuel Tarling (talk) 11:57, 24 August 2015 (UTC)

Any CSD backlog is only of interest to admins, and we have a special admin dashboard for that. It's what I generally work from. Kudpung กุดผึ้ง (talk) 12:11, 24 August 2015 (UTC)

Even less of a reason to have either of them. I'm going to remove them both, though if anyone disagrees and reverts the change, I'm more than happy to continue the discussion. :) Samuel Tarling (talk) 12:33, 24 August 2015 (UTC)

Thank you Samtar. I don't see anyone raising any serious complaints. I seem to be almost the only editor who systematically maintains these pages, and any positive help or ideas are most welcome. What we really need here is a strong participation from the community of experienced patrollers such as they have at the much less important AfC. Wishful thinking? Kudpung กุดผึ้ง (talk) 00:53, 25 August 2015 (UTC)

No worries Kudpung - is there anything further I can do to help maintain these pages? Samuel Tarling (talk) 08:10, 25 August 2015 (UTC)

Not just yet, but I'm working on something. Stay tuned. Kudpung กุดผึ้ง (talk) 08:13, 25 August 2015 (UTC)

Guidance

The guidance as it currently stands focuses entirely on patrolling the article. The addition of some text along the lines of:

If the article you have patrolled seems good you may wish to consider nominating the author for autopatrolled status at WP:RFP/A. This will help reduce the backlog of pages waiting to be patrolled.

would be constructive. Preferably to be added to the boilerplate on Special:NewPages, or as a second best, to Wikipedia:New pages patrol. Bazj (talk) 09:49, 23 July 2015 (UTC)

I don't think this comes within the remit of pstrollers. They have enough to do already and unfortuntely too many of them don't do it well enough. --Kudpung กุดผึ้ง (talk) 16:12, 23 July 2015 (UTC)

Kudpung, I'm not sure what you mean by their remit there. To quote Wikipedia:Requests for permissions/Header#Handled here, "Unlike other requests, any user may nominate an editor for Autopatrolled, even without that user's consent." If they have enough wiki-juice to patrol, they can certainly nominate. And rather than them having enough to do already, giving autopatrolled to those who merit it would reduce the patrolling workload, wouldn't it? Hopefully MusikBot will soon be on the case full-time helping to sift the suitability of nominees and reducing some of the workload there. Bazj (talk) 17:19, 23 July 2015 (UTC)

If, and it's a big 'if', they have enough juice to patroll. How long and how systeatically have yu been patrolling the work of the patrollers? Kudpung กุดผึ้ง (talk) 17:25, 23 July 2015 (UTC)

I haven't. However, if patrollers are as bad as you say, wouldn't you like to take more of the patrolling out of their hands?

As quoted above, ANY user can nominate, it's just a question of whether you draw that to peoples' attention, and reduce the queue of articles waiting to be patrolled, or not. Bazj (talk) 17:32, 23 July 2015 (UTC)

And how would you suggest I should take more of the patrolling off their hands? Kudpung กุดผึ้ง (talk) 18:09, 23 July 2015 (UTC)

I wouldn't propose YOU do anything, as you seem quite antagonistic to the proposal.

I would suggest that a higher uptake of the autopatrolled status by those eligible for it would reduce the numbers of pages requiring patrol. Spotting these eligible users & nominating them would be a logical follow-on to the process of patrolling a page. Bazj (talk) 09:24, 25 July 2015 (UTC)

@Bazj: when I see a new article by an experienced editor that is perfect, I have a look at their other contributions to see if they are a good candidate for autopatrolled. I usually ask them if they want me to request the permission though, since while I am allowed to request it on their behalf some prolific page creators still prefer to have that second set of eyes. This is an infrequent enough situation that I don't know if it really is necessary to discuss it on the how-to page, though I don't really see anything wrong with your proposed addition, either. A boilerplate on the actual newpages screen would probably be overkill in any case. VQuakr (talk) 18:19, 23 July 2015 (UTC)

There's nothing wrong with it in principle except that it makes more work for the admins at PERM, but FWIW I've probably stripped a dozen editors of their Autopatrolled flag over the years - only by doing due diligence when patrolling the patrollers of course. Kudpung กุดผึ้ง (talk) 19:22, 23 July 2015 (UTC)

@Kudpung: how would patrolling NPPers identify article creators with the autopatrolled flag? VQuakr (talk) 07:35, 24 July 2015 (UTC)

Anyone who has done any significant patrolling would know the answer to that. Kudpung กุดผึ้ง (talk) 07:39, 24 July 2015 (UTC)

@Kudpung: nice burn. Can you answer the question instead? VQuakr (talk) 07:59, 24 July 2015 (UTC)

No. The answer is so blatantly obvious that the question should never need to have been asked. Kudpung กุดผึ้ง (talk) 08:02, 24 July 2015 (UTC)

@Kudpung: I have patrolled a couple thousand pages, but do not understand how patrolling NPPers would connect you with autopatrolled page creators who happened to not merit the flag - the two editors typically would not interact. Rather than treat me like an idiot, why not answer? VQuakr (talk) 08:07, 24 July 2015 (UTC)

@VQuakr: The New Pages feed shows patrolled articles by a tick in a green circle: hovering your pointer over this will display either "Marked as reviewed on... by... " or "This page was autopatrolled". In the latter case you know that the editor whose name follows "Created by... " had autopatrolled status at the time: Noyster (talk), 11:03, 25 August 2015 (UTC) Oh, and if you have an article open and go for "Page info" on the Curation toolbar, it will display "This page was autopatrolled" if that is the case. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Noyster (talk • contribs)

Which would depend on using Special:NewPagesFeed rather than Special:NewPages, in which case it's not "so blatantly obvious that the question should never need to have been asked." Bazj (talk) 06:40, 27 August 2015 (UTC)

@Bazj: no poop. I would be less miffed by it if Kudpung were not simultaneously wondering why there is so little participation from the editors he is biting. VQuakr (talk) 07:03, 27 August 2015 (UTC)

I couldn't comment on that because I've never visited or worked in a developing country. Bazj (talk) 10:18, 27 August 2015 (UTC)

@Noyster: that is a plausible workflow, but no one has explained what that has to do with "patrolling the patrollers" yet. VQuakr (talk) 07:03, 27 August 2015 (UTC)

Looking for Volunteers to help Notability Detection project

We're building a tool to help New Page Patrollers and article creators make better decisions, and we need your help! We're looking for volunteers to decide if article topics are notable or not. We'll use these decisions to train an automated classifier that will score new articles based on how notable it thinks they're likely to be. Eventually, we hope to build a tool that will provide these scores to NPPs while they're patrolling to help them decide whether new articles are notable or not.

If you're interested, please sign up here. We'll let you know as soon as we're ready for you to start. Comments and suggestions are very welcome! Bluma.Gelley (talk) 07:41, 3 September 2015 (UTC)

Redirects converted to articles and dates in New pages feed

This has been annoying me for a long time, but especially so recently. Let's say a page was created a long time ago, back in 2006. It was either created as a redirect or converted to a redirect at some point after being created. Now, on September 3, 2015 someone comes along and changes the redirect into an article. The new article shows up on the New Pages Feed (as it should - because it's essentially a new page). However, it shows up as a new page created in 2006, not a new page created on September 3, 3015. Why? Shouldn't it show up as a new page created September 3, 2015? Is there a way to fix this in the feed? ~ ONUnicorn^{(Talk|Contribs)}problem solving 14:28, 3 September 2015 (UTC)

This also happens when material is added to a redirect page without removing the redirect, such as entering it for discussion at RfD. Examples: Jeez and many other "minced oath" redirects entered for RfD today: Noyster (talk), 08:19, 4 September 2015 (UTC)

Fixes like these (and other bugs and requests) will not be addressed because the WMF has withdrawn its technical support. It prefers now to invest in projects such as that mentioned by Bluma.Gelley above. As I have said many, many times, the best tools in the world are however only as good as the people who use them. --Kudpung กุดผึ้ง (talk) 08:53, 4 September 2015 (UTC)

Suggestion

Perhaps we should add something to the guidelines suggesting that if patrollers encounter an article by a new or newish editor that appears to be exceptionally good and was created within the last week, that they might want to either nominate the article for WP:DYK or, at least, put a note on the author's talk page suggesting the author nominate the article for DYK.

Although the main purpose of patrolling is to keep unacceptable articles out of the encyclopedia, deletion and tagging for clean up shouldn't be the sole and only things patrollers do. Actually improving the articles when one can, and recognizing quality when one finds it should also be on the table. Especially since we have a huge retention problem with new editors. Having their work noticed and potentially showcased on the main page would do more to help us retain good editors than bitey tagging of new articles within minutes or hours.

I'm not saying it should be a requirement of patrollers; just a suggestion on the page. ~ ONUnicorn^{(Talk|Contribs)}problem solving 13:58, 27 August 2015 (UTC)

All good ideas. Another suggestion recently was that patrolers would stop to assess if editors flkfil the requirement for autopatrolled and then nominate them at PERM if appropriate. It would be good however, if patrollers would at least first do what they are supposed to be doing, Kudpung กุดผึ้ง (talk) 23:58, 27 August 2015 (UTC)

Absolutely we should be on the lookout for DYK candidates, I've nominated several over the years and if you nominate someone else's work you are exempt from the quid pro quo at DYK. ϢereSpielChequers 18:05, 7 September 2015 (UTC)

Paid advocacy: An urgent request

New Page Patrollers are asked to be particularly vigilant for pages suspected as being created or edited by paid users. The criteria to check are listed at Wikipedia:Long-term abuse/Orangemoody. More background on this important story of enormous abuse is at Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2015-09-02/Special report.

Generally, inexperienced or too rapid patrolling are the main reasons that such articles get patrolled and slip through the net. If patrollers come across pages they don't know what to do with, they can leave them and pass on to the next one. Ideally however, they should not be too embarrassed to ask for help at New pages patrol/Noticeboard. --Kudpung กุดผึ้ง (talk) 06:32, 6 September 2015 (UTC)

Noted, although New pages patrol/Noticeboard appears to be intended for requests to review the work of other patrollers, not for patrollers themselves to ask for advice about particular articles; for this there doesn't appear to be any specific forum: Noyster (talk), 08:37, 6 September 2015 (UTC)

I don't think it really matters. I created the noticeboard. There just is not any sense of 'project' about NPP, unlike AfC for example - which at the other end of the spectrum is more of a social gathering around a common interest rather than an essential core feature of Wikipedia quality control which NPP is supposed to be. There is no cohesion at NPP and those who patrol rarely, if ever, communicate with each other. We always called it a lonely place. A bit like those huge, quiet railway marshelling yards (classification yards) where nothing much ever seems to be happening but where nevertheless thousands of tons of freight gets shifted. Kudpung กุดผึ้ง (talk) 09:30, 6 September 2015 (UTC)

@Kudpung: I have just completed and added to WP:WARN a template series for paid editing and compliance with the ToU. See {{uw-paid1}}, {{uw-paid2}}, {{uw-paid3}} and {{uw-paid4}}. I came her to drop a note about them and found this somewhat related thread in place.--Fuhghettaboutit (talk) 15:52, 7 September 2015 (UTC)

@Kudpung: interesting, thanks for the reminder! The signpost report states that the articles were generally reviewed by members of the same sockpuppet network, so "inexperienced or too rapid patrolling" would not really have been a factor. In any case there probably is no point in bringing it up in every discussion section on this page.

More generally, this seems to be an argument in favor of creating some sort of organized, ongoing effort to backcheck patrols. Even if a low percentage of patrols (say, 5%) had been double-checked, if the questionable ones were tracked the pattern could have been identified before the victims started to contact OTRS.

Unless, of course, you think this has garnered enough attention that we could convince both WMF and the community of the necessity of making "page patroller" a user right. That would make this sort of attack less feasible, too. VQuakr (talk) 17:29, 7 September 2015 (UTC)

• Some of these articles may have been patrolled by legit patrollers, and legitimately too. These were articles about genuine people and organisations, mostly of borderline notability - AFD would have deleted a lot of them but I doubt if many were A7 candidates. But the big problem of Orangemoody was that one group of accounts was patrolling each others articles, and that isn't something that individual patrollers have a hope of catching. If you want to catch that you need to detect mutual patrolling of articles. ϢereSpielChequers 18:02, 7 September 2015 (UTC)

Would that proposal be purely behavioral, or would it look at IP addresses (under the hood, of course) to detect related accounts and flag potentially bad-faith patrols? That's something we could really use, BTW - a logs that flag patrols by new users and patrols by users with IPs similar to the article creator. VQuakr (talk) 18:07, 7 September 2015 (UTC)

I was assuming that we would just work on who patrols each others articles, though there is a separate suggestion that creating a spammy article could be deemed reason to do a check for sockpuppets. If 2 editors each patrol 2 of each others articles but also hundreds of others then that could be random, but if they each patrol half a dozen articles including 2 of each others it should look suspicious. While if 20 editors have patrolled a hundred articles between them and sixty of those are from the same half dozen accounts including 2 of the 20....... ϢereSpielChequers 18:16, 7 September 2015 (UTC)

If the system was automated and only flagged potentially abusive creator/patroller IP combinations, then the privacy issues surrounding CU could be mitigated (no human would be looking at the actual IPs). I agree though, that a lot could probably be done just by looking at publicly visible behavior. VQuakr (talk) 18:22, 7 September 2015 (UTC)

As a rule, if I see an article that has been patrolled and is unsourced, poorly-sourced, or just questionable, I check the edit history and then check to see how new the reviewing user is. Unfortunately, I'm not able to review every article in the NPP queue, so hopefully others are taking similar steps.- MrX 18:39, 7 September 2015 (UTC)

Since unsourced is only a deletion criteria for BLPs, surely you mean marked as patrolled without tagging as unsourced? ϢereSpielChequers 20:35, 7 September 2015 (UTC)

To clarify, I check articles that are marked as reviewed shortly after creation that are suspicious for a variety of reasons. Of course I'm aware that being unsourced is not a reason for deletion. - MrX 20:42, 7 September 2015 (UTC)

• I wasn't suggesting for a moment that the general poor quality of new page patrolling was the reason for Orangemoody articles slipping through the net. However, I have detected two Orangemoody pages in the last 72 hours simply through my own sporadic but routine patrolling, one of them before I had even heard of Orangemoody. I therefore thought that at this juncture it might be worth making a mention on this page yet again that perhaps patrollers' vigilance could be hightened. Sorry I was in error, and I naturally forgive in GF those who took me out of context. Nevertheless, we still have a reminder that unlike all the functions such as Counter-vandalism and Pending Changes, etc, the essential operation of NPP which requires more clue than any of them requires neither training, experience, nor special rights. IMO his is clearly an anomaly and in any 1-hour session I spend on NPP, most of my my operations are correcting wrong tags, declining CSD (or changing the criteria), unpartrolling and tagging where tags were not applied, notifiing creators so that they can address the tagged issues, and much more. It's very frutrating that we can't trust our patrollers to do a reasonably good job and it's of even greater concern that no one wants to do anything about it while at AfC for the few pages that pass through their portal, there is more action and noise than at a Mad Hatter's tea party, and our NPP noticeboard and talk page often remain dormant for months. Kudpung กุดผึ้ง (talk) 00:24, 8 September 2015 (UTC)

  I don't think we can expect patrollers to identify which particular spammer or school of spamming is behind an article. But yes it is good to warn people if there has been an increase of spamming, better still if there has been an increase in something specific they can watch out for. In the case of Orangemoody that was mutual patrolling within a group of editors, and we already have discussions elsewhere about watching for that. ϢereSpielChequers 12:37, 8 September 2015 (UTC)

No, but we can make them aware that any new article about a company, posted in rolled gold condition in one single edit by a brand new editor should automatically ring an alarm bell - very loudly. Currently , most of our patrollers don't even recognise a hoax or an attack page. Kudpung กุดผึ้ง (talk) 21:17, 8 September 2015 (UTC)

No patrol information

Hi, I was checking the patrol log, and noticed that many articles do not have any patrol information, for e.g. this. Is it because no one patrolled it or can there be other reasons? Srijankedia (talk) 00:28, 15 September 2015 (UTC)

The main rollout of page curation was September 2012. Pages created before then (including Aglaja Brix) generally will not have been marked as reviewed. VQuakr (talk) 03:21, 15 September 2015 (UTC)

Thanks for the reply, VQuakr. The patrol log dates back to 16 Nov, 2007 (see this). What hapenned during these ~5 years from 2007 - 2012? Srijankedia (talk) 05:48, 15 September 2015 (UTC)

Hmm, good point. I must be confusing the patrol log with the curation log. I my memory from 2012 is too fuzzy to recall if that means it was never patrolled. VQuakr (talk) 20:38, 15 September 2015 (UTC)

If I remember correctly, in 2012 whatever was not patrolled within 30 day of creation, could not be patrolled anymore, and we had huge backlogs, so that it was not uncommon.--Ymblanter (talk) 02:46, 16 September 2015 (UTC)

Thanks for your replies. So is it correct to say that if a page was not patrolled within 30 days of creation, then it would just remain on Wikipedia without being patrolled ever? Srijankedia (talk) 15:36, 18 September 2015 (UTC)

This is indeed my understanding. It was change a couple of years ago.--Ymblanter (talk) 21:46, 18 September 2015 (UTC)

Great thanks for the info. Srijankedia (talk) 21:14, 21 September 2015 (UTC)

It wasn't changed. A handful of us (mostly admins) just worked day and night for a week or so to bring the backlog down significantly from its regular 40,000 or so. I belive at one stage we actually cleared it completely but due to the general apathy and NPP not having a carrot in the shape of a hat to wear, it's slowly crept up again to a 'mere' 3,000. The new curation feed keeps its backlog in its list so anyone who wants to work from the back of the queue can do so. In the old days anything over 30 days old - and that was most of them - just fell off the cliff to become a staggering unreviewed percentage of nearly 5 mio articles.

The actual number of unpatrolled articles and ones tagged for eternity out there makes a mockery of anything we do at NPP or AfC but the WMF doesn't give a hoot because they simply thrive on stats of number of pages created, and that's why they stomped on ACTRIAL and quietly swept their Article Creation Flow project under the carpet and let it die completely when Brandon Harris left. Perhaps with the now fully accomplished 100% change of senior staff since Tretikov arrived we could get interest in it rekindled - it's something every Wikipedia would have benefitted from enormously. Kudpung กุดผึ้ง (talk) 09:55, 22 September 2015 (UTC)

Files

Special:NewPages only shows file pages that are either local description pages of files on Commons or can be deleted with {{db-imagepage}}. GeoffreyT2000 (talk) 03:14, 3 October 2015 (UTC)

Backlog

There is now a 7,105 total of unreviewed pages. As of today, Friday 9 October, only 484 pages had been reviewed this week. This is less than the daily number of pages that need to be patrolled. Ths is slowly approaching the very reasons why WP:ACTRIAL was proposed and the Page Curation suite was created. It's obviously not working. Does anyone, such as for example Scottywong, DGG, Ironholds, Arthistorian1977, Compassionate727, Crystallizedcarbon, I dream of horses, Jbhunley, Kges1901, Lstanley1979, Mr RD, OccultZone, Oiyarbepsy, Rberchie, Sulfurboy, SwisterTwister, Swpb, TheLongTone, Trivialist, Ubiquity, Vanjagenije, Wgolf, Winner 42, WMartin74. know of any solutions? Bearing in mind of course that quality of patrolling rather than speed is the essence of the process. --Kudpung กุดผึ้ง (talk) 04:45, 9 October 2015 (UTC)

I'm aware and I had somewhat lowered my intense efforts with this recently due to actual life and attention to other areas such as AfD (as well as looking to nominate articles of concern to said AfD) and I think this has happened with some of the most recently active patrollers. I heavily cleared the last "backlog" (went through a few months worth in a few days or so, having multiple tabs taking of it and using mobile as I am using it for this message now) and all it needs is persistent watching (a lot of the articles are easy anyway such as geography and such). BTW, Wgolf (last active July 18) and Sulfurboy (September 28) will not be responding anytime soon as they have taken an extended vacation and I also haven't seen Chrislk02 (last active June 26) and FreeRangeFrog (August 26) so I'm not sure what happened to them (hopefully we will not have to fear the worst). Also, FWIW, I'm not sure if you're aware of this but Scottywong retired in December 2012 citing no interest anymore and pressure. No worries either way and I'll attempt my best to look through some of these, SwisterTwister talk 04:56, 9 October 2015 (UTC)

• We got a lot of backlogs. I kinda wonder if the answer is a one week option moratorium on new content and encouraging everyone to work on backlogs. Is this worth bringing up at the idea lab? Oiyarbepsy (talk) 05:03, 9 October 2015 (UTC)

It's also worth mentioning the recent bombardment of "redirects for deletion" have affected the flow and ease of NPP. SwisterTwister talk 05:05, 9 October 2015 (UTC)

I do not think this suggestion stands a single chance.--Ymblanter (talk) 05:11, 9 October 2015 (UTC)

Ymblanter, what are you talking about exactly by "suggestion"? SwisterTwister talk 05:23, 9 October 2015 (UTC)

Moratorium for content creation, as suggested by Oiyarbepsy--Ymblanter (talk) 05:25, 9 October 2015 (UTC)

(edit conflict) @SwisterTwister, Oiyarbepsy, and Ymblanter: I'm simply not that interested with patrolling pages at the moment. I am currently using autowikibrowser at the moment, being quite fascinated.

One obstacle I ran into is that page curation seems to have years old, recently edited pages in the queue if you go from the back.

Oiyarbepsy, I don't think a temporary solution is a good idea, particularly if it might be done repeatedly. It would be confusing for newer editors. I dream of horses ^{(talk to me) (contributions)} @ 05:17, 9 October 2015 (UTC)

What you're obviously referring to is what I mentioned as "redirects for deletion" tagged articles or I've also noticed someone will vandalize and, in other cases, restoring a previous article (non-notable musician best known for a band, for example) thus placing it at NPP. While I'm at it, I want to also mention NPP seems to have a "time lock" where it says you have exceeded your time limit and I simply bypass this by refreshing and clicking again. I mention this because it would be nice to not always have this "time lock". Cheers, SwisterTwister talk 05:23, 9 October 2015 (UTC)

• Moratoriums just cause problems later on. We've had first backlogs before. The only real solution , as with most other problems here, is to get ore experienced WPedians interested. No one person should be doing too much of this. I find if I do more than 10 or 15 a day, I start getting over-critical. Some other people when they try too many do that also; some do the opposite, and let too many pass. As SwisterTwister says, in practice, nobody can pay full attention to everything: one cannot focus simultaneously on AfD, AfC, and NPP. There are a number of thingsthat would help a little: Kudpung's proposals for unifying the flow of new articles between AfC and AfD would help a little, or at least get things more consistent. It would also help to have fewer AfDs--about 1/4 the articles that go to afd should have been deleted by speedy before that. And has generally been the case, Prod is being underutilized. And of course getting rid of the promotional paid editors should have a positive effect all down the line. I long ago proposed that various WPedians in different time zones sign up for a fixed commitment, but this doesn't fit the working pattern of most of us.

And theres a key problem here: nobody can patrol a large number of articles and still give each editor who needs help individual attention--raw productivity and careful work are incompatible. DGG ( talk ) 12:04, 9 October 2015 (UTC)

•  Comment: I am also really against any kind of moratorium on article creation. I like better the proposal to encourage users. Do you think setting up a "reviewathon" might help get other experienced editors involved? I will also try to do my bit and review some pages. Thank you Kudpung por bringing it up.--Crystallizedcarbon (talk) 12:33, 9 October 2015 (UTC)

(edit conflict) @Kudpung: I will spend some time today on it. As to the general problem of getting pages patrolled they obvious solution is to get more skilled people involved. The how is the stickler for that though. One problem is there is a disconnect between what people see NPP as and what it needs to be. Right now editors seem to see it as a good place to start, kind of like searching for vandalism only easier because of the curation tool and less intimidating than Recent changes. We saw an example of that recently. I got started at NPP because I thought it was a good place to "get my feet wet" and was just lucky not to screw up too badly before I started to get a clue. So, step one - re branding and re-casting the perception of what NPP is. You are doing a good job of that but I think there needs to be a way to get more people to read the NPP page before they start with the tool.

The second issue that affects skilled participation levels is status. As you say NPP takes experience, tact and a large dose of clue because NPP can require major interpersonal skills to deal with: clueless new editors, clueless COI editors, paid-editors etc.- it is a skill and recognition is a powerful motivator. Content creators are king, admins are seen as 'something' but NPP is seen as tag-bombing and trigger-happy CSDers. Even AfC is seen as a place for 'experienced' editors because of the minimum edit requirement. People are social, even Wikipedians and status or more particularly perceived status is a motivator, even to altruistic volunteers.

The user right proposal was a good idea because it would address both of these issues. First, it is a stake in the ground that allows NPP to be 're-branded' and allows new expectations to be set. Second it gives NPP a 'hat', which on the practical, and most important, side indicates some minimum 'qualifications' and makes it harder for paid-COI rings from being able to patrol their own articles. It also gives some status which makes people want to do NPP. Another benefit is it is better and easier to be able to simply remove a user-right from an editor who is doing a poor job than it is to wait around until they do enough damage to get banned from NPP, or worse cruise along at bad but not bannable bad. In this 'hat collecting' can be good because it gets people trained and involved however, a way to gauge minimum performance and maintain expectations after the 'hat' is important. (Not the least because the ability to mark patrolled is important to paid-COI rings but that is another discussion.)

Setting expectations and providing training and motivation are medium to long term solutions and I am likely just repeating what you know. The only short term solution I can think of is to just go review some new pages, so off I go. PS On the re branding going to something like 'New page review' could allow a break from past perceptions. Jbh^Talk 13:27, 9 October 2015 (UTC)

• @Kudpung: Assuming WP:ACTRIAL will never be revived, I strongly favor the alternative solution of automatically directing non-autoconfirmed editors to WP:WIZARD (perhaps starting with the same six-month trial proposed in ACTRIAL). This would not prevent non-AC editors from creating articles (apparently a sticking point for some at WMF), but would at least force them to explicitly assert that their page is, at the very least: 1) on a plausibly notable topic; 2) not covered by an existing article; 3) at least nominally sourced; and 4) not copied from somewhere else. Those few extra steps might cut out a good chuck of the junk. I do not have the time to spearhead the proposal for such a trial, but I would fiercely support it. —Swpb^talk 15:22, 9 October 2015 (UTC)

• It's difficult to know where to start. The WMF created the Curation system in close collaboration with me and a couple of others (and I think The Blade of the Northern Lights might wish to chime in here too), as a consolation prize for rejecting our ACTRIAL so rudely. They somehow thought it would solve all our problems and even do away with the need for a proper splash page for new users or to improve the Article Wizard to make it less a hurdle of instruction creep and more interactive (what we've got now is at least the Draft namespace).

I wouldn't rule out completely the possibility of relaunching the fundamental premise of ACTRIAL, (see also, and very importantly: this comment) in fact there are some growing hints of something similar at the VP by those whose memories are short or who weren't around at the time. The proposal was supported by an overwhelming majority on an RfC that attracted literally hundreds of users. More importantly, consensus even within the WMF, can change, and the recent Orangemoody affair may galvanise some new critical thinking on what Wikipedia is supposed to be and the purpose of some of the routine but absolutely essential tasks that are carried out by us unpaid volunteers.

The problem is, instead of improving the quality and quantity of NPP, the toolset just made it easier and faster for those who already know what they are doing and turned the process into a MMORPG for those who don't. It's a brilliant piece of architecture admittedly, and one that puts all those costly but not-asked-for gimmicks completely in the shade, but in spite of being told that it would only ever be as good as the people who use it, they (the WMF) steadfastly refused to accept that NPP is largely done by a) a tiny handful of highly experienced users, such as, for example, I dream of horses, and a vast number of very inexperienced users who just do a few patrols until they are told to lay off until they get more experience - I have tried encouraging a staggering 600 users to do it properly, and because like DGG I only do a few patrols a week, I'm sure I'm only touching the tip of the iceberg. We need to make NPP more attractive, and if it means creating a new shelf in the millinery, that's what we'll have to do. And soon. Kudpung กุดผึ้ง (talk) 17:24, 9 October 2015 (UTC)

• ACTRIAL will probably never be reinstated, but the same purpose can be accomplished in other ways. The way that I think Kudpung and I have in mind is to require all relatively new and IP users to go through the Article Wizard. Everyone can still make articles, but they will make them in different ways depending on their experience. The WMF should have no concern with this--we can devise our own workflows as long as we follow the basic principles. DGG ( talk ) 19:05, 9 October 2015 (UTC)

@DGG, Kudpung, Swpb, Crystallizedcarbon, and Jbhunley: I hope ACTrial is reinstated (or, rather, instated to begin with!), but I think DGG and swpb are giving a reasonable foundation for a "plan B".

The thing is, though, I really don't think the community will ever have consensus to have IP editors create articles, except through draftspace. I think, originally, articles for creation was created so IP editors can make articles, and honestly, that's fine with me. I don't want this to be associated with a perennial (excuse my spelling) proposal. I dream of horses If you reply here, please ping me by adding {{Ping|I dream of horses}} to your message. ^{(talk to me) (contributions)} @ 21:48, 9 October 2015 (UTC)

I like the idea of sending all users who don't have confirmed or autoconfirmed rights. I feel like a very significant portion of the articles currently being created are being created by people who want to be able to say that they created a Wikipedia article, and they aren't actually putting any effort into it. AfC would require them to actually put some effort into it, and many of them would simply quit at that. -©2015 Compassionate727^{(Talk)(Contributions)} 23:56, 10 October 2015 (UTC)

• Comment I'll be doing page patrols again, stopped due to lack of motivation of editing Wikipedia due to my topic ban. Though I've mostly gotten over it and feel I can help in other situations, like this! I'll be helping take the backlog down. Tutelary (talk) 22:13, 11 October 2015 (UTC)

Notice to participants at this page about adminship

Participants here often have to evaluate whether or not a subject is notable, decide if content complies with BLP policy, examine sources, and much more. Well, these are some of the considerations at Wikipedia:Requests for adminship.

So, please consider taking a look at and watchlisting this page:

• Wikipedia:Requests for adminship/Optional RfA candidate poll

You could be very helpful in evaluating potential candidates, and maybe even finding out if you would be a suitable RfA candidate.

Many thanks and best wishes,

Anna Frodesiak (talk) 23:16, 2 December 2015 (UTC)

Nice one Anna Frodesiak :) -- samtar ^whisper 09:37, 3 December 2015 (UTC)