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::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 <small>This may be inaccurate, but that's certainly how it looks from the outside.</small> 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. |
::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 <small>This may be inaccurate, but that's certainly how it looks from the outside.</small> 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. |
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::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. [[User:Ironholds|Ironholds]] ([[User talk:Ironholds|talk]]) 07:38, 2 December 2013 (UTC) |
::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. [[User:Ironholds|Ironholds]] ([[User talk:Ironholds|talk]]) 07:38, 2 December 2013 (UTC) |
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== The biggest problem with new pages == |
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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]]?[[User:Dlohcierekim| <font color="#00ff00"> Dloh</font>]][[User_talk:Dlohcierekim|<font color="#bb00bb">cierekim''' </font>]] 19:09, 2 December 2013 (UTC) |
Revision as of 19:09, 2 December 2013
This page has archives. Sections older than 91 days may be automatically archived by Lowercase sigmabot III. |
See also: Wikipedia talk:New pages patrol/patrolled pages for discussion on development of the special patrol page (inactive).
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)
- 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)
- 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)
- Keep plugging away at Bugzilla. Kudpung กุดผึ้ง (talk) 06:11, 29 August 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)
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)
"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)
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)
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)
- 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 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
areas 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)
- 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
- 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'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)
- 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 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?
- 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)
- 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:
- I get a list of patrollers who haven't patrolled in a while, filtered for recent activity level;
- 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;
- 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)
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)