The Wikimedia Foundation's Moderator Tools team will be spending 3 months working on improvements to PageTriage. We're aiming to begin work in April. Though our efforts will be focused on getting the extension to a place where it can be maintained by our team more proactively than it has been in the past, we also hope to work on some user-facing improvements.
We'll use this page to provide updates, pose questions, and solicit input. Please feel free to add your thoughts or questions to the talk page!
Project
In recent years the PageTriage extension has only been lightly maintained, if at all, by the Wikimedia Foundation. The reasons for this are that it uses outdated technologies for which engineering expertise has been lacking, currently only works on the English Wikipedia, and has been the responsibility of a team which has taken on the maintenance burden for a wide range of extensions (Growth). Despite this, we know that PageTriage serves an important function for what is the largest and most-viewed Wikimedia project, and we believe it should therefore be properly maintained and free of major bugs, in agreement with the 2022 WMF letter.
As such, we are aiming to work on a project between April and June 2023 which focuses on bringing the extension to a place where we feel confident that it can be maintained in the long-term. While we may address some new feature requests during this time, we are hesitant to add additional code to the extension without first addressing major technical debt, so this is unlikely to be the priority during this timeframe. We also want to note that our existing work may run over into April, so we might not be getting started right away in that month. Either way, we're aiming to spend 3 months on this project initially.
Priorities
We will clarify the details of this project closer to April - as there is ongoing work by volunteer developers and some WMF engineers to address some of these issues already - but this project may include:
- Replacing outdated technologies (e.g. JavaScript frameworks) with more modern supported technologies (e.g. T208256)
- Improving test coverage and documentation
- Refactoring functionality to make the extension easier to maintain, extend, and re-use in the long-term
- Instrumenting data collection to better understand user workflows and how these change in response to improvements
- Addressing some high priority new feature requests
Because the extension repository is now quite active, especially with volunteer developers, it’s hard to be more specific about the work we’d take on. Before April we will meet with volunteer developers and WMF staff who have worked on the extension to understand the latest changes and come to an agreement on the highest priorities for our team's contributions.
Long-term
In parallel, during this quarter, the Moderator Tools team will consult with other Wikimedia communities to understand their needs around content review and reporting processes. From our previous research we know that other communities have duplicated processes and volunteer tools to perform many of the same functions as PageTriage and New Page Patrol. As the team’s engineers learn more about the PageTriage codebase and what is possible from a refactor, we will be able to better understand the overlap between the functionality provided by this extension and the needs of other communities.
Towards the end of this quarter, we will reassess the situation to make longer-term plans for the following fiscal year. If technically possible, and we discover the potential for value in other communities, we may begin making PageTriage, or elements of it, wiki-agnostic.
Updates
We'll share updates on our progress here as and when we have them.
February 27, 2023
Over the last few weeks we interviewed six active New Page Patrollers, learning how they patrol articles, what tools they use, and what frustrations they have. We've published a summary of this research at /Interview research.
Please have a read and let us know your thoughts on the talk page!
February 3, 2023
In the past couple of weeks we've started interviewing active New Page Patrollers and have been learning a lot about what patrolling looks like today. These interviews are continuing over the next week or two, after which we'll summarise what we've learned on this project page.
We've also started diving into some data for a quantitative view of the process. Some statistics uncovered so far, looking at the date range March - September 2022:
- Approximately 560 new non-redirect articles are created every day on the English Wikipedia
- 60% of those (~340) are made by users without the autopatrolled user right, and therefore require NPP review.
- Nearly 600 pages are marked as reviewed each day (the excess includes redirects and pages which were not newly created, e.g. converted from a redirect to a page)
- In this time period, 495 editors marked at least one page as reviewed. 189 editors marked at least thirty pages as reviewed.
- Of the 8,057 newly created articles which were moved to the Draft namespace, 6,171 (77%) of them were either still in Draft space or had been deleted by January 2023. 1,864 (23%) were moved back to article space.
We're also starting to think about our prioritisation process for deciding what our team works on. Our current expectation is that we'll aim to spend around 70% of our time, likely mostly at the outset of the project, working on technical issues which are unlikely to affect the user experience. These improvements are critical to ensuring that we can maintain the PageTriage extension long-term and have a solid base for making improvements. We do, however, then plan to spend around 30% of our time on feature improvements. While the technical priorities are likely to be determined by the team's engineers and volunteer developers specifically, we'd like to design a broader participatory process for deciding which features get worked on. If you have any thoughts on what that should look like, please share them on the talk page.
January 2023
Although we're not delving into this project in detail just yet, we are getting some of the foundations in place so that we can hit the ground running in April. To summarise:
- This project page has been created and shared. We plan to update it as we progress. Once we have some tangible questions or items for feedback we plan to ping all participants of the 2022 WMF letter.
- We're starting enwiki user research - we want to learn how patrollers currently use PageTriage to patrol new articles. If you're interested in participating please see this message.
- We're also making more thorough plans for how we're going to learn about new page patrolling in other communities, such as which Wikimedia projects we'll target, what we want to learn, and where we want to be after interviewing editors.