Jump to content

Wikipedia:New pages patrol/New landing page proposal/Article workflow

Add links
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

When doing NPP and coming across an article with lack of evidence of notability and/or inadequate referencing, one has the options of draftifying it, requesting speedy, or starting an AfD discussion [...] In my experience, if you draftify, someone will squeal and tell you in no uncertain terms you should have gone for deletion instead. And if you go for deletion, you will get heat for not draftifying. (Also, if you request speedy, you'll be told you should've gone for AfD, and v.v.) I think the technical term for this is "****ed if you do, ****ed if you don't".

— DoubleGrazing[1]

What this project is about

[edit]

There are currently 845 New Page Reviewers, which makes the total number of users with this permission 1,679 (the rest are administrators, who automatically have this permission as part of their trusted duties).
Fewer than 10% of the rights holder are active. 12 admins regularly use the Page Curation process.
As of March 2025 the English Wikipedia is receiving around 500 new articles a day.
If every one of the 835 reviewers would do just one patrol a day , the backlog would be down to zero within 20 days and would stay there, but that is unlikely to happen.

Why NPP and Wikipedia needs this project
As of 10 March 2025 - a typical status of NPP backlog

Six years in the making and still an ongoing development, the WMF's Growth Team features has had some response but it has not had any impact on the number and quality of New Articles and it does not focus specifically on newly registered user whose goal it is to immediately create a new article as soon as their account is WP:autoconfirmed.

  • Wikipedia is such a confusing mass of information of organically rambling policies and guidelines (which anyone can edit) to the extent that new users tend to ignore them rather than follow them and find them useful; not to mention the excellent MoS which would baffle anyone who has not graduated in journalism or Communication Science.
  • More specifically, it is a minefield for good faith reviewers who are susceptible to being critiqued by other users and even admins who are even less knowledgeable about the written (and unwritten) rules, especially but not only, those pertaining to WP:BLP.
  • Approximately 5,000 drafts are deleted as G13 (abandoned drafts) each month.
  • NPP is arguably the most important single process in building the content of this encyclopedia. The required knowledge level of notabiity and deletion processes is possibly second only to that of a veteran admin, alone the notability guidelines amount to 5.9 hours of reading.
  • On en.Wiki NPP reviewers are the gatekeepers to the appropriateness and quality of new articles. Previous initiatives such as the community driven NPP survey Meta, the creation of Page Curation, the ACPERM limitation, creation of an AfC user group, creation of a user right for NPP, and software upgrades have all helped but as the scope of new pages has changed significantly in recent years reviewers are facing new challenges, ones that either reduce the interest in the task or cause them to leave due to burn out. Less than 10% of the holders of the NPR user right are active.

At the English Wikipedia we have always had a huge backlog at NPP; under the status quo we always will have. There are currently 845 New Page Reviewers, which makes the total number of users with this permission 1,679 (the rest are administrators, who automatically have this permission as part of their trusted duties). However, among this number there are far too few experienced and motivated rights holders to review the pages and maintain the backlog at a reasonable level. This is specifically an en.Wiki problem. Backlog drives can help but the graph resembles the retreating sea before successions of tsunamis, and is a sawtooth curve.

What is this project?

It's a proposal to reboot discussion and development for a system far simpler than its description here evokes. It will greatly reduce the number of inappropriate or non-main space ready articles in the new pages feed and the number of drafts in the queue at AfC. Without impacting on the existing but less effective process developed by the WMF, it will provide an additional onboarding flow for newly registered users. Without shifting the paradigm of user recruiting and retention it will encourage and greatly assist new users to create their first article within the encyclopdia’s criteria, and equally important, to dissuade newly registered users from creating articles that are wholly inappropriate for the encyclopedia and which waste the author's and everyone else's time at NPP and the ensuing deletions processes.

How

It builds on the basic premise of the function of New Pages Patrol but without modifying that process in any way. This project is concerned with, and starts at the moment of a new user's successful registration.

Target audience

Newly registered users who have the single goal of immediately creating a new article as their first, and possibly only contribution to Wikipedia.

The process
  1. An interactive landing page Welcoming new users who specifically want to create an article
  2. A new 'Your first article' introduction page
  3. A new and truly interactive Article Wizard

When registration is complete, the new user is presented with an attractive screen with tooltips, asking them what they want to do next.
If they check ‘create an article’ from the list, they will be directed to a new and much easier to read version of the 'Your first article' basic tutorial page which will ask them "What kind of article do you want to create?"
They will be presented with a dropdown of topics to choose from. Depending on what they they check they will then chose from a selection of thematic article templates to fill in with their content and on which at least two sources must be provided before they can progress to the next stage (See flow chart next page).

The system is extremely interactive in the true sense of a Wizard and has attractive UIs but is simple to create using available wiki code, HTML, some Java script, and possibly some CSS.

Most of the pages and function templates for all the stages have been created as wire frames just needing to be coded along with the thematic empty article templates. For the developer team there is an flowchart which describes the system (attached).

Why the NPP people should be involved in this project

This idea began as a project of a small group of NPP people in 2021. Over the years active pioneers of NPP initiated the creation of Page Curation as we know it today, ACTRIAL which became ACPERM, and the creation of the New Page Reviewer right in 2016, including the redesign of some of the UI used in the Curation tools. More recently, NPPers successfully exerted sufficient pressure on the WMF to make funds available to completely rewrite the code base of the New Pages Feed and Curation extension to bring them up to date with the current iteration of MediaWiki, at the same time incorporating around a hundred long awaited new features to it, spearheaded by user:NovemLinguae the NPP Lead Coordinator who is also MediaWiki +2 volunteer developer.

Today's WMF Growth Team has, in a roundabout way, given us to understand that they are mainly concerned with developing or co-developing processes that are their own ideas and which fall under the WMF policy that all developments should now be made Wiki agnostic. Since the WMF has grown from 7 to 700 employees since those early days when we were patrolling new pages 20 years ago, there is a resistance to ideas from the active members of the editing community who with their institutional memory and empirical evidence nevertheless have a far greater understanding of the challenges and needs of the respective audiences.

Where we left off

Original discussions were begun in a series of video conferences initiated by NPP in 2020 with the WMF Growth Team, around a project summary put together on a Wikipedia project page. While the WMF initially showed interest, it was not with the same enthusiasm as when ideas for Page Curation were proposed directly to Eric Möller (v.CEO) and Brandon Harris (chief desiner) back in 2010 when Wikipedia was suffering under an extremely high backlog under the old, pre-2012 system when the WMF only had 7 employees.

What the suggested next move should be

In teamwork, share the idea, develop it to a complete package then install it on a trial basis like we did with ACTRIAL.

Time frame and environment

Depends on the availability of members of a cohesive team and to be able to discuss the project on web based meetings (platform exists already, subscription paid) and a progress tracker (Pivotal or similar). Should not take more than six months working at a leisurely tempo that should not detract users from their other essential NPP work as patrollers and/or admins. Available resources: the TestWiki

Workshopping

[edit]

Stats

[edit]

Following a January backlog drive, Over a 1 month sample 1 to 31 Jan 2025? :

  • Number of new articles created in the article space by non-autopatrolled users, excluding redirects and dab pages
  • Number of new articles created by accounts that existed for less than 30 days and made less than 500 edits
  • Number of new articles excluding redirects and dab pages, that were still unpatrolled after the sample period
  • Number of new articles excluding redirects and dab pages, that got deleted within the sample period.
  • Number of new articles that were recreated from previously deleted titles.
  • Number of new articles that were created from redirects.

Proposed work group

[edit]

Original Core team

  • User:Sdkb
  • User:BusterD - project lead (Jan 2023–Present)
  • User:Kudpung - project lead (Oct 2022–Dec 2022)
  • User:Novem Linguae - created this summary document

Others

  • Blaze Wolf
  • BusterD,
  • Clovermoss

Wikipedia:Village_pump_(technical)/Archive_205#h-Change_to_the_behavior_of_Wikipedia:New_user_landing_page-20230524210900

[2] The latest round of discussion was at:

User:Sdkb/Vision for a better Article Wizard


Workshoping

[edit]

New Page Creation/registering

[edit]

Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Primo Desiderio is a classic example of how ACPERM is now failing.

NPP: https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/User_talk:Jorm_(WMF)/Archive_1#New_Page_Triage

Creation

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_talk:Growth_Team_features/Archive_5#Newcomer_experience_%2B_new_article_creation===User:Kudpung/YFA===

'Your first article': redrafted. Reduced from 40 minutes reading time to just over. 6 minutes. Three if the specific problem articles are sportspeople, contemporary music, and Bollywood. These are articles driven by fans. Interesting stats for sports bios here

Help:Introduction

[edit]

Look for it's place in the flowchart. This should come before the Wizard.

Article Wizard

[edit]
See also: User:Sdkb/Vision for a better Article Wizard

A "software wizard" is a user interface feature within a program that guides users through a complex task by breaking it down into a series of simple, step-by-step screens, essentially acting as a visual assistant to help users complete a process without needing extensive technical knowledge; think of it like a guided walkthrough for a specific function within the software.

The current 'wizard' is just a set of very simplified flip through static dos and don'ts without any interaction. This project looks at at the issues holistically and a new, interactive page creation wizard is part of it. [3] A 14 October 2017 RfC] on a 'new' wizard proposed by a user had 26 respondents. No opposition. Passed as unanimous. It replaced a more interactive original version that had been in use since 2009.

That was 7 years ago. A lot has happened since then and there has been a huge increase in in inappropriate or very poor new articles that clearly should be forced through the Wizard. The Wizard needs bringing up to date without it becoming a wall of text. Suggested: A more attractive design (border, page colour). Re-adding the former progress tabs. Last step offering a choice of thematic page templates. It builds in many ways on thean original theme by [[ wizard created by Rd232 (retired in 2013) which took an original theme by user:Jorm a stage further.

details
  • New "Article wizard" page
  • Mockup: TBD
  • To replace: Wikipedia:Article Wizard, which replaced Wikipedia:Article wizard/version1
  • Approximate # of pages to be created from wireframes: 10?
  • Will be truly interactive. The current wizard is merely a click-through check list. It offers no help or advice for building a first article page and is therefore a misleading misnomer.
  • Will have popup tooltips that need to be programmed in JavaScript and other conditional features probably using JS.
  • Will use a library of up to around 60 thematic article templates (Template:Article templates). Special:PrefixIndex/Template:Article_templates
    • These were created on a grant, ostensibly for use at editathons
    • These are based on a previous template that was frequently used by an older version of Wizard
    • These use standard page elements to choose from, in the right layout and order, appropriate infoboxes, and placeholders for images
    • Their talk pages could additionally be preprepared with the appropriate BLP warnings and Wikiproject banners.
    • The templates could also include popup tooltips whose code would be automatically removed when the draft is saved.
  • The new Wizard would be an indispensable tool for onboarding creators of their first article.
    • It is not to be confused with mentoring schemes.
    • It will greatly enhance a new creator's UX and encourage user retention.
    • In doing so, it addresses the Foundation's goals, but eliminates the creation of as many articles as possible with disregard to the quality.
    • It therefore reduces the burden on NPP and AfC and the number of disenchanted new users.

On AfC

[edit]

AfC has nothing to do with any NPP backlog drives. Such drives may obviously cause a temporary slight increase in the number of articles moved to Draft. Draftification is not AfC and does not oblige an article creator to avail of the AfC process. Draftification is neverthelss a standard procedure that can be used by New Page Reviewers as and when they consider appropriate. There is no shame in having one's article draftified. Quite to the contrary in fact, it can be a far more friendly process that having an article marched immediately to AfD or PRODed, and if/when a draft is submitted to AfC, a lot of help might be forthcoming - which is not in the remit of NPP. NPP also has deadlines - AfC does not.

For flowchart

[edit]
[edit]
Retrieved from "https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia:New_pages_patrol/New_landing_page_proposal/Article_workflow&oldid=1282207022"