https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Autoconfirmed_article_creation_trial

See also https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Research:Autoconfirmed_article_creation_tria... and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Autoconfirmed_article_creation_trial...

On Fri, Aug 9, 2019 at 1:48 PM Haifeng Zhang haifeng1@andrew.cmu.edu wrote:

Dear folks,

I'm checking the Article Creation page ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Article_creation), and it says:

The ability to create articles directly in mainspace is restricted< https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:ACPERM%3E to autoconfirmed users, though non-confirmed users and non-registered users can submit a proposed article through the Articles for Creation< https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Articles_for_creation%3E process, where it will be reviewed and considered for publication.

Anyone knows when the restriction (e.g., registered and auto-confirmed) become effective? I tracked the past revisions of the page but found no clue. A more general question is: where to find information about policy changes, e.g., article creation, in Wikipedia?

Thanks,

Haifeng

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Registered means has created a user account.

Confirmation can be done manually or automatically. From memory, it occurs automatically after 10 acceptable edits (I presume this means not-reverted edits) and/or 4 days after creating the user account. I think these values were chosen because past experience shows us that vandals have very little patience and tend to vandalise within their first few edits or first few days so anyone who gets past these milestones probably has good intentions. Confirmation is done manually if the user needs the right to create articles sooner than the automatic process would otherwise assign it; this situation usually arises at edit-a-thons where new participants always have good intentions (I've never seen a vandal come to an event). Administrators and those users who are designated event coordinators (e.g. me) have the ability to confirm an account earlier if there is some good reason.

Where is more information about policy changes in Wikipedia? Good question. After 14 years on-wiki, policies change without my knowledge all the time. It is a very common complaint that policy change takes place without adequate notification to affected WikiProjects, etc, so people can be aware of the proposal and participate in the discussion. And I suspect this situation suits a lot of people who know they are pushing through an unpopular change. There are lots of places where policy changes can be discussed and consensus reached, so it's hard to monitor all of them. Even using a watchlist, some discussion pages are so active, you just cannot keep watching them (when many of the page changes are not of any significance). We lack an effective notification system of issues at a higher level than "page change". There is an expectation that significant discussions should be drawn to the attention of others, but somehow this doesn't always happen.

Does the policy work? Yes and no. Very few articles survive the Articles for Creation process. If you review there (as I have done), you realise pretty quickly that new users almost always create articles about living people and current organisations, many of which appear to run-of-the-mill, e.g. a local dental practice group, a financial planner, etc. Although you usually have no concrete evidence (unless their user name is the same or a variant of the article title), nonetheless you tend to suspect this is people writing about themselves or their organisation and that there is conflict of interest and promotional intent. Some of them are well-written according to our Manual of Style, which tends to make you suspect undisclosed paid editing could be involved. So faced with the deluge of such articles, the reviewer quickly becomes conditioned to click "not accepted - insufficient citations to reliable sources" (which is code for an option you don’t get "I really doubt this is an encyclopaedic topic"). While the user can revise it and resubmit the draft, it generally gets rejected again and again. Eventually the user gives up and the draft is deleted after six months inactivity. Because the reviewing at AfC is rather soul-destroying (or so I find), reviewers decide to do something else with their time than monitor this stream of CoI dross, and so AfC is perpetually short of reviewers and there is usually a huge backlog of AfC reviews pending (which further discourages the contributing user). So back to the question of "does this policy work?". The answer is Yes it works in that it protects Wikipedia from content we do not want. The answer is No it doesn't work as genuine good faith users attempting to create an article on a topic that probably is encyclopedic are not noticed and given genuine assistance due to the conditioning of the reviewers and we lose those well-intentioned people as contributors because of this bad experience. It also burns out a lot of AfC reviewers along the way. What's the way to fix it? I wish I knew.

Kerry

-----Original Message----- From: Wiki-research-l [mailto:wiki-research-l-bounces@lists.wikimedia.org] On Behalf Of Haifeng Zhang Sent: Saturday, 10 August 2019 4:48 AM To: wiki-research-l@lists.wikimedia.org Subject: [Wiki-research-l] Question on article creation policy

Dear folks,

I'm checking the Article Creation page (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Article_creation), and it says:

The ability to create articles directly in mainspace is restrictedhttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:ACPERM to autoconfirmed users, though non-confirmed users and non-registered users can submit a proposed article through the Articles for Creationhttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Articles_for_creation process, where it will be reviewed and considered for publication.

Anyone knows when the restriction (e.g., registered and auto-confirmed) become effective? I tracked the past revisions of the page but found no clue. A more general question is: where to find information about policy changes, e.g., article creation, in Wikipedia?

Thanks,

Haifeng

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