On 28 May 2010 16:48, Alan Liefting aliefting@ihug.co.nz wrote:

A lot of rubbish articles get created that need to be speedied.

That's very true. And the CAT:CSD workload is more prone to backlog than it was a couple of years ago, perhaps because RfA is not as sympathetic to the 'recentchanges patrol' editors (the kind who keep such backlogs down) of years gone by.

AGK

I'll add that it doesn't take much to simply create an account and create an article that says "I luv Jane Doe she iz so awsumtastic!!" While banning anonymous creation in the mainspace had its good intentions, it's probably not as useful now as it was intended.

For instance, just today I speedy deleted a whole group of articles about some classmates in a primary school somewhere in the UK. If anons were allowed to create mainspace articles, and instead of a registered user creating these articles we had an IP, then not only would there be more transparency in who is creating them and where (as only CheckUser can see underlying IPs from registered accounts), but if blocks are needed to prevent disruption, we can make them relatively short-term (instead of the common practice of indefinitely blocking registered accounts as "vandalism-only").

Of course, it can also be argued that disallowing such editing may indeed help in smart article creation by reducing the number of crap articles (I mean complete crap) that gets created. There is probably some tradeoff there in new page creation as far as anon creation is concerned.

-MuZemike

On 5/28/2010 11:29 AM, Alan Liefting wrote:

AGK wrote:

...

On 28 May 2010 16:48, Alan Lieftingaliefting@ihug.co.nz wrote:

...

A lot of rubbish articles get created that need to be speedied.

That's very true. And the CAT:CSD workload is more prone to backlog than it was a couple of years ago, perhaps because RfA is not as sympathetic to the 'recentchanges patrol' editors (the kind who keep such backlogs down) of years gone by.

AGK

Keeping editing as a *very* open model makes extra work for the active editors. Since the anons cannot create new articles we are now getting millions (?) of bad faith editors creating an account to make edits. There are now over 12 million editors - many of them are blocked and many are "drive by" vandals with only a few edits.

Account creation or new article creation by new users needs to be changed.

Alan Liefitng

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I agree actually. It would also open the opportunity for rangeblocks on editors that dodge autoblocks more easily.

However I don't think you will ever achieve consensus for this. There are people in the community today that advocate blocking ip editing entirely, not just article creation. Getting those users to agree with opening anonymous article creation will likely be difficult. I'm not one of those people, but I recognize their presence.

Shirik Sent from my Verizon Wireless BlackBerry

-----Original Message----- From: MuZemike muzemike@gmail.com Date: Fri, 28 May 2010 13:31:40 To: English Wikipediawikien-l@lists.wikimedia.org Subject: Re: [WikiEN-l] declining numbers of active EN wiki admins

I'll add that it doesn't take much to simply create an account and create an article that says "I luv Jane Doe she iz so awsumtastic!!" While banning anonymous creation in the mainspace had its good intentions, it's probably not as useful now as it was intended.

For instance, just today I speedy deleted a whole group of articles about some classmates in a primary school somewhere in the UK. If anons were allowed to create mainspace articles, and instead of a registered user creating these articles we had an IP, then not only would there be more transparency in who is creating them and where (as only CheckUser can see underlying IPs from registered accounts), but if blocks are needed to prevent disruption, we can make them relatively short-term (instead of the common practice of indefinitely blocking registered accounts as "vandalism-only").

Of course, it can also be argued that disallowing such editing may indeed help in smart article creation by reducing the number of crap articles (I mean complete crap) that gets created. There is probably some tradeoff there in new page creation as far as anon creation is concerned.

-MuZemike

On 5/28/2010 11:29 AM, Alan Liefting wrote:

AGK wrote:

...

On 28 May 2010 16:48, Alan Lieftingaliefting@ihug.co.nz wrote:

...

A lot of rubbish articles get created that need to be speedied.

That's very true. And the CAT:CSD workload is more prone to backlog than it was a couple of years ago, perhaps because RfA is not as sympathetic to the 'recentchanges patrol' editors (the kind who keep such backlogs down) of years gone by.

AGK

Keeping editing as a *very* open model makes extra work for the active editors. Since the anons cannot create new articles we are now getting millions (?) of bad faith editors creating an account to make edits. There are now over 12 million editors - many of them are blocked and many are "drive by" vandals with only a few edits.

Account creation or new article creation by new users needs to be changed.

Alan Liefitng

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Emily, your approach to patrolling has it backwards. The priority is not removing articles; the priority is adding contributors. Without new contributors the inevitable attrition of existing active people will cause the quality to decline and the potential for covering new or neglected topics to diminish.

With new contributors, we can both improve the articles and gain new ones. It does not matter how someone gets here: if they care enough to create nonsense, they can be persuaded to create sensible material. The key hurdle is not persuading people to contribute usefully, but of persuading them to contribute at all.

For patrolling, nothing is easier than to remove impossible articles. One step harder, not all that much harder, but only a minority of New page patrollers do it, is figuring out which articles are improvable. A good deal harder is doing what Martijn asks for: to convert the people wandering into to make their mark, to mark their mark by doing something useful. It can be enormously rewarding.

I do not know how frequently he is able to try it. Myself, of the two or three dozen articles I deal with each day, I have time and energy to work with only one or two of the contributors. Martijn and I cannot do it all ourselves, but perhaps we can persuade you to join us, and try to rescue one contributor a day. It doesn't even take being an admin--if each of the thousand or so people who actively screen the incoming material did this for just one person, we could make an attempt to help the writer of every one of the unsatisfactory articles. If one in a hundred responded to us and became a significant contributor, 3,000 new really active people a year would deal with a great many of the problems of wikipedia. If we could get one in ten, it would totally rejuvenate the project.

On Fri, May 28, 2010 at 4:45 PM, Emily Monroe bluecaliocean@me.com wrote:

...

I'll add that it doesn't take much to simply create an account and create an article that says "I luv Jane Doe she iz so awsumtastic!!" While banning anonymous creation in the mainspace had its good intentions, it's probably not as useful now as it was intended.

...

For instance, just today I speedy deleted a whole group of articles about some classmates in a primary school somewhere in the UK. If anons were allowed to create mainspace articles, and instead of a registered user creating these articles we had an IP, then not only would their be more transparency in who is creating them and where (as only CheckUser can see underlying IPs from registered accounts), but if blocks are needed to prevent disruption, we can make them relatively short-term (instead of the common practice of indefinitely blocking registered accounts as "vandalism-only").

<snip>

Bad idea. I think we need to have a level above "autoconfirmed", where people can do things like gain additional rights (rollback, adminship, the like), and create articles. They need to have enough edits, and been here long enough so we can pass judgement on whether or not they are good faith.

Emily On May 28, 2010, at 1:31 PM, MuZemike wrote:

...

I'll add that it doesn't take much to simply create an account and create an article that says "I luv Jane Doe she iz so awsumtastic!!" While banning anonymous creation in the mainspace had its good intentions, it's probably not as useful now as it was intended.

For instance, just today I speedy deleted a whole group of articles about some classmates in a primary school somewhere in the UK. If anons were allowed to create mainspace articles, and instead of a registered user creating these articles we had an IP, then not only would there be more transparency in who is creating them and where (as only CheckUser can see underlying IPs from registered accounts), but if blocks are needed to prevent disruption, we can make them relatively short-term (instead of the common practice of indefinitely blocking registered accounts as "vandalism-only").

Of course, it can also be argued that disallowing such editing may indeed help in smart article creation by reducing the number of crap articles (I mean complete crap) that gets created. There is probably some tradeoff there in new page creation as far as anon creation is concerned.

-MuZemike

On 5/28/2010 11:29 AM, Alan Liefting wrote:

...

AGK wrote:

...

On 28 May 2010 16:48, Alan Lieftingaliefting@ihug.co.nz  wrote:

...

A lot of rubbish articles get created that need to be speedied.

That's very true. And the CAT:CSD workload is more prone to backlog than it was a couple of years ago, perhaps because RfA is not as sympathetic to the 'recentchanges patrol' editors (the kind who keep such backlogs down) of years gone by.

AGK

Keeping editing as a *very* open model makes extra work for the active editors. Since the anons cannot create new articles we are now getting millions (?) of bad faith editors creating an account to make edits. There are now over 12 million editors - many of them are blocked and many are "drive by" vandals with only a few edits.

Account creation or new article creation by new users needs to be changed.

Alan Liefitng

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David Gerard wrote:

On 28 May 2010 23:21, David Goodman dgoodmanny@gmail.com wrote:

...

With new contributors, we can both improve the articles and gain new ones. It does not matter how someone gets here: if they care enough to create nonsense, they can be persuaded to create sensible material. The key hurdle is not persuading people to contribute usefully, but of persuading them to contribute at all.

+1

Those who speak of trying to restrict contributions because we haven't got the admins have it completely arse-backwards.

Without wanting to re-inforce a message just on its merits, which is certainly something worthy in itself; my preferred phrasing is "bass-ackwards".

Yours, in such deep suplication, it hurts my tippy toe shoes.

Jussi-Ville Heiskanen

First off, let me say that you have influenced my editing a bit. Just read my whole email.

Let me respond to your statements one at time, in no particular order.

For patrolling, nothing is easier than to remove impossible articles. One step harder, not all that much harder, but only a minority of New page patrollers do it, is figuring out which articles are improvable.

I've improved articles, particularly during lulls when new pages aren't being created (or, at least, when new, nonsense articles aren't being created--I know, I should do this all the time, and I think I'll least do it much more often). I've copyedited, I've wikified, I've added categories, I've removed POV statements, and I've added to wikiprojects. Every so often, I'll do so to see if it really does fit deletion criteria. Sometimes, when I do this, I get an edit conflict with somebody else adding a deletion tag. 99% of the time, it's a CSD tag. If it's a CSD tag, then I usually give up. I don't have the time to improve the article before it gets deleted, for one. Plus, if my intuition is verified by someone else, then perhaps my intuition is correct.

If an article is highly technical, I'll just not mark that page as patrolled. I'm sure that's forgivable.

The priority is not removing articles; the priority is adding contributors.

I partially agree with you on this. The point of new page patrol isn't removing articles. The point isn't adding contributors, either, though. It's catching problem articles early on, and then actually doing something about it.

It does not matter how someone gets here: if they care enough to create nonsense, they can be persuaded to create sensible material.

I guess this falls under "assumption of good faith". The sad truth is that we're not always dealing with good faith. If somebody writes about the awesomeness of their newest crush, or insulting their hated teacher as their first article, it tells me that they don't take Wikipedia very seriously. While these editors have good faith, they lack maturity. If they inserted such nonsense into an existing article, we wouldn't have so much patience. This is particularly true if they don't log in. We'd give them four chances, and ban them. Like I said, it isn't an issue of good faith. It's an issue of competence.

If somebody, on the other hand, posts their resume or writes about their garage band, this is probably true. We can point to the notability guidelines and be like "Look. It isn't personal, but if your band doesn't even have a consistent name yet, then you probably shouldn't write an article about it."

My main concern is that I see new contributors' writing articles, and it's obvious that they are biting off more than they chew. Templated or no, there is no way to say "No, your article doesn't fit criteria for inclusion" to a newcomer, who doesn't even have a talk page yet, without violating WP:BITE. Every time I have to tag an article written by such a person, I know that chances are good they are never coming back. The problem is, most of them never bother to read the message. I'm not sure how to completely fix this. If I write out, "Hey! Your article might be speedily deleted! Quick! Slap a {{hangon}} tag and write why your article should be included in Wikipedia on the talk page! You might also try actually improving the article really, really quickly!", the article might be deleted by the time I'm done. That's why templated messages exist.

Maybe we can remove the scary-looking red, exclamated triangle from the template, and remove any mention of speedy deletion from the subject header (just have it be like "Your article, [insert article link here]). This bothers me a bit philosophically because it's euphemistic, but it might be necessary.

All I'm proposing is giving space between autoconfirmation and being able to create articles.

I think I'll try out writing the deletion warning message for the articles that I PROD. I will also try to improve the less obvious articles that I think might fit the CSD criteria more often (Its good practice for editing less difficult articles, anyway ;-).

And at this point, I think I'll at least temporarily bow out of the debate.

Emily

On May 28, 2010, at 5:21 PM, David Goodman wrote:

Emily, your approach to patrolling has it backwards. The priority is not removing articles; the priority is adding contributors. Without new contributors the inevitable attrition of existing active people will cause the quality to decline and the potential for covering new or neglected topics to diminish.

With new contributors, we can both improve the articles and gain new ones. It does not matter how someone gets here: if they care enough to create nonsense, they can be persuaded to create sensible material. The key hurdle is not persuading people to contribute usefully, but of persuading them to contribute at all.

For patrolling, nothing is easier than to remove impossible articles. One step harder, not all that much harder, but only a minority of New page patrollers do it, is figuring out which articles are improvable. A good deal harder is doing what Martijn asks for: to convert the people wandering into to make their mark, to mark their mark by doing something useful. It can be enormously rewarding.

I do not know how frequently he is able to try it. Myself, of the two or three dozen articles I deal with each day, I have time and energy to work with only one or two of the contributors. Martijn and I cannot do it all ourselves, but perhaps we can persuade you to join us, and try to rescue one contributor a day. It doesn't even take being an admin--if each of the thousand or so people who actively screen the incoming material did this for just one person, we could make an attempt to help the writer of every one of the unsatisfactory articles. If one in a hundred responded to us and became a significant contributor, 3,000 new really active people a year would deal with a great many of the problems of wikipedia. If we could get one in ten, it would totally rejuvenate the project.

On Fri, May 28, 2010 at 4:45 PM, Emily Monroe bluecaliocean@me.com wrote:

...

...

I'll add that it doesn't take much to simply create an account and create an article that says "I luv Jane Doe she iz so awsumtastic!!" While banning anonymous creation in the mainspace had its good intentions, it's probably not as useful now as it was intended.

...

For instance, just today I speedy deleted a whole group of articles about some classmates in a primary school somewhere in the UK. If anons were allowed to create mainspace articles, and instead of a registered user creating these articles we had an IP, then not only would their be more transparency in who is creating them and where (as only CheckUser can see underlying IPs from registered accounts), but if blocks are needed to prevent disruption, we can make them relatively short-term (instead of the common practice of indefinitely blocking registered accounts as "vandalism-only").

<snip>

Bad idea. I think we need to have a level above "autoconfirmed", where people can do things like gain additional rights (rollback, adminship, the like), and create articles. They need to have enough edits, and been here long enough so we can pass judgement on whether or not they are good faith.

Emily On May 28, 2010, at 1:31 PM, MuZemike wrote:

...

I'll add that it doesn't take much to simply create an account and create an article that says "I luv Jane Doe she iz so awsumtastic!!" While banning anonymous creation in the mainspace had its good intentions, it's probably not as useful now as it was intended.

For instance, just today I speedy deleted a whole group of articles about some classmates in a primary school somewhere in the UK. If anons were allowed to create mainspace articles, and instead of a registered user creating these articles we had an IP, then not only would there be more transparency in who is creating them and where (as only CheckUser can see underlying IPs from registered accounts), but if blocks are needed to prevent disruption, we can make them relatively short-term (instead of the common practice of indefinitely blocking registered accounts as "vandalism-only").

Of course, it can also be argued that disallowing such editing may indeed help in smart article creation by reducing the number of crap articles (I mean complete crap) that gets created. There is probably some tradeoff there in new page creation as far as anon creation is concerned.

-MuZemike

On 5/28/2010 11:29 AM, Alan Liefting wrote:

...

AGK wrote:

...

On 28 May 2010 16:48, Alan Lieftingaliefting@ihug.co.nz wrote:

...

A lot of rubbish articles get created that need to be speedied.

That's very true. And the CAT:CSD workload is more prone to backlog than it was a couple of years ago, perhaps because RfA is not as sympathetic to the 'recentchanges patrol' editors (the kind who keep such backlogs down) of years gone by.

AGK

Keeping editing as a *very* open model makes extra work for the active editors. Since the anons cannot create new articles we are now getting millions (?) of bad faith editors creating an account to make edits. There are now over 12 million editors - many of them are blocked and many are "drive by" vandals with only a few edits.

Account creation or new article creation by new users needs to be changed.

Alan Liefitng

---

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-- David Goodman, Ph.D, M.L.S. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:DGG

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On 28 May 2010 17:18, Gwern Branwen gwern0@gmail.com wrote:

Jimbo himself admits that banning all anons from page creation didn't do much of anything to help.

He's not talking about banning unregistered/unconfirmed users from creating pages. I think he is talking about tightening up on article creation generally, though in what way I'm unsure.

{{fact}}

In any case, he certainly has a point. Having to wade through the nonsense that gets submitted to Wikipedia is a huge time leech. Suggesting otherwise is silly.

AGK

Andrew Gray wrote:

Regardless of what technically happens to that submitted junk, and how many boxes they tick in the process, we'll still fundamentally have a space people can put prospective article content into, and someone has to say no to it.

Is that true? When was the family of deletion processes last reconsidered? If we had a good look at PROD-like mechanisms, which could be partially automated, and "holding areas" where marginal content could be placed in limbo, what would we come up with? What if stub-sorting (by topic) were more integrated with quality sorting? We have certainly not scaled any great heights of sophistication in dealing with the influx of articles. That may or may not be a good thing, but there is surely scope for innovation.

Charles

I say this as a new page patroller myself:

For love of all that's sweet and holy, somebody higher up please tighten up the technical standards for non-userfyed article creation. Most of my PRODs and CSDs nominations are from people who simply don't know what they are doing. In the meantime, they get to bypass the more popular recent changes, and instead their aganist-policy creations are clogging up the more obscure new page patrol.

Emily On May 28, 2010, at 10:48 AM, Alan Liefting wrote:

Tightening up on new page creation would free up a lot of time for admins as well as other editors. A lot of rubbish articles get created that need to be speedied.

Alan Liefting

WereSpielChequers wrote:

...

The good news is that after dipping below the 1720 peak, admin numbers are on the rise again and we currently have what I believe is a new record of 1724 admins. However if one were to exclude adminbots then I think we are still below peak levels, and even if we are now appointing admins faster than they are resigning, the key metric is the number of active admins, and that is currently about 170 below peak levels, as less than half our admins are now active.

Apart from admin bots we only have 24 admins who created their accounts in the last 24 months, and at least a couple of them were new accounts for returning admins. http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special:ListUsers&dir=prev&... What few RFAs we have are largely mopping up stragglers from years back, so wikipedia may still be getting lots of new editors, but very few are becoming admins

We had a step change after rollback was unbundled in early 2008, and there was a big fall in RFAs, Things have since deteriorated further, there were fewer successful RFAs in 2009 than 2008, and the 2010 results so far are continuing the trend. It used to provoke comment whenever there were no RFAs on the board, now such events have become normal.

My fear is that if these trends http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:WereSpielChequers/RFA_by_month continue, we will have a growing gulf between admins and non-admins, as the defacto requirements for RFA are becoming out of reach for most editors.

We may still have enough admins to do the urgent admin tasks for quite some time to come; But I can see us becoming more dependant on the occasional admin who can clear a 100 article backlog at CSD in an hour or two, and I fear a growing divide between admins and others.

WereSpielChequers

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