Hello,
When I was born, I didn't know how to speak or walk. When I started in the school, I
didn't know how to multiply 2x2. When I started in the University, I didn't know
how to research a topic within academy standards. When I first drove a car in the driving
school, I didn't know how to drive properly. In everyone of these learning steps, I
had someone helping me: my parents, my teachers, my professors, my driving-teacher(?).
When I started writing in Wikipedia, I didn't know what a template was, how to make a
redirect, what to link or not and how to properly add a reference. Instead of just
deleting things, we (the community) should help newbies. You can learn with a text written
inside a box or whatever, but way better is if we help them, take what they did and
correct it and let them improve. Could the editing platform be better designed? For sure.
But we are a community. It is in our hands to be rude with the newbies or welcoming. I try
to chose the second one.
Best,
Galder
________________________________
From: Gnangarra <gnangarra(a)gmail.com>
Sent: Saturday, March 9, 2024 1:18 PM
To: effeietsanders(a)gmail.com <effeietsanders(a)gmail.com>om>; Wikimedia Mailing List
<wikimedia-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org>
Subject: [Wikimedia-l] Re: Mopping with the tap open
could there be message box that asks a simple question like "thank you for the
contribution, where did you get this information from?" with a text field, it just
adds it to the edit description. so something is captured in the edit history.
On Sat, 9 Mar 2024 at 10:25, effe iets anders
<effeietsanders@gmail.com<mailto:effeietsanders@gmail.com>> wrote:
Thanks Benoit,
This sounds like a good step in the right direction. We'll need to try out several of
these approaches, but also improve our own documentation on nl.wikipedia. My impression is
that it is currently far too hard to add a reference, to expect that this is done by most
new contributors.
Do we know more about:
* How many new contributors know they should add a reference, e.g. when writing a new
article
* If they know that they should add a reference, how many know how to recognize a good
reference from a poor one
* How many new contributors, if they know that they should add a reference, can figure out
how to actually make this happen (assuming they know the url already)
* Assuming that they can find the reference button, and know their URL, in how many cases
does the auto-convert feature work? (we could test this by taking a random sample of
reference URLs, and entering them in the reference insertion tool)
These are not just technical problems - some of them are more about awareness (we can
focus for example a little less on copyright, and more on other quality aspects) or good
documentation (how to recognize a good source?). I also suspect that these numbers might
vary quite a bit across communities/countries.
In my personal experience, it is hard to add references to articles even if all the
'social' steps work smoothly (they often dont!). Maybe my sample is biased, but it
feels like I get much more often an error in nlwiki when I try to convert a url to a
citation, than in enwiki. Does anyone know if this is indeed the case? Is anyone tracking
statistics on this?
Best,
Lodewijk
On Wed, Mar 6, 2024 at 4:03 PM
<bevellin@wikimedia.org<mailto:bevellin@wikimedia.org>> wrote:
Hello
Some wikis have added the requirement to add citations at the edit summary step. But it is
clearly too late in the process, as users just want to publish. Some users will add
citations as a second step, but it might be too late, as the edit has a great chance of
being reverted meanwhile.
You might be interested in the Editing team's current project, Edit check
<https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Edit_check>.
This project aims to provide in-context help by checking on the edit. The first iteration
is "Reference Check": if a user adds a paragraph with zero source, they are
encouraged to add one. We are currently testing it at 22 Wikipedias, to verify if the
prompt to add citations is not blocking users.
You can test it at your wiki using an URL parameter:
1. Edit any article in the main namespace using the VisualEditor.
2. Add &ecenable=1 to the URL in your browser. -- For example in Dutch, as Romaine
started the thread:
https://nl.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Zon&veaction=edit&ecenab…
3. Reload the page with the new URL.
4. Create a new paragraph, that is at least 50 characters long without adding a citation
5. Press the Publish… Notice the prompt that appears
6. Test is completed, don't save your edit unless you know what you are doing.
All edits are tagged, so that you can find them in Recent Changes or in your Watchlist. If
a user selects "no" after the prompt, they have to select a reason why. That
reason is tagged as well, easing experienced users' work on patrolling and improving
these edits.
We will soon add a message if the added citation is listed on MediaWiki:Spam-blacklist or
MediaWiki:BlockedExternalDomains.json.
As Edit Check only checks the first paragraph added, the next iteration will be to add
multi-Reference checks. We are currently working on the design for multi-checks.
Of course, Edit Check is not limited to adding citations. We can imagine other ways to
close the tap. Your suggestions are welcomed, as are your questions.
Thank you,
--
Benoît Evellin - Trizek_(WMF) (he/him)
Community Relations Specialist
Wikimedia Foundation
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Boodarwun
Gnangarra
'ngany dabakarn koorliny arn boodjera dardon nlangan Nyungar koortabodjar'