What I have noticed is that new editors (speaking from workshop experience) find it harder to find the source button since it is no long written but equivalent to quotation mark => “ . To add a ref if they don’t know where to do it from they need to virtually try clicking every button. A lot of them also use external links by mistake (the buttons are so close to one other it’s easy to make a mistake). 

Kind regards,

Nattes 



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> 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&ecenable=1
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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