Forwarding to wikitech-l. Private e-mail threads are not a transparent way to discuss this.

-Chad

---------- Forwarded message ---------- From: Snotty Wong snottywong.wiki@gmail.com Date: Tue, Sep 13, 2011 at 12:02 PM Subject: Autoconfirmed article creation trial To: Jimbo Wales jwales@wikia.com, Jimmy Wales jwales@wikia-inc.com, sgardner@wikimedia.org, Philippe Beaudette pbeaudette@wikimedia.org, brion@wikimedia.org, bharris@wikimedia.org, rlane32@gmail.com, jalexander@wikimedia.org, ariel@wikimedia.org, aschulz4587@gmail.com, robla@wikimedia.org, swalling@wikimedia.org, innocentkiller@gmail.com, tstarling@wikimedia.org, Mdennis@wikimedia.org Cc: Kudpung kudpung.wikipedia@gmail.com, yanksinfinite@aol.com

Dear WMF staff and developers, I'm User:Snottywong on en-wiki and I'm emailing you on behalf of several other en-wiki users who have been helping to organize a trial.  The trial, which you may already be familiar with, is to temporarily restrict new article creation to autoconfirmed users.  If you're unfamiliar with the details, you can catch up by reading the original bugzilla thread I started in an attempt to implement the trial.  (See https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=30208) The bugzilla thread has largely become stale, there has been no activity for several weeks.  It's clear that some developers are not in favor of this trial, as they believe it will result in a reduction in new editor retention.  It would be an assumption of bad faith to say that the developers are purposely ignoring the bugzilla thread in the hopes that the volunteers who organized it will give up on trying to implement it, but sadly it appears this may be happening.  This email is an attempt to reopen the lines of communication between the volunteers who organized this trial and the developers, in the hopes that this more private communication will facilitate coordination.  I can assure you that nothing you send me in an email will be publicly posted. The situation, from the perspective of the volunteer editors who organized the trial, is this:  We put together a proposal to restrict article creation to autoconfirmed editors.  We posted notices to the proposal in the most public places on Wikipedia, the village pump, WP:Centralized discussion, etc.  Over 500 editors contributed their opinions to the proposal over the course of 2 months.  The proposal was then closed by an uninvolved admin, with the view that the proposal had been widely endorsed and there was consensus for the change.  The admin also noted that there was strong support for a trial of the changes before they are made permanent, and that this is the direction in which we should proceed. Anyone familiar with Wikipedia knows that it is spectacularly amazing for a proposal that was open for 2 months with 500+ editors contribution to actually succeed. So, we proposed the change, got strong support for it, and then we asked you guys to make it happen.  And we feel like the response we got was "we don't think that's a good idea, so we're not going to do it."  This was a very disappointing response for us, partly because of the hard work we had put in to organize the proposal and the trial, and partly because it goes against the fundamental Wikipedia concept of governing by consensus; one of the most important aspects of Wikipedia which has gotten it where it is today. After digesting this response for awhile and regrouping, we understand your natural instinct to protect Wikipedia from a change that you believe could hurt it.  This is the perspective we're coming from as well: we believe that the number of inappropriate and very poor quality articles that are created every day by very new users is hurting Wikipedia in a different way.  We do our best to patrol these new articles and we try to ensure that these inappropriate articles don't make it past our defense mechanisms, but there are simply too many to handle and plenty make it through.  This is evident when you click the "Random article" button a few times. It's also understandable that it's easy to assume that this trial, on the surface, will lead to less new editors and less new articles.  On the contrary, we believe that it will lead to more serious editors and better quality articles.  Quality over quantity.  We believe that with Wikipedia approaching 4 million articles, there is a natural decline in the number of new things that can be written about; and that instead of focusing on creating new articles, editors will begin to focus on fixing the ones we already have. But, we will never know what this change would bring unless we actually try it.  This is why we want to implement it only as a temporary trial, and reserve judgment until after the trial.  We need your help to make this happen.  Specifically, we need: 1. Your cooperation.  Nothing will happen if you guys stonewall us and refuse to act, and this would be a devastatingly disappointing outcome for dozens of editors. 2. Your expertise.  Changes to the MW software are required to implement this trial.  Some comments on the bugzilla thread imply that these changes are relatively minor.  We also need to collect copious statistics about the effects of the trial.  We can do much of this work ourselves, but we need your help in both collecting the statistics as well as determining which ones are important. 3. Your creativity.  Obviously, preventing people from creating new articles will produce some level of an annoyance factor for them.  The more positively we can communicate this restriction to new users, and the more options we can give them to create new articles and become autoconfirmed more quickly, the less annoyed the users will be. If we can make them feel like they've earned the trust of other editors by the time they become autoconfirmed, they will be that much more invested in the whole concept of Wikipedia. We have started some of this work at WP:ACTRIAL, but there is only so much we can do as volunteer editors with limited time and no developer access.  We need your help.  Please let us know if we can come together to make this happen, and let's lay out a road map for cooperatively and collaboratively implementing this trial. Best regards, Scott (User:Snottywong)