[WikiEN-l] Massive AfC backlog

[Katie Chan]

On 19/06/2012 20:59, Steven Walling wrote:
> On Tue, Jun 19, 2012 at 11:52 AM, Tom Morris<tom at tommorris.org>  wrote:
>
>> There is currently an enormous backlog at Articles for Creation, of over
>> 700 articles.
>>
>> If you've got some time spare, it'd be great if you could help work on the
>> AfC backlog.
>>
>> See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:AFC
>>
>> Many hands make light wiki-work. ;-)
>>
>
> Thank you for bringing this up Tom.

I'll second this comment. :)

> As a volunteer admin, it looks to me like AFC is horrible mess. Not only
> has there always been a large backlog, but articles that have references
> and would normally pass the CSD barrier at New Page Patrol are routinely
> rejected for trivial reasons.

To be fair, we did manage to get it down to just over 200 only recently. 
The problem is of course it went back up fairly quickly. The rate of 
reviews is about even with the rate of submissions, which mean a few 
days with less review than normal will cause the backlog to shoot way up 
and not come back down.

> I think we need to brainstorm ways to either drastically improve AFC's
> ability to review articles in a reasonable time, or discuss not
> highlighting it so prominently to authors of new articles. People who
> actively seek input from other editors before publishing articles in
> mainspace are our most promising new editors, and we're doing them a grave
> disservice right now.

This is a permanent issue. On the one hand, we have people who think AFC 
acceptance standard is too high, with AFC requiring newbies submitter to 
have a better understanding of WP:MOS and various rules than we would in 
mainspace. OTOH, we have people who thinks article acceptance standard 
isn't high enough and that reviewer should consider a hundred and one 
thing before accepting an article.

Personally, while I do think AFC is perhaps a little bit stricter than
necessary, and I'm probably guilty as charged myself here, I don't think 
the standard should be whether it would survive CSD either. There's a 
lot of articles that doesn't meet CSD which would definitely get deleted 
via AfD that rightly get rejected.

BTW, the solution to the backlog is not to stop highlighting it to new
authors but to attract more reviewers so that more submissions get reviewed.

KTC

-- 
Experience is a good school but the fees are high.
     - Heinrich Heine