[WikiEN-l] Article Landing Pages - functional prototype to test and comment on

Sun Mar 11 01:51:13 UTC 2012

Since the Foundation vetoed the EN wiki idea of not allowing newbies to
create articles until they'd been autoconfirmed, I'm surprised that it is
considering requiring them to have "a familiarity with policy" and "several
references". Yes you need that for a Good Article, but this is about new
articles at their very outset. Whatever happened to the idea of
crowdsourcing and being the encyclopedia that anyone can edit?

If you are going to require "a familiarity with policy" then simply
restricting new article creation to Autoconfirmed editors would not be
restrictive enough. Admins, Rollbackers, Reviewers and Autopatrollers would
probably be a reasonable proximation of editors who've demonstrated  a
familiarity with policy. Though if we must go down that route I'd prefer
something much less restrictive - would you be willing to compromise on 100
edits before you can create new pages? More importantly are you going to
seek community consensus for such a restriction? The idea of restricting
article creation to Autoconfirmed editors got a clear majority and arguably
a consensus on EN wiki, but I'm pretty sure that a significantly more
restrictive proposal would struggle to get consensus; I'm sure I wouldn't
be the only one to oppose it.

As for requiring several references, BLPprod was pretty contentious with
its requirement that all new BLPs have one reference (and not necessarily a
reliable one). It also allows for a tenday period in which  editors can add
a reference from a reliable source and rescue the article. several
references for any new article is a much higher barrier.

Before we go to such a restrictive closed wiki approach I'd really like to
understand why the WMF has made such an abrupt Uturn on openness. I'd also
like to see an answer from the great unanswered question of the ACTRIAL
proposal; Why do you want newbies to make their mistakes in existing and
sometimes very widely read articles where their mistakes will be widely
seen and permanently recorded in the edit history, as opposed  to have them
creating new articles which relatively few of our readers will read and
where many of the mistakes will disappear via deletion?

WereSpielChequers

On 10 March 2012 11:16, Oliver Keyes <okeyes at wikimedia.org> wrote:

> Hey guys
>
> So, as you know, we have issues with how new pages are treated on
> Wikipedia. A lot of the pages created by new editors simply aren't very
> good; this is bad for the new editors, because their pages get deleted, and
> bad for the new page patrollers who then have to wade through a tide of
> junk. It’s also contributing to page patrollers being overworked.
>  Recently, Engineering has been working on two projects that we hope will
> hopefully improve the situation: Page Triage,[1] which is aimed at making
> patrolling easier, and the Landing System:[2] a better way for new editors
> to create articles. With these project we hope to both reduce the burden on
> patrollers by making it easier to patrol, and by ensuring the articles that
> are created are of higher quality.
>
> The first of the two Engineering is working on, partly because it lends
> itself to being broken out into smaller pieces of work, is the Landing
> System. Currently, when a registered newbie clicks on a redlink, they get
> automatically taken to an edit page where they can create the article, but
> without any context as to what is actually happening.  With the proposed
> system,  instead of seeing a blank edit window devoid of context, they'll
> see a new page that gives them various options.[3] They can create an
> article there, go through the article wizard, or go back to wherever they
> were before if they didn't mean to end up at that URL. If a new editor
> tries to create the article, they'll be informed that they need a
> familiarity with policy, an absence of a COI and several references
> (amongst other things) before the tool recommends they create it.[4] If
> they don't have those things, they'll be directed to the Article Creation
> Wizard.
>
> This is an experiment. Our hypothesis is that this could help increase the
> quality of new articles and reduce patrollers’ workload, while making the
> process more welcoming at the same time.
>
> What our devs would really love is if people could provide feedback on what
> they've put together so far. There is an early prototype at
> http://ee-prototype.wmflabs.org/ <http://ee-prototype.wmflabs.org/;> , and
> I’d encourage everyone to test it out. The tool is currently targeted at
> logged in users since an account is required for creating a pge, so you
> have to be logged in to see it.  I’ve created a test account (username
> “editor”, password “mailing list”) for people to work with. Then just go to
> something like
> http://ee-prototype.wmflabs.org/wiki/Special:ArticleCreationLanding/test,
> and take a look at what you’re presented with.
>
> We know that the prototype server is fairly slow (sorry about that!) and
> the prototype could be a bit buggy, but if you have suggestions as to how
> we should improve the tool itself, you can send them to me at
> okeyes at wikimedia.org, or to
> http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Talk:Article_Creation_Workflow/Landing_System
> ,
> where the devs are watching closely :).
>
> Thanks!
>
> --
> Oliver Keyes
> Community Liaison, Product Development
> Wikimedia Foundation
>
>
> [1] http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/New_Page_Triage
> [2] http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Article_Creation_Workflow/Landing_System
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