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

[WereSpielChequers]

Hi Oliver,

Yes my criticism of your requiring new authors of new articles to have  "a
familiarity with policy" and "several references" was about what you said
you intend this new software to do, not on how close the current prototype
is to achieving that. If your intent is other than you said then please
clarify your intent, don't expect me to disregard your stated intent simply
because the current prototype doesn't fully implement it yet.

I'm well aware of last year's studies which showed that despite an
increasing proportion being spammers and far more being vandals than in our
early years, most new editors are still editing in good faith. But that
doesn't mean they don't make mistakes, a large proportion of them do, much
of my editing is fixing mistakes made by new editors. One of the divides in
the community is between those who think that newbies need to be accepted
indeed welcomed, their mistakes corrected without criticism and their good
stuff celebrated; As opposed to the majority who supported the idea of
stopping editors creating articles until they'd been autoconfirmed, and who
believe in template bombing newbies articles or simply reverting their
edits as "unsourced".

Your comment "we'd been led to believe that in the eyes of the community,
new pages can be a serious problem. One of the most vocal editors telling
us this was an issue was you." is potentially misleading. Yes I've been
concerned about the new page process since at least 2009. Remember my
mystery shopping exercise when I demonstrated that new articles by new
editors face a significant risk of being incorrectly tagged for speedy
deletion and sometimes even deleted? But I approach this from an Article
Rescue Squadron perspective. To me the major problems are in the loss of
good faith contributions and contributors. Others took a very different
tack and the community voted by a clear majority for the ACTRIAL proposal -
which you and I both opposed. So the majority of the community consider
that new pages by newbies are a serious problem; I consider that the new
page process has serious problems. The difference is crucial, your comment
implies that I was a vocal supporter of ACTRIAL rather than an opponent of
it.


I do talk to some of our more deletionist colleagues, and we have a lot of
common ground in ways to improve new page patrol to more effectively sift
the goodfaith from the Badfaith articles. There are several flaws in the
new page process and even a number of proposed improvements that  I have
been able to agree with vocal supporters of ACTRIAL. Where we disagree is
in whether we think that the best way to improve quality is to raise
barriers to newbies or to help the goodfaith ones and collaborate with them.

WSC

On 11 March 2012 03:37, Oliver Keyes <okeyes at wikimedia.org> wrote:

> WSC, have you actually tried using the prototype, as suggested? It makes
> very clear precisely what we're suggesting of newbies. I may be mistaken,
> but your questions above about what exactly is included, and the idea that
> we "require" anything, strongly implies you haven't actually tested it. It
> might be a good idea to use the prototype before commenting on it.
>
> Nobody has said "we want our existing articles filled with errors". Nobody,
> anywhere, has said that. Nor have we any evidence to suggest this is the
> case; Steven and a few others did a small study last year that showed the
> vast majority of edits by new and anonymous people are good edits, and
> we've just wrapped up a larger one with Aaron Halfaker, Stuart Geiger and
> Maryana Pinchuk that provides more data on that. Of course we want quality:
> this idea that quality and openness are somehow opposed in a titanic battle
> to the death is simply incorrect. The reason we're starting off by seeing
> if we can improve quality and inform newbies with Special:NewPages rather
> than Special:RecentChanges is, firstly, because it's a lot easier to trial
> there (less stuff going on), and secondly because we'd been led to believe
> that in the eyes of the community, new pages can be a serious problem. One
> of the most vocal editors telling us this was an issue was you.
>
> On 11 March 2012 03:00, WereSpielChequers <werespielchequers at gmail.com
> >wrote:
>
> > Hi Steven,
> >
> > I'm quoting from OKeyes' description  "a familiarity with policy" and
> > "several references" and responding to that proposal. If the experiment
> is
> > going to be nothing like that, then how would you describe it?
> >
> > WSC
>
>