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

[Oliver Keyes]

On 11 March 2012 10:36, WereSpielChequers <werespielchequers at gmail.com>wrote:

> 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'll clarify, but testing the prototype would also have made it clear: it
isn't a requirement. We're not saying "you must agree that you have X, Y, Z
before you write an article". What it says is more along the lines of "bear
in mind that our editors usually expect writers not to do X or Y, but to
include Z. Articles that don't follow these guidelines may be removed, so
pay attention to that and here's a way to find out exactly what X, Y and Z
are". We have no intention to prohibit article creation - that would be
self-defeating. We just want to experiment to find out if we can improve
article creation.

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
>

Totally agreed that this is one of the major issues. My point was not "your
opinion is invalid because of ACTRIAL"; my point was that you, amongst many
others, have asked us to do work in this area - to make it both more
inviting to newbies and easier for editors to process. It is perfectly
acceptable to argue that ACW is not going to have an impact, and I'm happy
to debate that with you. But it is unfair, after telling us we need to work
in this area, to then take issue on principle with the fact that we're
doing so.