Community Wishlist Survey 2019/Admins and patrollers/Page Curation and New Pages Feed improvements

Page Curation and New Pages Feed improvements

  • Problem: New Page Review is a key process on Wikipedia, and the only firewall that prevents inappropriate new pages being added to the Encyclopedia. However, there are many longstanding issues with the Page Curation tools and the New Pages feed which inhibit efficiency and cause problems to be overlooked. Aside from a few additions made when the Growth Team added Articles for Creation (AfC) drafts to the New Page Feed last year, the tools haven't been supported for many years and the list of proposed developments is long. These include bugs, features never implemented, and suggested improvements which have been left unaddressed. While a few requests for improvement of the tools used by New Page Reviewers can be addressed by on-wiki customisation by volunteers, most others are part of the Mediawiki software and require the intervention of the WMF developers.

    We have been repeatedly informed that the Community Tech Team does not have the resources to provide ongoing support for the tools they developed (or even to fix bugs that have popped up) and that this wishlist is the only venue for us to come to for technical assistance. While some of the tasks below are almost trivially easy, others may require a significant time investment.

  • Who would benefit: While New Page Reviewers and admins are the only users with access to the Page Curation tools, ultimately the entire wiki benefits from the work that we do. AfC drafts were recently added to the New Page Feed, and many of the suggested improvements here would also benefit the AfC team. The English wiki is also not the only one that could benefit, as these tools are not only relegated to EN Wikipedia but were originally designed to be available for use on other wikis as well (There are currently some bugs stopping the rollout of the tools on other wikis, fixing these is part of this proposal as well; This would make the Page Curation tools and New Page Feed able to be enabled on other language wikis).
  • Proposed solution: The requested improvements come in a few categories:
    • Bugs that should have been fixed a long time ago,
    • Additional sorting options and additional 'potential issues' flagging in the PC tools and New Pages Feed, which would help to flag problems for reviewers to follow up on,
    • Resources dedicated to other suggested improvements supported by the New Page Reviewer community to make them more user-friendly and improve efficiency and to make them non-en.wiki-specific, enabling rollout on other language wikis.
  • More comments: While there were several dozen good suggested improvements, we have listed only the highest priority items below by their Phabricator tickets, in the hope that at least some of our most pressing concerns will be addressed.

Discussion

Insertcleverphrasehere: Just a heads up, if you didn't notice -- we've moved this proposal from "Miscellaneous" to "Admins and patrollers". -- DannyH (WMF) (talk) 18:52, 15 November 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Possibly not at this moment in time, because it is still not perfect until the wished for upgrades are carried out. The English Wikipedia is however by far the most important project and being synonymous with the word Wikipedia is the source for all the undesirable pages masquerading as encyclopedia articles. As a MediaWiki extension, it could probably be ported to other WikiMedia projects (and even other non-Foundation projects who want to use it). It should be borne in mind however that without a well performing New Page vetting system, the English Wikipedia will cease to exist as we know it. Kudpung (talk) 06:16, 18 November 2018 (UTC)[reply]
Excuse me, I must ask you to say that again. What a nice and vivid statement concerning the status of English Wikipedia. "English Wikipedia is by far the most important project"? "English Wikipedia is the synonym for Wikipedia"? What's the proof? --Super Wang on zhwiki (Share your opinions) 12:04, 20 November 2018 (UTC)[reply]
Super Wang on zhwiki I think that Kudpung is referring to en.wikipedia being the hardest hit by spam and promotion pages. Therefore it is more necessary to have a robust system in place to deal with these additions on the English Wikipedia than anywhere else (elsewhere a lower volume can generally be dealt with by a small dedicated team, this is difficult on en.wiki). En.wiki *is* synonymous with the word Wikipedia, and it is the first project that companies and individuals come to when looking to advertise or promote themselves; specific countries have in-country promotional issues to deal with, en.wiki has global promotion to deal with. — Insertcleverphrasehere (or here) 13:38, 20 November 2018 (UTC)[reply]
@Insertcleverphrasehere:Thank you for explanation, but sorry, that doesn't make much sense to me. You know, due to Taiwan's int'l status and the large population using Chinese language, zhwiki has also been always a target of vandalism. I acknowledge that enwiki is the first project ever, but if you think enwiki is the only source and bulletin board for companies and celebrities, I must say that thought reflects "English language-priority". --Super Wang on zhwiki (Share your opinions) 00:17, 21 November 2018 (UTC)[reply]
Besides, enwiki has a "global" promotion doesn't mean other wikis don't. Chinese is the language used by the most people (1.5 billion, 2015 consensus) on this planet. There aren't less issues than those on enwiki here on zhwiki. It's some kind of bias that someone thinks "English Wikipedia has 'global' issues to deal with". --Super Wang on zhwiki (Share your opinions) 00:24, 21 November 2018 (UTC)[reply]
@Super Wang on zhwiki: Fair enough, and fair enough. As I've said in comments below, I'm keen to push to fix remaining issues that are keeping the Page curation tools from being non-en.wiki-specific, so that they can be used on other wikis as well; the phab task is phab:T50552. If we do this right, then the work done for these improvements can be ported to other wikis such as zh.wiki. Keen to chat more about this. — Insertcleverphrasehere (or here) 00:49, 21 November 2018 (UTC)[reply]
just a note I moved the discussion below to the discussion page. --Cohaf (talk) 00:51, 21 November 2018 (UTC)[reply]
You could listen a bit more carefully to your fellow intl Wikipedians. I also wondered why this is the top wish for „a key process on Wikipedia“ but it's about the US/GB Wikipedia only. Sargoth (talk) 10:09, 23 November 2018 (UTC)[reply]
@Sargoth, Once again, we were forced to come here as a last resort by community tech, which refused to maintain or update the tools that they built many years ago unless we came here and got in the top 10. Not sure how much more carefully you want me to listen; I've added the ticket to make the tools non-en.wiki-specific to the list above, and I'm going to push for this if I can so that these tools can be made available elsewhere on other language wikis as well. — Insertcleverphrasehere (or here) 13:29, 23 November 2018 (UTC)[reply]
„as a last resort“, this sounds disillusioned. I hope you get your supports (I didn't vote here and will propably not but am quite disapointed about the oppose-votes at the gender options proposal. Best of luck :) Sargoth (talk) 14:07, 23 November 2018 (UTC)[reply]
Sargoth Somewhat disillusioned, yes. As for the gender options one, note that oppose votes don't count. Still, the premise of a voting free-for-all and top ten as a good system for identifying all the stuff that needs developing is a bit ridiculous. It tends to lead to no development for proposals that are fairly trivial to fix, but only impact a relatively small segment of the user base. A good man once said that "Democracy is two wolves and a lamb voting on what to have for lunch". We had the same problem here, in that NPP isn't particularly sexy; this proposal is going to take a fair amount of effort, and while essential, it doesn't directly help all wikipedians (you can see some people complaining about it below). Note that you can canvass to your heart's content per the wishlist rules (which is really dumb, but it is how we managed to get a decent number of votes here). I'd suggest heading over to various wikiprojects and canvassing for votes if you want that particular proposal to pass in the top 10. — Insertcleverphrasehere (or here) 16:01, 23 November 2018 (UTC)[reply]
  • Oppose per Jo-Jo Eumerus, this is a Fascistism to IP users, things that is suitable for English are not necessarily suitable for other languages. --117.14.243.161 03:21, 26 November 2018 (UTC)[reply]
    Note that each language wiki would be able to use their own tags and deletion processes by specifiying what is in each section of the toolbar via on-wiki .js pages. As for 'Fascistism' to IP users; there is a simple solution to that problem. — Insertcleverphrasehere (or here) 08:58, 26 November 2018 (UTC)[reply]
  •   Comment I would really love to see a wiki-agnostic page curation tool. I wish there was a way to vote for that specifically - right now it's just one of a big bag of feature requests, a significant part of which I imagine would have to be dropped to make the scope reasonable. --Tgr (talk) 04:47, 25 November 2018 (UTC)[reply]
      Comment @Tgr Most of the other feature requests are things that the other language wikis will want as well. In any case, from the looks of things making the tools non-en.wiki specific only consists of a few key things that need fixing, so not hard to tack on to this proposal; value for effort, it is one of the best tasks on this list. Making the tools Wiki-agnostic (non-en.wiki-specific) was tried as a separate request a few years ago in the community wishlist, but failed to garner enough support (40-somethingth); honestly getting tacked on to this proposal is the best chance it has to be completed. — Insertcleverphrasehere (or here) 09:04, 25 November 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Voting