• New page patrollers might be interested in participating in this. —SW— ^prattle 21:34, 20 September 2011 (UTC)

Who has got the time, the initiative, and the software? Certainly neither the majority of the NPPers, nor probably the few unpaid volunteers who are able to do a proper job of NPP (certainly not me, anyway). If the WMF want such research, they should consider doing it themselves like they did their 'Summer of Research' - which incidentally they got wrong and published wildly iincorrect and misleading claims and statistics at Haifa. In doing so they may begin to understand that the real problem lies not in 'patroller burnout' or any other such nonsense, but in a lack of WMF initiative to address the issue at the core of the problem: the maturity and experience of the NPPers. --Kudpung กุดผึ้ง (talk) 09:51, 22 September 2011 (UTC)

Kudpung, I understand your frustration with WMF more than most. We spent a long time planning ACTRIAL and the WMF has made it clear that it's not going to happen. However, what it did accomplish was to demonstrate to WMF the nature and the urgency of several major problems with WP, and prompted them to devote resources to addressing those problems. Refusing to give them input to guide them on these improvements would be cutting off your nose to spite your face. I agree that their ideas will not solve 100% of the problems that ACTRIAL was designed to solve, but even if we only get a solution to 50% of the problems, it's better than getting a solution to 0% of the problems. I say let's take what we can get for the moment, and hope that while WMF is digging into these issues they will see some of the things we have seen for years, and perhaps being to agree with us that allowing any idiot to immediately create a new article no longer serves a useful purpose here. —SW— ^squeal 14:32, 22 September 2011 (UTC)

I understand where you're coming from SW, but I have lost a lot of confidence in the WMF over this issue, along with a lot of enthusiasm for Wikipedia. It was only because of the insulting terms and personal attacks they used at Bugzilla. If they had explained themselves in a civil manner, I might have been disposed to collaborate on alternative solutions; but telling us now to do screencasts to prove what we've already told them is just yet another way of expressing their disdain and distrust for the work and research of the volunteers who may be just as qualified - if not more so - than they are themselves. Kudpung กุดผึ้ง (talk) 16:36, 22 September 2011 (UTC)

(Moved from Wikipedia talk:New pages patrol/patrolled pages )

I am wondering if the following is possible. This script (User:Bradv/AjaxPatrolLinks.js) uses AJAX patrol links once you are on a new article, so you can click on "mark as patrolled" without leaving the page. This script (User:Mr.Z-man/patrollinks.js) adds patrol links to all unpatrolled pages when viewing in Special:NewPages, however clicking the link will load a new page. The first script seems to find the "mark as patrolled" link by div class (which is always 'patrollink' on new pages), which is not used by the second script. The second script generates the links without a div class, instead using a span id that changes with each link. (i.e., <span id="plink0">, <span id="plink1">, etc).

The million dollar question: is there any way to combine the scripts so I can have AJAX patrol links on Special:NewPages? This would useful on other projects like Commons as well. ^Avic_ennasis @ 22:57, 7 Elul 5770 / 17 August 2010 (UTC)

(Moved from Wikipedia talk:New pages patrol/patrolled pages) --Kudpung กุดผึ้ง (talk) 18:19, 26 September 2011 (UTC)

I'm strongly of the belief that these articles are being checked, they just aren't being patrolled, because most people don't edit via the Special:NPP page, they find them via the NewArticleBot, a new link added to existing pages etc. So I randomly picked 9 pages - the top article of every 500 article page. Very small sample, I know, but completely random over the 28 day range. Only two of them had only been edited by the article creator - but one had been added to a WikiProject (ie talk page created) by an experienced editor with autoreviewer, reviewer & rollbacker rights. The other had a ref, a navbox and two cats, so is in OK form. One was created by a user with over 30000 edits (not sure why he isn't autopatrolled) and was stub-sorted by a autoreviewer and had a bot ask for more cats. One was editted by 4 fairly new editors, but was added to a Wikiproject by an experienced editor and had 4 refs, an infobox, fully categorised and a navbox. One had a heading fixed by an autoreviewer, was added to a wikiproject and had a navbox and a cat. One had minor errors fixed by an autoreviewer using AWB, but had nav and infoboxes and good cats. Two articles had cats added by admins.

So, what does this all mean? Of these 9 articles, which span the breadth of the 28 day backlog, all had been viewed, edited or improved by experienced editors. But none had been officially patrolled. Ideally, I'd love to see my suggestion above, that any non-minor edit by an experienced editor (create a new user-right, or use one of the existing user-rights, I don't care) should be marked as patrolled. Twinkle seems to do it sometimes - (I saw one article that had been twinkled but was still on the unpatrolled list). Patrolling isn't the only defence that Wikipedia has against poor quality articles. We have cleanup template tagging and backlog attacks, we have article alerts, we have new article bots, we have database lists, we have catscans, we have wikiprojects. There are many ways to filter out the articles that shouldn't be here, patrolling is just one (very good) way to start the process. But if they get through due to a poor patrol, then I would almost guarantee that they will be caught at some stage in the future.

If the "any edit by an experienced editor = patrolled" approach isn't acceptable, then the next best thing is to simply show that "mark as patrolled" link on the page regardless of how you find the page - ie not just if you click on it from the NPP page. This apparently caused performance issues last time it was tried, but it would open up patrolling to so many more people. We already have Twinkle for when we see problems, but what about when there are no Twinkle-related problems?

To sum up - people are informally patrolling these articles - they just aren't clicking the right link. Either remove the need to click the button, or make the button more accessible. The-Pope (talk) 12:50, 21 September 2011 (UTC)

"any edit by an experienced editor = patrolled"—This is certainly not true. There are editors that drive by articles and add cats or sort stubs and do nothing else to the article. There are a handful of these editors (probably the admin you noted is one of these), who have truly insanely high edit counts, that seem to spend a certain amount of time doing nothing but adding/sorting categories. It's great that they do that, but it does mean that you can't interpret an edit by an experienced editor to mean that the article has been patrolled. As you note, always showing the "mark patrolled" button is not feasible: [1]. Of course, these things are always possible, but it may entail adding a separate indexing system for looking up whether an article is patrolled, or redoing the data model, etc; I don't know anything about this software, it may simply be more trouble/expensive than it is worth. ErikHaugen (talk | contribs) 19:25, 21 September 2011 (UTC)

Assuming that the daily intake of new pages from non-autopatrolled users is around 1,000, The Pope's sample size is far too small to be representative. Let's not forget that a huge number of new pages aren't even articles, they are just blatant nonsense, spam, vandalism, hoax, or test pages - many of which will have been instantly summarily deleted by any admin who happens to be patrolling new pages, while others tagged as such will also be very rapidly deleted. These pages will not figure in the sample. The biggest problem lies in the pages that are patrolled as suitable that should be instantly deleted or at least tagged for major issues, this even includes copyvio and dangerous attack pages that are TLDR for the majority of NPPers who will not recognise them as such. There are only two possible solutions to these problems:

• Make NPPer a user right for experienced editors only

and/or

• Implement the Live new pages by autoconfirmed editors only rule - or at least accept the consensus for a trial of it.

Any other solutions such as new zoom tools will only be as good as their users. Kudpung กุดผึ้ง (talk) 10:15, 22 September 2011 (UTC)

It wasn't meant to be a representative sample of new pages, it was just a snapshot of the NPP backlog and I expected to see over half as virtually untouched since creation, so I was surprised to see that so many had had some work done on them by experienced editors. I agree with Erik that the "all edits" approach will probably miss too many articles, but I simply refuse to accept that we have to have a walled garden approach that only edits via the NPP page count, all others are not valid patrols. Creating a special NPP user right will still be useless if you force us to only patrol in one way. The "show the Mark as Patrolled to more editors" approach is just so obvious, that I can't accept that a technical solution is not workable. Find another way to do it. Get someone else to code it. Look at it from a different angle. Start from scratch. Please. Or else, quit worrying about the constant 30 day backlog and hope that somehow, someway, other than NPP, we manage to weed out the bad from the good and pray that the NPP regulars don't give up so we have a chance of keeping it as a 20 day backlog. — Preceding unsigned comment added by The-Pope (talk • contribs) 11:44, 22 September 2011

Could it be that the examples given are because many experienced editors tend to work on a specific issue. When I edit new pages it's because I'm looking for something specific and it happens to match, such as looking for BLPs with a lack of any references and add {{blp unsourced}}, but my adding of a tag doesn't mean I've read and approve the whole article, and as a result don't want it to be marked as patrolled. Regards, SunCreator ^(talk) 12:51, 22 September 2011 (UTC)

Apart from a handful of experienced users who in spite of their efforts cannot hope to monitor over a thousand new pages per day, 'and' carry out all the tasks that are expected of NPPers, the 'regulars' are a transient bunch of editors who quite clearly do not appear to understand the principles involved or want to read the instructions at WP:NPP - as any one knows who has patrolled the work of the patrollers to gather the necessary stats. I don't know where this 'walled garden' notion comes from, but the facts are that the special:newpages, and the live feed are a magnet to power hungry newbies who don't even need a user right for something as crucial as slapping tags on new pages or passing them as fit for inclusion. Let's not forget that the moment they have clicked 'Mark this page as patrolled' on a hoax or a blatant piece of libel, it's cached by Google and many other mirror and archive sites. And that's just the tip of the iceberg. Making a nice control panel for the patrollers isn't going to educate the patrollers who don't wish to be educated, and it won't help the true regulars who know their business off by heart and blinfolded.

I still firmly believe that the logical solution is WP:ACTRIAL; we could then probably dispense entirely with NPP as a process, and the mature patrollers who would feel they are out of work could then offer their experience as reviewers at AfC or the Wizard instead. We also have thousands of redundant 'reviewer rights' holders from the PC business. I would have hoped assumed that someone as experienced as SunCreator with their 43,173 edits would have enough confidence to mark and tag new pages without needing to leave them for the inexperienced newbies to patrol. Kudpung กุดผึ้ง (talk) 15:08, 22 September 2011 (UTC)

My comment about a walled garden is referring to the fact that you only get to press the mark as patrolled button if you arrive at the article from one page. Not from here or from here or anywhere else I may come across new articles. Now, yes, these aren't as "complete" or provide 100% coverage of new pages, but they work for me (and given they work off text searching and redlinks, they are remarkably effective). Why can't I easily patrol these articles? Just like most people have only dabbled in the UBLP backlog elimation drive, whilst I've spent most of the last 20 months doing it full on - I'm only ever going to dabble in NPP - it doesn't appeal to me. I'd do much more if it was ubiquitous, but I'm not going to search it out. (and I 100% agree with you about WP:ACTRIAL - people are used to having to register, check emails, activate etc to post on some news blogs, forums etc, so why should having a few days break or an "application" approach not work and be accepted if you want to create, not just edit, here.)The-Pope (talk) 16:31, 22 September 2011 (UTC)

It seems clear now that ACTRIAL isn't going to be allowed - at least until after months or years of more discussion and tangential trials have proven that at the end of the day it was the best solution.The WMF is set on pressing for their own solutions instead, although ironically, they freely admit that they have little or no first-hand experience of NPP. Discussions are now taking place with some collaboration from users from outside the Head Office, and some interesting ideas are coming to the table. The WMF are beginning to listen to what the unpaid volunteers have to say, but as long as the WMF project remains ill focused and wrongly prioritised, progress is going to be very slow, and in the meantime, new editors and new articles are still on the decline, nothing is being done to improve the Wizard or AfC interfaces, and the few mature and experienced page patrollers are getting fed up of having to re-patrol patrolled pages, and patrol and educate the patrollers. Kudpung กุดผึ้ง (talk) 17:40, 26 September 2011 (UTC)

Today is the first time that I have visited WP:NPP, and I found an article (Robert Grant (astronomer)) and went through the checklist, but I've scanned WP:NPP at least five times and I never see where it discusses what is the "end of process", which seems to be synonymous with what is being described above as a "button" or "patrolled".  Is this something that needs Javascript?  Is there someplace that documents what you are talking about?  Unscintillating (talk) 20:03, 9 October 2011 (UTC)

Another question is, do NPP patrollers add WikiProjects, and if this is documented somewhere, please point me to the documentation.  Unscintillating (talk) 20:03, 9 October 2011 (UTC)

I also don't understand the concern about re-patrolling a patrolled page, since it seems this should make the review easy.  Unscintillating (talk) 20:03, 9 October 2011 (UTC)

I agree with incredulity that WMF has forced all of this extra work on the NPP volunteers, when the developers have already shown that the concept requires only a handful of edits.  Unscintillating (talk) 20:03, 9 October 2011 (UTC)

Ok, so it seems that "end of process" needs to be documented.  The concept appears in the "Tools" sections as, "automatically mark pages as patrolled".  So, a new section right after "Tools" looks to be the right spot.  A post below in "So cumbersome" states, "If you open a page from special:new pages or from the live feed gadget, you will see that 'mark this page as patrolled' link.  It also says, "Everything you can do to help out with patrolling is most welcome."  So, the proposal is to add a subsection to "Tools". 

=== Manually marking pages as patrolled ===

In some editing contexts, you will see a 'mark this page as patrolled' link.  Otherwise, everything you can do to help out with patrolling is most welcome.

Unscintillating (talk) 08:50, 12 October 2011 (UTC)

From what I recall, most if not all the articles I have created have been edited by someone else within 24 hours. I don't understand this moral panic of new articles not being "really" patrolled, whatever that means. Have mörser, will travel (talk) 13:55, 16 October 2011 (UTC)

You would if you were to spend three hours patrolling new pages that arrive in the live feed at the rate of one every 5 seconds, and where the majority of them are so totally inapproriate they have to be deleted very quickly. --Kudpung กุดผึ้ง (talk) 15:25, 16 October 2011 (UTC)

If so many new articles are arriving at Wikipedia why do NPPers spend so much time deleting articles that are merely questionable but not 'totally inappropriate"? Ottawahitech (talk) 17:50, 16 October 2011 (UTC)

The majority of edits on articles are trivial edits for doing work like categories or obvious tags & the like. The actual edits that add substantial information are a relatively small proportion of the total on almost any article. The problem at NPP is that the mix of unacceptable articles submitted is shifting, from the obvious junk that we predominantly had 5 years ago , to the extensive current spamming. G11 is inherently a vague criterion that depends on judgement, and the judgment is whether it is rescuable or not with routine editing or whether it means starting over. What amounts to routine editing is not definable: what I am prepared on routine to do is probably more than what most people are, but what I am actually willing to do depends on what I think of the ultimate viability of the article, including ultimate notability. If I don't consider it notable I will not waste my efforts trying to fix the promotionalism. Even G12 is not all that well defined, for many of the G12 could be rescued by rewriting on the basis of the copied source--and here again the same differences apply. I'll rewrite anything if I think the subject essential to an encyclopedia, but now I make the exception of whether the original author will cooperate with my request for additional sources and the like; I do not have time to deal with uncooperative COI editors even for important topics.

What I am increasingly doing is what Kudpung is also, making a global judgement and then finding all the possible reasons. Unfortunately, to be perfectly frank about it, The level of judgment required is to not make howlers--nobody can judge suitability with actual accuracy, and there's no point in pretending he usual level of decisions at AfD do much better, though they're not as close to random as they were a few years ago. That lack of trust is why we have rules, but what do we do when the rules become incapable of dealing with the situation. I support Kudpung's idea of requiring a user-right to mark as patrolled, even if it means significant delays in patrolling. The idea, as with editors, is not to bar people, but to make sure they learn. Earlier, I tried to check up on deletion logs of admins who were deleting without basis--the explicit basis for which I asked to become an admin; nowadays, I more often will check up on a particularly erratic NPPatroller.

Another way of wording this is that my practical criterion is becoming whether I think the editor can submit a satisfactory article, not necessarily whether the article in front of me is acceptable as it is. I cannot tell if my judgment is even approximately correct--since the people who go away never give us a chance to see if they would have learned had they stayed. What we do fairly consistently now is stop people who submit a string of unsatisfactory articles, but of course that does not deal with any moderately intelligent commercial spammers, who will know enough to adopt a different username every time. ::::Again, I have no solution but incremental improvement of every step we can improve. DGG ( talk ) 00:14, 24 October 2011 (UTC)

It seems that usually the obscure stuff gets spammed on Wikipedia. I'm still amazed how many articles for banks (especially non-US ones) were created during the "Occupy" flurry. Have mörser, will travel (talk) 09:11, 24 October 2011 (UTC)

I've recently started to help out here at WP:NPP after reading in various places about crisis situation etc.

But I'm finding it pretty irritatin: if I have an article up on screen I often want to do some cleanup edits to it (re-word the lead sentence, or add a category, or sort out spelling, or add a stub template, or whatever - actually improving the article, not just tagging it quickly using Twinkle for someone else to do the work) I can either:

• Mark it as patrolled, then re-open it from the next screen to do the other edits, or
• Edit it, close it, go back to Special:NewPages and find it again, open it, mark it as patrolled.

There should be an easier way. Is there something I've missed, or is NPP not expected to be done by people who'd ever dream of actually contributing positively to an article, only by those racing for a high edit count?

I wholly support the suggestion someone made above, that there ought to be a "New page patrol" button visible on unpatrolled articles, reached by whatever route, when they are read by any editors of some certain status - perhaps even those who've applied specifically for a new "New page patroller" status? - so that they can "patrol" the article while doing whatever they went there for (stub-sorting, or BLP work, etc), if they feel so inclined. Would be useful if that button led to a link reminding what criteria to use before ticking the article as "patrolled", but I'm sure that could be arranged. PamD 16:00, 9 October 2011 (UTC)

Hi Pam. We have lots of problems with NPP at the moment and we're working hard with the WMF to find some solutions. Everything you can do to help out with patrolling is most welcome. basically, for someone like you who knows how Wikipediqa works, there should be no problem. Basically, if you open a page from special:new pages or from the live feed gadget, you will see that 'mark this page as patrolled' link. As soon as you have made an edit and saved it, It will be automatically marked as patrolled. On the other hand, if you are using Twinkle, it won't automatically mark as patrolled when you add a CSD or a PROD template. It might not always work either when you add a normal maintenance template. It's great having you help out , because you must have hundreds of stub templates consigned to memory! If you have any other questions, don't hesitate to ask me on my talk page. Kudpung กุดผึ้ง (talk) 16:22, 9 October 2011 (UTC)

Thanks, Kudpung. I'm confused: are you saying that if I open a page from Special:NewPages, and edit it, then it will automatically get marked as patrolled without me ticking the link? So I don't have to open it again to do so, and have been wasting time doing so? In which case, how come it's still showing yellow when I go back to the list page - does it take some time for the "patrolled" status to register? If you want to expand the circle of established editors who help out at NPP, perhaps you need a clear and friendly introduction to help us when we drop by this way! PamD 16:33, 9 October 2011 (UTC)

Ah, sorry, I forgot to mention, you only click that link if thr page is fine and needs nothing doing to it at all. It's quite rare actually. The moment you make a small edit to the page, it should be automatically delisted from special:new pages or no longer be showing in yellow. The softyware doesn't always work as well as it should thouh, so consider doing some manual checks. Kudpung กุดผึ้ง (talk) 17:49, 9 October 2011 (UTC)

Thanks, that certainly wasn't obvious. I wonder how many possible NPP helpers get put off by apparent complexity of it all?! I'll try and drop by from time to time to do a few from the back end of the list. PamD 19:13, 9 October 2011 (UTC)

NPP, if done properly, is indeed a complex task. Oddly, and one of our greatest problems, because it does not reauire a user right, it attracts the youngest and least experienced of all ediotrs. However, help is one its way;, and at mediaWiki we are right in the middle of developing new solutions. Thanks for all your help, and keep up the good work - how you find time for it among all your excellent stub sorting is anyone's guess, but at least while patrolling pages, you'll be able to add the right stubs for us  :) Kudpung กุดผึ้ง (talk) 09:08, 12 October 2011 (UTC)

I agree, having the patrol "button" disappear when you edit the page is a major interface gaffe. To add insult to injury, the "button" is in tiny font. Have mörser, will travel (talk) 17:45, 16 October 2011 (UTC)

The logical place where I'd expect that button to be is in the tabs at the top where "move", "tag" etc. are located. Have mörser, will travel (talk) 17:52, 16 October 2011 (UTC)

There are both technical and logical reasons why the button is where it is and why it's not available in a Twinkle tab. The 'Mark this page as patrolled' link is designed specifically to be only visible to pages that are opened from Special:new pages. Kudpung กุดผึ้ง (talk) 04:34, 17 October 2011 (UTC)

Bad design. Have mörser, will travel (talk) 21:02, 17 October 2011 (UTC)

Please prgramme a better one and I'll submit it to the devs.Kudpung กุดผึ้ง (talk) 21:29, 17 October 2011 (UTC)

Not everyone is a programmer. That doesn't imply that only programmers can spot a user interface howler.Have mörser, will travel (talk) 09:00, 24 October 2011 (UTC)

As a followup to the article creation workflow designs being worked on at the Foundation, Brandon Harris has a started a new draft design document for the nitty-gritty details of patrolling new articles at New Page Patrol Zoom Interface. Zoom meaning, "when you zoom in on a particular article to patrol" from the list. This is the first stage of a process and nothing is finalized, so your comments as patrollers are very much welcome on the talk page at MediaWiki.org. Cheers, Steven Walling (WMF) • talk 03:07, 20 September 2011 (UTC)

I'm sorry but this seems like development for development's sake. JUST MAKE THE MARK AS PATROLLED BUTTON MORE ACCESSIBLE!!!! But that's too hard to code properly and ruins performance, but a fancy new interface is the answer. KISS principle, please. If every time you (maybe just opt-in, maybe just autoconfirmed, maybe everyone) read an unpatrolled page you saw the little "Mark as patrolled", then I'm sure the backlog would disappear in days. At least have a trial.The-Pope (talk) 12:35, 20 September 2011 (UTC)

The concept of Ockham's razor seems to be lost on them, as the thread above rather clearly demonstrates. The Blade of the Northern Lights (話して下さい) 01:10, 21 September 2011 (UTC)

It is development for the sake of development - and the proposed NPP control panel does not even begin to address the problems for quality control of new pages in the slightest. This is the WMF response to their inability to recognise and understand the problem and to accept the consensus that was reached for the simplest of all solutions: to limit new page creation to autoconfirmed users, with several avenues for fast-tracking serious new articles by serious new users. There's an admirable initiative to create lots of new tools, but an almost absurd ignorance of the fact that tools are only as good as the workman who uses them. New NPP tools cannot raise the cognitive level of a 12 year old to that of a mature, experienced user. Kudpung กุดผึ้ง (talk) 09:27, 22 September 2011 (UTC)

I think keeping the patrolling of new pages less prominent is a good idea insofar than it is best only done by more experienced users. Imagine the mess if any old numpty was to see a big, red, flashing notice at the top of every page saying "Come and patrol new pages now!!".

I agree absolutely that the ability to create new pages should be an earned privilege (excluding ones own user pages). I'd suggest that an editor should have a fairly substantial number of good (not deleted or marked as vandalism etc.) edits under their belt before being able to create whole articles.

Regarding interface improvement: Kudpung drew my attention here from another thread and now I'd like to simply draw the attention of WMF back to where I came from. fg^t_c 04:45, 7 November 2011 (UTC)

Don't worry - there is never going to be a suggestion that NPP will be made more prominent. A brand new patrolling interface is currently being developed that will need experienced users. A long while back, I misunderstood the WMF's reason for wanting it, but now I'm totally in favour of it and working closely with them on its development - that's why we've sent out an invitation to patrollers to to provide feedback on their patrolling experience and suggestions. Kudpung กุดผึ้ง (talk) 06:28, 7 November 2011 (UTC)

I've not actually done that much patrolling yet. I don't think my judgement is worth very much on the subject (although I obviously still express my views where I see fit). I'm still finding my feet in many ways. fg^t_c 06:59, 8 November 2011 (UTC)

I can't believe it! I found out that I was able to mark pages as patrolled. Should I have kept quiet?Greg Heffley 19:28, 31 October 2011 (UTC)

So here at NPP, there are thousands of pages that appears at Special:Newpages. We here need more help with patrolling all of the pages. We had lots of discussions at the village pump for NPP. We have a new right called "autopatrolled". It helps but there are still tons of pages needing review. Also, there is the 30 day threashold that puts all unpatrolled articles in a list. I need sugestions on how to improve the process. ~~EBE123~~ ^talk_Contribs 17:23, 4 June 2011 (UTC)

Well, the autopatrolled userright isn't really "new", so to speak—it's been around for almost two years now. I think one way we could reduce the backlog is through a backlog elimination drive like the one the Guild of Copy Editors recently finished (drive link). It's hard to estimate how many articles such a drive could remove from the backlog, since copyediting is different from NPPing, but I think it could clear a decent chunk of the NewPages backlog. Guoguo12 (Talk)  17:49, 4 June 2011 (UTC)

I'm not sure what will help. This is like every other backlog we have—you want help? Recruit more helpers. Also, didn't we want to start a trial for restricting article creation to autoconfirmed users only? /ƒETCHCOMMS/ 03:49, 5 June 2011 (UTC)

Ebe123, you may well wish to read the archive of this talk page before doing anything drastic - it's all been done before, and a lot of serious research was done into it. Perhaps I ought to unarchive the page. The the new rule that was passed by consensus recently to restrict new page creation to autoconfirmed users, is a result of that research, and is only waiting for someone to decide the details of a trial (or if in fact one is needed). When it goes active, it will drastically reduce the work NPPers need to do. Kudpung กุดผึ้ง (talk) 09:30, 5 June 2011 (UTC)

There are many backlogs - Category:Wikipedia backlog. We have unsourced trivia articles that go back years. Because they are not new pages and are harder to find, they tend to get ignored - apart from Wikipedia mirrors who copy the garbage and spread it far and wide. There are over 175,000 orphaned articles that are likely indicators of trivia. Guts Pie Earshot has been tagged since 2006. There are over 4,000 articles that have been tagged since November 2006 - Category:Orphaned articles from November 2006 and Category:Orphaned articles from October 2006. This - Wikipedia:Contribution Team/Backlogs - is helping, but it's an ongoing problem. If new page patrollers were prepared to spend a little time on helping to clear the backlogs that would help out enormously. SilkTork *^{Tea time} 11:17, 5 June 2011 (UTC)

Our 800+ active new page patrollers should be able to make short work of that once they become redundant when the new rule tkes effect. (see box below).

Kudpung กุดผึ้ง (talk) 15:56, 5 June 2011 (UTC)

The list above is pretty neat to see. I just wanted to give you all a heads up that the Foundation did a short, informal study of New Page Patrol's workload over the years as part of our summer research program. If you're interested, the preliminary results are here, and include lists of the top 50 patrollers per year based on the logs, excluding bots and autopatrolling. Any comments are most welcome, Steven Walling at work 00:08, 26 June 2011 (UTC)

• Thank you so much for pointing this out. I especially appreciate this part: m:Research:Wikimedia_Summer_of_Research_2011/Summary_of_Findings Ottawahitech (talk) 13:40, 31 October 2011 (UTC)

• Just wondering where one can comment on this interesting research? Ottawahitech (talk) 16:59, 12 November 2011 (UTC)

Is it just me or does it seem wildly inappropriate that User:RjwilmsiBot has patrolled 88802 pages? I'd have thought it was more useful to have humans doing the patrolling personally, and then with some reserve. Surely simply visiting a page and clicking the button to get you score up somewhat defeats the object of patrolling? Looking at the bots responsibilities; I don't see anything about it automatically patrolling new pages either. fg 17:24, 12 November 2011 (UTC)

RjwilmsiBot has the autopatrolled flag, so it automatically marks pages it creates as patrolled. I assume this is related to it's fifth function, creating redirects to pages with special characters in the title. So no issue there. Cheers. lifebaka++ 17:52, 12 November 2011 (UTC)

Ahhhh. Cool. Thanks. fg 18:17, 12 November 2011 (UTC)

A discussion on the improvement of NPP is taking place here. Kudpung กุดผึ้ง (talk) 02:15, 1 July 2011 (UTC)

And, another discussion about improving NPP as part of an overhaul of the whole article creation workflow is happening over on mediawiki.org. raindrift (talk) 23:30, 15 September 2011 (UTC)

We know - and it won't address the immediate and urgent problems surrounding NPP. It's goals are too broad and undefined. The solution proposed to restrict the creation of new pages to autoconfirmed editors - with three optional , parallel avenues to fast-track live publication - would have an immediate effect, needs no overly complex software changes, and would be a first help and encouragement to seriously nded new authors. It would stop the blatant crap articles dead in their tracks, and avoid the necessity of having new pages patrolled by an army of the least experienced and least mature of all users. --Kudpung กุดผึ้ง (talk) 18:56, 18 September 2011 (UTC)

I see rumours swirling outside Wikipedia that annonymous edits are no longer allowed. I know this is not true but I saw somewhere someone saying that there is a proposal to limit the access to new article creation.

Is there a place on Wikipedia where one can easily access all changes that HAVE ACTUALLY TAKEN PLACE without having to read tons of other fluff? Ottawahitech (talk) 14:22, 8 November 2011 (UTC)

It is true that IP editors not able to create new mainspace pages. That's the reason we created a WP:Wizard for IPs. These articles get reviewed and then declined (and then the user is able to improve it and then resubmit it) or accepted.

But IPs are still able to edit existing pages. (with the exception of protected pages) mabdul 14:59, 8 November 2011 (UTC)

• Thanks Mabdul. Could you cite sources? Ottawahitech (talk) 01:03, 10 November 2011 (UTC)

Software changes to User Permissions such as these require both Community Consensus and MediaWiki/WMF sanction, so you can be sure that there was a high level policy discussion somewhere, but it might be hard to find. To access recent changes see Help:Recent changes. For information on deletion policies and processes, please see Deletion and Notability, and for information pertaining to page protection see Page Protection. --Kudpung กุดผึ้ง (talk) 04:52, 10 November 2011 (UTC)

The ability of unregistered users to create new pages was disabled back in 2005 [2]. The WMF's chief research officer announced in 2007 that unregistered editors would be allowed to create pages again, [3] but this wasn't actually implemented after everyone pointed out what a lousy idea it was. [4] Hut 8.5 11:25, 10 November 2011 (UTC)

WhatamIdoing asked at the village pump for a way to highlight unpatrolled pages on User:AlexNewArtBot/MedicineSearchResult maintained by Tedder. I stepped in and have created one that seems to function quite well. I am working on improving it though.

I've made the script to work on any/all of the search results pages (of which there are many). This is simply a FYI.

Add:

importScript("User:Fred_Gandt/getUnpatrolledOfAlexNewArtBotResultsPages.js");

to your common JavaScript to make use of it.

I'll be adding notes to the script and documentation to its related page in the near future. Feedback is welcome (good or bad) at my talk page or on the script's talk page. fg 18:12, 12 November 2011 (UTC)

Do you all have to look at my new pages? I do a lot of evil things, but starting spam pages has never been one of them. Even if I start a page and it is not perfect, it will be beneficial.

TCO (talk) 03:09, 5 December 2011 (UTC)

You are not autopatrolled. →Στc. 03:17, 5 December 2011 (UTC)

I started a discussion to remove an option to create directly pages out of the article wizard at Wikipedia_talk:AFC#propose_removal_of_the_third_Wizrad_option_to_create_directly_a_page. SInce this involves directly the NPP, I hope some feedback of you. mabdul 15:46, 7 December 2011 (UTC)

CorenSearchBot (talk · contribs) is back in action! This should help us with our copyvio detection. WhatamIdoing (talk) 18:55, 8 December 2011 (UTC)

I've recently created a Toolserver tool Recent moves that shows articles recently moved from other namespaces into article space, using an interface similar to Special:NewPages. These new articles are frequently overlooked by new page patrollers, since they don't show up on Special:NewPages. There's not a lot of them, and I'd greatly appreciate one or more NPPers making a point of reviewing these on occasion. You can filter out moves by autopatrolled users. Let me know if you have any comments or suggestions. Thank you! Dcoetzee 10:47, 15 January 2012 (UTC)

One problem I've noticed as I have been patrolling is that often pages have, in fact, been patrolled and tagged for issues and simply not marked as being patrolled. I haven't been able to read through all of the extensive discussion yet, but I haven't seen this issue raised. Is there perhaps a method by which pages that have previously been tagged with various maintenance tags to be automatically marked as patrolled? I'd bet this would cut the backlog down significantly. There are obviously people who essentially patrolling outside of this system and thus not able to (or unaware of the system for) mark pages as patrolled. It would be nice to either make the un/patrolled status of a page more obvious, perhaps as a preference akin to the gadget that displays the articles assessment status? MyNameWasTaken (talk) 19:26, 26 January 2012 (UTC)

Don't think that automatically marking pages with maintenance templates as patrolled is a good idea. There are many automated or semi-automated processes which apply such templates and the fact an article has one doesn't mean it has been read and checked by a human being. Hut 8.5 19:33, 26 January 2012 (UTC)

Or even people who add tags but don't do everything you should do before marking as patrolled. ErikHaugen (talk | contribs) 22:10, 26 January 2012 (UTC)

Every page written in 2011 has now been patrolled. (Which means the queue is 25 days or so...) BCS (Talk) 23:50, 26 January 2012 (UTC)

I know this was discussed above, and I bet if I checked the archives it would be discussed many more times. But, as a relatively new admin (~2 months), I find myself now on the administrative end of looking at speedy deletion tagging. I find a lot of A7/A9 tags being added to articles in under 1 hour of the article's creation...heck, I find lots of them being placed within 5 minutes of the article's creation. And this makes me sad--so sad. Now, as was stated above, most of this is being done by relatively new editors (usually editors with between 1 and 5K edits). But I've even seen sysops and other editors with over 50K edits engaging in the same behavior. At the beginning, I tried to leave messages on the talk pages of the taggers, though sometimes now I don't bother because it seems like the problem is quite ubiquitous, and sometimes I wonder if maybe I'm just in the minority opinion on this issue.

Currently, the project page says only, "e. A good rule of thumb is to wait until at least 15 minutes after the last edit before tagging the article (or up to an hour for the {{newpage}} tag)." What I tell taggers is that personally I think that rule is far too lenient to taggers. My opinion (and part of me writing this here is to try to see what the consensus of other editors is) is that while it's fine to tag for G3, G12, even A3 or A10 very soon after creation, I don't think we can adequately judge A7 within just a few minutes of an article being created. When someone puts up an article about some singer that at first seems non-notable, how do we know for sure that the person wasn't just about to add some more info about an award that singer won? My personal recommendation is that we shouldn't be tagging A7 or A9 for at least an hour or two after the article is created. Is there really any harm in leaving things up for a bit, just in case? We all know that there are very series consequences to tagging too quickly (in that it drives away good faith contributors).

Am I totally on my own on this one? Or are there others that think this is important enough to consider actually writing into a guideline somewhere (or, at the bare minimum, onto this tutorial? Qwyrxian (talk) 07:12, 4 October 2011 (UTC)

Two hours is fine. Personally, I'd go for a minimum of 24 hours, but that's probably an extremist viewpoint. I really don't understand the urgency, for anything other than attack pages and copyvios. --Demiurge1000 (talk) 07:18, 4 October 2011 (UTC)

Hi. You're not on your own on this, and you can rest assured that there is currently a lot of top level research being done into these issues. A lot of common sense or judgement depends on how long to wait. Experience will show which articles are ever likely to be further developed. While waiting to tag articles, quite a lot of time will elapse while other checks on the article and its creator are being done. These checks include looking at the page history for previous deletions, looking at the creator's log and talk page for possible previous warnings of any kind. If the page appears to have the makings of a serious article, in the meantime, patrollers should be doing some basic clean up, such as format, moving a misspellt page name, adding stub templates, and adding project templates to the article talk page, searching Google for possible copyvio, and maybe finding at least one RS for a totally unsourced page. etc. One argument for not leaving it too long is to be able to catch the creators while they are still online and logged in - the majority of new pages appear to be created by SPA who will probably never return to Wikipedia to see if their article still exists. Of course, the average NPPer doesn't do these checks, but as an admin with a deletion tool, I do, before I finally delete an article page. Kudpung กุดผึ้ง (talk) 07:34, 4 October 2011 (UTC)

While I think many pages would benefit from some extra time, the problem with setting hard limits is that we want to get rid of the pages parents have written about their kindergarteners and the garage bands formed two days ago (I swear I am not making these examples up), and we want to purge spam from obvious corporate accounts as quickly as we can. There's no reason that content like Soldiers of Revenge or Family mountain days needs to exist for any longer than the time it takes to tag and delete it. The line between "potentially an article" and "irretrievably bad" can get blurred when dealing with A7/A9/G11, but we don't want to swing the pendulum too far and prevent the no-brainer quick tags that should be happening. The Blade of the Northern Lights (話して下さい) 21:25, 7 October 2011 (UTC)

The problem is that many times the baby gets thrown out with the bathwater. There are many good faith new (and not so new) wikipedians who are being demoralized when information they painstakingly add to wikipedia is removed. Ottawahitech (talk) 14:24, 19 October 2011 (UTC)

Do you have any proof of this? If you do, please let us know so that we can follow up on it. Thanks. Kudpung กุดผึ้ง (talk) 17:05, 19 October 2011 (UTC)

No proof that I can think of, but a lot or anecdotal information. Here is some I just happened to find recently:

i think we should Patrol new pages from oldest to the newest. I dont know how many contributors are good typists or are not fumbling around - i.e. not using the preview button and instead directly saving the page to get te review of their friends neighbors (who knows!) Wikishagnik (talk) 13:44, 4 February 2012 (UTC)

User_talk:TParis#Donald_Braswell_Page_Deletion

User_talk:TParis#In_a_shocking_twist..._it.27s_another_frustated_user_whose_page_got_deleted.21

Wikipedia:Missing Wikipedians Ottawahitech (talk) 14:53, 21 October 2011 (UTC)

I nearly gave up editing because of what I percieved to be aggressive speedy new page patrolling. Why is it that given the rule of thumb to wait until at least 15 minutes after the last edit and the recommendation to patrol from the back of the queue that so many NPPs, even experienced ones, seem to do some very speedy taging? Is it just to catch people still online? (Msrasnw (talk) 15:14, 21 October 2011 (UTC))

I can think of a variety of reasons. We do need to do some reviewing from the front, because we need to catch attack pages as soon as possible. I also think that some people are tagging new pages not by looking at the New Pages list, but simply by looking at Recent Changes (i.e., the tagging is a part of general vandalism patrol). Those are the "positive" reasons. I think there are a lot of personal/questionable reasons as well--I think that, for many people, there's a real feeling of "success" or "winning" when you tag a page and it gets deleted so quickly. I think it feels like "Defending the Wiki". The people commenting here seem to be more experienced users, but a lot of newer New Page Patrollers are actually relatively new users (those with less than 10K edits) and/or a few months of editing. And I think that those users tend (I'm obviously generalizing here, but I'm trying to speak out of my own experience--how I felt when I started with Twinkle and Huggle and NPP) to think only in terms of "this does not belong here get it out now." I remember early on that I tagged a page about a book (movie? something like that) under A7. The admin who reviewed it rightly declined it, since A7 doesn't cover books. I asked which category I was supposed to use, then, and the admin said that there wasn't one, and that I had to use PROD or AfD. I was shocked. Floored. I thought that there must be a mistake, because obviously this content was inappropriate and needed to be deleted immediately. It took me a long time to understand why the categories are as limited as they are (i.e., that speedy deletion is supposed to be an exception, not the norm, for deletion); even longer to think about the idea of biting newcomers by speedily removing their first contribution. Qwyrxian (talk) 23:52, 21 October 2011 (UTC)

An excellent personal revelation Qwyrx. I come across many new pages that contain simple statements such as: (Bookname) is a novel by (authorname). It's not vandalism, it's not a hoax (because WP:BEFORE shows an ISBN for it), it's not gibberish, it's not an advert - but nevertheless the author has now got his book to the top of the Google research results, and it clearly identifies the subject. However, The book has only received a few scant reviews, and is the first book of an unknown author WP:BEFORE . The article will clearly not survive a PROD or AfD, so there is no need for it to languish for another 7 days at either of those two processes, and there is no reason to expect that the page can be developed into an article about a notable subject. The vast majority of such articles are written by WP:SPA who are not likely to return and write a new article about something else. Some SPA and SEO experts are clever enough to realise that they can game the system by writing about a product rather than its nn company, knowing that where the firm can be deleted A7, the product cannot (at least for 7 days). I am firmly in favour of a new CSD criterion for products and services (which would also cover the dozens of similar articles about new software and video game, etc), but it seems to be a WP:PEREN and until consensus changes, if it ever does, we have to abide by the rules and ensure that page patrollers understand the criteria that we have, and do not apply their own feelings when tagging. A brand new landing page for new users is currently under development which may perhaps deter people from creating such 'articles'. Kudpung กุดผึ้ง (talk) 01:18, 22 October 2011 (UTC)

Unfortunately neither AfC nor NPP handle those problems too well. Smart Inventory Solutions (found at the back of NPP) Guardian Angels for a Smarter Life (found via AfC). By the way, the guideline for book notability is quite poorly written and apparently contentious; see the talk page there. Have mörser, will travel (talk) 08:52, 24 October 2011 (UTC)

I'm becoming more aware of that also. My emphasis too is shifting a little to the need to keep out spam. The problem remains, that for books, unless one actually checks properly to try to find reviews, and there is no freely available database that does it, except for the newspaper reviews one finds in Google News Archive, one cannot be reasonably sure it isn't notable. Products of other sorts are a slightly different matter, because a great many of them do have the potential for merging or redirecting, and the necessary standards for what constitutes reviews or articles that give substantial coverage is often fiercely debated in good faith at AfD. So this leads me to be a little more sympathetic to restricts on new page creation than I used to be. But still, in explaining Wikipedia to prospective new users, I continue to find the prospect of being able to write an article and have it immediately appear is such an incredibly great encouragement to good people. The danger of not getting new users is so great that it makes even spam look relatively insignificant.

The fundamental problem is,that the problems of open editing were much less significant when Wikipedia itself was less significant. Many of our procedures were good enough for the way people used Wikipedia 6 or 7 years ago, but much less suitable today.

I do not have a solution. The promise of open editing is still so revolutionary that I can only suggest we keep on tweaking what we do until something better is developed that supersedes or parallels us. I almost said nothing lasts forever, but the basic idea of selective print encyclopedias did last 250 years, through many social and intellectual revolutions. DGG ( talk ) 03:52, 23 October 2011 (UTC)

I can partially understand the WMF's blunt refusal to implement WP:ACTRIAL in spite of consensus, and I'm sure that if they had had hands-on extensive experience at NPP and as admins who do the deleting/CSD declining, they would have reacted differently. ACTRIAL was proposed together with solutions for near instant publication of reasonable articles by serious creators, but this went largely ignored; it may nevertheless have been the catalyst for the new Article Flow project, which while excellent, appears to be now languishing already for a lack of continued development time. In the light of the IEP disaster, something will need to be done very soon. While I was one of the major developers and proponents of ACTRIAL, I respect the opinions of those who intelligently opposed it, and I'm working hard with the WMF to get these new solutions moved forward. Important new tools are being developed for a brand new page patrol system, and we'll be hearing more news about this shortly. Kudpung กุดผึ้ง (talk) 04:40, 23 October 2011 (UTC)

What is this "IEP disaster"? Have mörser, will travel (talk) 08:58, 24 October 2011 (UTC)

WT:IEP and WT:Ambassadors contain it blow-by-blow. In short, the IEP is the India Education Program, which is an effort to get students from India to edit here; sounds good in theory, but we've hit two major problems. First, although some Indians indeed speak excellent English, the people in these classes were plainly not among them; I would not have mistaken any of them for the next Jawaharlal Nehru, if you know what I mean (c.f. Talk:Financial inclusion). Secondly (and this isn't uniquely Indian, it's a general issue with Asian editors), they had no understanding whatsoever of copyright, despite our repeated attempts to tell them to stop. Many, many copyvios were produced, and it's been one hell of a time trying to sort through all of them. I don't know what kind of prepwork the WMF did for this, but it's startling to me that they wouldn't have anticipated this, and their inability to recognize what's happened is decidedly disheartening. While they feel they can do whatever they feel like with ACTRIAL, they really have to be careful with this, because copyright problems could do serious damage. The Blade of the Northern Lights (話して下さい) 18:37, 24 October 2011 (UTC)

I found some more anecdotal "proof" that some wikipedians are discouraged when info they add to Wikipedia is being removed: http://www.alexa.com/reviews/single/4535591 Ottawahitech (talk) 11:01, 29 October 2011 (UTC)

I'm not sure that that "proof" has anything to do with NPP. He talks about edits and new contributors, not new pages.The-Pope (talk) 16:42, 29 October 2011 (UTC)

• I am sorry, but I don't see your point. Are you saying that the fact that many (if not most) new pages at Wikipedia disappear within minutes does not demoralize those (potential)wikipedians who wrote them? Ottawahitech (talk) 13:45, 30 October 2011 (UTC)

• I don't see your point of highlighting the comments of someone who we don't know, making generalist negative comments about this site. He may have got into a POV dispute. He may have been wikilawyered away. He may have bullied. He may have tried to spam/COI edit/ignore our rules. We don't know. I do know, from what I read, that he didn't mention New Pages at all, hence I'm not sure why you highlighted it. We all know that this can be a difficult place, if you are unable to "get to know the rules".

Getting (sort of) back onto topic of NPP, I'm not going to run out onto a sporting field (pick a sport, any sport) without understanding what I can and can't do. I'm not going to start tweeting, facebooking, linkedining, myspacing etc without spending some time understanding what is expected, what the various guidelines are. Why people (and the WMF) expect to allow anyone to create any page is beyond my comprehension. Yes, allow anyone to edit, but why don't we make sure that people have some idea about what this site is about before they create. Sure, have a AFC like process for "I'm new, not autoconfirmed, and I want to create a new article" queue, but for most people, get them understanding the game before they become the quarterback/point guard/penalty taker etc.

And getting even more onto the speedy tagging/deletion issue, the two really good things about speedy tagging is it may get rid of the really bad stuff before it gets google cached and mirrored everywhere, and it may notify the user whilst they are online and can address the issues, and not hope that they come back in a few days. If the notifications are too aggessive/confusing, then by all means rework them, but speedy tagging can be very advantageous, in some instances. And of course, the risk/reward is different depending on the topic at hand - a creator of a true, clear, undoubtedly A7 candidate article needs to realise that this is an encyclopedia, not whatever repository of non-notable people they thought it was. If the A7 is borderline or not valid, then a discussion with the tagger should be done instead.

Finally, should there be an tickbox available in twinkle to give you the option notify article creators when you cleanup tag an article, not just when you tag for deletion? New editors may not go back to their page, or to their watchlist, but they should notice the big orange bar. The-Pope (talk) 16:24, 30 October 2011 (UTC)

I've made this very suggestion many times that the twinkle application of some of the more pressing maintenance templates should be accompanied by an automated placing of a message to the creator. Such template messages don't exist and I have even offered suggested template messages. This suggestion seems to be so clearly rejected by a silent consensus that there have never even been replies to the postings on the relevant template/Twinkle/uw talk pages. I regularly manually paste my own custom messages - and it works! Kudpung กุดผึ้ง (talk) 16:54, 30 October 2011 (UTC)

• To answer The-Pope's question above: the reason I posted the URL above was in answer to Kudpung's request for a proof (it's burried somewhere at the beginning of this section). Sorry for the confusion - I find it is very difficult to carry on long conversations without having a proper conversation threading mechanism. Ottawahitech (talk) 15:27, 10 November 2011 (UTC)

Kupdung, are you sure about your statement that edits made to pages accessed from the NPP feed will automatically mark pages as patrolled? For me it does not work that way, see [5]---the entries around 10:05, December 8, 2011 were produced by going back to the NPP log, re-accessing the pages, and manually clicking "Mark patrolled". All of these articles I had before accessed from the NPP feed, and edited. I did not use any Twinkle buttons.

Could it be that having Twinkle enabled is sufficient to not automatically have such pages marked "patrolled"? --Pgallert (talk) 08:21, 8 December 2011 (UTC)

No, I am not sure at all and it's one of the issues that has confused me for a long while. There appear to be glitches in the scripts that work it, and there were more following the Wikipedia software upgrade. I am not an expert on technical matters, and my focus is on the overall human quality of patrolling. You might get the most rapid answer from contacting User talk:Snottywong or User talk:The Blade of the Northern Lights directly. --Kudpung กุดผึ้ง (talk) 08:32, 8 December 2011 (UTC)

Nah, I do not need this solved for myself. But at least for my account it always was that way, and I do agree it is a bit cumbersome. BTW, my workaround is to first mark patrolled, then click "back" in the browser and make the necessary edits. --Pgallert (talk) 08:52, 8 December 2011 (UTC)

Just to clear this up: I have tested this with an edit of my own to a new page, and editing alone does not currently appear mark a page as patrolled. The page needs to be opened again from special:new ages and marked as patrolled. The best thing to do is to mark a page as patrolled first, and then proceed with any edits. Kudpung กุดผึ้ง (talk) 09:50, 14 December 2011 (UTC)

This seems to be a software bug that should be reported by someone more familiar with the technical side than myself,But it also seems fixable by modifying the twinkle scripts, which will help those who use it. DGG ( talk ) 02:19, 5 February 2012 (UTC)

At the end of the current patrol log sits a deleted page: http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Isaac_galland&redirect=no&rcid=484091760. This should've been solved with https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Special:Code/MediaWiki/103692 if I understand correctly. But apparently it hasn't? Jhschreurs (talk) 10:44, 5 February 2012 (UTC)

Hey there, looks like the NPPdefcon template is broken. I checked out User:Snottywong/NPPdefcon but didn't see anything obvious to fix. Having looked at several previous revisions, it appears something else the template draws on must have been disrupted somehow because its broken even in revisions from periods where I know it looked correct. Can someone more adept than I take a look? MyNameWasTaken (talk) 22:15, 7 February 2012 (UTC)

The user changed their username, the page is now at User:Scottywong/NPPdefcon. Hut 8.5 22:52, 7 February 2012 (UTC)

Not the problem I meant. I just would have sworn it used to look a little cleaner, but maybe I had it confused with the other defcon indicator. MyNameWasTaken (talk) 23:07, 7 February 2012 (UTC)

Is there an easy place to find the associated wikiprojects for a new article so I can tag the talkpage? There seems to be no standardisation of template names so most of the time I'm having to search the wikipedia namespace to find it - which is more than a little tedious and often takes far more time then it takes to review and patrol an article. Spartaz ^Humbug! 04:43, 12 February 2012 (UTC)

AFAIK, there is no definitive list, but you will find that {{WikiProject XXXXX}} is fairly standard. There are lots of alternatives available as redirects, but that has become the standard. You could check out Wikipedia:WikiProject Council/Directory for a list of projects, not templates, but I've found that most you can guess, and any which aren't obvious can be found by checking out the talk page of the topic involved - ie if you find a classical composer from Greenland, then clicking through to Talk:Composer and Talk:Greenland will highlight what projects they are in, which can be copied. From our unreferenced BLP tracking we have a list of a few hundred templates at User:DASHBot/Wikiprojects/Templates. The-Pope (talk) 05:23, 12 February 2012 (UTC)

Hey guys! Just a note to tell you that (finally) the report on the NPP survey we ran late last year has been released. All comments and suggestions are welcome on the talkpage :). I'm really, really sorry for the delay; I finished this in early December. I'm not too happy about the long turnaround time either ;p. Okeyes (WMF) (talk) 10:11, 15 February 2012 (UTC)

Over the past several months there has been contentious debate over aspects of WP:Article Titles policy. That contentiousness has led to efforts to improve the overall effectiveness of the policy and associated processes. An RFC entitled: Wikipedia talk:Article titles/RFC-Article title decision practice has been initiated to assess the communities’ understanding of our title decision making policy. New Page Patrollers play an important role in ensuring new articles are titled properly. As a new page patroller, you are encouraged to participate in the RFC.--Mike Cline (talk) 16:47, 16 February 2012 (UTC)

Anyone know anything about this: Wikipedia:Village pump (technical)#Special:NewPages queue —SW— ^chatter 15:23, 24 February 2012 (UTC)

Hey guys :). As previously mentioned in a few places, the Foundation has started work on our new patrolling software: New Page Triage. I'm posting updated specifications in a few hours, and I'd really advise everyone who is interested in page patrolling to head over to the talkpage, comment on the suggestions on the page already and the additional ideas the community has come up with.

We've also got an office hours session next Tuesday, the 13th, at 19:00 UTC (that's 12:00 PST, for the west-coast Americans around ;p). If you can make it, it's on IRC in #wikimedia-office. If you can't, drop me a line on my talkpage and I'm happy to send you the logs once we're done :). Regards, Okeyes (WMF) (talk) 21:44, 9 March 2012 (UTC)

Just wanted to say thank you to whoever's been keeping the backlog down recently, your work is appreciated :). --Cerebellum (talk) 13:56, 18 March 2012 (UTC)

Hey guys

After suggestions on the New Page Triage discussion page, we've opened a Request for Comment on adding the NOINDEX tag to unpatrolled articles - basically ensuring they can't be syndicated by google. If you've got an opinion or any comments, head on over there and post your two cents :). Okeyes (WMF) (talk) 13:09, 20 March 2012 (UTC)

Is there any way to refresh the bot that tracks the np backlog? We are currently only 2.5 days backlogged

Regards,

Athleek123 (talk) 01:49, 28 March 2012 (UTC)

Is there a way to find out who the patroller of an article is? Thanks. Hanfresco (talk) 11:17, 20 April 2012 (UTC)

Indeed! At the moment you'd use this form. We're also working to revamp Special:NewPages completely as part of WP:NPT; I would encourage you to give it a read and provide any feedback you can :). Thanks! Okeyes (WMF) (talk) 14:02, 20 April 2012 (UTC)

Incorrect: Each page has its own patrol log. --Kudpung กุดผึ้ง (talk) 01:16, 16 May 2012 (UTC)

Hi, I wanted to report something.

I don't know if it's an error in the software or not, as perhaps it's intentional, but just in case, I thought it'd be a good idea to report it anyway.

This is it: As far as I know, people are not allowed (or shouldn't be allowed) to patrol their own new pages. But if you go to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:NewPages and you find your new unpatrolled page and click on that link, it takes you to the page, and you get the [Mark this page as patrolled] link. You probably shouldn't get this link, right? Because you shouldn't be able to patrol your own pages.

This is not new, I noticed it a few months ago, and I keep seeing it all the time because now I've created about 200 pages, and this "feature" is always there, if I visit my own new pages through the link at Special:NewPages

Is this intentional or is it an error in the software?

Azylber (talk) 09:29, 3 May 2012 (UTC)

if you click it in theory it should say you cannot mark your own pages as patrolled. Edinburgh Wanderer 10:40, 3 May 2012 (UTC)

I haven't tried clicking on it, just in case it works. Marking one of my own pages as patrolled would break the rules. And regardless of whether it works or not, it probably shouldn't be offering me the option anyway. Azylber (talk) 10:43, 3 May 2012 (UTC)

We're actually replacing this with New Page Triage/New Pages Feed (the project page is here); I'll test whether the same thing occurs in this software. In the meantime, if you have any comments to improve that software, please contribute on the talkpage :). Okeyes (WMF) (talk) 11:16, 3 May 2012 (UTC)

I am not sure where the best place to put this is, so feel free to copy or move it to a better location. A little while ago there was a RFC here on making the reason on generic cleanup tags mandatory. It was closed as successful. While the finer points on enforcing this consensus are still being discussed, I feel I should leave a note here as I imagine new page patrollers use this tag a lot. Regards AIRcorn (talk) 02:14, 15 May 2012 (UTC)

Like many issues regarding improvements to New Page Patrol, although the proposal received consensus, any further development has become a field of contentious comment. NPP is a broken process and in spite of some efforts to replace it with something new, it all epends onthe people who will actually be doing the patrolling. Try herding cats. --Kudpung กุดผึ้ง (talk) 01:28, 16 May 2012 (UTC)

Hello there (apologies for the overly promotional template below), if any experienced new page patrollers would like to try their hand at something different today, AFC is severely backlogged. We reviewers are in too short supply to make any kind of dent, and the number of submissions keeps climbing. Any help would be really appreciated. Thanks, France3470 (talk) 12:13, 19 May 2012 (UTC)

Articles for Creation urgently needs your help! Articles for Creation is desperately short of reviewers! We are looking for urgent help, from experienced editors, in reviewing submissions in the pending submissions queue. Currently the are 1830 submissions waiting to be reviewed. Do you have what it takes? Are you familiar with Wikipedia's policies and guidelines? Do you know what Wikipedia is and is not? Do you have a working knowledge of the Manual of Style, particularly article naming conventions? Are you autoconfirmed? Can you review submissions based on their individual merits? If the answer to these questions is yes, then please read the reviewing instructions and donate a little of your time to helping tackle the backlog.

Greetings from the desk of O=MC^{4 Orschstaffer/Principal},

This is a school assignment♭, Presently I am researching/developing a WikiProject for a classroom assignment. Please be patient with my attempts to Improve Wikipedia and the global Wiki interface. O=MC⁴ See the New pages patrol box being used in the classroom. O=MC⁴ 12:57, 7 June 2012 (UTC)

I don't see any guidance on the main page as to when to mark articles as patrolled. How does that work?--Bbb23 (talk) 17:10, 3 June 2012 (UTC)

Articles are marked as patrolled if, and only if, they can be accepted for inclusion in the encyclopedia, and when the patroller has done everything that is required, including additional research, by the instructions at WP:NPP and it linked related pages. Kudpung กุดผึ้ง (talk) 02:48, 4 June 2012 (UTC)

The short answer is that you can mark any page as patrolled unless it qualifies for speedy deletion, in which case you should tag it for deletion. You aren't required to spam clean up templates onto the article or fix formatting or add WikiProject templates anything like that, although (like any other editor) you are welcome to do whatever you can to improve an article. WhatamIdoing (talk) 04:07, 4 June 2012 (UTC)

And the slightly longer answer is that patrollers are very strongly encouraged to do a minimum of research before applying ANY tags at all. Checking for COPYVIO, for example, is paramount, as is reading the WHOLE article to evaluate for attack or hoax pages. Pages that may not need deleting but need dangerously necessary attention but are marked as patrolled without tagging, will escape any future attention. This defies the entire notion of patrolling new pages - which indeed some editors in the past have suggested that new page patrol is unnecessary! Any patroller who does less is not doing the encyclopedia a service. If it can't be done properly, there's little point in doing it at all. Newbies and lazy editors who want to get involved in the 'managerial' side of Wikipedia should search for an alternative area to work - one where they are prepared to invest all their skill and take time to do the job properly. Kudpung กุดผึ้ง (talk) 05:05, 4 June 2012 (UTC)

Looks like we have two different answers. Is there an actual guideline or policy on this? Separately, if I nominate an article for deletion, do I mark it as patrolled?--Bbb23 (talk) 01:11, 5 June 2012 (UTC)

In the case of PRPD, AfD, and CSD, that side of it is taken care of by the site software. generally, most tagging will automatically record articles as patrolled - or not; it depends on what side of the bed Twinkle got up from. The common sense answer is that no articles should be left untagged if they require some form of attention. Around 80% of all new pages get deleted sooner or later, and extremely few creations can be marked as patrolled without needing any tags. The actual guideline is common sense rather than policy. Kudpung กุดผึ้ง (talk) 01:34, 5 June 2012 (UTC)

I do not agree with your opinion that most non-deletable pages need to be tagged. Cleanup templates should not be spammed into every single page that they happen to apply to. They should only be added if you believe that doing so will actually be helpful (e.g., to help a newbie find information on formatting WP:Inline citations, not to point out that stubs can be expanded). WhatamIdoing (talk) 02:26, 13 June 2012 (UTC)

Tagging, as I have mentioned many times before, is a matter of common sense - which the majority of new-page patrollers either do not appear have, or are so new here that they do not even understand the fundamental principles of creation/inclusion/deletion. If you were to do some new page patrolling you would probably notice that not only do most new pages need tagging for something or other, but around 80% of them actually get deleted sooner or later. However, if I remember rightly, you do not consider New Page Patrol to be an entirely necessary process, or one that needs to be done accurately, hence I understand your comments. Kudpung กุดผึ้ง (talk) 04:02, 13 June 2012 (UTC)

Kudpung, I know this is hard to remember, but I've patrolled hundreds of pages. I frequently even follow the directions about working from the back of the list. But I don't find it either necessary or useful to spam tags onto most of the non-deletable pages, and when I do add a tag, it's almost always just one tag. WhatamIdoing (talk) 19:42, 28 June 2012 (UTC)

OK, as an experienced WP editor but inexperienced NPP-er I've had another go at a few pages just now and come up, again, with a problem about the process. Looking carefully at the NPP page, I note that if an editor uses Twinkle to add tags, etc, the page is automatically marked as patrolled. But if an editor picks a page from the new pages list, and improves it by editing manually (ie makes real improvements to the article rather than just slapping a few tags on), it stays on the Newpages list and they have to reopen it from that list to click on the "Mark as patrolled". I've worked from the back of the list and found articles which have had lots of edits, one which had been taken to AfD, which were still marked as unpatrolled. This seems crazy. There's an incentive for eager NPP-ers to do nothing but add tags, as real editing makes it more difficult to tag the article as patrolled. No wonder so much rubbish turns up at stub-sorting, where several editors have "edited" the article by adding tags, but the structure and content cry out for simple improvements (eg a bold superfluous heading, a non-sentence lead, glaring typos). PamD 09:38, 30 June 2012 (UTC)

Yes, I can see I could mark it as patrolled first and then re-open it to edit it, but I might get distracted (I'm a full time carer and Mother's needs take priority over NPP) before I can re-open it and do the necessary cleanup edits. I would lik to be able to mark as patrolled as part of an editing session. Why can't I? PamD 09:41, 30 June 2012 (UTC)

I've been asking for months that the "mark as patrolled" button to be visible at all times (until it's been clicked) for those who opt in to having it displayed. Apparently it's a "server load" issue that stops it from being able to be implemented, I think. But back to the original question, there are different very levels of patrolling. Should it be patrolled if there is at least one verifying ref and no negative comments, or should it only be patrolled if it is fully sectioned, linked, categorised, tagged, templated, infoboxed, succession boxed, navboxed, wikiprojected and copy edited? In the end it is your call. Patrolling is just one layer of defence. A properly patrolled article is "good" only when it is patrolled. A properly linked/categorised/wikiprojected has a chance of being seen many times in the future, so is more protected from future damage.The-Pope (talk) 09:53, 30 June 2012 (UTC)

I've always believed that patrollers, as the first to see new articles, should take a few moments to add the easy, essential missing items such as stub tags, cats, missing reflist template, bolden the entry line, move wrongly capitalised page names,and address any other minor, but significant formatting errors. Nobody is suggesting however, that they should spend 30 minutes turning rubbish into a real article - and that's why we have the tags. Some of us have been trying for two years or more to encourage the community to address the problems of new pages, but none of the efforts have born fruit, and some have been quickly rejected by the Foundation. As Wikipedia grows, the number of totally unwanted pages grows with it, and partly due to lack of information for first time page creators (and nonsense creators) - or the way such information, if available, is presented to them. I've been toying with the new, new-pages prototype; it's pretty and it's cleaner than the current special:new pages, but it does not address any fundamental issues of page patrolling, and is not really much of an enhancement over the live feed that has been available for years. At best, it is eye-candy for competent patrollers, while at it's worst, it may even encourage even more inexperienced users to patrol pages. Kudpung กุดผึ้ง (talk) 10:13, 30 June 2012 (UTC).

The New Pages Feed handles this a bit differently. If you go to a page from there, the "mark as reviewed" link will continue to persist. In fact, you've actually been placed into a "curation mode", which will become more obvious once the Curation Toolbar is rolled out to everyone.

The Curation Toolbar, by the way, allows you to decide whether or not to mark a pages as reviewed when you apply tags. There's a checkbox ("also mark as reviewed"); it remembers state so if you turn it off, it stays off. --Jorm (WMF) (talk) 20:32, 30 June 2012 (UTC)

Right, New Pages Feed looks quite a lot better. As an occasional NPP-er I hadn't been following all the recent developments closely though was aware that stuff was going on, was surprised that New Pages didn't look new-and-improved, didn't realise / had forgotten that NPF exists. Should there be some prominent mention of it at WP:NPP? I've just now reviewed a handful of pages, and I like the way that I can select a page, edit it, then choose to click "Reviewed". Definite improvement. PamD 21:17, 30 June 2012 (UTC)

When we've got all the elements of the prototype in place we're sticking a wacking great notice at the top of Special:NewPages to inform people about it, but the NPP page would definitely be a great place to advertise it :). Okeyes (WMF) (talk) 19:31, 16 July 2012 (UTC)

I stumbled across two articles that have been recently created on the Talk page: Talk:Universal Sufi Festival and Talk:Rahe Bhander Ennoble Award. I don't see any advice about how to deal with that (a move with attribution would leave the talk page pointing to the article?), so am dropping this here for someone with a clue (sorry!). Johnuniq (talk) 11:58, 19 July 2012 (UTC)

You could get an admin to move-without-redirect? Happy to do it myself :). Ironholds (talk) 16:13, 19 July 2012 (UTC)

Now done! Ironholds (talk) 16:14, 19 July 2012 (UTC)

Thanks. I notified the user in case they can't find the articles. Johnuniq (talk) 08:04, 20 July 2012 (UTC)

I've noticed that members of this project tend to be a little heavy-handed and jump the gun by immediately moving for deletion of articles before they even have a chance to be started/written. Some of us don't use sandbox and contribute on the go. Unfortunately, WP was easier years ago. Today, there are too many bells and whistles and levers and templates that confuse the hell out of me--WP is becoming too technical and isolating average editors without a CompSci/coding background. Today, articles are becoming opaque because they are too technical for the general public (e.g. while I understand more science than most, even I notice the physics and cosmology articles are getting incredibly academic and inaccessible to the average reader...try reading an article on a star from the view of a curious non-astrophysicist). Today, the editors on projects like this one tend to intimidate people from continuing to edit (If contributions are doubted immediately before one has a chance to completely present them, it will drive away potentially good editors who don't want to deal with that hostility/intimidation--intentional or not). There should be a window of at least few days--a grace period--before members of this project jump to action yelling "delete! delete! delete!" I can't understand how this project can claim to be "backlogged" but start proposing deletion and inundating a nascent article with a technocratic genocide less than 24 hours after it was started. That's my two cents.--ColonelHenry (talk) 13:53, 28 June 2012 (UTC)

Then perhaps you would like to join any discussions that attempt to introduce more quality and expertise into the corps of new page patrollers which appears to be mainly populated by very young and/or very inexperienced users. I tried my best for two years to get something done, but the powers that be have other ideas - like creating very usefultools for patrollers, but which are still only any good in the hands of users who understand the policies and deletion criteria. --Kudpung กุดผึ้ง (talk) 18:20, 28 June 2012 (UTC)

Kudpung I'll see what I can do. Can you bring me up to speed on what pages I should look at or what I may need to know so that I can effectively look into the matter?--ColonelHenry (talk) 21:27, 28 June 2012 (UTC)

So, just to review, what was the problem with starting the article in your sandbox, other than you just don't feel like doing it? And the whole articles for creation thing, is that just too much bother as well? Franamax (talk) 18:57, 28 June 2012 (UTC)

The community has agreed that editors are allowed to start pages in the main namespace. NPPers have no business punishing people for doing exactly what the community tells them they may do, even if its "just too much bother" for the NPPer to come back to an article in an hour or two to see what progress has been made or the NPPer "just doesn't feel like doing it". WhatamIdoing (talk) 19:45, 28 June 2012 (UTC)

Did you actually read the thread? The OP is asking for a few days, not an hour or two. Please show me where the community agreed to give editors a few days to demonstrate the viability of a topic. And while you're at it, please show me where it was decided that userfication or incubation is some sort of "punishment", I must have missed that discussion too. Franamax (talk) 21:14, 28 June 2012 (UTC)

To give some background: I started the article in the middle of the night. I thought I'd have it up faster but then I realized that most of the resources were in German, Italian and Bulgarian and would need translating. I decided to go to sleep and tackle it tomorrow. Tomorrow came, work bogged me down. Unfortunately, real life and real obligations get in the way of what we would like to do. I wish I had more time to contribute. Asking for 2-3 days is a lot less harmful than other contributions that leave something slanderous in place for 18 months like the calumnies at John Siegenthaler or the past edits that introduced Stephen Hawking as "a dirty lying cripple." Sometimes a little more considered judgment on priorities can temper the corrupting influence of the crude power of NPP.--ColonelHenry (talk) 21:27, 28 June 2012 (UTC)

Franamax--I don't use sandbox. Never have, not inclined to leave my comfort zone to try it out. Old dogs and new tricks. I don't use a lot of the templates and little coding gizmos just because I haven't felt the need to explore outside my comfort zone to learn more about them. Quite frankly, on a prima facie basis, I find them making WP needlessly complex. WP doesn't have a problem with editing on the fly, and didn't when I had over several thousand edits from 2002-2008. I was not aware of WP:AFC before your comment but on reading the first line, it doesn't apply here. I have a user account. AFC applies to people who don't have one and request an article be written.--ColonelHenry (talk) 21:27, 28 June 2012 (UTC)

The thing is, the site has scaled up quite a bit since 2002 and it's not really possible to give everyone their desired comfort zone. Especially when the large majority of new article creators would define their comfort zone as "this band my firend made is teh coolest and definatly notable". The difference between a mainspace page and a user sandbox is just that you put "User:ColonelHenry/" in front of the article name, which I bet even an old dog like you could figure out. ;) The templates and coding, that's a different story, but that's not needed at all to get an article to stick. All you need to do in your own pagespace is to put together enough to show notability (which I think we agree needs to be done anyway, right?) and say the basics of the topic. After that, yeah, move it to prime time and lots of other people will put the bells and whistles on - but no article ever got deleted because it didn't have an infobox. And AFC might not be the place I'm thinking about, though I think it is, there is a place to incubate articles where others can help with them. But even if it's wrong because you have a user account, so what? That's another rule you know, ignore rules and put it there anyway, it will work out. My point is that not everyone can insist on the easiest path for them in particular, if we are to have an overall working website, and so long as there are people willing to help you userfy an article, things should work out. Now I do think that speedy notices should have a real clear option (ideally one-click) to let you easily userfy a page for the case you mention, where you thought it would be quick and easy to get the page up but it turns out to be more complicated. Your initial work shouldn't go to waste. But I don't think there should be some inherent right to have your partial page sitting in the mainspace either, when there are so many other good options for it. The reality is that most people, most pages - not viable now and never will be (I think 85% of new pages get deleted, the vast majority deservedly so). Franamax (talk) 22:11, 28 June 2012 (UTC)

• which I bet even an old dog like you could figure out. ;) Don't give me too much credit, I'm just a barely functional drunk. I'm lucky if I can count anything or tie my shoes before noon. Seriously though, I know enough to be effective and do quality work. But I'm set in my ways and idiosyncratic. In a world like Wikipedia there probably isn't a defined "normal" when it comes to editors and editing styles (something I can say after meeting and getting to know many wikipedians at meetups). Perhaps there should be a template that connects to some form of oversight that says "This article was started on (date) and might take a day or two to look nice. It is a work in progress." And that gives a reasonable 48-hour, 72-hour, maybe 5-7 day grace period. Provided it isn't a vanity article about "yo, my cousin's band roX...nawmeen?" Thankfully, some of us don't write articles like that--even if we are slow from time to time in getting it done for other's edification and satisfaction.--ColonelHenry (talk) 00:31, 29 June 2012 (UTC)

I agree: it's not really possible to give everyone their desired comfort zone. Where we disagree is whether the person who needs to step out of his comfort zone is the NPPer or the article editor.

Have a look at the article in question when it was tagged for deletion. Although obviously non-speedy-able from the first version, it was tagged within minutes and PRODded about 18 hours later. Would it really have hurt anyone to leave this alone for even a few days? Would it have been a calamity if the NPPers stepped out of their comfort zone this time, and focused on the 80% that is terrible? WhatamIdoing (talk) 23:24, 28 June 2012 (UTC)

The underlying issue, and the main one, is that NPP is largely carried by a corps of editors who are extremely young and/or inexperienced. Only this morning I had to ask a new user to calm down whose first 15 of their 22 edits (the rest are to their user page) were to create AfDs; another patroller tagged a perfectly reasonable and serious article start with ((WP:A1]] within 39 seconds of its creation. There is nothing wrong with NPP as a process, and it is the most essential process at Wikipedia, but the problem is the people who are allowed to do it. New tools are in the making (sigh) that will hopefully streamline the actual process somewhat more streamlined (although I haven't found them particularly insightful), but they don't and can't address the incompetency of the patrollers. The best tools in the world are useless in the hands of an unskilled worker. Kudpung กุดผึ้ง (talk) 02:59, 29 June 2012 (UTC)

What do you think attracts newer editors to NPP? Is it positive vandalism? (in the vein that violence and destruction is negative creation or while art or the pursuit of beauty is positive creation). Do you think NPP contributors need special qualifications (elected like admins, appointed, community-nominated?)--ColonelHenry (talk) 05:22, 29 June 2012 (UTC)

To your first question: What attracts young/and new users (and they are mostly young) is the power that it gives them to be quasi moderators of one of the world's largest websites. They generally wouldn't be given moderator tools on even a run-of-the-mill local forum. In tens of thousands of checks on the work of patrollers, I've never come across one who has patrolled with the intention of vandalising the project. I'm sure that apart from the obvious feeling of power, that most patrollers patrol in good faith, but by not gaining more experience as general content editors first, and by not reading and learning the somewhat complex policies and the instructions for NPP, they get it hopelessly wrong and just make more work for the rest of us. To your second questions: Yes, obviously, and strongly so, and for those reasons. We don't (officially) let kids, or people without driving licences drive cars on open, public roads, do we? And most countries nowadays insist on passing through driving school before the test. NPP currently requires no training, and no demonstration of competency - ironic really for such an important task. Kudpung กุดผึ้ง (talk) 08:11, 30 June 2012 (UTC)

Why not just make it harder to start new pages. IOW, require contributors to have some higher standard of content contribution (whatever metric, maybe number of total edits or a granted right or whatever). Since the vast majority of the stuff coming in is bad...and since there is plenty of work to be done elswehere...why not just have a model of apprenticeship? Seriously, every trade, profession, sport, etc. works this way. You learn by doing. The days of "wiki wiki" fast fast and throwing up unreferenced crap for Larry Sanger to just get the thing going...are long gone.

And similarly, divert the patrollers into having to do some DYK or GOCE or BLP referencing or the like before NPPing. I mean I have NO DOUBT that we regularly and repeatedly rebuff really smart, experienced people that have good writing skills and the like (ex professors and the like) because they start to contribute and maybe don't know all the technical wiki tricks...and then have some heavy handed 14 year old dropping textbox turds on them. And then they are gone...

TCO (talk)

That's exactly what happens - except that not only are they only 14 years old, some of them are as young as 8.

We tried to make it harder to create pages but although the community adopted the solution by a healthy consensus, it was rejected by the Foundation. Kudpung กุดผึ้ง (talk) 04:24, 16 July 2012 (UTC)

Kudpung, can you explain where you get the idea that "some of them are as young as eight" from? I've just checked not only the analysis but the raw data from the survey, and not only did we not directly ask age (making precise statements of age hard), I can confirm that, even if we are generous with the year of birth data, not a single person in the sanitised list of respondents is eight, or was eight when filling out the survey. Where are you getting this data from? Similarly - yes, some of them are fourteen. But 79-82 percent of them are over 18, and this rises to 83-85 percent for the high-workload patrollers, who do 89 percent of the work. So, we have no quantitative data to indicate "some of them are as young as 8", and very few are 14. What quantitative data are you relying on here?

On the page creation front - TCO, we're working on a tool to better inform new editors of what is expected when they create pages, and I would be very grateful for your input :). Note that the disclaimer at the top should be taken very seriously (I actually have a meeting later today to discuss a redesign) but the essential methodology and principles will remain the same. Any feedback is welcome :). Okeyes (WMF) (talk) 19:30, 16 July 2012 (UTC)

There has appears to have been no further technical development on this since 8 February, (and that was only a comment and nothing to do with physical software development). If something is taking place, it might be a good idea to keep the community informed, provide some facts, a link to the working prototype, and an ETA on the product. Thanks. Kudpung กุดผึ้ง (talk) 21:27, 21 July 2012 (UTC)

Is there currently a way to filter new pages by category? For instance, is there some tool that can show me only unpatrolled pages that are categorized under Category:Chemical compounds? I'm having the problem that Special:NewPages is simply overwhelming in its range of topics, and finding a topic I'm familiar with or learning about new topics I'm not interested in is very time consuming. When it comes to rock bands, sporting events, TV shows, Bollywood, etc., I am completely clueless, and frankly I'd prefer to remain that way, as I have zero interest in these things. If I could just filter these out and focus on some broad area I'm familiar with, I could be a more effective page patroller. (Likewise, I'm sure there are Bollywood connoisseurs out there who get annoyed at having to sort through articles that would interest me.)

Any thoughts/recommendations on this? Thanks. ~Adjwilley (talk) 21:17, 6 July 2012 (UTC)

The problem with using categories is that many new articles don't have any. Pages like User:AlexNewArtBot/ChemistrySearchResult which are updated daily by a bot based on both cats and text - see TedderBot's contribution list is probably the best bet. It's a pity that these lists are often unknown to many, they should be prominant on most WikiProject's pages if they are to be effectively used. Yes, they have some false positives, but in general they are the best way to track new articles by topic, not just the whole lot. The-Pope (talk) 01:48, 7 July 2012 (UTC)

And then you want to add Fred's script so you can patrol them through that page. Put this:

importScript("User:Fred Gandt/getUnpatrolledOfAlexNewArtBotResultsPages.js");

into your User:YourName/common.js to use the script. Then you get a button to click that will tell you which of the new pages are unpatrolled, and a "Patrol" button that will take you to the unpatrolled pages with the little link for patrolling in place. WhatamIdoing (talk) 03:00, 22 July 2012 (UTC)

Ahh! an important step indeed. I checked out the Tedderbot pages and was having the problem that I couldn't see which ones were patrolled (most had already been caught at the time).

It would be nice if there were some sort of un-patrolled category on the pages so they could be caught and sorted with a tool like AWB. I'll play around with it and see what I can find. ~Adjwilley (talk) 23:55, 22 July 2012 (UTC)

Note that we are backlogged again, with the end of the queue now in approximately 28 days (the cutting line is 30 days).--Ymblanter (talk) 17:32, 21 July 2012 (UTC)

It tends to go up and down. The only times it goes down significantly is during a crisis, such as last year's IEP when experienced editors rallied together to clean up a mess. New tools are great in the hands of those who know how to use them, but something needs done to address the issues of what apparently are generally poor patrolling and/or an insufficient number of patrollers. As you are concerned by the backlog, perhaps you may be able to come up with some ideas. --Kudpung กุดผึ้ง (talk) 18:03, 21 July 2012 (UTC)

No, I do not really have any good ideas - except for the fact that the problem can be potentially solved by introducing flagged revisions, but this does not seem to be an option for the moment. May be more actively search for candidated to autopatrollers.--Ymblanter (talk) 19:36, 21 July 2012 (UTC)

A big banner at the top of this page says that this page is "within the scope of the Counter-Vandalism Unit". Oddly enough, the CVU has recently introduced a CVU Academy that aims to teach editors interested in counter-vandalism how to do it properly. If there is a need to "more actively search for" autopatrol candidates, then either a parallel but similar effort, or an effort by the CVUA to assist in identifying and/or training appropriate candidates for NPP, might be useful. (On the other hand, parts of this comment about some involved in that initiative, may give some here pause for thought on this idea.) --Demiurge1000 (talk) 21:10, 21 July 2012 (UTC)

I have no idea how the CVU can claim NPP to be within its remit - the two projects have very little in common. Perhaps the CVU banner should be removed from this talk page, and all attempts at NPP reform kept in the hands of experienced users. That said, we're still waiting on a Foundation product that in spite of promises for action does not appear to have received any further attention from the software experts since 8 February. Kudpung กุดผึ้ง (talk) 22:26, 21 July 2012 (UTC)

I'm confused as to where you're getting that there hasn't been attention since the 8th of February. We deployed a new version of the New Pages Feed to enwiki on Thursday and the next version has been deployed to the test server. If you're talking about the Article Creation Workflow, that software was/is dependent upon MediaWiki 1.20 and so couldn't be deployed until 1.20 was made out. However, we have decided to hold off on deployment of the feature because, upon reflection, the implementation did not meet the design requirements and we're revisiting it.--Jorm (WMF) (talk) 22:46, 21 July 2012 (UTC)

What Brandon said. We had a deployment earlier this week; that's not "no attention since 8 February". If you did not notice the deployment then, well, that's not our problem. Okeyes (WMF) (talk) 23:39, 21 July 2012 (UTC)

I'm afraid I have no idea what you are talking about Oliver. Jorm has just clearly said deployment has been held off. Kudpung กุดผึ้ง (talk) 06:56, 22 July 2012 (UTC)

Thank you for clarifying which of the solutions we are working on you are talking about :). This was not initially done, hence the confusion. Yes, deployment has been held off; we decided it might be better to finish the new patrolling system before creating a system that risks upsetting the already shaky balance between number of patrollers and number of articles created. Apologies if you think we should've gone ahead immediately. Okeyes (WMF) (talk) 10:40, 22 July 2012 (UTC)

I still don't see the connection between the development a proper landing page for new users and the 'shaky balance' (whatever that is) between number of patrollers and number of articles created. Surely your goal should be to 1) address the lack of patrollers, and 2) to demonstrably improve the understanding of Wikipedia and its policies of those who then do the patrolling. Neither the 260+ warnings I have issued to patrollers nor the NPP bans issued by other admins have ever been contested, so NPP is clearly and dangerously underperforming - and that is the root of the problem.

The NPF, while a truly excellent tool (why wasn't it thought of years ago?) when in the right hands, does not unfortunately, and cannot, address any of these issues. At best, it's such a cool tool that it might even risk attracting even more inexperienced users to patrol new pages.

As I understand it, Article Creation Flow was conceived as a peace offering for the rejection of ACTRIAL, which, I hasten to remind, was not proposed by a bunch of exclusionists as was claimed at Bugzilla, but was designed to combat the huge flow of totally useless new pages and at the same time encourage the development of serious new articles. While a new landing page also won't and can't address the actual standard of patrolling, it would most likely significantly reduce the number of new pages that the regular community is expected to clean up and/or delete, while at the same time encouraging new editors of shaky creations to do their own cleaning up and perhaps becoming potential Wikipedians - it might also help reduce the amount of admin error. The only 'upset' of some balance or other, as far as I can see, would thus be a net positive all round. Kudpung กุดผึ้ง (talk) 23:05, 22 July 2012 (UTC)

"I still don't see the connection between the development a proper landing page for new users and the 'shaky balance' (whatever that is) between number of patrollers and number of articles created" - at the moment, new users going to redlinks are not exactly presented with a helpful and simple interface that intuitively explains their options. Developing the landing page will do these things; it'll say "hey, this is a redlink! here are your ways forward (go back, maybe create a new article, request it be created, whatever". This should hopefully decrease the number of bad new articles by briefing new writers on the requirements. That's great. But it could conceivably also increase the number of incoming articles overall, because instead of a confusing interface people are being actively told "you can create articles and here's how". So, yes, this could upset things, at least in the short-term.

In regards to patrols; you've issued 260 warnings for incorrect patrols or tags, yes? That's a very, very tiny number of problematic postings. I've, as one admin, validated many more CSDs than that. As one patroller, I've patrolled far more pages than that. And, again, I'm just one guy. 260 is a minute percentage of the number of actions actually taken (presumably, we have at least 3 million total patrol actions logged in the article namespace alone). I've not seen any evidence that it's a systematic rather than a subjective problem, and we don't invest months of developer time in what is essentially an edge case. If you can show that it's actually systematic, we should have a conversation. Okeyes (WMF) (talk) 01:28, 23 July 2012 (UTC)

And, no, that would be the new pages feed that is aimed at helping resolve the ACTRIAL issue :). Here's the thing; you talk about our priorities for improving the quality of patrollers and addressing the lack of patrollers. How do we do this through software, exactly? A userright requirement for patrolling? It's largely not our place to just arbitrarily jump in and say "yes, we want this userright"; if you want something like that, go hold an RfC. Okeyes (WMF) (talk) 01:30, 23 July 2012 (UTC)

My 260+ warnings are only my warnings, and should serve as an indication that it is possibly only the tip of the iceberg. You are fully aware that I, as just one of the users concerned with making progress towards addressing New Page Patrol issues, I have patrolled 10,000s of pages over 100s of hours, including those that have already been supposedly 'patrolled'. The community would welcome any suggestions from the Foundation to address these issues as they already appear to be doing. The creation of a landing page for new users (Article Creation, Flow) is not a fringe issue, it was already proposed by the Foundation as a tandem solution to ACTRIAL, and would provide an important solution. I will say again that while NPF is a brilliant tool, sophisticated tools are only as good as the worker whose hands they are in, and in the worst case scenario, because it is such a cool tool, NPF may even attract more inexperienced users to the task. It therefore clearly does not address the core issues in any way - if it were to, I would like very much like to understand how you/the Foundation feel(s) it does. I will also point out that the Foundation does occasionally jump in with arbitrary solutions (sometimes in fact good ones) and/or to reject community response. The opportunity for a reasonable, structured conversation was available last week in Washington. Kudpung กุดผึ้ง (talk) 02:13, 23 July 2012 (UTC)

Indeed; I was there! I did, in fact, try to talk to you - you blanked me, for some reason. Okeyes (WMF) (talk) 02:14, 23 July 2012 (UTC)

Nope, it is not my art after travelling a 24,000 mile round trip, with the express intention of discussing some issues with you in particular. --Kudpung กุดผึ้ง (talk) 02:41, 23 July 2012 (UTC)

I'm sorry, Oliver, but that is a lie. I offered to facilitate a discussion between the two of you, and you told me to fuck off (your words). Now I don't give a shit about that but I won't let you come here and pretend that it was Kudpung who refused to engage with you. HJ Mitchell | Penny for your thoughts? 03:17, 23 July 2012 (UTC)

Erm. No, I'm pointing to that specific situation - I approached him, said "Hey [name]", he blanked me. Okeyes (WMF) (talk) 03:34, 23 July 2012 (UTC)

And for reference, Kudpung, as an (admittedly not-quite-as-good) alternative, I'm happy to have a conversation with you on Skype if there's something you want to talk through :). Okeyes (WMF) (talk) 03:37, 23 July 2012 (UTC)

Yes, we need work by the volunteers here; the better the tools, the more we will use them. Kudpung said not that he had patrolled 260 pages, but that he had gotten in touch with 260 patrollers, to improve their patrolling. This has a multiplier effect much more effective and far reaching than just patrolling. As far as I know he has made the major effort of anyone in this, both in advocating this approach and in actually doing it, and he deserves the tribute for it. An attempt to belittle or ignore his work is unwarranted. Those working on the project for the WMF ought to have made it a major effort to talk with him at Wikimania--after making their presentation, it was perhaps the most important thing they needed to do there. International conventions were invented for purposes like this. I as well as HJM tried to facilitate it, and we tried repeatedly. I certainly would have learned a good deal just by listening to the discussion. DGG ( talk ) 04:30, 23 July 2012 (UTC)

I know that he spoke to both Howie and Karyn Gladstone; I can't speak for any other conversations that were had :). Okeyes (WMF) (talk) 06:45, 23 July 2012 (UTC)

And thank you, DGG, for proving my point :). I wasn't claiming that he'd not done a mammoth amount of work, precisely the opposite - that he does more work on this front than almost anyone. And that's the problem with trying to extrapolate from him identifying 260 poor patrols; he does a lot more work than everyone else, so his experience is unlikely to be reflective of the experience of reviewing admins as a whole. This means that while it may seem a substantial problem, it isn't necessarily; he may be catching most of the individuals responsible on his own.

Now, just because it isn't substantial numerically doesn't mean it isn't important, but it does mean thatcontribs=user it may not be worth the massive effort of undertaking a (third) page patrol software project to fix it. Despite what people may assume from the fundraiser every year, we don't actually have that big a team; day-to-day, I currently work with 2 (3, on occasion) programmers in this area, and each of them only have four days a week to dedicate to the projects they're working on because of 20 percent time (the idea that one day a week should be spent bugfixing other or previous projects). To invest in yet another project in this field would inevitably mean pushing back everything else we have to do because, again, we're a small team, and our to-do list includes a global profiles system, an inter-wiki notifications system and fixing user talkpages. And that's just until the end of the year.

In addition, I'm not even sure what software we could invest in to fix this problem; it's primarily a social one, and this makes fixing it with technology a wee bit difficult - and also means we cross a line we've tarried on before of "this community process is broken, we will jump in and fix it from above", which makes me rather uncomfortable. If people have ideas to fix the issue, I would advise them to bring it up with staff (as mentioned above, I assume Kudpung already did in his conversations with Karyn and Howie), and then see if there is perhaps a social solution to what is ultimately a social problem. Because, resource-wise, we're tapped out unless we want to fling our project timetables out the window. Okeyes (WMF) (talk) 06:52, 23 July 2012 (UTC)

Getting back to the question of what we should do here, I think we all agreed at Wikimania that Oliver & colleagues managed a very useful rework with the revised patrol page that would help almost all patrollers; though it needed some further development. I also think the consensus was unmistakable that it was good enough to be immediately deployed as the default page, keeping the old page in secondary status. (Unless the programmers think there is some fatal flaw,) Further development can proceed from there. Delaying deployment pending further work or further discussion or the development of additional pages is not helpful. I recall saying there after Oliver's presentation that although the community should have done the development, it was highly appropriate for the WMF to do it when the community had failed for so many years. Now is not the time to add bureaucratic obstacles. The foundation has shown it got this right. Let them not spoil their good work by delay--the sort of delay we all associate with unnecessary bureaucracy. . DGG ( talk ) 05:05, 23 July 2012 (UTC)

I'm slightly confused; we're not talking about delaying the replacement for the New Pages Feed - it's considered a working prototype, and will move on from "prototype" when we've finished and deployed the curation bar (think twinkle but with keyboard accelerators, more options, a better interface and it doesn't break every time MediaWiki upgrades). The delayed project is a completely different thing. Okeyes (WMF) (talk) 06:45, 23 July 2012 (UTC)

Would I be right in thinking that perhaps the delay in developing Article Creation Workflow is somewhat connected with the proposals for an entirely new interface design? (both by the same project creator). If so, I can understand the workload, but it would be great if development of a new landing page - at least its basic architecture without the final skin - could take place concurrently in order to save time. As you know, I personally consider user retention to be a high priority, and of course it goes hand-in-hand with the excellent NewPagesFeed and how, and by whom, it will be used. --Kudpung กุดผึ้ง (talk) 03:50, 25 July 2012 (UTC)

The two issues are not related.--Jorm (WMF) (talk) 05:04, 25 July 2012 (UTC)

• I certainly had social activities in mind, not so much the software development. We are btw less than 24 h from the cutting line.--Ymblanter (talk) 11:22, 27 July 2012 (UTC)

An RfC discussion is currently taking place at:

Wikipedia:Village pump (proposals)

Users interested in enhancing new-user retention/new-article retention are invited to join the discussion.

--Kudpung กุดผึ้ง (talk) 02:12, 2 August 2012 (UTC)

I have been concerned for some time that the AfC process is using standards not only internally inconsistent, but inconsistent with the standards experiences NPPatrollers have been using, and inconsistent with the rest of Wikipedia. Ses my comment there at [6] DGG ( talk ) 21:19, 5 August 2012 (UTC)

The page states: After 30 days, unpatrolled pages are removed from Special:Newpages and added to Category:Unreviewed new articles by a bot. Do I understand correctly that this does not occur anymore? Today in the morning, the queue was backlogged, and I happened to be the only patroller interested in the back of the queue at these specific hours (checked by the log that nobody els was patrolled the back of the queue). I saw articles disappearing from the queue (as if patrolled by someone else), but they are not in the category. Or are they expected to be transferred later at some point?--Ymblanter (talk) 10:46, 18 August 2012 (UTC)

Hi there,

I just found the New pages patrol page - looks like great work! I have 2 questions:

I couldn't tell from the instructions how to remove an item from the queue if it has been edited. I just finished editing Matthew de Lacey Davidson and wasn't sure how to remove it from the list of new pages to be reviewed. How should I handle that?

By the way, for awhile I've been using AWB to edit new, random or category based pages - but it looks like there are other tools that are recommended (Twinkle, etc.) Should I look at getting something other than AWB?

Thanks!--CaroleHenson (talk) 01:40, 11 August 2012 (UTC)

• For removing an edit, you should go back to the queue, click on the article, and patrol it. (If you clicked on an article from the queue and first edited it, return to the first version you loaded from the queue, reload it to take into account your changes, and patrol the resulting version).--Ymblanter (talk) 07:28, 11 August 2012 (UTC)
  • "Patrol it" means "click the tiny link at the bottom of the page that says 'Mark this page as patrolled'" if using the old system, and click the checkmark in the middle of the sidebar if using the new pages feed. WhatamIdoing (talk) 21:47, 19 October 2012 (UTC)

I have a couple of issues that I would like clarrified

1. Why is the defcon alert saying 30 days while the oldest unpatrolled page is of 3rd Oct?
2. Is it ok a mark a page patrolled if I am resolving some of the issues while I am adding templates for others (and addressing all issues)? I might not be very knowledgable about topic and yet don't want to skip 20 pages and edit only five (as the defcon is at 30).

Regards -Wikishagnik (talk) 05:11, 13 October 2012 (UTC)

I can't answer your first question, but the oldest unpatrolled page is almost certainly more than 30 days old. If you sort by 'oldest first' you'll see that list goes bac;k to at least 12 February 2012. The meta information on the page feed says '1638 total unreviewed pages (oldest: 983 days)' which may be due to a bug because the graph at http://toolserver.org/~snottywong/cgi-bin/patrolgraph.cgi showed an enormous drop in unpatrolled pages over the past 13 days. You'll get better feedback by posting your enquiry at Wikipedia talk:Page Curation.

When marking a page you have tagged as patrolled, you need to be failrly certain that it is not going to remain unnoticed and and unimproved for the next 5 years. Topic knowledge is not required and that's why the new patrolling tool has the feature of being able to send a message to the creator. Kudpung กุดผึ้ง (talk) 08:39, 13 October 2012 (UTC)

Hmmm... I don't know what I am doing wrong but when I try sorting unpatrolled pages (the one in yellow), the oldest article I am getting is for Oct this year (I am selecting the oldest radio button). Your answer for the 2nd option is a tall order. Right now I am tagging based on article content alone (without doing any google search). Addressing all issues with an article I feel is something that GOSE should be looking at (I guess it would be OK to mark all articles for GOSE/expansion/copyedit etc.), but then I might be playing it safe. Just a generic question to all editors, Is it OK to tag articles and not fix issues yourself? -Wikishagnik (talk) 22:22, 13 October 2012 (UTC)

According to the reccommendations on the tutorial at WP:NPP, patrollers/reviewers are encouraged to do some minor fixes on-the-fly, and if necessary some further detective work. For example, this can be very effective in catching serial vandal/hoax/attack page creators, recreations of deleted pages, COPYVIOs, and sockpuppets. At NPP, accuracy and thoroughness are far more important than speed. That said, The special:new pages that you are working from is all but deprecated and I thought in fact that you were already working from Special:NewPagesFeed - do try it. Kudpung กุดผึ้ง (talk) 05:11, 14 October 2012 (UTC)

I think the bot's down or getting bad information or something. I manually changed it yesterday to reflect what it says it's supposed to reflect, which is the Special:NewPages list (which never exceeds 30 days). WhatamIdoing (talk) 21:49, 19 October 2012 (UTC)

I was patrolling some of the user talk pages and I noticed that the earliest unpatrolled ones listed are only a month old. Are these pages automatically patrolled after a month? AutomaticStrikeout 21:34, 22 October 2012 (UTC)

Special:NewPages only lists articles under 1 month old. You might be able to find articles that have fallen off the list, on an outdated list of unpatrolled new pages at WP:NPP30. →Σσς. (Sigma) 00:42, 23 October 2012 (UTC)

Thank you very much. AutomaticStrikeout 01:14, 23 October 2012 (UTC)

Is there a list of new redirects, as opposed to a list of new pages in general? Emmette Hernandez Coleman (talk) 23:45, 26 October 2012 (UTC)

Are you using Special:NewPagesFeed? If so, set your filter to show redirects. Ryan Vesey 00:03, 27 October 2012 (UTC)

How do you exclude non-redirects? Emmette Hernandez Coleman (talk) 00:06, 27 October 2012 (UTC)

I don't think that's possible, I'll talk to Oliver and see if he knows anything I don't or if he can get that created. Ryan Vesey 00:23, 27 October 2012 (UTC)

I see no reason why that particular type of page creation needs to be patrolled - it's closed if it's bad, and it's closed in seven days anyhow. I have a feeling that this happens with all XfDs that create new pages, so perhaps that should be excluded? MSJapan (talk) 00:07, 2 November 2012 (UTC)

They are not, so I assume that it's probably a software bug. Please report any unusual events like this to Wikipedia talk:Page Curation. Thanks. Kudpung กุดผึ้ง (talk)

For those who may be interested, there is an RfC regarding a potential new CSD criterion. The RfC can be found here, please feel welcome to weigh in. AutomaticStrikeout 22:02, 2 November 2012 (UTC)

The articles in the Category:All unreviewed new articles are not part of the usual New Pages Patrol effort. I regularly review articles in this category, but I would appreciate some assistance by other editors at this time. --DThomsen8 (talk) 02:07, 6 December 2012 (UTC)

I sent a TV episode to prod. There are only seven pages left in the category. WhatamIdoing (talk) 00:31, 7 December 2012 (UTC)

I'm told these show up in the queue - are they really meant to be patrolled? Do sub-pages show up as well? Thanks. Dougweller (talk) 18:36, 14 December 2012 (UTC)

User pages don't by default, eg this link only shows articles: [11]. There's a pull-down where you could see other namespaces, but I don't think most of them are as useful. ErikHaugen (talk | contribs) 19:10, 14 December 2012 (UTC)

I found the queue at Special:NewPagesFeed, using the "Set filters" option, it allows you to set it to the article or user namespace. Since there is an option to set the user namespace there, it seems as if user pages can/should be patrolled. Just my opinion... The Anonymouse (talk • contribs) ^{[Merry Christmas!]} 20:17, 15 December 2012 (UTC)

Yes they can be patrolled, and I for one think they should be patrolled, but we don't have the resources to do it in the same way as we do articles. So in practice userpages are nowhere near as thoroughly patrolled as articles. My view is that since we are allowing anyone to write anything and post it on the Internet we should at least be patrolling all pages for attack pages and copyvio. Occasionally I trawl userspace for certain high risk words and phrases and delete the attack pages that I find, but it is a big project and some of the stuff I've found had been up for some time first. That's why I've proposed in the past that we default to making userpages editable only by the user and by admins, with a page by page option by which an editor can open up pages in their userspace for collaboration. If we did that we'd at least resolve the problem of long dormant editors having their userpages vandalised without anyone noticing. ϢereSpielChequers 20:50, 15 December 2012 (UTC)

Note that we are mass-patrolling (or mass-curing, if you want) now the articles created on November 24, which corresponds to one month and one week.--Ymblanter (talk) 21:54, 31 December 2012 (UTC)

At this point, it's not likely that anything positive will come out of this discussion. Page creators are not obligated to utilize user space while working on new articles but they must understand the fact that Wikipedia is a collaborative environment and anything in mainspace is liable to be tagged by someone else. New Page Patrollers should attempt to ascertain if the new article is currently being edited before tagging it (perhaps by asking on the page creator's talk page). Also, it is not the end of the world if a page is tagged and unless the tag is deletion-related, the issues probably don't need to be addressed right away. AutomaticStrikeout (T • C) 19:59, 21 January 2013 (UTC)}} [ This thread has been moved from WT:Page Curation. I am quite busy in RL right now but will try to respond more to this later. —Neotarf (talk) 00:08, 16 January 2013 (UTC)]

Why are new articles getting tag bombed within seconds of when they are started? Neotarf (talk) 14:13, 13 January 2013 (UTC)

Can you point to an example or two, Neotarf? --Anthonyhcole (talk) 14:56, 13 January 2013 (UTC)

Heh, is there anything you don't have watchlisted? Okay, [12], and the first thing I did was put the translation template on it. [13] Here's an older one.[14] This one actually got added to a list of articles needing translation, even though I had put a template on it, and there was some demand that it be completed in a certain time frame, even though the edit summaries should have shown that it was being worked on a little bit every day. Neotarf (talk) 23:10, 13 January 2013 (UTC)

I wrote something longer at the "Templates for newcomers" thread before I saw your comment here. —Neotarf (talk) 01:31, 14 January 2013 (UTC)

• 49 minutes is not 10 seconds. Please use your sand box or learn how to cope with edit conflicts rather than getting angry with other editors. Remember the tagger has no way to know of you are still working on it or have logged off for the day. The Swedish source article had a reference, why didn't you copy that over with the first edit? Unreferenced articles, even translations, will always attract attention these days.The-Pope (talk) 01:40, 14 January 2013 (UTC)

Two ways to avoid this tag bombing are: use of the {{inuse}} template, or better still, developing articles in user space first and moving them to mainspace when they are sufficiently complete to avoid the risk of them being tag bombed - even many experienced, established users do this. That said, there is still much room for eduducation of the patrollers, and issues of this kind are still best reported at WT:NPP which has not been made obsolete by the curation tool and where replies will also be very rapid. This page is mainly for reporting issues concerning the technical use of the New Pages Feed and the Curation Tool. Kudpung กุดผึ้ง (talk) 02:10, 14 January 2013 (UTC)

Thanks, I'll try that one, then. I used {{ New page }} before, but still ended up with several days of talking about what I was trying to do instead of actually doing it. I see someone even has an essay on it: WP:Don't demolish the house while it's still being built

I posted on this talk page because it was the one in the edit summary.

I have not found the whole develop-in-userspace concept to be particularly user friendly, and yes, I did spend several hours looking at the tutorial. It seems to require admin tools to finish, and I suppose some editors have admin friends they can ask to help. The last time I waited for an admin (for a contested page move), it took maybe 3 months, due to backlog. At that point, who can remember what else needs to be linked to the article and from what language wiki. Easier to put everything together while you still have all the the windows open. I seem to remember that the last time I had this conversation, I found out that most people don't really start articles in user space.

—Neotarf (talk) 09:30, 14 January 2013 (UTC)

Developing a page in user space is identical to doing it in main space (other than hiding categories and some templates if it is going to be days/weeks in your user space) and if the target page is available for use, then you don't need any admin assistance to move it when you are ready. You may be thinking of articles for creation which is mainly aimed at IP or new editors who can't create articles. Whilst the whole site is a work in progress we dont want too many obviously half finished articles in main space. If you put a few internal wiki links and a reference or two in your first draft then you are probably ok to work direct in main space. (and you really need to learn how to deal with edit conflicts. I've had two in this thread alone, and haven't lost any text.The-Pope (talk) 11:30, 14 January 2013 (UTC)

Whatever. —Neotarf (talk) 12:17, 14 January 2013 (UTC)

Lots of users make use of user space drafts. When the article is ready for prime time, just move it to article space and then request deletion of the redirect from your user space sandbox. There is not a significant backlog on housekeeping deletions. VQuakr (talk) 04:20, 16 January 2013 (UTC)

As I said before, I have wasted a lot of time looking at the instructions for this and did not find them to be particularly user friendly. Also, most people do not use this method. —Neotarf (talk) 15:20, 16 January 2013 (UTC)

Back to the original question...one reason is that it's easier for patrollers to find and examine new articles than "articles that are stable after creation" or "newest articles at least 24 hours old". -- ArglebargleIV (talk) 11:18, 14 January 2013 (UTC)

Only slightly easier. It takes half a second to click Sort by: ( )Newest (X)Oldest in the new pages feed. Braincricket (talk) 04:14, 16 January 2013 (UTC)

Reviewing the oldest articles isn't what was requested. To review articles that are a day old is more difficult and to only review those articles which aren't still being edited by others is not possible at the moment. The-Pope (talk) 05:28, 16 January 2013 (UTC)

Q: "Why are new articles getting tag bombed within seconds of when they are started?"

A: Because people don't review from the back of the queue. Braincricket (talk) 06:20, 16 January 2013 (UTC)

We have to default newpage patrol to the front of the queue because of the need to delete attack pages ASAP. Consequently a large portion of the tagging and other patrolling takes place at the front of the queue because the typical patroller is not just looking for attack pages. As a result of some people's concern with overhasty tagging we have consensus that A1 and A3 tags should not be applied in the first minutes after an article is created, personally I'd like to see that broadened to include more goodfaith articles, but consensus has not yet been with me on this. However the current arrangements are unsatisfactory and we do have a problem with tagbombing at newpage patrol. ϢereSpielChequers 06:27, 16 January 2013 (UTC)

(ec) My first edit on this article should have translated enough of the article to establish notability and keep it from being deleted. Twenty minutes into translating, someone tag bombed it with notes that it was uncategorised, unreferenced, unlinked. Does anyone really think those things are going to go onto an article in the first minutes of translation? I also see yet another tag saying the article needs inline citations. Per WP:IC this is not correct.

So now I have to stop editing and deal with all these Issues, not to mention the pontificating snarks. And most of the tags would be unnecessary once the article is finished. If they had waited an hour I would have had the article translated already, and have been ready to start the peripheral stuff in the morning. As it is, I have stopped editing.

They wonder why the number of new articles has gone down and why the new editors are leaving? This is why. The system is broke.

—Neotarf (talk) 15:56, 16 January 2013 (UTC)

• I don't understand why we're even discussing this issue. Neotarf seems belligerent and unwilling to create articles in his or her userspace. If Neotarf did so, Neotarf would have no problem. As such, Neotarf has no reason to complain when somebody patrols his or her pages. Ryan Vesey 15:23, 16 January 2013 (UTC)

• Because editors who insist on it drive away editors who aren't comfortable with creating an article in the user space. I'm one of them. Different editors edit with different styles. Policy doesn't mandate one way of creation or another because of this realization...only a few inconsiderate new page patrollers who abuse that power sometimes by being imperious by insiting on one way or another. It's aggressive and hostile, and burns people. How would you like it if you had just started painting your house and I came up and stapled a sign on the door marking it as "condemned" or a "violation?" You'd tell me to "piss off." Same here, if I start an article and someone tags it while I'm doing those initial things to start it up...the way I feel comfortable editing, you get me out of my comfort zone and I'm more likely to walk away from wikipedia and such hostility than continue subjecting myself to it. I haven't yet (almost though) because I like contributing and it happens to me rarely. Mind you, I don't write attack articles, or write about things not notable. I aim towards solid editing and contributing substance. Multiply me by a few hundred, or a few thousand and think how NPP has contributed to driving that multitude away because of the pettiness of some NPPers who were just a little too trigger-happy. --ColonelHenry (talk) 16:27, 16 January 2013 (UTC)

• If somebody wants to create an article outside of their userspace, I have no problem with that. If somebody who should know better wants to create Carl Emil Pettersson outside of their userspace with no references and wants to complain when it is tagged 49 minutes later, I do have a problem. Creating foreign language articles in the mainspace, like this one, is inappropriate. If an appropriate article is created in the mainspace and it has some errors, the creator shouldn't be angry that it was tagged, they should be happy. I know I am. It might allow me to recognize an error that I didn't see and fix it. Ryan Vesey 16:34, 16 January 2013 (UTC)

• When it's benign like that, I have no problem with it. I rarely tag an article, but before I do, I check to see if it has been recently edited...because of this very conflict. If someone has recently edited an article, and there are several edits within a short time frame...i.e. within an hour, I'm not going to tag it thinking it may still be worked on at that time. A friendly reminder on an article that is obviously not being worked on should not be a problem, and I would endorse such a policy. Unfortunately, even benign suggestions can be taken too seriously creating bad faith situations--especially when someone's thoughtful work disappears because of an edit conflict only to find out it was an NPP tagger. Even more unfortunate, and not infrequently, some NPPers are a little too sadistic with the tagging. That's why this discussion pops up as often as it does. --ColonelHenry (talk) 17:02, 16 January 2013 (UTC)

• And once you hit save, this isn't "your house" anymore, it's all of ours. This is a collaborative environment. It's written on every edit screen: "Work submitted to Wikipedia can be edited ... by anyone", not "can be edited by anyone when you have finished with it". I wish we knew when someone else was still editing. I wish the edit conflict system was easier to use. I wish people would realise tags are offering advice, not just condeming their work. But we are stuck with what we have, and sometimes an article (good or bad) will get missed by everyone, other times it will be jumped on in seconds. The hyperbole and exaggeration in this case (it was tagged almost an hour after creation, not seconds) doesn't help, but as it is the second case like this in the past few months, I hope something can be done - which hope doesn't include banning tagging for a certain length of time after creation. The-Pope (talk) 16:49, 16 January 2013 (UTC)

• I don't disagree. But a little better judgment on the part of an NPPer is to be asked for unless there's an obvious bad faith error. For example, sometimes it takes me 4-5 edits in a half hour to start a good intro, set up the sections, put in references, external links, categories, and I do them in separate edits. Sometimes, I'll write a paragraph from my notes and put in the references in subsequent edits. To be shot at by an NPPer upsets that flow if they decide to butt in. While some will say "this wouldn't be a problem if the user edited in the user space"...it can equally be said, "this wouldn't be a problem if the NPPer checked the edit history to avoid interjecting his tags while someone (in his good judgment of that editing activity) is actively editting the article." An hour or two isn't too much to ask for, and might be a good policy.--ColonelHenry (talk) 17:02, 16 January 2013 (UTC)

• I object to Mr. Vesey's categorizations of me as "belligerent" and "unwilling", and of his dismissal of my legitimate concerns as "complaining". They are uncivil and unsupportable. I suggest he review the salient policies and adjust his remarks accordingly. —Neotarf (talk) 02:13, 17 January 2013 (UTC)

Moved in order to maintain proper indentation. Neotarf appears to be responding to my initial comment, but placed the response in a place where it appears like I had responded to this statement with my second comment. Ryan Vesey 02:23, 17 January 2013 (UTC)

• You are very clearly "belligerent" and "unwilling" when it comes to the concept of creating the article in your userspace. It's as easy as creating the article at User:Neotarf/ARTICLE NAME. You responded to statements related to creating articles in your userspace with "Whatever" and "As I said before, I have wasted a lot of time looking at the instructions for this and did not find them to be particularly user friendly. Also, most people do not use this method". You have made zero effort to find a solution on your end, expecting others to bend over backwards for your sake. If you don't want to deal with articles receiving tags for necessary improvement, create the articles correctly in the initial edit, create them in your userspace, or don't create them. Ryan Vesey 02:31, 17 January 2013 (UTC)

• You are ordering a content editor who is editing in good faith to do it your way or get off the wikipedia? And you want to be an admin?!—Neotarf (talk) 03:56, 17 January 2013 (UTC)

• I never said that. Ryan Vesey 03:58, 17 January 2013 (UTC)

• Just to be clear on the math, since I have been accused of everything from ownership of an article (that I have not edited for 4 days!) to "not making an effort" (on issues that I have dropped my intended editing project in order to explain my exact efforts here and elsewhere over and over in minute detail); I started the article at 12:58, I added a translation banner at 13:00, and by 13:18 I had finished a rough draft of the first part, with an edit summary of "translate two paragraphs". At 13:47, twenty-nine minutes later, the first template bomb was dropped, and I have not edited the article since.
• I have noticed that almost the exact same thing happened in a thread above. Someone created an article, was not allowed to finish what they started, and then was subjected to bullying and harassment by the very people who have apparently been told to hold off of templating newly articles.
• If all of these people are really here to create an encyclopedia, it's not working.
• —Neotarf (talk) 04:26, 17 January 2013 (UTC)

• The WP:OWN comment was in response to Colonel Henry's house painting scenario, not to you. No one is ever "not allowed to finish what they started". Edit conflicts can happen on old pages too. Unless the wmf devs work out an alternative merging/notification/warning system, you just have to accept that they will happen. Would you have had this same response if the edit that caused you to lose the info was another editor adding content or refs or fixing a spelling error? I have retitled these sections to correctly reflect the situation under discussion. The-Pope (talk) 16:56, 17 January 2013 (UTC)

• There is a similar scenario at WP:Don't demolish the house while it's still being built. If you and others are disrupting the article creation process just because this is "the encyclopedia that anyone can edit", then maybe it's time to look again at WP:IAR "If a rule prevents you from improving or maintaining Wikipedia, ignore it."
• And yes, editors are "not being allowed to finish what they have started". Unless you are 14 years old and live in your mother's basement, most editors must juggle WP with RL. I have a finite amount of time available to edit. If I have to use the time to deal with interruptions and with rude and aggressive individuals, then I lose that time for productive pursuits.
• —Neotarf (talk) 00:07, 18 January 2013 (UTC)

You don't need to lose that time for productive pursuits. Just ignore the tags and do the work you want to. The tags aren't hurting anything. You're choosing to waste your time here. There is no time limit. You are allowed to finish at your own pace, unless it's tagged for deletion, which isn't the case here. (Also, please don't insult editors who happen to have more time or choose to use more of their free time here.) --Onorem♠Dil 00:18, 18 January 2013 (UTC)

Please review my beginning remarks, and the remarks of the editor who started the other discussion that is now closed: that is not at all what is being said here. —Neotarf (talk) 00:39, 18 January 2013 (UTC)

The belief of a minority of editors that people are somehow doing something wrong by not starting articles in their userspace is divisive and results in resentment. Maybe we need to directly state in policy that editors have the right to create articles directly in the mainspace, even if a few NPPers would find it slightly more convenient to have everything done in userspace. WhatamIdoing (talk) 18:02, 18 January 2013 (UTC)

Has any editor said that editors don't have the right to create articles in the mainspace? My article creations are probably half and half. What I, and others, have said is that if somebody chooses to create the article in the mainspace, they have no right to complain when their article is tagged or edited. Ryan Vesey 18:04, 18 January 2013 (UTC)

Yeah, if anyone is saying that editors are doing something wrong by creating articles, then they are in the clear, fringe, minority. A more widespread view is that editors that create articles in mainspace should be unsurprised when other editors modify those articles - this is, after all, a collaborative project. VQuakr (talk) 20:30, 18 January 2013 (UTC)

Edit conflicts are very much part of the problem, and with a bit of pressure to up the priority of some easy software fixes we could reduce that problem. It should be possible for a categorisation edit and a typo fix not to edit conflict with each other. The WMF could easily invest some programmer time in improving the code to handle more simultaneous edits without losing half of them as edit conflicts - we just need to keep telling them that improving the edit conflict software should be a higher priority and get more programmer time than moodbars and Article Feedback tools. Similarly it would be easy to replace some tags with automatically generated hidden categories. We really don't need an uncategorised template, the latest newpage patrol screen doesn't use that template when it lists uncategorised pages, and we could replace thet template with a hidden category of uncategorised, and while we are about it deadend could be replaced with hidden cats for zero, one two or three links to other articles. All of that would reduce stress at newpage patrol, and hopefully shift people from stuff that could easily be automated like adding deadend and uncategorised templates to stuff we actually need volunteers for like categorising articles and adding wikilinks. ϢereSpielChequers 19:03, 16 January 2013 (UTC)

Is there some way to sense if an article is stable, for example, if there have not been any new edits for a certain length of time? It seems a waste of time to start adding categories and such before the scope of the article is evident. Perhaps the only patrolling options open at the time of an article's creation should be for obvious vandalism. —Neotarf (talk) 04:36, 17 January 2013 (UTC)

• ColonelHenry, we had this very same discussion exactly 6 months ago in the thread you started at Wikipedia talk:New pages patrol/Archive 2#Clubbing baby seals - has it started all over again because I recently archived it to create a clean page for 2013?

The WMF could better invest some programmer time by producing the long promised new landing page they offered as a consolation prize to their uncivil rejection of WP:ACTRIAL. All they did was to develop (an albeit excellent) new interface and tool for patrolling new pages.

Untill we get that landing page (and I'm having my doubts) we're saddled with the same old problem of editors who without any experience or user rights whatsoever are allowed to wield a big stick over new articles. Some of us, (me and WereSpieleChequers included) have been campaigning for over 3 years for improvement to the standards of NPP, but it won't happen until the community gets together and calmly reaches a consensus for changes. Sometimes we have to look at the future and the bigger picture rather than simply get angry over what directly concerns us personally as individuals. The only possible solutions are one or the other (preferably both) of the following:

1. Making NPP a user right for suitably experienced users
2. A new new-user interface that clearly explains without walls of text to newbies what the basic requirements are for every new article in order to avoid tagging and possible deletion.

There is another advantage with solution #2: it would reduce the need for CSD, XfD, PROD, BLPPROD, DELREV, REFUND, etc and hence reduce the work load for admins which in turn would address the current dearth of adminship candidates.

On 'comfort zones' I can't think of anywhere I would prefer to develop my articles than in the comfort of my own Wikipedia workspace, or better still on my computer until ready to move to mainspace - the only time any of my new articles were tagged were, believe it or not, by inexperienced drive-by taggers... Kudpung กุดผึ้ง (talk) 07:35, 17 January 2013 (UTC)

How big of problem is this as a wider issue? Hasty tagging for minor issues obviously merits coaching, but there NPP is always going to get complaints so the mere existence of complaints should not be used as an indicator of a problem. How would we go about quantifying this in assessing if there really is a need for a change? VQuakr (talk) 08:09, 17 January 2013 (UTC)

You'll quantify it like we did: by spending several months patrolling new pages as well as the ones that have been patrolled. You won't need much convincing that there is a problem. --Kudpung กุดผึ้ง (talk) 16:26, 17 January 2013 (UTC)

What you describe is not quantification. I have spent a significant amount of time patrolling new pages. Avoiding WP:BITE is one of the most common issues that comes up when coaching new patrollers, and even patrollers with lots of experience can easily slip up and bite new editors. But the topic here appears to be more specific. So again, how do we assess the severity of the problem, and how would we know if any corrective action fixed (or even improved) it? VQuakr (talk) 18:04, 17 January 2013 (UTC)

What kind of evidence is being looked for here? Are there statistics that would show when the new procedures kicked in that could be compared to new article creation or editor retention statistics? Even if you could establish correlation, it would not establish causation; this is a complicated place. You have above two real life examples, case studies as it were. Most editors just walk away when they see this kind of set up. I think it is extremely unusual that someone who had a bad experience on WP would 1) be able to figure out where to go to discuss it and 2) bother to wade through all the uncivil remarks to continue to try to communicate.—Neotarf (talk) 00:49, 18 January 2013 (UTC)

I am regularly lampooned whenever I mention Wikipedia on Facebook. With the exception of a few Argentinians who are appreciative of my translation efforts in the area of human rights, most on FB who are educated or knowledgeable will not touch WP with a ten foot pole. This week's sample comment: "Wikipedia is ruled by the Last Man Standing. Everything is doubtful, except your own convictions. Unless you are intimately familiar with the intricacies of NPV, OSE, TTV, WCZ etc you might as well stay off the Talk pages. Insults, smirks, sarcasm and holier-than-thou are all common fare: it is not territory for the faint of heart." I can never think of a good response to this sort of thing. —Neotarf (talk) 01:48, 18 January 2013 (UTC)

My advice in those types of situations is to tell people to try to use common sense, try to listen to the advice you're given, and try to have a thick skin. (Though most of the time I spend "defending" Wikipedia is explaining that you shouldn't trust what the article says just because it says it on Wikipedia. You should check the sources that Wikipedia uses to back those facts.) Hey...look at that. Full circle back to why tags matter and articles shouldn't sit unsourced in article space... --Onorem♠Dil 02:09, 18 January 2013 (UTC)

So all these professors need to do is STFU and become more masochistic? And for no money? Ha, ha, with an attitude like that, you should get lots of PhDs to write articles.

And the justification for this contempt for the new editor and for ignoring WP:CIVIL is that "tags matter"? Why is that? Oh, I concede to you completely, the article carl emil pettersson is now live and stable on google, the google spiders having finished crawling it, and it has a tag that declares it to be "unclassified". It is also a stub and likely to remain so, so congratulations, you win the internet. BTW, this is an incorrect tag, which is why I removed it. But it was put back on without discussion, without a courtesy note on my talk page --the patrollers just chose to edit war with me -- and certainly without a link to the policy that describes why it was put there in the first place (which is a glaring oversight).

—Neotarf (talk) 21:41, 18 January 2013 (UTC)

88% of what you just said made no sense. Why are you bringing up PhDs and the like? What do you mean "you win the internet"? Why should a courtesy note be placed on your talk page when a tag is restored? You clearly know about it so you must have been watching the page. What tag is incorrect? It's been explained to you on the talk page why both tags are correct. Finally, it's unlikely to remain a stub, despite your statement that you'll discontinue improving it due to the drama you initiated. I've added a little bit myself, and will continue to expand it with any English sources I have found and am getting assistance from another Swedish speaking editor since I borrowed the book that the article uses as a source. Ryan Vesey 21:58, 18 January 2013 (UTC)

Mr. Vesey, I have already reminded you about WP:AGF and WP:CIVIL, and on the article talk page I have also placed, along with a reminder about WP:BRD and a request for what policy you are citing for the inline citation requirement, a reminder to comment on content, not on the contributor, and now you make further unsupported and uncivil accusations against me. Please retract them. —Neotarf (talk) 22:52, 18 January 2013 (UTC)

There are no violations in of AGF or CIVIL in the post you replied to that I see. WP:BATTLE is policy as well. VQuakr (talk) 00:36, 19 January 2013 (UTC)

VQyakr, I have been dismissively accused of "initiating drama", and my concerns ignored. This whole discussion is nothing but one continuous ad hominem attack against me; no one has even addressed the substance of my comments. —Neotarf (talk) 03:59, 21 January 2013 (UTC)

(edit conflict)(multiple) *@VQuakr: As I said, as we did: by patrolling pages, including the ones that have just been patrolled and warning the patrollers who get their patrolling wrong (I have spent literally 100s of hours patrolling new pages and their patrollers). You will then ascertain for yourself that there is sufficient concern to campaign for training, minimum qualifications, or even a user right for patrollers. I am not aware of any extensive programmes for coaching patrollers - I've unofficially mentored a few who want to better understand the system, but generally those who regularly get it wrong are resistant to offers of help. I have yesterday made it a condition of an unblock request that the user refrains from patrolling new pages. That's how bad it is if you still need convincing. --Kudpung กุดผึ้ง (talk) 09:03, 18 January 2013 (UTC)

We both have significant amounts of experience patrolling new pages, and as such are unlikely to be impressed by an argument from authority from each other. That is why I am asking for some sort of justification that a problem exists based not on your personal experience. With hundreds of thousands of patrol actions per year, mere existence of complaints (including valid complaints) is unavoidable. But before even considering solutions such as requiring a technical permission to "allow" patrol, we should have a much better characterization of the problem we are attempting to solve. I do agree that creating a more dedicated, voluntary program for coaching newer patrollers would be a pretty good step though. If editors are resistant to feedback that is a problem with the individual, not with NPP. VQuakr (talk) 20:21, 18 January 2013 (UTC)

All you have to do is look at this thread, and the two articles they reference, and you can see for yourself what is happening. It is not unique, I almost didn't start the article at all because of past experience. I take the tags very seriously, and as the person creating the article I evaluate every question the tags introduce, as well as whether the tags are appropriate. You would be amazed at the misplaced tags, missing persons begin marked as BLP, etc. One of the problems with this tag bombing of a newly-born article is that it does lead to incorrect tagging, as the tags are put on before the scope of the article can be seen. And as you can see, it also leads to editor burnout. The logical order is to translate the article from beginning to end, before the google spiders have a change to scan it, so that when it goes live there is at least a complete text, then start researching the sources to see what is available in English or other languages. The issue of the tags is being forced too early, if the tag bomber would only look at the article that is being translated, they would see that. I shouldn't have to stop my own process to look up the policies they are not following and point it out to them. Then there is the whole issue of the way I have been engaged on the talk page. My original question was answered within minutes, but the tag bombers chose to engage in WP:BITE, as well as giving me incorrect and unsourced (and unhelpful) information about the article creation process. Originally I had a block of about two hours to make the article. If the edit conflict had not wiped out the last half hour of translation, I still would have been able to finish it the next day, along with adding the sources, images and links. But the tag bombers want to argue, and have kept me occupied with that for that last six days, eating up six times as much of my time as I was originally willing to donate to the Project. —Neotarf (talk) 22:33, 18 January 2013 (UTC)

You have not provided an example of tag bombing yet, which is an accusation of disruptive editing by the pointy, excessive use of tags and is an accusation of bad faith. You seem to have an us/them mentality when you refer to "tag bombers" that is not going to solve anything. Since you are not a newcomer WP:BITE doesn't really apply in the strictest sense, though of course the underlying concept of civility applies to everyone. Realistically though, if the editing process that works for you requires you to take two hours until the first reference is added, and you find addition of an "unreferenced" tag to the article in that intervening time to be stressful, then the solution is to create the article in a draft outside of mainspace. AfC or User space are both usable choices. You mentioned before that you find the help page on user drafting too confusing; I am happy to assist in its rewrite or working with you individually to nail down the process if you wish. It really is not difficult. VQuakr (talk) 00:36, 19 January 2013 (UTC)

Tag bombing does not have to be pointy or done in bad faith. Tag bombing is (go read the page you linked) the act of adding multiple tags to an article. Many inexperienced NPPers do this with the best of faith and in the sincere hope of being helpful. It isn't actually helpful, but their intentions are good. WhatamIdoing (talk) 01:52, 19 January 2013 (UTC)

The point is moot since it is just an essay, but the first sentence of the essay is qualified later on to note that "moderate" use of tags (plural) is not bombing. Adding more than one applicable tag to an article can, of course, be helpful. VQuakr (talk) 20:17, 19 January 2013 (UTC)

VQuakr, please do not put words in my mouth or misrepresent my concerns. Plenty of insinuations here, but no one has been able to show where my observations are in error. Hmm, it looks like I am not the first to have some concerns about template bombing. —Neotarf (talk) 04:21, 21 January 2013 (UTC)

If you use an essay to advance your argument, showing how that essay does not apply to the situation is not "putting words in your mouth." VQuakr (talk) 04:42, 24 January 2013 (UTC)

• @Neotarf: Of course it would be unusual, that's the whole reason why new users need to be given some basic information the moment they sign up for an account. I'm interested to know ahat the new procedures are - can you give me a link? All I can think of is the new initiative started recently called The Teahouse, but it's not a 'procedure'. There has never been any proper information for new users on Wikipedia - nothing has changed since I first registered 7 years ago, but today I'm probably one of the best informed Wikipedians, but it was bloody hard work getting there and I'm still learning... Kudpung กุดผึ้ง (talk) 09:03, 18 January 2013 (UTC)

Yes, I am self taught as well, as with all things computer. Don't know what to recommend to you, there are some welcome pages for new users, but I never received one. The first message on my talk page was from the sock of a banned user. I have never found any useful tutorials on WP, and have never been able to use the processes some recommend here, including the article wizard and user space process that the tag bombers seem determined to force everyone to use. I found useful off-wiki information, but there is a huge amount of incorrect information out there as well, so it's all trial and error, and very time-consuming. —Neotarf (talk) 21:57, 18 January 2013 (UTC)

@WhatAmIdoing: Many inexperienced NPPers do this with the best of faith and in the sincere hope of being helpful. It isn't actually helpful, but their intentions are good. Like so many situations in real life - they just get under our feet. There ought be be a rule of needing more clue before messing around in meta areas, but Wikipedia is the encyclopedia anyone can edit, which ufortunately also includes the management stuff. Kudpung กุดผึ้ง (talk) 13:56, 23 January 2013 (UTC)

Neotarf, what are you looking for as an outcome to this discussion? Ryan Vesey 04:32, 21 January 2013 (UTC)

It's a shame this discussion was hatted in much the same way as new articles are also patrolled by well-intentioned but overzealous editors who are impatient to show their self-appointed powers. At the end of the day, Neotrarf really is over-reacting just a little bit, and I would welcome their help at the kind of new-page patrolling that I do, which is to nip those wannabe 'moderators' in the bud, and perhaps turn them into useful content creators. --Kudpung กุดผึ้ง (talk) 14:11, 23 January 2013 (UTC)

It is a shame that I am being accused of "over-reacting" and by an admin at that. I'm not seeing any evidence at all that what I have stated is not correct. —Neotarf (talk) 01:45, 24 January 2013 (UTC)

Being told you are overreacting is not a violation of WP:CIVIL. You have not provided an example of "Tag bombing new article within seconds of their creation," so that would be a good place to start. This was pointed out very early on in the thread. VQuakr (talk) 04:27, 24 January 2013 (UTC)

Yes, this was presented earlier in the thread, here is just one again. [15] See also the new section I have started about patrolling. —Neotarf (talk) 04:45, 24 January 2013 (UTC)

I agree this is a better example of behavior that we want to discourage. Here's a suggestion - how about modifying the new page patrol report on the tool server to allow tracking, by NPPer, of the median age of the pages they edit? If we could filter out the pages that are deleted (assuming that these were unwanted content that should be flagged immediately, that would help highlight the patrollers who are consistently tagging very young pages and might be in need of coaching. VQuakr (talk) 05:07, 24 January 2013 (UTC)

It seems there is already some similar function "Average age of patrolled articles" and that it doesn't seem to be having any effect. The project page says to wait for 15 minutes after the last edit or up to an hour before patrolling new pages, for anything except "attack pages, copyvios, vandalism or complete nonsense", but that info doesn't seem to be available to the patrollers. Also, from what I can see, all the patrolling options are available all the time. —Neotarf (talk) 05:31, 24 January 2013 (UTC)

I could be mistaken, but I think the "Average age of patrolled articles" column just refers to the articles that have been recently reviewed. I was suggesting longer-term tracking to recognize trends in individual patrollers' behaviors. Unless tagged already by an anti-vandalism bot, recognizing the page as unwanted content requires reading the page. VQuakr (talk) 06:28, 24 January 2013 (UTC)

I see. This would distinguish pages that had merely been marked as patrolled from pages that had been edited (with tags or templates), along with some sort of information about whether the page was a bona fide new article. And of course the reviewers would know in advance that this was being tracked. Sounds good. —Neotarf (talk) 08:43, 24 January 2013 (UTC)