User:Kudpung/NPP

“ A necessary evil is an evil that must be allowed for a greater good to result ” — Wikipedia

The final analysis

At the risk of being emailed again by the WMF to tell me my contributions to this research project are not appropriate, whatever conclusions the WMF and the en.Wiki reach - I regretfully fear this project will probably end in stalemate - the following points should be taken into consideration by both sides, in particular, by first asking everyone to read very carefully all the threads again, and especially the whole of T149021 that was actually created in October 2016 by Nick Wilson, perhaps (wishful thinking?) as a result of my discussion with him in Italy several months previously. The amazing thing is that 8 months (eight months) later the WMF has been unable to even come up with a way of providing the stats. All that said, a thorough read of T149021 seems to reveal that the WMF is now clearly very worried about what the en.Wiki may do, as demonstrated by Kaldari's use of the word 'threat'. I'm not sure though exactly what the basis is for the foundation's fear; is it really anything to do with an imagined 'founding principle'? or is it merely that they risk losing face once again? Actually, probably a mix of both. It proves again also that we do need the tools we want to be able to maintain their insistence that the volunteers work even harder to help Wikipedia gain a reputation for being a reliable knowledge base in face of all the public criticism about it.

Stats

It does seem to be unusual that the Foundation is unable to comply with the request for up to date stats. Here are the same kind of charts we need now, compiled on the creation of articles from January 1, 2011 through May 31, 2011. The statistics were gathered by Scottywong via SQL queries to the toolserver which didn't seem to pose him any technical problems to obtain:

Backlog May 2017. Graph: Kudpung

Articles created by non-autoconfirmed users: deleted versus kept.

Articles created by autoconfirmed users: deleted versus kept.

Graph of the number of articles created per day by both autoconfirmed and non-autoconfirmed users. The large spike in April was caused by bot activity.

The absence of stats has been mentioned by DGG as being one of his concerns: 'The WMF is very good at measuring everything except the really critical information, like how many article are accepted and improved, or accepted and still there a year later. They are basic trying to capture snapshots at intervals, but we need to know what happens to articles. ' [1],

This backlog stretches back to late December 2016, which means that there are pages which have been waiting for five months without being marked as reviewed, or removed from the queue. Danny Horn, Wikimedia Foundation Community Tech team* May 31, 2017[2]

It would be interesting to know on what statistics the WMF bases their assumption. The graph on the right does not correlate with this statement. In fact the December figure was around 16,000 and continued to drop until February.

The backlog is a self-created problem (WMF)

Absolutely not. The Page Curation / New Pages Feed were doing more or less a good job (by those who would use it) for the 5 years since its creation by Jorm and Kaldari until its inadequacies, (or more accurately, those of the entire NPP system) were exposed by the new trend that has shaped the profile of the envelope of what we call the fire-hose of totally inappropriate new 'articles'.

So the rise of the backlog from around 6,000 to 22,000 in a year means that the current system is not working well. The only way to get the backlog under control is to change the current system.

- well, not quite - and it happened in 6 months, not a year : Volunteers have discussed all possible solutions at great length both on and off Wiki. The only way to get the backlog under control is to improve the current system. And, very importantly, introduce some stricter control over the type of new articles before they get created, or at least before they get published in mainspace: prevent the spam and rubbish, while encouraging others to read the instructions and follow the guidelines when creating content that might just be acceptable.

Reward

I used the term 'reward' metaphorically - the volunteers are not looking for handouts from the WMF in return for good work. The volunteer community however, has a right to expect the WMF to provide the clean-up brigade with the tools they need in order to uphold the values the WMF insists the volunteers maintain.
Let’s not be confused with the role of the volunteer community here. It’s comprised, very broadly of three elements (which obviously overlap):

• Those who add respectable, encyclopedic articles and/or expand the content
• Those who get rid of the unwanted content and keep the content free of disruption by others
• Those who repair and improve substandard but nevertheless encyclopedic content and provide help to the new and/or inexperienced users who show the potential of becoming permanent and positive members of the Wikipedia community.

Sticks and carrots and stats

Stick and carrot tactics are not going to get the community to do better work of building and and keeping clean the content of this encyclopedia. Instead of the Foundation trying to insist that they are right and the community is wrong, what we need right now is for the expert statisticians and data analysts employed by the WMF to explain to us why that simple but very worrying Kudpung Kiddy Graph has such a strange shape - and to prove or disprove once and for all any correlation between its shape and any events on the ground, and to do it properly without the conjecture. When we have that, we need the expert code writers employed by the WMF to write the tools the volunteers need and keep asking for - that would be the 'reward'.

To expect the volunteer community to write their own code as well would be asking a bit too much - en.Wiki is as big as all the other WMF encyclopedias rolled together and thus demands some extra attention. What the volunteers might well do however, is find their own solutions which the Foundation may disapprove of, but which they are fully entitled to roll out by ‘’creating their own governance structures by which they maintain quality’’

"Rescuing or engaging with new content can be a reward in and of itself" , but only if the community of page reviewers can see potential in the articles they police rather than a disheartening flood of utter rubbish that needs constant mopping up. In the older days of Wikipedia, NPP was interesting, new articles arrived and it was a pleasure to read them, cross a few Ts, and dot a few Is and approve them for inclusion. This is absolutely not happening today. What we are basically doing today at NPP is shovelling s***. And rather than being rewarded, we’re being criticised for doing it as best as some of us can.

On the other hand, this:

This page should not be speedily deleted because I'm working with Tina Collen an artist based out of boulder who would like to create a page for herself (http://www.tinacollen.com/) and about her art fleurotica (http://www.fleurotica.com/). we are working on content as we speak from her website and additional information.kindly allow us to recreate the site. thanks, Smit & Tina

and this

This page should not be speedy deleted because I would really like to start a wikipedia page about this musical group, because I think it is significant to the community, it is a professional music group that publishes and albums worldwide, but is made up of young people with disabilities. I am still learning how to use Wikipedia. I would like more time to learn how to use it, and more time to create the article. Sorry for my lack of knowledge on this topic. Please allow me to have more time to create a good article on this topic. Nicoleprovost

are clear examples of subjects (now visible to admins only) that would never qualify for a Wikipedia page, but where the creators, who also have a COI, deserve better than a quick, blunt CSD. The pages are not toxic, but are not of the kind that need to be urgently created immediately in main space. A proper landing page for such users and a more gentle let down might, just might have resulted in these users creating something else for Wikipedia. However, the Foundation is clearly not in favour of creating such tools or allowing such possibilities - and that is what I, for one, do not understand.

"Patrollers get blocked or banned for getting it wrong"

Absolutely shockingly untrue.
The only incident that I know of where a user lost the right was at here. I was not involved in the discussion. About two rights were revoked due to false positives returned by the grandfathering script. However, numerous very new and/or inexperienced users have been asked to refrain from patrolling until they have gained some experience at Recent Changes deleting vandalism. They have always been offered help. Established users without the Reviewer right who patrol pages may be met with more pithy comments when they have demonstrated a lack of understanding of the principles involved.

Just throw stuff out of the queue after 30 days...

New User deletions

Autoconfirmed User deletions

'They [the WMF] think the problem is "The queue is too big" so the solution is "Just throw stuff out of the queue after 30 days". [...] they fundamentally misunderstand the guidance given to patrollers. They wrote "Following the Article namespace checklist – the minimum effort that a reviewer is supposed to do – this article would probably take days to fix. You'd have to track down references, most of them not in English, and completely rewrite the page from scratch." That's incorrect. The guidelines for patrollers say to fix easy issues and tag more complicated things, which doesn't take long at all. [...] Detecting issues and fixing issues are very different things with very different time commitments, and so the analysis is flawed. [...] But if every reviewer followed the guidance given to them, there's no reason to believe articles in need of improvement are driving the backlog.' BU Rob13, 2 June 2017[3]

Again, this comment by BU Rob13 clearly illustrates once more how the Foundation is unambiguously putting their own spin on the issue in order to avoid doing the required development work to Page Curation. It's hardly surprising that after the denial of ACTRIAL in 2012, and other development issues, by 2015/2016 the community had finally lost most of its trust for the Foundation - most of the good guys had gone. It would be very difficult for the Foundation to maintain their policy of denial of the situation revealed in the pie charts on the right and come up with an alternative to preventing new users from creating their articles in mainspace.

The Foundation's 'Magna Carta' vs the shifting values of the Wikipedia community

There is a dichotomy in San Francisco (and to some extent within the volunteer community) that trades on the "anyone can edit" 'ethos'. The usefulness of this mantra had already expired by 2005 when the WMF began imposing its own limits on it, proving that being organic, Wikipedia like many things in life needs new rules as it grows and evolves. I would like to see the memorandum of incorporation in which this Founders’ 'Magna Carta' with its bulleted points that state:

• Anyone can edit
• Anyone can create anything they like in mainspace
• Anyone can create anything they like immediately in mainspace
• Controlling such content is optional
• Anyone can manage Wikipedia contributors and its back office
• Managing Wikipedia contributors and its back office is optional

Probably 100s of external articles and research, and even doctoral dissertations have been written about Wikipedia/WMF, but the paper The Free Encyclopaedia that_Anyone can Edit - The Shifting Values of Wikipedia Editors, Kim Osman (2014),, particularly comes to mind and only takes 10 minutes to read and understanding it does not require an academic background. While it focuses on paid editing (see also:Orangemoody editing of Wikipedia), the words ‘paid editing’ or ‘advocacy’ could easily be substituted by ‘vandalism’, ‘hoax’, ‘attack’, ‘nonsense page’, and ‘auto biography’, the problems surrounding the issue of policing new pages remain the same. Editors are urged to read this paper before commenting further.

Likewise, a more anecdotal and less formal approach to the way Wikipedi content and contributors are controlled is given in A Wikipedian Explains How Wikipedia Stays Reliable in the Fake News Era. . While focusing on the issue of hoaxes, again the word ‘hoax’ could be substituted by ‘vandalism’, ‘advocacy’, ‘attack’, ‘nonsense page’, and ‘auto biography’, because the problems surrounding the issue of policing new pages still remain the same.

The Community's values are not shifting - far from it, and the claim is again a misleading piece of conjecture. What has changed, as previously explained, is the profile of the daily intake of new pages. The community's values have actually strengthened in face of the increasing onslaught of cleverly crafted paid advocacy, general spam, vanity bios, and low quality pages from non English language regions.

Rabble-rousers stir the conscience, point out contradictions and declare truth, even when it is not popular to do so

Sometimes, the only way for the community to get a reaction from the Foundation is to cause a stir. Just because the WMF are paid for their work doesn’t mean that they are better than any of the thousands of volunteer contributions many of whom who are highly qualified in their various fields. The WMF must acknowledge that they are not our feudal masters; they are here to serve us, the volunteers. They manage the legalities, the money, and the servers; they do not manage the volunteer workforce which actually does an excellent job of building this encyclopaedia. Furthermore, history has clearly shown that the WMF does not always manage things particularly well. It provides top-down solutions that were never asked for but deemed by them to be worthy of expensive development while choosing to ignore critical issues such as the state of NPP. It spends money on what appear in some cases to be needless travel while severely restricting the funds available for volunteers' face-to-face meet ups and conferences, and spends a lot of time and money on stats which may well in fact be useful, but which they wrongly interpret.

The Foundation demands we produce a quality encyclopedia on the one hand while brushing aside the requests for practical tools and help that would make it possible, but making, on the other, for example, what some of us feel is the absurd suggestion of allowing all unpatrolled articles to be automatically released into the corpus after a short period of time.

The Foundation could be a good friend

ACTRIAL was important because it showed this: a discussion that took place only 3 years ago demonstrating how the WMF is internally confused between ideology and pragmatic management, including the comment from Dan Gerry, the then new product manager at the WMF that demonstrates also why my comments though not impolite, may not seem to come out on the side of the Foundation.

“ ...it was not a wishy washy discussion, or a discussion spun to suit an corporate agenda, it was explicitly "Here is a list of things the Foundation has failed at". I was very impressed by this attitude. The most echoed of those failings is community engagement. Multiple staff members, including those on the VisualEditor team, have recognised that the Foundation has not engaged enough with the community, and more crucially, that it has not engaged early enough with the community.(...). In recognising where it has failed, the Foundation has taken the first steps to fixing the problem. (...) I think the Wikimedia Foundation recognises its failings, and is interested in ways to move forwards. The Foundation has made new employees such as myself aware of these failings so that we are less likely to repeat them. ” — Dan Garry, Wikimedia Foundation, 24 September 2013,

This 2012 discussion with former WMF contractor O.Keyes (Ironholds) about a key phase in the examination of NPP by the community, clearly and unambiguously reveals, also with comments by WereSpielChequers, how the Foundation ducks and weaves for months to delay any progress or action concerning NPP.
The continuing reluctance of the WMF to support the movement, rather than try to run it is a serious concern and as fast as we try to build new bridges over the gap, the they wave away our olive branches. That's what happened to me, DGG, and HJ Mitchell several times and unfortunately quite rudely so not only by a junior contractor, but also by one of its most senior personnel, and to me again in Esino Lario where I was politely but firmly asked to change the subject. A glance at at Bugzilla (now Phabricator) from the ACTRIAL days will leave not doubts as to the horrifying disparagement with which the community is regarded by the WMF, while Phabricator will reveal that current requests filed since around October last are just not being given attention. This WMF proposal clearly conveys a message that hiding the backlog from view is the best solution, and while they find suggestions from the community 'interesting' they appear reluctant to provide technical support to any of the suggestions from the volunteers. Their viewpoint as developers is that in a few years ORES and AI will be perfected and will largely replace the patrolers. The community however, needs practical solutions now and is on the verge now of enacting (mutiny?) what the Foundation is now publicly calling a 'threat' :

Toxic environment

“ I worked for the Wikimedia Foundation for 5 years (as a researcher for 3!) until I left in early 2016 due to the toxicity and turmoil in the organisation's management structure. ” — Ironholds

During 2015-2016 concomitant with the forced resignation of CEO Lila Tretikov after her short tenure, there was a mass exodus of a very large number very senior staff members including Deputy Director Erik Möller, and engineer Brandon Harris (Jorm). It was almost a 90% turnover.
Brion Viber, the WMF's first employee and currently its lead software architect, is recorded as saying "Perhaps it's time to stop calling self-selected surveys of a tiny subset of our user base 'community consensus' ". My observations however, are that the highly critical issues are discussed by 500 or more volunteers, most of them seasoned editors and admins concerned with the quality of the content and the way the encyclopedia is presented to the public. Far from a 'tiny subset'.

Writing in wp:kurier, the German equivalent of Signpost, longstanding German admin H-stt writes: (translation) "The Foundation has a miserable cost / benefit ratio and for years now has spent millions on software development without producing anything that actually works. This is in large part due to the fact that decisions are made without consultation with the community. On the other hand, it has to do with the fact that people like Erik, Steven and Philippe were recruited from the community, but obviously have no experience in really getting a product "out the door" and completing a project successfully. (...)The WMF isn't up to the job. Nobody who works there really understands and has a handle on software projects. This is evidenced by a horrific track record over many years."

“ ...I left voluntarily because it was clear things were going to just continue to deteriorate at the top. But if some of the key folks in engineering left, that would really really suck. You don't want that to happen, trust me. These are good, super-talented people, and the institutional/technical memory that would leave with them would set the org back severely. ” — Erik Möller

In the same wp:Kurier issue, Frank Schulenberg, currently serving as the Wiki Education Foundation's Executive Director, offers a reminder of his comment at a Board meeting:(translation) "At the end of the meeting, the Board asked me for a final view. I have asked all those present to close their eyes and imagine that we are going to start an internet encyclopedia now, in 2014. Would it look like the Wikipedia does at the present time? Probably not. The Wikipedia is simply getting old."

"I think the Wikimedia Foundation recognises its failings, and is interested in ways to move forwards." What we seem to have however in mid 2017 is a Foundation with now over 300 employees, that is trying hard to operate as seriously as a truly professional, global organisation, but still not quite really getting there, and making many faux pas on the way. Its relations with its capital, the volunteer communities, are constantly strained, and some volunteers are beginning to view New pages patrol/Analysis and proposal as another provocation or at least, unhelpful.[4]. [5][6][7][8]
A dogmatic ideology rather than organic evolution of the project, will lead to the detriment of all the Wikipedia projects, and the millions of hours of voluntary contributions and maintenance work will have been wasted.

The 'threat': ACTRIAL

Some of the comments from the Bugzilla case here but these are some of the milder comment from the community. The real insults (not listed here) came from the very small team of WMF employees who rejected the huge consensus

Aug 5 2011, 9 16 PM snottywong.wiki wrote: Frankly, I'm appalled by the way this request has been handled. You seem to be more interested in the WMF's goals of editor engagement, and not interested at all in Wikipedia's core policy on consensus. Is this really the way Wikipedia works when you pull back the curtains? A proposal can get clear consensus from 300-400 editors, but then a couple of developers can trump that consensus because they don't like the idea? Do you believe that the editors who supported this proposal were not aware of the WMF's goals for editor engagement when they voted for it? Do you believe that you are smarter and/or know better than the editors who supported this idea? How did you come to the conclusion that the consensus for this proposal is "not strong enough"? How many more supporting votes would it have taken for the consensus to be "strong enough"? Discussing the political aspects of this trial on bugzilla is extraordinarily inappropriate, not only because the comments are not visible to most wiki users, but because the political aspects have already been discussed and decided by ordinary wiki editors. If the developers want to have their say in whether various proposals should be enacted, then they should participate on Wikipedia by frequently checking and contributing to the proposals and centralized discussions as they are happening, NOT by going on strike when the request finally gets to bugzilla for the final stage of implementation. I have contacted the WMF in the hopes that this request will be fulfilled in a timely manner, without a discussion on the political aspects of the request (which has already happened in a 2-month-long discussion on enwiki). Aug 5 2011, 9 16 PM Kudpung wrote: Wikipedia is indeed the encyclopedia anyone can edit. There has however, never been a policy that anyone can create new pages. If the trial delivers the expected results, it will solve a far greater number of perennial problems than simply that of over 1,000 pages per day (80% of all newpages) that have to be deleted through one process or another, and which are largely patrolled by a loose group of extremely inexperienced, and partly very young and/or non native speakers of English - NPP is already widely recognised as a broken process. I believe there is every urgent reason to implement this trial now without further delay. The consensus was reached by a debate involving around 500 users and a clear majority in favour, and based on examination of the problem rather than straight subjective 'support' or 'oppose' !voting. A further centrally publicised RfC on the actual terms of the trial has also received practically unanimous support. I realise by now that the WMF may not be in favour of this new user right change, but they should accept a decision arrived at by the very kind of consensus that they insist is the way to get things done at Wikipedia. By questioning the authority of the self governing Wikipedia community, any devs who would refuse this request for a trial, will be rocking the very foundation of a pillar of Wikipedia policy. Furthermore, Brendon is apparently overstepping his authority in unilaterally forbidding this trial. Rather than protecting a perceived user right for anyone to create new spam, attack, autobio, and copyvio pages, ultimately such action will result in the loss to the project of mature, established users and administrators who dedicate their free time to striving for improvement in the quality of Wikipedia, and its credibility as a universal knowledge base. Aug 9 2011, 9 40 PM snottywong wrote: That statistic was never intended to prove that everyone in the world has bad faith. It was intended to show that the vast majority of articles created by brand new users are utter crap (and if you've ever done any new page patrolling, you'd be quite aware of this). It's extreme bad faith to say that the people who are deleting these articles are "trigger-happy deletionists" trying to game the system at the expense of new users. Seriously, that is ridiculous and you should be ashamed of making a comment like that which disparages the hard work of dozens of editors, particularly considering you're on the WMF staff. If it weren't for patrollers filter

"Ever heard of WP:ACTRIAL? The root of the problem with newcomers and junk creations drowning out the rare good things is their zero effort to learn something before creating the article." - SmokeyJoe

"I have heard of ACTRIAL, and I would love it if it were implemented." - Primefac

Someone said somewhere that they would like a canned background to ACTRIAL. My apolgies if the following extracts seem to be one-sided cherry picking, but in fact the majority of oppose votes (such that there were) were on the lines of the hyperbole Beeblebrox mentions.

See also Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2011-02-14/WikiProject report which demonstrates Wikipedia is organic and that the WMF is indeed capable of introducing new restrictions of the kind they will later claim will 'kill' the project.

"Autoconfirmation is such a low standard, the idea that this will "kill Wikipedia" is ridiculous hyperbole." Beeblebrox, 10 April 2011

"Wikipedia has changed from the slap and dash days when we wanted to grow and any content was welcome. We did grow, though we also gained a reputation for publishing unreliable and poor quality material. We are now in the days of more demanding quality article building, and our reputation is improving. Article editing and article creation is more difficult now, and it requires an editor with more than a five minute attention span, and who has the patience and willingness to read guidelines and follow consensus. Editors who are not prepared to wait, listen and learn are not the editors we want." SilkTork 6 April 2011

"Gah, the difference between editing and creating articles has been driving me crazy. Thank you for stating exactly how I feel about this; we can be open to new editors contributing to the encyclopedia without allowing just anyone to create articles (which require additional administrative attention, and can serve to drive away otherwise well-meaning editors when they simply just don't "get" the rules)..." EVula 23 April 2011

"...editors who are impatient and demand to do everything their way right this moment are probably not good fits for this project anyway. The vast majority of "first edit is a creation" articles are destined for deletion, of types ranging from well-meaning but inappropriate articles to obvious promotion and pure vandalism. I'm certainly glad to drive off spammers and vandals, and this would help to keep them away, but I am worried about those whose articles were clearly written with good intent but just not in keeping with our project..." Seraphimblade 5 May 2011

"This will decrease the pressure at on new page patrollers, AfD patrollers, and admins who patrol CSD's by quite a bit. And this comes from a user whose first non-IP edit was to create an article (which later went on to be a GA). I don't think that having to get auto-confirmed would have stopped me from creating the article." Scottywong 8 April 2011

"While Autoconfirmed isn't a particularly high hurdle, it is a hurdle, and one which we should mark (if adopted) with well-documented guidance of the pathway between a new user and their ability to create new articles. The hurdle should serve to educate, rather than outright eliminate, the clueless newbie." Jclemens (opposing) 8 April 2011,

"One way to invest in the retention of existing editors is to devise ways to reduce the amount of janitorial work required to maintain the project. This change would result in a precipitous drop in the number of AfD's, CSD's, and new page patrolling required, and would free up experienced editors to do more valuable tasks." Scottywong 8 April 2011,

"Naturally, we must remember that Wikipedia is "The free encyclopedia that anyone can edit" and therefore limiting anonymous and new users' permissions too much will make us stray from that mission. However, I must note that anyone could still edit articles, they just can't all create articles on their own. Semantically, we'd still be true to our mission." Crisco 1492 18 April 2011

"A new article requires an administrator to delete. Sure, we can use speedy deletion criteria, but it still requires an administrator to do the work. Moving to this system will therefore reduce the amount of vandalism that cannot be reverted by normal editors. Autoconfirmed status does not take long to get, and there are alternative methods to creating articles. This seems like a good move to me." Worm That Turned 7 April 2011

"... There are plenty of articles, but far too few of them are even half-way decent. The new editors who need encouragement are those who pitch in and improve articles, not those who create articles on their newly formed garage band or whatever on their first edit..." Malleus Fatuorum (Eric Corbett) 6 April 2011.

The problem is with WP:Your first article, which is where new registrants land, it's a TL;DR albeit well intended wall of text in true Wikipedia fashion. Nobody, but nobody is going to read through all that before posting their spam, garage band, or non-native English autobio from a far-flung continent. We don't need stats to prove it - it's a obvious as the sky is blue (at least to any true, regular New Page Patroller). Even A fluffernutter is a sandwich! suggested this on 26 March 2011, 6 years ago:

"Welcome to Wikipedia! We require new users to have some familiarity with how Wikipedia works before they can create something from scratch. To do this, we suggest you try [link to gnomish thing] or [link to easy thing]. You'll need to have carried out ten edits before you can create a new article, but if you don't want to wait, you can suggest your idea at WP:AFC."

The precursor RfC, which started the ball rolling was widely supported. The main ACTRIAL RfC at Proposal to require autoconfirmed status in order to create articles], ironically started by a Foundation employee expecting there to be no consensus, left us in no doubt as to the wishes of the community. Over 500 users participated in that RfC which was carried by a two-thirds majority. We now have 400+ New Page Reviewers. If all of them have actually done any patrolling at all, they will be left in no doubts as to the number and state of new articles, and it would be interesting to see how they would all vote on a new ACTRIAL RfC. Notwithstanding the fact I don't think it's necessary to even put it to the vote again - IMO that consensus still stands, and the situation today is even worse - much worse.

ACTRIAL vs collateral damage

" Although this may also have the unfortunate side effect of discouraging legitimate editors, I think that the benefits outweigh the costs." – GorillaWarfare 22 March 2011

As a necessary evil there is obviously a risk that a tiny number of potentially encyclopedia-worthy articles may be lost and/or some impatient new users won't return to Wikipedia. To use this as an excuse however, to refuse to allow the volunteer community to introduce safeguards that would preserve the project's reputation and quality is pure short-sighted idealism. The very word ACTRIAL is a portmanteau of autoconfirmed and trial. To refuse even the proposed short trial is to treat the community with disdain for its efforts. Allowing the trial would provide concrete numbers rather than continue to keep stalling based on fanciful conjecture, and might even furnish the Foundation with the opportunity to say to the community 'Ha! We told you so' , although when they started what was the major ACTRIAL RfC thinking they would win hands down, it all went horribly wrong for them. Thing is the various language Wikipedias by contrast, are big enough to take being proven wrong (but in fact they rarely are).
Anyone who is '...glad to be part of a community (as staff and as a volunteer) where people care so much about facts' , should probably not be campaigning to block the very gathering of such important facts.

What the WMF could really do to help

The 2011 comments above led by the strong statement by Beeblebrox are mostly from highly experienced and respected admins and bureaucrats. There are more of them than the members of the WMF team who rejected ACTRIAL and who put their current proposal together.
In my opinion, if the incredibly small group of employees who contend that the hundreds of volunteers are wrong would like to delay the almost inevitable local roll out of ACTRIAL, they should consider finally prioritising their workload to:

• Perfect the details listed here, especially those that were already listed at Phab but are being ignored because the WMF doesn't like them, or actually does not regard improving their Curation tool as a priority.
• Ensure that unpatrolled articles do not get indexed for at least 90 days
• Ensure that the entire backlog is visible to those who want to see it all and work from the front, the middle, or the back.
• Create the landing page that was begun by Jorm - contrary to claims by current WMF staff, there is a lot of salvageable conceptual and graphic design work there - only the flow chart needs slightly adjusting to accommodate the Draft namespace was specifically created to blend in with what the community believed would be the workable solution. The rest is coding and it's so easy that even I could do it with my limited knowledge of html, js, and php . But do it in direct collaboration with the community reviewers who have the institutional memory and the empirical experience.

Conclusion

In many of its claims the Foundation report is lacking in accuracy, in fact some of its parts have been proven to be quite wrong; the WMF has lost most of its senior staff over the past two years, and the tenure of many others has been (and is) quite short. On the other hand, especially regarding the long issue of policing of new pages, many of the volunteers who have been concerned with these NPP issues have been around a long time, some of them 10 years or more and have established themselves as knowledgeable and 'senior' members of the community. Not only are some of them highly qualified people, but they possess the institutional memory and all of the empirical experience. There is a good chance that they do know best, and at least they have the power of getting or not getting consensus for what they need.

There is a risk of course that if the community goes ahead with ACTRIAL, the WMF will withdraw its support altogether for the Curation software it developed. That of course would be an irritation because as a MediaWiki extension it requires specialist access, but the patrollers/Reviewers would have a much lighter workload and be able to patrol more accurately. The dignity of Wikipedia and public confidence in it as a quality product would be preserved. I don't think the CEO and the Trustees would argue about that, but of course they are obviously not being kept in the picture. All a bit 'Yes, Minister' really.

The final word (edited) comes from one of our most respected volunteers of all:

We are not editing subject to the approval of any particular staff member of the WMF; on the contrary, provided that the overall editing of the en.WP falls within the fundamental policy of the foundation, they exist in order to facilitate our work, not the other way round. As I see it, their appropriate role in development of editing tools for use here is to do what is practical to fulfill our reasonable requests. The difficulty here is that in the area under discussion, dealing with with new less-than-satisfactory articles, neither we nor they have yet found any good way to solve the problem. [...] This problem has been here for many years, and for many years we've essentially ignored it because there was nothing much we could do about it. Now that we're trying to face it, our inadequate attempts to solve it are interfering with each other.

It is my personal opinion that none of us ever will [solve it]--the fundamental principle that anyone can edit is basically incompatible with the requirement of maintaining a quality encyclopedia. At the beginning, this was not visible as a dilemma, for there was no delusion that we were actually trying to make a quality encyclopedia, just to make --or play with making--an encyclopedia of some practical usefulness. Everyone recognized then that, while it might be useful, it would not fulfill the basic requirement of a traditional encyclopedia, of being of sufficient quality to be an authority. That's still the official view--we still object when people treat us as having a higher level of reliability than our methods can actually attain. We are right to object, because our methods cannot really do that and our work is being misused.

Unfortunately, because of our great scope and universal availability, and the deceptive appearance of reliability that our format produces, the public, which does not itself collectively have very high standards of reliability, insists upon treating us as if we were reliable. We have therefore tried over the years to meet the public's expectations. To some extent, this is a good thing to do; certainly we have no reason for deliberately being unreliable. But we will never come near the goal of quality as long as we have collective amateur editing. We're nearer than I or any of us originally thought, but it's not because of our accuracy. Anyone who wants an accurate encyclopedia must work under other methods. The WMF, like any formal organization, will never be really supportive of uncontrolled work done under its auspices. No person who is really qualified to set policy in a formal organization, is simultaneously able to honestly work on an equal basis in an anarchic environment like that of en.WP. Some people can switch modes, but they can't do both simultaneously. The only model for how the professional organization of the WMF can treat us amateurs, is like irresponsible children--to humor us a little, and hope we grow up enough to become educated and socialized, and teach us discipline without our noticing & resenting it. But most of us are not children, and that sort of pretense does not work with strong-minded and idiosyncratic adults, most of whom are here precisely because they can get away with self-importance they cannot realistically pretend to in more organized environments.

One danger is that the WMF, in trying to improve our standards, will drive away the volunteers. (It will be very hard to drive some of us away, but it's not impossible.) Worse, it will also destroy the positive aspects of our values--the spontaneity and experimentation and freedom from consequences that children and adolescents enjoy (as do adults trying to recapture their childhood.) Our values are that we will muddle through, making many errors but finally creating something new and important. To some extent, it's the fundamental value of free culture. Unless it's preserved, there's no reason for there being WP except as a fosil, and no reason for the WMF except to maintain the fossilized remains.

I know I'm not answering the current question: I cannot do that. I do know that most of the attempts to deal with this problem on a large scale have totally failed. I cannot do better--I and many of us here can work adequately with a few articles at a time--nobody can work adequately with hundreds. There are a few people here attempting to single-handedly deal with it. <name redacted> had been too reckless in what he accepts, but there there are others reckless in what they remove, including a few very well established admins, who singlehandedly are deleting such drafts in bulk, even though nobody has ever authorized this. They too make multiple errors, in the opposite direction. There have been some whose standards are just erratic. There are some, like perhaps myself, who have focussed excessively on only one aspect, such as promotionalism. There are some who have tried various forms of the X speedy standards and ended up with proposals to delete thousands of articles, almost all of which if examined are found to be acceptable exceptions. Most of us do know that articles and contributors must be dealt with individually and personally; since absolutely nobody has time to do it, some have resorted to harsh impersonality...

There is a point where someone in trying to help makes more problems than they solve. I think it's wrong to seize on only one example. But that's the way WP works - if there's a problem, we find a victim. If we can do nothing positive ourselves, we judge others... DGG, 14 June 2017

Essential reading

1. The first in the series of ACTRIAL RfC was started 10 March 2011, by The Blade of the Northern Lights following many hours discussing the issues with NPP and its backlog. Was not formally closed but by 26 March 2011 had a 2:1 participation in favour of the proposal.
2. The second in the series of ACTRIAL RfC , was launched 3 April 2011‎ by Ironholds (Oliver Keyes), a WMF contractor and strong opponent. The RfC with a participation of 524 users garnered a two-thirds majority in favour of restricting article creation in mainspace to autoconfirmed users. Closed on 27 May 2011
3. The third in the series of ACTRIAL RfC, launched 29 May 2011‎ by Kudpung, determined the rollout as a trial in deference to the wishes expressed in RfC#2, and established the duration of the trial.
4. The fourth in the series of ACTRIAL RfC and its talk page, launched 12 August 2011 by Scottywong, is a discussion and elaboration of the technical features of the rollout, including he creation of templates and help for new users.

See also

The future of NPP and AfC - a pilot project to investigate NPP and AfC created in September 2016.