User talk:Novem Linguae/Essays/Thoughts on draftspace

Thoughts on your thoughts

Thanks for putting your thoughts on draft space here. Here are some thoughts of my own.

Response to "Pros of draftspace"

• "Keeps poor content out of mainspace
  • You say "80% of drafts are declined and 20% accepted" and that indicates that "draftspace is doing a good job of quarantining content that shouldn't be in mainspace."
    • But how sure are we that all of those 80% really don't belong? It seems like the standards of some (not all) AFC reviewers are really quite high
    • Moreover, I'm not convinced the purpose of draft space is or should be "quarantining content that shouldn't be in mainspace". I think it should be a place for content that isn't ready for mainspace but that has a realistic chance of being improvable to the point that it should be in mainspace. In other words, true junk does not belong in draft any more than in mainspace, and it needs to be deleted. Draftspace should be reserved for things with real potential.
• Most drafts are not promising
  • See above. Then they shouldn't be in draft space. If an unpromising draft is created in draft space, fine. But if NPP is moving pages that are not promising and have zero liklihood of ever being acceptable to draft space, that's a problem. Trash is trash and needs to be removed.
  • Is this really a pro? It seems like a con of draftspace that most drafts aren't promising.
• New editor assistance
  • This would be a huge pro, but I'm not sure its functioning as it should. I think the AFC process is overwhelmed with the volume, much of which should not be going through the draft process to begin with. They respond via templated messages, many of which are less helpful to the editors trying to create the article than we would like. In an ideal world I'd like to see a functioning mentoring system (yes, I know we have the WP:adopt-a-user program, and the WP:Growth team has a new mentoring program they're trying). I really think newcomers need more guidance than they get from the AFC process.
• Protection from immediate deletion
  • Again, that's great for articles with potential. But for genuine irredeemable junk, isn't it kinder to rip the bandage off via AFD than to send them to an interminable process of trying so hard to improve the article and being rejected again and again until they finally give up and it gets deleted 6 months later?

Response to "Cons of draftspace

• Less editors
  • This is indeed a major flaw in draftspace. Maybe we (not you and me specifically - but the community) should brainstorm ways to get more eyes on drafts. I think one major turn off for a lot of editors in working on drafts they didn't start is the afore-mentioned fact that most of them are irredeemable.
• The "non-notable article" problem
  • Is this really a con of draftspace? This seems like a flaw in the way we communicate our standards to the general public.
• The "encyclopedia is getting full" problem
  • Is it though? After all, we're WP:NOTPAPER. There are still many thousands of articles that could be written on historical figures and events, even if the ones that everyone knows about have already been written. New books, movies, and music are becoming notable every day, and history is being made daily. There are problems with writing about stuff that just happened, but I would posit that we are a long way from achieving our Wikipedia:Prime objective of containing the sum of all human knowledge. Maybe we've covered the low-hanging fruit and made a dent on the fruit in the middle of the tree, but we've still got a ways to go.

Conclusion

• "I am not convinced that scaling back draftification nor deprecating draftspace would make things any better."
  • I'm not convinced depreciating draftspace is the way to go either. I do think draftspce has its place. However, I think if we scale back sending things that can never be fixed to draft space, that will be a start on improving its functioning. I don't think it'll magically solve all the problems of draftspace over night, but I think it's a necessary first step.
• "The new user experience stinks because..."
  • There are approximately 1 zillion ways you could finish that sentence. I hadn't really looked at the WP:Growth team's nonsense before today, but then I briefly went into my preferences and enabled the newcomer homepage - in short, they're trying to steer people away from writing new articles as their first step. I was impressed with the article they gave me and suggested I edit. They also automatically assigned a mentor; someone I recognized and think was a good choice. Hopefully the more things like that there are to steer them towards hanging around and getting a feel for things before writing articles the more things will improve.

~ ONUnicorn^{(Talk|Contribs)}problem solving 20:17, 21 October 2022 (UTC)

Thanks for your thoughts. I'll have to check out the Growth Team mentor program. Glad to hear that has some potential. This idea of "don't draftify junk" is a good one and is stated at WP:DRAFTIFY, with varying degrees of adherence. Certainly we should never draftify something that is a CSD. –Novem Linguae (talk) 23:36, 21 October 2022 (UTC)

More thoughts

I've been lurking at the Growth team's mentorship project for a long time. They claim it's based on esearch but I can't find where any Wikipedia users have been consulted or the community as a whole. The project will fail because 1. It's impossible to mentor every new user. 2. The mentors themselves are good faith people but not experienced. 3. The WMF assumes everyone is creating new articles from mobile phones. It's my contention that while it's excellent that the encyclopedia can be read on mobile devices, trying to edit it, write a new article, or take part in backroom stuff on a mobile phone is not very responsible. The WMF assumes that everyon rgistering an account has a firm intention ti permanently become a Wikipedian.

The Growth team's project is extremely expensive and is the reason for their claim that they don't have the bandwidth for attending to other urgent matters.

'Move to draft' message

Based on vry recent discussions at the VP. A solution to make moving to draft more friendly - and to do it from Page Curation as soon as resources allow. The linked help page is a move away from traditional Wikipedia walls of text. It contains all the links to find the specific policies if the creator still needs more info.

OTOH All that's really needed is a decent landing page and a decent Article Wizard.

Other thoughts

At the end of the day, perhaps we're all barking up the wrong tree, here are two possible solutions. Both require the reviewers to act more responsibly and take just a tiny bit more time over their reviews. Both require some redesign of the sytems. Both are less expensive to produce than the WMF's 2-year, still not concuded mentorship scheme:

Double checking

Introducing a user right in 2016 for reviewing had a huge, positive impact on NPP, but the process is of course still far from perfect. Because it demands a high level of knowledge of notability and deletion policies, and has a complex array of functions more than any other Wikipedia process (except maybe Twinkle), it only attracts a very small number of editors. Some find it too complicated and they give up because they bit off more than they could chew. A few others were probably hat collectors, and a small number obtained the right with the express intention if abusing the system (none of this is conjecture - it's all documented). There are currently 727 NPPers but in reality there are abut 20 regular active reviewers who are doing around 90% of the work.

Now that the backlog is really down to a handful of articles (sorry to say, but it will probably creep back up when the reviewers have relaxed their efforts), it's time for the active reviewers to take more time and use the features of Page Curation more often to their advantage. One solution could be a fail-safe by double checking - a simple system of double reviewing. It does not add more than 2 or 3 seconds to a review (tested). The first reviewer does their thing, and a second reviewer either endorses it or makes a suggestion for a different solution.

This does not mean being a Stasi, Gestapo, or the KGB, with reviewers assuming poor work and ratting on each other. Outside Wikipedia, such collaboration is called 'teamwork' and no one resents having their work checked by a workmate. It would avoid a lot of bad faith and enraged newbies stomping off in disgust for having their unsourced 3-line stub which 'took three hours to create' being draftified or listed for deletion. Let's not forget that the way good faith newbies are treated at NPP and AfC makes a huge difference to their early Wiki experience. After all, the WMF is always yelling "Retention, retention, retention!" even if they don't have a clue how to go about it themselves.

Merging NPP & AfC and create all articles as drafts

Pool resources and merge AfC with NPP. All new pages have to go through NPP asooner or later anyway. A single process:

'Mark as patrolled' does just that. Listing for deletion works as usual. Tagging works as usual. 'Tag and leave as draft' leaves as draft and moves the article to the draft queue which already exists in the feed. Merge the user rights of both AfC and NPP (insisting on the same due diligence before according the right. Actually this suggestion is nothing new. We were talking about it in 2016.

Kudpung กุดผึ้ง (talk) 21:04, 26 October 2022 (UTC)

And more thoughts

ONUnicorn already identified many of the issues that came to mind for me reading this essay. I don't know what percentage of drafts overall are promising. At the back of the AfC queue where I usually work I would estimate 50% are promising. Prior to G13, I estimate 10-20% are promising. In a related aera, I estimate 10-20% of articles deleted through WP:PROD would survive an AfD discussion. As a community, we've decided that a lot of content with potential is not valuable to us. That's sad given where the project started but evolution and maturation do happen and most of the deletionists I've worked with do want to improve the encyclopedia and a lot of their behavior may be motivated by discomfort with the chaos inherent in a "free encyclopedia anyone can edit."

I don't right now have any suggestions for improving draftspace. One observation I have is that the more we use it, the further we seem to move from colaborative editing. From my perspective, that's not a positive thing but for a quality-focused editor overwhelmed by NPP, AfC and other backlogs, probably quite welcome, at least emotionally. ~Kvng (talk) 22:15, 10 January 2023 (UTC)

Front vs. back of the queue

You'd written "The front of the queue has G11, G12, COI, UPE, high schoolers writing articles on themselves and linking to their Instagrams, non-famous YouTubers, and non-famous musicians. The back of the queue has refbombed articles with borderline notability. Yes there are some good articles peppered in there, but overall the quality is not that high." In my mind, the front of the queue contains the drafts submitted for review the longest ago, and the back are the recently submitted drafts containing the most junk which are usually speedily dealt with. Curb Safe Charmer (talk) 10:51, 16 January 2023 (UTC)

Interesting. I think of the "front of the queue" as the new submission side of the queue. Anyway I changed the term to something less ambiguous. Thanks for the feedback. –Novem Linguae (talk) 16:45, 16 January 2023 (UTC)