Wikipedia talk:Tips for pending changes reviewers

Feedback is welcome

Hello friends. I recently created this page, Wikipedia:Tips for pending changes reviewers, that contains practical tips and optional criteria for pending changes reviewers. Please feel free to edit it or add to it. I envision this becoming a practical handbook, a place where we can put our tips and tricks, without having to RFC and change the official guideline page. Pinging the 3 all time most active pending changes reviewers: @Mattythewhite, Neiltonks, and EvergreenFir:. Also pinging the 3 most active from this month (besides me): @Vaticidalprophet, Fiachra10003, and Paper9oll:. Thanks. –Novem Linguae (talk) 09:47, 11 February 2021 (UTC)

Wow, am I really one of the most active pending change reviewers? Out of interest, where did you find this out? Mattythewhite (talk) 18:19, 11 February 2021 (UTC)

Mattythewhite, yes, actually you're the #1 most active. I wrote an SQL query. Make sure to scroll down when clicking these, results are at the bottom. Most active (all time) Most active (this month) –Novem Linguae (talk) 23:30, 11 February 2021 (UTC)

Thanks for the ping. Going to spell out my thoughts here, because I come apart significantly from a lot of people with 'vandal fighter' type positions and don't want to add to the essay directly things that likely don't have consensus.

I think editor retention is a Very Big Deal, and the single worst thing you can possibly do to a new user is false-positive them as a vandal. (The WP:CIR issue comes second; don't waste your time on obvious incompetents, but lean towards the side of assuming competence is acquired, and shepherd accordingly.) I don't like templates -- I think User:Ritchie333/How newbies see templates is required reading for anyone in a position where they'll be erasing the contributions of new users. It mostly focuses on speedy deletion, but warning templates aren't much better, especially considering how many people tend to over-warn and jump to higher-level templates too early. (4im was a mistake.)

I think welcome templates have surprisingly similar problems to warning templates. I used to use them, until I sent a link to one to some non-Wikipedians, and got (paraphased) "Holy shit, you join Wikipedia and suddenly someone expects you to read this giant avalanche of links?". I no longer use them.

Whenever I revert a good-faith edit, I personally write on the talk page of the user in question to explain who I am, what I did, and how they can make the same or similar edits without being reverted. Recent examples here and here. This is fairly time-consuming, but it's better than the alternative. I mention "good-faith" in the relevant edit summaries, but I don't assume new users will be familiar with the term. In general, you should assume people won't understand even the most basic wiki-jargon you use -- I recently saw someone interpret "verifiability" in article creation as meaning "the results of a scientific experiment are verifiable".

I'm pretty conflicted about what to do about good-faith incompetent edits, e.g. those with abysmal spelling and grammar. I usually skip those ones while reviewing; I suspect they virtually always get reverted. There may be some use in accepting them and copyediting after the fact.

A lot of people take very 'vandal fighter' positions, where removing vandalism and discouraging vandals becomes top priority. I think this can have heavy collateral damage with removing legitimate contributions and discouraging good-faith editors. It also, ironically, doesn't do all that much for vandalism -- the worst vandalism is the subtle hoax or long-standing factual error, not someone blanking an article and replacing the text with "U ALL SUCK COCKS", and the nuanced vandalism that causes real issues is often missed by the 'vandal fighter'. My experience/suspicion is that this is often people who haven't written that much content themselves, and have less understanding of the feeling of losing your work or ability to distinguish content disputes and conduct disputes. If you start finding yourself exceptionally concerned with vandalism, it may be time to take a step back and realize that while this work is important, it's not the be-all and end-all, and can have unforeseen consequences. Vaticidalprophet (talk) 09:09, 12 February 2021 (UTC)

Interesting. Thanks for posting your thoughts.

• I added the bullet about warning people because I saw an admin in WP:PERM telling people applying for rollback that they looked at their PC contributions and weren't warning enough. I think I saw that twice. So there are certainly some experienced users that expect that if you revert something, you should warn too, probably to teach the new user about the guideline they violated.
• I agree about the welcome templates. I use {{welcome-short}} because the sea of links on the other templates is a bit too much. Luckily {{welcome-short}} is in Twinkle.
• I almost never skip warnings. I saw an admin say once that he starts on level 2. But for the most part I think that all 4 warnings are expected.
• I don't usually write personal messages on the reverted person's talk page (although I will occasionally), but I do make sure to give an edit summary for every revert, and I try to be soft and polite in my revert messages. I'll say something like "should probably use a reliable source for that" rather than "not a reliable source".
• You mention vandals a lot, but when I review I don't see a lot of vandalism. And half the time I do see vandalism and try to revert it, ClueBot or somebody with Huggle will beat me to it. I think that our anti-vandalism folks do a great job and revert the obvious stuff quickly. And then the medium complexity stuff gets left to reviewers. Then the high complexity stuff (undue weight, edit wars) gets through the reviewers, and the experts that have the article watchlisted get to fix the hard stuff.
• I'll also add that I use a slightly higher standard for reverting/letting edits through with PC review than I do normally. The reason? In my opinion, if somebody went to the trouble to PC the article, I assume it means the article is having quality problems and they want help dealing with it.

 –Novem Linguae (talk) 10:10, 12 February 2021 (UTC)

Very well put, Vaticidalprophet. I'd add that the nature of mass editing compounds the problem: those like you who take care will act slower, while those who just plow through templating left and right will get through many more pages, so if you're a random newbie, you're a lot more likely to encounter the plower.

Regarding the welcome templates, couldn't agree more. I hope that the new design of {{Welcome}} adopted last April improved things over the old design, but there are plenty of complaints, many from old-timers who don't want change.

Regarding templates more generally, I both agree and disagree. In their current state, I agree that most are extremely offputting in the way Ritchie's essay perfectly captures, but I don't think they inevitably have to be that way. I spend a lot of time editing templates, since making them even slightly more friendly has a multiplied impact, and they're a necessary evil to handle the volumes we deal with. One thing I think it's important to note about how newcomers see templates is that, quite often, they don't realize they're templates. Sometimes this is good, since you're more likely to read something that you think someone spent time writing out just for you, but often it turns bad if the template doesn't fit the situation, since then you think they're telling you something they're not. This can be partially addressed with better template design/tools, but it also requires editors to take care in choosing the templates they use for a given situation carefully. {{u|Sdkb}} ^talk 06:04, 13 February 2021 (UTC)