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Essays

Have any of you noticed the many essays being submitted about crime fiction (Brazilian, Nigerian, Kenyan, South African, etc.)? They don't seem to be coming from the same user, however they all share writing styles, poor or nonexistent referencing and other characteristics. Their submitters seem to be very recent users with bizarre names and no significant edits. I wonder if they're coming from school assignments or the like. Anyhow, I was just thinking out loud; I've declined about 4 today. Cheers, FoCuSandLeArN (talk) 18:21, 2 January 2014 (UTC)

Re-enabling anon users page creation

As one of this project purposes is allowing anonymous users ċto create pages, could a configuration change be made so they can create pages in main namespace, while they remain unreviewed / unpatrolled / not googleable until a reviewer approaches them? If isolating such queue and making it invisible in web search results is possible, there could be benefits, such as:

  • proper categories in the newly created projects, wikiprojects can work on the queues (a category lists unreviewed pages separately)
  • separation of article and its discussion, engaging newcomers in discussion
  • possible refocus of AFCH tool to be used for general new pages feedback, be that the anons queue or not

--Gryllida (talk) 09:50, 26 December 2013 (UTC)

  • NO After the Wikipedia biography controversy creating new mainspace pages by unregistered editors/new editors were prohibited by the foundation. What you propose is an attempt to make an end run around the solution that has been established in response to the foundation's restrictions. Back away from the stillborn horse, it's never going to walk. Hasteur (talk) 13:42, 26 December 2013 (UTC)
    • Hasteur, thanks for the context, it is very useful for the question. How would a separate isolated unreviewed anon queue be different from what we have with AfC now (other than a specifically obvious big fat 'AfC' prefix in page name, while in my case unreviewed status would still be visible, just not as prominently). Gryllida (talk) 15:17, 26 December 2013 (UTC)
      • Gryllida Because the foundation has said that anonymous editors and new editors are not allowed to create pages in mainspace ever. They require that a editor who (in theory) knows the rules for inclusion proxy the request to mainspace. Besides, the entire project is going to be absorbed by the Wikipedia:Drafts space soon enough which will allow anonymous editors to create a page. Think of it this way: the main namespace must be treated like a temple and therefore we aren't going to let any random drive by create anything in mainspace. Hasteur (talk) 15:18, 26 December 2013 (UTC)
        • What I don't like is the concept that anons are inexperienced while logged in ones are experienced, I would expect them to follow the same path to article creation with only thing different being review times (and queues, but the contributors wouldn't care). Drafts process does not appear to solve issues I mentioned in original query.
        • I would like to stress that whatever foundation said was perhaps at a time when it was not technically possible to have unreviewed articles queue which are invisible to search engines. In the very edge case it might be technically possible to make an article only readable by author and logged in users and nobody else, making it very limited for spam/advertising/hoax use which, as I understand, was the main concern and reviewing solves it. Gryllida (talk) 16:03, 26 December 2013 (UTC)
        • Errr, the foundation ddin't say that. It was Jimmy's decision (not the foundations), and he didn't say "forever", he said it would be on an experimental basis (signpost story). I'm not sure if there was a discussion where he said it's no longer an experiment. Legoktm (talk) 16:36, 26 December 2013 (UTC)
          • Legoktm is most definitely correct here. It is emphatically not a Foundation policy that anon page creation is banned. I think folks are forgetting that English is the only Wikipedia where it is the case that anons cannot create articles. All other large projects, including German, Spanish, French, Russian, Japanese, etc. have anon page creation. If the English Wikipedia community has come to consensus we want to enable it again, then it's something we would definitely consider. In the meantime, I would encourage us to not be hasty. We just launched Drafts, which anons can create. We aren't actually advertising to readers on redlinks and search that they can create drafts anonymously. Let's do that, and see if we can use drafts to gauge how many pages might be submitted by anons, what the quality is, etc. Steven Walling (WMF) • talk 17:41, 28 December 2013 (UTC)
          • Thanks all for the context of the original change. ☺ Gryllida (talk) 07:17, 5 January 2014 (UTC)
  • We have a drafts namespace, why not use it? --Rschen7754 19:56, 26 December 2013 (UTC)
  • This thread is not going to go anywhere or help anything or anyone. While it is understandable that some editors may not be up to speed on the requests for creation of the Draft namaspace and the events of 2011 where ACTRIAL was rejected by the WMF after an 8 month R&D by the community, it is clear, two-and-a-half years later that both AfC and NPP are still unable to cope. Whether based on Founding Principles or not, the Foundation has demonstrated its inflexibility to adapt to the needs of Wikipedia 10 years further down the line (the kerfuffle getting the Draft namespace technically rolled out was another classic example of the Foundation's stalling until they couldn't find any genuine reasons for rejecting it), so we have to go forward and work with new (and perhaps more unwieldy) solutions we can come up with. The draft namespace is one of them. Requested by AfC, let's look towards developing its use for AfC in the best way possible, and avoid making perennial suggestions that will not fly under any circumstances. Kudpung กุดผึ้ง (talk) 21:09, 26 December 2013 (UTC)

Question break

It appears that Drafts namespace is in development to isolate anonymous contributors submissions. I have asked several questions below. --Gryllida (talk) 21:14, 29 December 2013 (UTC)

1) Why is that so? Is it not technically possible to do it in main namespace and leave anonymously created pages unreviewed? --Gryllida (talk) 21:14, 29 December 2013 (UTC)
2) Would the drafts have proper categories and be subject to being added to WikiProjects if desired? --Gryllida (talk) 21:14, 29 December 2013 (UTC)
3) The drafts appear to have a separate talk page, and not be Googleable. Those are a good thing… --Gryllida (talk) 21:14, 29 December 2013 (UTC)
4) What advantages, other than ones mentioned above, does the Drafts namespace have? --Gryllida (talk) 21:14, 29 December 2013 (UTC)
5) What work is desired for switching from AfC to Drafts, other than typing them into the page creation wizard and the helper script? Gryllida (talk) 21:15, 29 December 2013 (UTC)
  1. Technically, it is possible to do it in main namespace and leave anonymously created pages unreviewed. The problem becomes all of the anons that are only here to advertise their product or company or new users that just copy a webpage into WIkipedia (copyvio) or those that come here only to say "gry is a gay asshat". Those things do not belong in mainspace and the draft namespace makes it possible to filter those things out.
  2. WikiProjects are encouraged to adopt drafts of the topic that they focus on. Categorization would have to be solely of an administration type.
  3. Those are a very good thing.
  4. There is a great expansion possibility there. It's easier to remember "Draft:Foo" than "Wikipedia talk:Articles for creation/Foo" for a new user. The namespace can be used for other things in the backend and for the helper script.
  5. I personally would like to see the Article Creation Wizard have some backend bite whether it be an extension or a guided tour or some other scripting option. Other than that, not much... It's probably best to process out the current system and let it fade away.
Hope my answers are insightful. :) Technical 13 (talk) 21:31, 29 December 2013 (UTC)
Thank you. What do you call «administration type» of categorization? Gryllida (talk) 21:44, 29 December 2013 (UTC)
With 1, what makes the things acceptable in Draft namespace but not acceptable in mainspace? One would think being unreviewed is enough for rubbish to exist in any location. Is not being Googleable the difference? Or is it readers being able to clearly see that this is a draft? Something else? Gryllida (talk) 21:44, 29 December 2013 (UTC)
Things like "no context" or "no claim of importance" must be acceptable in a draft workspace simply because it is a draft workspace. As a practical simplification, drafts are exempt from all "A-criteria" speedy-deletion criteria, whether they are in Draft:, WT:AFC/, or in a user sandbox/subpage. davidwr/(talk)/(contribs) 22:57, 29 December 2013 (UTC)
In theory, one could say "things ... are acceptable for unreviewed pages simply because they're unreviewed and hence not indexed by search engines". What I'm trying to understand is what makes Draft namespace different: the big Draft word which is considered more intuitive, or something else? --Gryllida (talk) 00:25, 30 December 2013 (UTC)
For a detailed answer to question 1, you'll need to read through all of the relevant requests for comment linked to in Wikipedia:Drafts#Footnotes item #1. Sit down and get comfy, it's a long read. davidwr/(talk)/(contribs) 21:40, 29 December 2013 (UTC)
Thank you, that's useful. Knew there would be context somewhere. --Gryllida (talk) 21:55, 29 December 2013 (UTC)
6) From reading the above, Draft: appears to be its own namespace which is easier to work with, and more intuitive, than drafts scattered across Wikipedia talk (AfC), userspace (users sandboxes), and some «Incubator» process that's being phased out. Gryllida (talk) 00:39, 30 December 2013 (UTC)
rough categorization can be done, for exampleby weighted keyword searches, such as is done at User:AlexNewArtBot. The specificity and completeness of these searches is not extremely high, but it's more useful than nothing. Even at the very simplest, there's a reasonable chance that any article with won and lost in it will be about sports; that any article with the words album and song will be about popular music. Needless to say,m developing this should be the function of the community. Since it can be done by a bot, it should not involve the developers. DGG ( talk ) 01:10, 30 December 2013 (UTC)
on another point, "no claim of importance" does not belong as a speedy criterion for any sort of drafts, because the hope is that the draft can be revised to show importance. "No context" should not be there either, because context can always be added. We may need another criterion to deal with the utterly inappropriate or impossible, but I do not immediately see how to define it--if someone does, it can be added after the usual discussion at WT:CSD. DGG ( talk ) 01:10, 30 December 2013 (UTC)
  • Some problems that are not acceptable in mainspace are okay for drafts because the new users are given a chance to improve them and get rid of the problems, rather than starting all over after deletion. However, that's only as long as someone is actively working to improve them. The G13 deletion category allows old, abandoned drafts to be deleted if no one can be found to work on them after six months. Still, there are some topics which are either obviously non-notable ("Joey was born last week and he is so cute") or cases in which the submitter is not really making a serious effort to create an article ("Hey, look! I can see my toes!") which really don't need six months' grace. Also, while it's true that the drafts are not picked up by search engines directly, there are other Wikis which draw in the material, and then they are indexed by search engines. However, this often happens within minutes of creation, be they articles or drafts, so whether or not the pages are later deleted doesn't make much difference. —Anne Delong (talk) 02:55, 30 December 2013 (UTC)

Question break 2

Legoktm User talk:Steven (WMF) User:Kudpung davidwr Technical 13 What are the actions required for a switch to the Drafts namespace, other than implementation of appropriate page names in the article wizard and the helper script? Gryllida (talk) 07:14, 5 January 2014 (UTC)

1) I don't know the current tech setup so I can't answer this, and 2) I should have receive a notification from the WP:Notifications system because you put User:Davidwr in the message but cleverly hid it withing a "span style="display:none;" markup. I did not receive the notification, so I expect that the other people whose attention you wanted did not receive it either. Hopefully they are watchlisting this page and will see your question. davidwr/(talk)/(contribs) 20:05, 5 January 2014 (UTC)
User:DavidwrThanks. I think it worked, but not first time as I mistakenly used comments instead of span. I tested with an anon IP on its talk page and it appears to have notified me. Gryllida (talk) 10:48, 7 January 2014 (UTC)

Wikipedia talk:Articles for creation/About

At intervals of a few months, people have been leaving drafts about various topics there. —rybec 22:19, 27 December 2013 (UTC)

My guess is that these are people who are writing about something that has come from the "About" page of a web site, so they put "About" at the top of their article, for example, if a user name was "User:FamousJohnDoe", they might make a page called "User:FamousJohnDoe/About". When this is submitted, the template will say "This page should probably be located at Wikipedia talk:Articles for creation/About (move)", so they move it. This is only a guess, though. —Anne Delong (talk) 20:34, 2 January 2014 (UTC)
The page is now create-protected, at the request of Mdann52. —rybec 13:55, 7 January 2014 (UTC)

Button lag

Why does the button ({{AFC button}}) take so long to bring up a page? ~KvnG 16:51, 1 January 2014 (UTC)

@Kvng: It uses Toolserver to get the page, which isn't known for its speed. --Mdann52talk to me! 11:08, 7 January 2014 (UTC)

Barnstar 2.0

--The bellow is copied from Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Articles for creation/December 2013 - January 2014 Backlog Elimination Drive by Josve05a--

I suggest that we change File:AFC-Barnstar-2.png with File:Articles for Creation Barnstar Hires.png, since the second one is a Barnstar 2.0, as the rest of the barnstars. -(t) Josve05a (c) 20:49, 8 January 2014 (UTC)

Josve05a Rather than propose the change on an individual drive, it might be a better idea to propose this change at WT:WPAFC. Hasteur (talk) 21:07, 8 January 2014 (UTC)

--The above is copied from Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Articles for creation/December 2013 - January 2014 Backlog Elimination Drive by Josve05a--

I decided to do this last year; see User talk:Anne Delong#16 for an example --Mdann52talk to me! 08:33, 9 January 2014 (UTC)

Invitation to User Study

Would you be interested in participating in a user study? We are a team at University of Washington studying methods for finding collaborators within a Wikipedia community. We are looking for volunteers to evaluate a new visualization tool. All you need to do is to prepare for your laptop/desktop, web camera, and speaker for video communication with Google Hangout. We will provide you with a Amazon gift card in appreciation of your time and participation. For more information about this study, please visit our wiki page (http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Research:Finding_a_Collaborator). If you would like to participate in our user study, please send me a message at Wkmaster (talk) 06:45, 9 January 2014 (UTC).

(UTC)

New Article on Adam Jones

I have created an article about the professional lacrosse player Adam Jones. It is in my sandbox but does not appear to be waiting for acceptance. Is there something I must still do?

Thanks

Thebigshadiw (talk) 14:17, 9 January 2014

@Thebigshadiw: If there is no review template on a sandbox page, you can add one by adding {{Subst:submit}} to the page. After saving the page this will become the requested review template.
Having said that: The article in your sandbox has been in the article space since December - you created the page yourself on "18:01, 6 December 2013". I suppose that might have been by accident, since the edits after that edit the sandbox edition again. Either way: I merged both versions, so currently you can find the article at Adam Jones (Lacrosse) which contains the full edit history of the sandbox and article page. Excirial (Contact me,Contribs) 15:07, 9 January 2014 (UTC)

Proposal: merge AfC review and AfD into "articles for discussion"

The following discussion is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made in a new section. A summary of the conclusions reached follows.
The result of the discussion was to not merge. The consensus is that AfC and AfD are fundamentally different, and that combining them would create more problems than solutions. Also, this would be a HUGE change to several core processes on Wikipedia, something that an RFC is better suited for. (non-admin closure) Michaelzeng7 (talk) 00:33, 13 January 2014 (UTC)

(I mentioned it above, but after an encouraging word I'm inclined to give it a separate heading and cross-list it)

According to the AfC review instructions, the rule of thumb is that an article created by AfC should have a "50% chance of surviving AfD". Why have one review to predict the outcome of another that may happen right afterward? And with AfC reviews in all likelihood being used to move articles up from Draft namespace, and AfD in all likelihood transferring any failing article that could be userfied down to Draft namespace, the symmetry has never been clearer: AfD can simply be a way station where articles on the border are sorted to Draft or Article status depending on whether notability has been documented -- subject to a "customs check" for obvious speedy deletion criteria that could torpedo even Draft status. There is no reason to judge an article more or less harshly at the point of crossing depending on which namespace it is currently filed in. Therefore, I propose that the only distinction between AfC review and AfD discussion should be whether the AfD article name has "Draft:" in front of it. The two pools of reviewers can merge and ensure a single standard. Wnt (talk) 23:46, 21 December 2013 (UTC)

This would be a major change and we already have one major change on our plate now - deciding what changes, if any, need to be made to AFC now that Draft: is live. davidwr/(talk)/(contribs) 00:20, 22 December 2013 (UTC)
aside from the sensible reason mentioned by davidwr above, maybe "why have one review to predict the outcome of another" might be because you think the second review requires a fair bit more effort than the first. In AfC reviews, theoretically, you get one reviewer casting his eye over an article to see if there is at least a prima facie case for notability. In AfD reviews, where no clearly winning collection of refs have already been cited (ie in the least notable cases) it surely requires at least a small handful of reviewers must independently do some decent searching on the subject to satisfy themselves that no possible coverage exists which would support a case for notability before they add a delete vote which contributes to consensus. I might be way off course but it seems to me that one is quite a bit more efficient than the other, but of course this might have its downsides too. Nonetheless the level of proof required in the first case is also less (or at least per the "50% chance of surviving AfD" comment it should be), which underlines the difference I think. Aaaand there is a point as well relating to the purpose: AfD - purpose to establish whether article is notable, AfC - coach new editor into learning about the standards of submission for wikipedia articles - different purposes which I suggest might likely point to different kinds of processes. --nonsense ferret 01:09, 22 December 2013 (UTC)
  • Oppose. AfC (and NPP for that matter) are fundamentally different from AfD. AfD is a community debate process and is also heavily backlogged - at least the complex ones that even many admins are reluctant to touch. That said, AfD is inherently flawed due to the votes by editors who are not fully conversant with polcies/guidelines, whereas - it is hoped - AfC reviewers will have more clue. Kudpung กุดผึ้ง (talk) 02:27, 22 December 2013 (UTC) Added 'Oppose' to this comment. Kudpung กุดผึ้ง (talk) 04:45, 24 December 2013 (UTC)
  • Oppose. AfD is for articles that already are in mainspace, where they were placed by a registered editor. Deleting these is often quite controversial. AfC is for proposed articles. These are often in only rudimentary condition, and there is a learning curve for their authors, so how they are handled is very different (mentoring, ideally, versus jury judgment). There is no deadline for AfC submissions to be completed; while AfD discussions can continue for some weeks, that's typically due to lack of comments, and at some point an admin will come along and close these as no consensus, keeping the status quo. (In short, there is no synergy here, and quite a bit of potential confusion from a merger.) -- John Broughton (♫♫) 03:35, 22 December 2013 (UTC)

When the heck did the 50% rule get added? Someguy1221 (talk) 03:38, 22 December 2013 (UTC)

On June 9, 2013 (diff). It may have been added and removed before June 9, or removed and restored after that date. davidwr/(talk)/(contribs) 03:53, 22 December 2013 (UTC)
  • Oppose In the case of AfC, ideally we are working with and briefly mentoring a new editor, as well as evaluating a draft article. We decline but don't promptly delete poor AfC drafts, encouraging further work. The focus of AfD is an already existing encyclopedia article, and the notability of the topic. The skills and experience of the original author or any other major contributors is entirely secondary to the main issue at AfD - whether to keep or delete the article. I believe that these processes are different enough that they should remain separate. Cullen328 Let's discuss it 07:09, 23 December 2013 (UTC)
  • Absolutely Oppose AFD is a "trial by jury with a possible death sentence (sometimes it resembles a lynching rather than a fair trial)" process. AfC is a "help a newbie write an article" process. They have nothing in common except that the acceptance criteria at AfC mentions "has a 50% chance of surviving AfD". Roger (Dodger67) (talk) 08:29, 23 December 2013 (UTC)
  • Oppose While I agree AfD should be renamed Articles for Discussion, I do not agree that combining AfC with AfD would be beneficial. Dlohcierekim 02:08, 24 December 2013 (UTC)
  • Comment. Everybody seems to be assuming, that if AfC and AfD were combined into a 'renamed' form of AfD that meant articles-for-discussion rather than the traditional articles-for-deletion, that the end result would be the elimination of everything good about AfC. But isn't there another possibility? Rather than turning AfC into a lynching-by-jury process, could we not instead fix up the broken AfD process, like bringing Darth Vader back to the light side of the force?  :-)   Instead of making AfC more like AfD, we could make AfD more like AfC.
  Kudpung mentions that both AfD and AfC are heavily backlogged, but of course, that fact favors combining the contributors. The AfC backlog would quickly become a lot less daunting, if we had the AfD participants with 90+days and 500+edits helping work on the AfC queue. p.s. To avoid the impression that AfC is getting merged into AfD, rather than articles-for-discussion I would suggest something like articles-for-improvement as the new name for the combined-forces-group. See also the question above by FocusAndLearn where they ask how something can be move from mainspace back into the AfI-fka-AfC queue. HTH. 74.192.84.101 (talk) 03:37, 28 December 2013 (UTC)
The discussion above is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.

unimportant note about AFCH and {{AfC postpone G13}}

The helper script doesn't remove this template when an article is promoted, nor does it add an HTML tag asking editors to leave the template in the article for tracking purposes. When I checked, there were only 45 articles in the main space which contained the template. [1] —rybec 00:48, 14 January 2014 (UTC)

@Rybec: Your diligance is noted. [2] is the patch to the development branch. Once we finish the backlog drive, we'll advance the code that is in the release preview up to the base gadget and advance the code that is in development into the release preview. 30 days after that the new release preview can be moved up to release. As more people are using the version that has this patched in will clean the templates up when submissions get accepted to article space. Hasteur (talk) 01:22, 14 January 2014 (UTC)
I've gone through and truncated all the mainspace invocations. Hasteur (talk) 02:15, 14 January 2014 (UTC)

RFC closed

FYI

I have recently closed Wikipedia:WikiProject Articles for creation/RfC for AfC reviewer permission criteria. Feel free to take a look. --Mdann52talk to me! 08:33, 14 January 2014 (UTC)

AfC being discussed by Jimbo

Sorry if I've missed a better place for this discussion, but it appears that a discussion of AfC is taking place on Jimbo's page Let's discuss Articles for Creation and I do not see any notice of the discussion here.--S Philbrick(Talk) 12:35, 15 January 2014 (UTC)

AFC submission template

I was looking at a new AFC submission that was still in a user's sandbox. I noticed that, on the {{AFC submission}} template at the top, it still says "Warning: This page should probably be located at Wikipedia talk:Articles for creation/sandbox." Now that the new draft namespace is the preferred location for AFC submissions, should we change this template to suggest that we move them into the Draft: namespace rather than the Wikipedia talk: namespace? Jinkinson talk to me 21:51, 15 January 2014 (UTC)

Thank you for your suggestion, however we are not ready to have AFC submissions be in the draft namespace yet. We're at least 30 days out from when the AFCH gadget can handle all the components necessary in the draft namespace (End of backlog drive + 30 days on "Release Candidate" gadget). I think I can speak for WPAFC in that we've already agreed to transition over to the draft namespace and will start by having new submissions land in the draft namespace then progressively "house-cooling" the current location and trying to let the submissions age out by CSD:G13. If we find a submission that the author has it pending, I see no reason to have it "clean" the submission by moving it to the new location as part of the process of reviewing the article. Hasteur (talk) 22:03, 15 January 2014 (UTC)

Add to Wikipedia:Backlog?

Perhaps we should add the AFC queue to Wikipedia:Backlog? --LukeSurl t c 01:32, 16 January 2014 (UTC)

I think that's a good idea! ///EuroCarGT 04:01, 16 January 2014 (UTC)

Proposal to move the AfC project to the new Drafts namespace

Now that the new Drafts namespace is live, I feel that it would be best to have the AfC drafts there as well. What should be the way we go about doing this? Any general thoughts? Ramaksoud2000 (Talk to me) 23:33, 18 December 2013 (UTC)

To Do:
  1. Change the WP:AFCH to support the Draft Namespace
    1. Support moving the content page and the talk page over
    2. Support cleaning both pages
    3. Support banners
  2. Change various bots that handle the AFC space
    1. HasteurBot
    2. AFC bots
  3. Modify templates related to AfC to take the path given.
  4. Move a few submissions over to the draft namespace. Give the user an option to opt into the testing.
Here's a bare minimum of items that need to be adressed Hasteur (talk) 00:58, 19 December 2013 (UTC)
Please add a link to the location of the documentation for the new drafts namespace so that we can understand its purpose before commenting. —Anne Delong (talk) 02:14, 19 December 2013 (UTC)
It can be found at Wikipedia:Drafts. Ramaksoud2000 (Talk to me) 02:27, 19 December 2013 (UTC)
For Mediawiki, it is at mw:Draft namespace. Ramaksoud2000 (Talk to me) 02:29, 19 December 2013 (UTC)

Okay, having read that, three things come to mind:

  • (1) I have tried several times to get a consensus that all of the articles submitted for review should be in one place. So far no luck. Why would this be any different? There is no point in making a change unless we all do it together.
  • (2) If the articles will now have their own talk page, this is going to cause a lot of fragmentation of discussions. How will we decide when to post as a comment on the submission, when to post on the article talk page, and when to post on the user's talk page? Maybe Afc comments should all be placed on the talk page, with a note on the article "A comment from a reviewer has been added to this submission's talk page on (date)". Making sure that the new editors see the comments will be more complicated.
  • (3) The Draft namespace will not be just for articles under review. How do we keep them separate, or do we? —Anne Delong (talk) 02:45, 19 December 2013 (UTC)

Indeed, like Anne says: this needs to happen all together. In addition, some of my thoughts:

  • I think comments should now go to Draft_talk, that makes sense to me. This will require really posting comments to the talk page, and, again like Anne says, some sort of talkback/what-have-you.
  • A master list of currently running AFC bots should be created
  • All documentation needs to be rewritten for the new namespace, ideally in some sort of subpage area

Above all, this needs to be gradual -- otherwise everyone will be completely confused. Theopolisme (talk) 03:04, 19 December 2013 (UTC)

Yes yes yes yes yes yes --Mdann52talk to me! 08:37, 19 December 2013 (UTC)
  • I support the idea of using it. I don't think we need to move content across, just change the wizards and scripts to point to the new space and then let people create away in it. Eventually all the old stuff will be accepted or declined, or deleted. After 6 months we can think about moving over the pages still alive kicking in the old talk space to the drafts. Graeme Bartlett (talk) 10:17, 19 December 2013 (UTC)
    • Before anything else happens, I'd be very happy if we could settle on criteria for inclusion of the draft namespace. I think we need to have a pre-defined definition of spam that needs to be deleted in particular. The draft namespace might be a step in the right direction, but if we don't set anything up, it will become a dumping ground for spam, overwhelming the good additions (pretty much like is happening to AfC). I make some suggestions later, but I would support soft deletion (draft blanking) for drafts that are promotional in tone, and not getting better. That definition is too soft methinks and should be a little more tight. We also need a plan how to deal with stale drafts that are "bad" for other reasons. We have a wonderful new toy, but lets not rush it in to the ground. Martijn Hoekstra (talk) 11:13, 19 December 2013 (UTC)
It seems like your review process can essentially merge with AfD (or vice versa): instead of deleting most normal articles, you demote to draft; instead of "keep"ing drafts, you promote to article, but the standards for what gets what outcome should be convergent, including the option (sparingly) for completely tossing useless content. Wnt (talk) 14:54, 19 December 2013 (UTC)
Yes, I was thinking along those lines, but possibly going even further - it comes back really to the fundamental problem that a newbie getting started without getting bitten by either the software or the community is hard. I came up with this:
  • When you'd basically get when creating articles is the option to go "live" or "draft" - autopatrolled defaults to live, everyone else to draft - but you have the option of swapping to the other one. The article wizard can probably handle this, as proposed above.
  • If NPP look at a "live" article and it can't obviously be improved by editing and doesn't violate stuff that must be removed ASAP (G10 and G12, possibly G1, BLP PROD), they move it to "draft"
  • A bot could automatically move a completely unreferenced non-BLP PRODable article (no {{reflist}}, no external link) to draft. Need to discuss this in more depth as I guess it's possible to have a referenced article which refers to all offline sources in plaintext - but how many of those are likely?
  • A draft can be moved back into mainspace at anytime, with the understanding it might be redrafted if it's not up to snuff.
  • Any article moving back to draft goes back to NPP's watchlist
  • Anything that is still in draft 6 months after it was first put there (regardless of how many times it goes to and from mainspace) gets wiped per G13.
Basically, the process has to be simple enough to do without a script, in one place, and looked at by the largest crowd possible, and without negative results for the creator.
I am really uncomfortable with a general lack of consensus of what "spam" is. I come from the old days where spam was, simply put, "the same thing lots and lots of times". By extension, spammers by my definition are criminals and scamsters. Just suggesting that some small business or charity is at the same level of Sanford Wallace is just not on. Ritchie333 (talk) (cont) 17:34, 19 December 2013 (UTC)
  • I would like to hear any comments about ways to keep pages in the draft namespaces from showing up on Google searches. It's fine to say that Google doesn't index pages marked "NOINDEX", but there are a number of other wikis that are scooping text from these areas and "rebroadcasting" them in a form that Google does pick up. Today I was checking to see if an article was a copyright violation and found seven copies in various wikis, even though the page had never been out of "Wikipedia talk". —Anne Delong (talk) 03:17, 20 December 2013 (UTC)
    This is a valid concern, but as you say the situation for the draft namespace is likely to be exactly the same as for WT:Articles for creation space. — Martin (MSGJ · talk) 11:22, 20 December 2013 (UTC)
Yes, but if everything is being reworked anyway, now might be the time to do something about it if possible. —Anne Delong (talk) 12:40, 20 December 2013 (UTC)
Anne Delong Yes, the entire draft namespace is not indexed, and you cannot manually index a page with the __INDEX__ magic word either. As far as what to do about mirrors of Wikipedia that ignore robots.txt... I'm not sure what to do. I've filed T60758 to discuss with more technical folks. Steven Walling (WMF) • talk 20:13, 20 December 2013 (UTC)
  • Here's something that maybe could be easily moved to the draft space: Afc submissions that are not in English. They are declined and many of them just sit in Afc not being translated. Could they maybe be immediately moved to something like "Draft:Articles for translation/French-to-English/Pagename"? Then editors who like to translate could find them easily, and the Afc reviewers wouldn't deal with them at all unless the translators resubmitted them. Just a thought. —Anne Delong (talk) 03:58, 20 December 2013 (UTC)
  • I have tweaked the article wizard so that new drafts are placed in the draft namespace. It seems to be working well, so far. Forgive me if this is premature, but I don't think we need to talk about this for days and days! — Martin (MSGJ · talk) 11:17, 20 December 2013 (UTC)
Okay, how do I get a list of drafts that I can review, fix up and move to mainspace? Ritchie333 (talk) (cont) 12:24, 20 December 2013 (UTC)
Wait! What is happening? Are the Afc reviewing tools set up to work in the Draft namespace yet??? Was there a consensus for this that I missed? —Anne Delong (talk) 12:36, 20 December 2013 (UTC)
AFCH (the primary tool for reviewing AfC submissions) is not set up to support the draft space. MSGJ did you gloss over the list of items that needed to be dealt with before we start using the draft space? Hasteur (talk) 15:43, 20 December 2013 (UTC)

MSGJ can you confirm what now needs to be fixed, in terms of bots and other pages because of your changes today ? Nick (talk) 15:18, 20 December 2013 (UTC)

  • I've just reverted the changes. Such a major change need to be discussed first, especially when the reviewing gadgets for example doesn't work in the Draft namespace as of writing. I'm not opposed to such a migration, but it need to be planned in advance. -- KTC (talk) 15:42, 20 December 2013 (UTC)
  • I think I have a patch in to support the change, however the beta tracker branch doesn't appear to be updating. Theopolisme What magic incantation do I need to intone to get the dev branch working? I show core.js as being now 2 revisions behind. Hasteur (talk) 15:55, 20 December 2013 (UTC)
  • I can confirm that with this that the Draft space appears to be supported on the dev branch. I'm going to start preparing a set of release notes so we can re-sync the production gadget (that doesn't require any poking around in the low level custom js) Hasteur (talk) 22:42, 20 December 2013 (UTC)
  • Comment: Just FYI, while folks are making a decision here, it seems that some Draft pages are getting moved back to Wikipedia Talk namespace. See examples like Draft:Biblio Cyrus. I think MatthewVanitas has been doing several of them. I can see some advantages to this in the interim (i.e. HasteurBot and AFCH script will actually work on AFC subpages), but on the other hand it's a little sad, since the Draft space was proposed to avoid having drafts live in the awkward location of AFC submissions currently. What do you people think we should do until a firm decision is made about whether and how to migrate AFC? Steven Walling (WMF) • talk 20:02, 20 December 2013 (UTC)
If the intent was to move all of the submissions suddenly out of Afc space, without providing for any of the Afc tools or procedures to function, then I can only assume that this was an attempt to shut down Afc completely, and for another group of editors with different priorities to take over dealing with articles from new users. If so, the editors involved should say so directly. I don't think that there is a consensus for this (see THIS proposal).
I know that there is a backlog in Afc right now, mainly caused by the many resubmissions and the extra reviewing work cause by the elimination of the tens of thousands of G13-eligible submissions, but this is temporary. The G13s have been reduced by 2/3 over the last three months. In two more months they'll be gone and the backlog should ease. I'm sure that the Afc editors would be glad to do their reviewing in Draft space once the procedures are in place. Why not? I don't see what is sad about planning for a smooth transition. Maybe the editors who are so eager for the change should have been helping to organize it a couple of months ago, and then we'd be ready now. I am sorry to be negative, but I feel that this needs to be said. —Anne Delong (talk) 21:34, 20 December 2013 (UTC)
No, there definitely wasn't a requirement to do anything with the AFC backlog in the Request for Comment. As you can see from the Village Pump announcement people definitely also are not planning on mass moving AFC submissions in to Draft. At least not unless there's a consensus to do that on this Talk page. Steven Walling (WMF) • talk 23:35, 20 December 2013 (UTC)
  • Support moving all AfC pages to the new Draft namespace. One reason, of course, is to have a single place, not two, for reviewing. More generally, the new namespace has major advantages. For example, each draft article can have its own talk page, which means WikiProject templates could be posted there, encouraging WikiProject participation before an article goes live, not after. Also, bot programming is going to be easier if searching and editing is done within an entire namespace rather than only a small portion of one. Statistics are going to be easier to compile (for example, how many draft articles are deleted each month). -- John Broughton (♫♫) 00:04, 21 December 2013 (UTC)
    I love this idea, and I'm thinking that some projects should implement a Draft-Class assessment to help track how many drafts are sitting waiting to be taken live. Imzadi 1979 → 21:03, 28 December 2013 (UTC)
    I am very supportive of getting projects involved sooner rather than later - a lot of band and album submissions pass through AfC and getting the various music related projects onboard would help sort them out far better than seeing if there are any submissions ending in "(band)" or "(album)" in the queue. Ritchie333 (talk) (cont) 21:33, 28 December 2013 (UTC)
  • Support moving all of the Afc pages to the new Draft namespace, but only after the Afc reviewing tools have been revised so that the articles can be reviewed. Also, if other drafts besides ones for review are also in the same namespace, it needs to be decided if and how to keep them separate, for reviewing purposes and for the statistics mentioned above. —Anne Delong (talk) 00:12, 21 December 2013 (UTC)
  • Comment: As far as I understand, the ideal solution is to have all new submissions made to the Draft namaspace, which means changing the way the Wizard works.
I also understand that there would be little gained in moving all current and backloged sumissions to the Draft namaspace right now, and to wait with this until the G13 backlog has been cleared, and hopefully, the current submissions backlog.
Discussion has been begun between some users that the NewPagesFeed and Curation toolbar could be cloned and adapted for use at AfC. This would result in the creation of a Special:Drafts feed, and using the shell of the Curation fly-out to be populated with suitable criteria and content for the use of AfC reviewers. This has been confirmed as being technically possible but as it is a MedWiki component, it would require the cooperation of MedWiki. This suggestion was made several weeks (months?) ago but has been carefully avoided by Steven Waling. Perhaps this is due to the dichotomy that while Steven is apparently still very much involved in developments for AfC and providing some valuable help, other staff members have clearly enunciated that AfC, as a local en.Wiki process, is not within the Foundation's remit. See: User talk:Hasteur#AfC. Kudpung กุดผึ้ง (talk) 03:04, 21 December 2013 (UTC)
What are you talking about "carefully avoided"? I brought up the idea of a drafts feed in multiple places just this last week. Like question number three in Wikipedia talk:Drafts#Open questions, as well as number four and five in this list of future enhancements to consider. Steven Walling (WMF) • talk 04:24, 21 December 2013 (UTC)
My apologies - I missed that, but I am generally following discussions that are specific to AfC. Kudpung กุดผึ้ง (talk) 05:28, 21 December 2013 (UTC)
  • Comment I really don't care where the drafts are located at this point. I might point out though, the existing AFCH and article wizard aren't set up to handle the Draft namespace and it could be a few weeks until one of the volunteer developers that work on the project have time to add it to the developer version of the script. Once that is complete, it will take a minimum of two weeks testing before it should be moved into the beta script and at least 3-4 weeks in the beta script before it goes live to make sure that we get it right. This means, that for at very least the next 6 weeks upwards to 2-3 months, the production version of the script and most reviewers won't be able to review drafts in Draft: Quite frankly, knowing this was the case, I think that the hastiness and rude pushiness of the community to get this namespace created by the core developers was foolish, but I digress. Technical 13 (talk) 04:59, 21 December 2013 (UTC)
  • So there is a plan afoot to dismantle Afc, which it seems has been discussed everywhere but here. I am really dismayed at this and finding it very difficult to assume good faith, especially since it looks like my earlier question about this was sidestepped. I am not going to follow this discussion any further because it is getting me too upset. I'll go back to working on the backlog. You guys do whatever you want, and when Afc is gone I will find something else to do with my time. —Anne Delong (talk) 05:20, 21 December 2013 (UTC)
Anne, there are lots of discussions going in in different places which I am trying to stay on top of, but I have not seen any at all that suggest disbanding AfC. Indeed, I would find such a suggestion would be very unwise. There may have been some hints that AfC submissions be simply channeled through NPP but that would certainly not solve any problems - NPP has enough problems of its own. No, I think AfC is essential for en.Wiki even if other Wikipedias don't have such a system, and now that we have got a set of criteria for reviewer 'permission' we need to look ahead and see how the process can be greatly improved now that we have the Draft namespace which was requested specifically as a result of of AfC discussions.
I have been suggesting for a long time (and see above) that the NPP system be cloned and adapted for AfC, but as yet this has not gained traction. It would probably be a disapointment for all those who have worked so hard to develop and maintain the Helper Script which has served us so well, but that's the price of progress. I'm confident that those same programmers will rise enthusiastically to the challenge of adapting the NPP codes for use as a separate system for AfC. If some programmers feel they have been pushed out because their ideas have not been adopted, there's not much we can do about it- and if my ideas are not adopted either, I wouldn't go off in a huff. Kudpung กุดผึ้ง (talk) 05:48, 21 December 2013 (UTC)
  • The Draft namespace is intended to simplify things, not to complicate them further. It is certainly not the least sensible to have yet an additional route of entering new articles, in addition to the existing (A) direct entry into mainspace, regulated by NPP. (B). Entry into AfC, regulated by AFCH approval (C) writing in user space, followed by moving into mainspace, regulated by nothing at all. I think the intention is to use it to combine AfC and userspace drafts at least, possibly merging in other things as we find them. There's some thought we should send all new submissions there, and I wouldn't be opposed to it necessarily, though I can foresee some strong objections.
I do not support moving the afch system into drafts as a permanent solution. I support renaming its parts to use the drafts namespace, while making only the minimum changes, and then set a termination date for it (perhaps June 2014) and devise a new system altogether. The system of having people comment more or less at random, even when we have implemented requiring certain standards for the reviewers, will never work well, because it does not provide for the necessary interaction and feedback with the new contributors. The more I word with the old AFCs , the more I see all the lost opportunities, bother for new users and new articles. We need a way of associating reviewers to new contributors., according to competencies and interests, and having them work as they would if they were in the same room with them tutoring a newcomer.Though this will take more people than the present, more people will do it because it will be so much more rewarding. DGG ( talk ) 07:14, 21 December 2013 (UTC)
I am not at all sure Kudpung's plan to make changes & improvements in AFCH as we move it to Draft space is an adequate solution, though I will not oppose it. The problems are deeper than this can handle. But it does have the advantage of not putting off substantial change until we can write a complete new system, and it does offer the possibility that we might after all be able to make enough changes to improve it substantially.
But I agree with Kudpung that we should not try to immediately deal with NPP also. We need to get AfC right first. DGG ( talk ) 09:38, 21 December 2013 (UTC)
In the chronology of the posts in this thread it looks as if Legoktm is responding to something I have said. I just want it to be clear that I am not in favour of moving everything at once to to the Draft namespace. Far from it. What I have suggested was that only new submissions should be channeled from the Wizard to the new namaspace, and that we continue to work on backlogs where they are until they are cleared. Kudpung กุดผึ้ง (talk) 14:03, 21 December 2013 (UTC)
  • Support—I"m not active with this project, but I can only see benefits long-term if AfC shifts to use the Draft: namespace. WikiProjects can be tagged on the appropriate Draft talk: pages, then those projects can get involved ahead of time. Sometimes articles are accepted through AfC, but once a WP becomes aware of it, the article is merged or PROD-ed because of specialist concerns that AfC reviewers don't know about. That said, I don't want anyone to think I have a timeframe in mind; rather AfC should make the switch when AfC is ready for the switch. Imzadi 1979 → 21:03, 28 December 2013 (UTC)

Courtesy break

Question to the AFC (MatthewVanitas—Northamerica1000—FoCuSandLeArN—FairyTailRocks—Dodger67—Numbermaniac—Arthur goes shopping—APerson—Anne Delong—DGG) reviewers (Kudpung—[[User:{{{3}}}|{{{3}}}]]): Previously there has been an explicit request that no change in the AFCH tool (both the Preview release version) and the Stable Release version occur while a backlog drive is in progress. From my own experience, I can verify that the development tracker version does handle the drafts namespace. The Development Tracker version is 33 days old currently, and the Stable version is from September. Is there consensus to, as an exception to the previous request, promote the current Preview release to stable and to promote the Dev Tracker version to Preview Release? Hasteur (talk) 13:44, 21 December 2013 (UTC)

  • If, and only if, the current queue of submissions that are currently in the WT:Articles for creation/ location is gone (< 100) before the drive is over should we break protocol and make such a major update to the script while the backlog drive is going on. Technical 13 (talk) 14:09, 21 December 2013 (UTC)
  • What improvements are in the new version? DGG ( talk ) 18:39, 21 December 2013 (UTC)
  • I don't mean to be rude but having <100 pending submissions in the AFC namespace seems like a far-fetched dream to me. Unless it's absolutely necessary, can't we wait until after the drive? -- t numbermaniac c 00:58, 22 December 2013 (UTC) ok... See comment below. -- t numbermaniac c 02:54, 22 December 2013 (UTC)
    • Except for the fact that the current drive is December - January (2 months) that will end on Feburary 1st. I doubt that the advocates for Drafts want to wait that long to allow support in a non-alpha (and potentially bug ridden) version of the code to come through the standard channels Hasteur (talk) 01:23, 22 December 2013 (UTC)
  • To Numbermaniac's comment of "having <100 pending submissions in the AFC namespace seems like a far-fetched dream to me." I say, not really. If "most" new AfC drafts are being created in Draft:, then few if any are being created in the AFC namespace so we should be able to grind through the existing queue fairly quickly. The reason the BLD's seem to take forever and only very slowly whittle down is the constant inflow of submissions making us barely review more than break even most days. Technical 13 (talk) 02:05, 22 December 2013 (UTC)
  • As I've said already, ideally the new submissions from the Wizard should be channeled to the Draft namespace ASAP, but not of course before the Draft ns has been thoroughly checked out for bugs and whatever else and the HS works on it on. I guess some admins are still plodding through the G13s and the drive will hopefully clear up a lot of the current submission backlog - but let's hope that reviewers will be working for accuracy and not speed. Other solutions, such as the one I suggested for cloning(duplicating) and adapting the NewPagesFeed & Curation toolbar are more long term but the possibility will need investigating soon - over to Hasteur, our resident expert ;) 02:17, 22 December 2013 (UTC)Kudpung กุดผึ้ง (talk)
  • Oh... Hang on... Wait...😯 I didn't see we had a draft namespace... I was only away for 3 days... When did this happen? I never heard anything of a draft namespace... Okay, I reject my comment about <100 submissions... Sorry... -- t numbermaniac c 02:37, 22 December 2013 (UTC)
  • Like User:Numbermaniac, I have been offline for a while - nieces and nephews to entertain, summer vacation, etc. So after reading through the above, my comments: 1. Do not abruptly move all WT:AfC drafts to Drafts. 2. Allow Drafts to be used by editors who wish to do so, with the explicit understanding that AfC reviewing is not yet possible in that space. Perhaps a bot could be set to post such a notice on existing and new talk pages there? "Please note that drafts created here cannot currently be submitted for review by the AfC process. We are working on migrating AfC processes to this space." 3. Make the creation/adaptation of reviewing tools for the Drafts space a priority. 4. Once we do have a properly functional reviewing toolkit at Drafts stop accepting new submissions at WT:AfC and channel all non-userspace drafts there. 5. While Draft-space reviewing tools are in Beta-testing, allow the longest-pending submitted drafts to be moved from Drafts to WT:AfC if the tools at Drafts hit a snag that would cause significant delays in the review process there. (A backlog in one place is bad enough, two backlogs would be dreadful.)
  • The short version: Allow a smooth (as possible) transition to evolve, don't throw the baby out with the bathwater. Large abrupt changes in the way we work at en.WP have a nasty habit of blowing up in our faces; VE, Watchlist War, OBOD, etc. Roger (Dodger67) (talk) 07:38, 23 December 2013 (UTC)
  • question mark Suggestion Just for the record, support using the Draft namespace for all new AfC submissions. How are we going about to do this? Well, first thing is to get AFCH and all the other essential stuff working over there. Then, we can change the Article Wizard to create all new AfC drafts/submissions in the Draft namespace. All old and currently pending AfC drafts can stay in the Wikipedia talk namespace. Eventually, all AfC submissions will use the Draft namespace. That's the most gradual way of implementing this that I can think of. Michaelzeng7 (talk) 00:20, 13 January 2014 (UTC)

Template-protected edit request on 2 January 2014

The Wikipedia Talk namespace is no longer used for AFC, it should now be in the Draft namespace. buffbills7701 00:11, 2 January 2014 (UTC)

  • Not done: WT: is still used for the thousands of drafts and submissions still in it. If you were to propose an actual change x to y request that allowed for either namespace (for at very least the next six months which is how long it would take for G13 to clean out the namespace if no other edit was made to any draft), then your proposal could be considered. Technical 13 (talk) 01:45, 2 January 2014 (UTC)

buffbills7701 changed Wikipedia:Article wizard/Ready for submission before asking the above question, and before Technical 13 answered this question. The change was live for approximately 22 hours and there's now 270 articles in the Draft namespace which will need to be manually processed. Nick (talk) 22:17, 2 January 2014 (UTC)

  • Nick. they are surely at the bottom of the queue of 1,500 that are still pending in WT:AfC... I suggest leaving those 270 for someone using the develp or beta version of the script to deal with (I'll get them myself over the course of the next week). No worries. Technical 13 (talk) 22:46, 2 January 2014 (UTC)

Please for the love of Diety do not change/propose to change where the new submissions are put for the time being. Per the above section ("Proposal to move the AfC project to the new Drafts namespace") WPAFC knows that we want to get there, but untill the tools are set up to support AfC submissions in the draft namespace (most importantly the AFCH helper tool) don't make the proposal, don't change the templates, don't change the wizard's output. Hasteur (talk) 21:21, 5 January 2014 (UTC)

Finding drafts ready for review

I had been using {{AFC statistics}} to find drafts ready for review. However, its "pending" (yellow/tan) section seems to include several drafts that have been declined and not re-submitted (for example Wikipedia talk:Articles for creation/Surrey Comet and Wikipedia talk:Articles for creation/Orca Creative Agency). Is there any way to get a list of drafts that have been submitted and not declined since their last submission, preferably sorted by date of most recent submission? DES (talk) 21:49, 9 January 2014 (UTC)

@DESiegel: The best page for that is probally Category:Pending AfC submissions. The submissions in that category are all waiting for review, and ordered by submission date (Oldest first, newest on the last page of the category). Excirial (Contact me,Contribs) 23:53, 9 January 2014 (UTC)
@DESiegel: The problem with that template is that on average, there's so many submissions that are active, that the template does not render correctly (due to hitting the interperter limit). As mentioned by Excirial, the Pending AFC submissions is good, but I personally prefer Category:AfC pending submissions by age as this gives you the break down of all the pending submissions. The pages get updated 1x a day between their constituent categories so you effectively have a day to try and work things down. This also gives you a decent sorted list. Hasteur (talk) 00:04, 10 January 2014 (UTC)
Thank you both, that should be quite helpful. DES (talk) 00:18, 10 January 2014 (UTC)

Template:AFC statistics still shows Wikipedia talk:Articles for creation/Surrey Comet as pending, even though it was declined in September 2013. Is this a feature, a bug, or user error? --Hroðulf (or Hrothulf) (Talk) 09:42, 16 January 2014 (UTC)

My guess is that there is a bug in {{AFC statistics}} or in the instructions page that tells us to go there to find submissions to review. I have removed those instructions from Wikipedia:WikiProject_Articles_for_creation/Reviewing_instructions until someone figures out how this should work. --Hroðulf (or Hrothulf) (Talk) 14:05, 16 January 2014 (UTC)

Reviewer permission implementation

Well, the Wikipedia:WikiProject Articles for creation/RfC for AfC reviewer permission criteria has recently been closed. Kudpung's suggested criteria were generally accepted. The closing admin, Mdann52, suggested that another Rfc would be needed to decide how this would be implemented. I started a proposal about this at: Wikipedia:WikiProject Articles for creation/RfC for AfC reviewer permission implementation. Please comment. —Anne Delong (talk) 14:19, 16 January 2014 (UTC)

  • The reviewer qualification criterion issue is not related to the review process flowchart at all, so I have split the conversation off from the flowchart topic. (With apologies to Kudpung for the somewhat uncomfortable split that puts some of their post in the wrong topic.) Roger (Dodger67) (talk) 12:43, 16 January 2014 (UTC)
No apology needed. Guilty as charged - in fact it's a discussion issue I generally accuse others of ;) Kudpung กุดผึ้ง (talk) 12:50, 16 January 2014 (UTC)
Ummmm.... I'm not an admin :P --Mdann52talk to me! 13:40, 16 January 2014 (UTC)
Sorry, --Mdann52, I just assumed since you closed the Rfc... I will change any relevant text. Sorry also for posting in the wrong thread. I was responding to Kudpung's comment about discussion being needed. —Anne Delong (talk) 14:19, 16 January 2014 (UTC)

RTPB - "Read The Pink Box"

The text of Template:Afc decline, which is the notification posted to draft submitters' talk pages, should be changed to emphasise that the editor must read the decline comments. The current text is worded as a "bland" unemphatic request: "Please view your submission to see the comments left by the reviewer." in plain text in the middle of a short paragraph. Perhaps a bulleted list of points would be better with this one, suitably reworded to make it imperative, at the top of the list.

The vast majority of topics on the Help page are "why was my draft declined?" questions. It is obvious that most/all of them never saw the decline reasons given by the reviewer. They probably come to the help page directly from their talk page after a cursory reading of this template. Only when one of us responds on the help page with "RTPB" do they actually look at their draft page. A simple edit to this template can substantially reduce the help page workload. Roger (Dodger67) (talk) 20:38, 16 January 2014 (UTC)

I've taken the bold action to change some of the wording to indicate that they need to read the decline reason and they can re-submit when they feel the issue has been resolved. I'm not sure how to more forcefully indicate that they need to read the decline reasoning without it becoming Bite-y. Hasteur (talk) 21:19, 16 January 2014 (UTC)
That was a good idea, and I've taken the bold step of making it even more prices precise. Kudpung กุดผึ้ง (talk) 07:23, 18 January 2014 (UTC)

Handling new article submissions

Please discuss at User:Gryllida/Handling new article submissions; I've placed the thing there, to evade archival bots. Thanks. --Gryllida 09:46, 21 January 2014 (UTC)

The auto template that places a message on user talk pages has a glitch. When the article is in Userspace, the link provided to the article has it in the Articles for Creation directory, which makes it impossible for the user to get to the article. I've had a couple of people message me regarding inability to find their page again. The Ukulele Dude - Aggie80 (talk) 12:16, 21 January 2014 (UTC)

Riding off into the sunset

Since it appears that I'm about to be forcibly ousted from the project for defending the project I'll say goodbye now. It's a shame that standing up for principles is enough to have an editor topic banned, but whatever. I'll be stopping the G13 nudge and G13 nomination bots as they are related to AfC and I won't be able to do even simple un-contentious mantenance. Perhaps ArbCom will stay the topic ban and even the admonishment, but in a world where standing up for principles means that editors can be topic banned I don't want to edit in that space any more. Hasteur (talk) 21:18, 21 January 2014 (UTC)

Whoa, what has just happened? FoCuSandLeArN (talk) 00:36, 22 January 2014 (UTC)
Hang on, and slow down, Hasteur. You're not topic banned yet - as I write not a single arb has voted for it. Throwing your toys out of the pram and stopping the G13 bots is really spiteful and will harm the project more. Please, just stop getting into battles on the arbcom case and just flatly state that your bots might be at risk. Then walk away from the case completely and carry on doing AfC work until as and when the arbs tell you otherwise (if at all). Oh and the two people you mention here are (IMHO) just two people who disagree with you strongly and are prepared to do so at length - they are not trolls. Ritchie333 (talk) (cont) 08:27, 22 January 2014 (UTC)
When 2 arbitrators have voted for the topic ban (and one indicated it as the primary measure) it's indicative that there is something wrong with the state of wikipedia. If WCM and CH can disrupt the Arbitration proceedings so thoroughly to get a admonishment or sanction to stick, then that is indicative that the Arbitration procedure is bollocs. I've told the committee that they now have to find a replacement for the bot tasks as I'm not having anything to do with this project. Hasteur (talk) 12:48, 22 January 2014 (UTC)
Firstly, personally I don't like the idea of a topic ban. I think this behavior was limited to the case, I'll likely oppose. However, I will go as far as to say that I was bothered by your behavior. You made your point, and then proceeded to attempt to secure the worst possible outcome for Kafziel, arguing with any who opposed you. It appeared extremely vindictive, in this particular case. It was undoubtedly disruptive. It's likely Kafziel will be desysoped, and if you had been willing to simply put down your stick we wouldn't be here. The fact that I was thanked for proposing sanctions [4] is a bit frustrating, as far as I'm concerned. This is especially due to the fact that while I've read the comments from those two editors I have not found them particularly compelling. What I did find compelling was your persistence in going after Kafziel, even after the outcome, (from your perspective), would have seemed largely favorable. You went after those two editors despite their writings being of marginal utility to me as an arb. You went after AGK for a comment which, in my eyes, was quite benign. Essentially, in this particular case you acted extremely aggressively, in a manner that appeared to be ownership oriented. I don't have any doubts you have the best interests of AfC in mind. Then again, I think that Kafziel had the best of intentions (if not rather poor execution) when taking those actions. All in all, if you had put down your stick, I don't think I would have supported anything at all against you. In fact, it would have made it more straightforward in my eyes to desysop Kafziel. But when he was hounded over it the line becomes more blurred. NativeForeigner Talk 18:42, 22 January 2014 (UTC)
Wikipedia shooting itself in the foot yet again *sigh* Sionk (talk) 19:19, 22 January 2014 (UTC)
NativeForeigner Kind of hard to know the mind of ArbCom and know what arguments are carying water when they don't respond to comments, when it takes a certified mail to get a response of acknoledgment, when no arbitrator or clerk is exercising decorum standards for the case. Perhaps in the future you and your esteemed colegues could reflect on how your complete lack of interaction in the case leads to problems like the one we have. When the arbitrators don't reveal what points are/aren't carying weight I had to make the assumption that every falsehood had to be argued against. But the brand is on the wall and even if the remedies don't pass, the fact that they were proposed and voted for by some administrators only leads precedent for them to be used as permanant scarlet brands of shame. So if removing myself from AfC and the project protects it, then so it must be. Hasteur (talk) 20:13, 22 January 2014 (UTC)
You make a point. We really should all try to be active on wiki and not simply retreat to the mailing list. I don't think removing yourself from the AfC project would be of benefit at all, and assuming the topic ban fails I would urge you to continue your work in the area. I'll try and be as open as I can regarding my thought proceses on cases, as I promised in the election. NativeForeigner Talk 20:21, 22 January 2014 (UTC)
Pardon me if I seem skeptical, but that's the same empty promise that every new Arbitrator makes. Take a look at the very first case you sat during the term, Wikipedia talk:Arbitration/Requests/Case/Nightscream. Not a single comment outside the Voting on the Proposed decision. Even last year after the revelation of private ArbCom correspondence, there was a call to have almost all the ArbCom deliberations on wiki so as to reduce the chances of things being accidentally leaked, with great fanfare there was a plan only to hear that ArbCom has continued equivicate on a solution to be able to move more discussion into public view (Wikipedia_talk:Arbitration_Committee/Noticeboard#Wikipedia:Arbitration.2FRequests.2FCase.2FNightscream_closed) and be more interested in revising the Discretionary sanctions regime after the regime had been revised last year. In short I invite you and your coleagues to pull back the first curtain where the majority of discussion that is not truly sensitive happens. Hasteur (talk) 20:34, 22 January 2014 (UTC)
  • I just looked over at the arbcom page there, and it doesn't seem that it is likely the topic ban will happen. There is also not currently enough support to even admonish you. Hasteur, I do hope you reconsider as I have enjoyed working with you on this project and find you an invaluable asset to the project. You seem to struggle with one of the same issues that plagues me, an uncontrollable urge to have the last word. It's okay. When you feel yourself going back and forth and not making any progress, try a different approach. Ask for help in explaining what you are trying to relay. I'm often horrible with getting my point across. When I feel that I'm going no where, I'll ask around and see if I can find alternative ways of expressing my thoughts. I'll ask other editors (on IRC, on their talk pages, in email, in an RfC) or sometimes I'll even generalize the issue as best I can and ask someone I know in person what they think or would do to try and get an alternative perspective. The trick when you are asking is to try and relay just the facts and leave the emotion and your perspective out of it until they have formed an opinion. Anyways, since I could go on way too long about this, and make this page way TL;DR, I'll just stop now by saying that I hope you reconsider giving up on the AfC project and don't worry about Kafziel or their their alts. ArbCom is dealing with that issue, and it should no longer be a concern of your. Move forward and upward! Technical 13 (talk) 19:58, 22 January 2014 (UTC)
Drop the stick and slowly walk away.... Legoktm (talk) 20:51, 22 January 2014 (UTC)

People are more important than Wikipedia.

davidwr/(talk)/(contribs) 21:20, 22 January 2014 (UTC)

@Hasteur: Assuming the choice of what to do on Wikipedia is left in your hands, nobody should hold it against you if you decide to leave AFC or for that matter the whole of Wikipedia for a period of time. While your skills and expertise will be missed, it is your right to take a break if you need to. You are a person. This is an encyclopedia. Take care of yourself first. People are more important than Wikipedia. You are more important than Wikipedia. davidwr/(talk)/(contribs) 21:20, 22 January 2014 (UTC)

MT WARNING Music page

Hello

We received a note saying this page doesn't meet all the standards. I notice someone else came and did some editing and we've added a few more substantial things like our nomination for Fashion Film Awards.

Can you advise specifically if any other problems?

Best Cathy — Preceding unsigned comment added by Cathyoates (talk • contribs) 21:55, 23 January 2014 (UTC)

Hi @Cathyoates:, you didn't use Articles for Creation but instead placed your article among the regular Wikipedia articles. I've renamed it to Mt Warning (band) to match the way articles are usually titled. Someone remarked on the talk page that your username resembles the name of Cathy Oates. Please follow WP:COI if you do have a conflict of interest.
PS sharing an account isn't allowed. —rybec 00:47, 24 January 2014 (UTC)
@Cathyoates: Unfortunately, when you moved "your user page" to MT WARNING, you also moved your "user talk page" to Talk:MT WARNING. When rybec moved the article to Mt Warning (band) what was once your user talk page got moved to Talk:Mt Warning (band). I have fixed up your user page and moved Talk:Mt Warning (band) to User talk:Cathyoates/old then copied its contents back into your user talk page. An administrator will come around within a day or so and delete the leftover bits at Talk:Mt Warning (band) so it can be used the way it is designed to be used - as a talk page for the article. An administrator will also come around shortly and do the necessary "history merge" of your "old" and "current" user talk pages. davidwr/(talk)/(contribs) 19:26, 24 January 2014 (UTC)
I had looked at the talk page of the article just before or after the move. I had only seen the message about conflict of interest, not the messages that are now on Cathyoates' talk page. —rybec 00:25, 25 January 2014 (UTC)

User talk:Jimbo Wales/Archive 154#G13

New discussion on JW's talk page. Rankersbo (talk) 22:13, 23 January 2014 (UTC)

recent AFC/R revision

This edit [5] seems to have not archived the removed material. -- 70.50.148.122 (talk) 04:38, 27 January 2014 (UTC)

Submissions not being moved to Wikipedia talk:Article for creation

Dear reviewers: Up until a few months ago, all of the Afc submissions were either (1) created at Wikipedia talk:Articles for creation, (2) moved their by the submitters after reading the "This page should probably be at Wikipedia talk:Articles for creation/Submission title" notices, or, if the new users couldn't figure out how to do it, (3) moved for them by the reviewers if they couldn't figure out how to do it themselves. Lately though, some reviewers have been choosing not to do this, and a lot of reviewed articles have been left in user space. While not important for blank submissions or ones that are being nominated for deletion anyway (for example as attack pages), this causes problems for other submissions.

I am working on the G13 deletion backlog, and recently the first batch of these unmoved submissions have come up for review. There is a sudden jump in the number of history merge problems, because a lot of duplicate submissions are discovered when the move takes place. Discovering copy-pastes right away is important because the historymerge needs to happen before the older article is edited, and also so that the new users can have the proper move process explained to them before they do the same thing again.

Another problem with leaving declined articles in user space is that the editors often just remove the Afc templates and keep the (now "Fake") articles in their user space, where later they are noticed and send to Mfd, causing a lot of extra work there.

A third problem that I have come across several times in articles left in sandboxes is that the user will remove the text from the sandbox and start to make something new, but the sandbox is still in a category as having been submitted on a certain date, even though the new topic has never been submitted. It also retains the history of the old, likely unrelated article underneath. When a sandbox submission is moved to Wikipedia talk:Articles for creation, the categories and history are moved with it, so the sandbox is left with only a redirect and no other history, and can be reused without the aforementioned problems.

I know that the previous consensus that submissions should all be at "Wikipedia talk:Articles for creation" appears to have weakened in recent months, so I am just asking reviewers to consider (as a courtesy to those working in areas other than review of new submissions) moving articles from user sandboxes to sensible titles in Afc space. Thanks. —Anne Delong (talk) 18:16, 27 January 2014 (UTC)

If I could add a suggestion for admins - personally I load up all the pages at Category:Candidates for speedy deletion as abandoned AfC submissions using "linky" in Firefox, after a check that it is 6 months and no-one's edited (two did yesterday and left the G13 in place - bah!). I then (with Category:Candidates for speedy deletion as abandoned AfC submissions open) use the "d-batch" in Twinkle to delete all the ones I want, plus find and delete any redirects - for example
  • (Deletion log); 23:37 . . Ronhjones (talk | contribs | block) deleted page Wikipedia talk:Articles for creation/Matt janak ‎(G13: Abandoned AfC submission – If you wish to retrieve it, please see WP:REFUND/G13 (TW))
  • (Deletion log); 23:37 . . Ronhjones (talk | contribs | block) deleted page User:Mjanak80/Matt janak ‎(G8: Redirect to deleted page "Wikipedia talk:Articles for creation/Matt janak" (TW))
  • (Deletion log); 23:37 . . Ronhjones (talk | contribs | block) deleted page Wikipedia talk:Articles for creation/PreApps ‎(G13: Abandoned AfC submission – If you wish to retrieve it, please see WP:REFUND/G13 (TW))
  • (Deletion log); 23:37 . . Ronhjones (talk | contribs | block) deleted page User:Sacasto/sandbox ‎(G8: Redirect to deleted page "Wikipedia talk:Articles for creation/PreApps" (TW))
Thus those old redirects won't be re-used - especially useful if they have just used "sandbox" as the sub page.  Ronhjones  (Talk) 23:07, 27 January 2014 (UTC)

Decline templates

When an AfC submission is declined on account of notability concerns, the template reads as follows:

Please improve the submission's referencing, so that the information is verifiable, and there is clear evidence of why the subject is notable and worthy of inclusion in an encyclopedia.

If the topic of the article is not just lacking evidence of notability, but is actually non-notable, then it seems like a cruel form of torment to keep asking them to improve an article we'll never want. Also, since verification and notability aren't explained in the template, recipients that do not click through to the relevant guidelines will use primary sources to verify the content and boastful claims to explain the article's significance.

I have never looked at the template closely before and I wonder if it is actually encouraging repeated poor submissions rather than setting recipients on the right path. CorporateM (Talk) 06:39, 20 January 2014 (UTC)

While I agree to an extent, the notability template is applied to anything that isn't screaminly obviously notable. I mean anyone or anything who clearly fits the notability criterea such as an olympic athelete or a High School should get declined on sources, everything else where notability needs to be proved should get notability. And if you're further asking reviewers to have the judgement to distingush between "No nay never" and "Hmm... I don't know, possibly... if you add sources" then the job of reviewing gets much much harder. Rankersbo (talk) 09:41, 20 January 2014 (UTC)
I would think something using the words "if" and "may" would be better. "This article may not meet Wikipedia's requirements for an article. If the topic of this article has been the subject of multiple, in-depth, independent, credible sources, please consider adding more references to establish the article meets Wikipedia's requirements. If not enough credible, independent sources have written on the topic yet, please consider improving other articles that have been written about." CorporateM (Talk) 14:45, 20 January 2014 (UTC)
  • CorporateM and I talked about this on my talk page earlier this week, and this idea sort of dovetails with an idea I floated elsewhere a few weeks before that: there is a certain quantity of AfC submissions which just aren't ever going to be notable as they stand, to the point that any competent reviewer ought to be able to tell that, and the longer we fail to tell their creators that during the submission process, the more we're wasting both creator and reviewer time.

    Currently an AfC submission that says "Harold the border collie is the most awesomest dog ever he fetches sticks twice a day" gets notability-declined pretty much the same way as "Harold Wales is the CEO of 123 Enterprises, Inc. He wrote an article in Time once."- but one of those submissions actually has a good chance of being fleshed out to meet our notability standards, and the other has almost none. We could - and I'd argue, probably should - save the border collie's owner a lot of time and frustration by replacing "Please improve the submission's references [blah blah] and submit again" with "This subject does not appear suitable for Wikipedia. [If you feel you can prove otherwise, references blah blah]". I dealt recently with a paid editor on IRC whose boss wouldn't allow her to stop re-submitting the company's AfC submission until she could show him where she had been given a flat "no, your company article isn't going to work here" from us. Again, she could have been saved a lot of grief if we were able to tell her the truth to begin with: "good effort, but this isn't going to be accepted unless something changes rather spectacularly." A fluffernutter is a sandwich! (talk) 15:05, 22 January 2014 (UTC)

To clarify, my suggestion in this string was intended to pertain to all editors. I have not done enough article-reviews to know if non-notable AfC submissions are dominantly COI-related. Now that the discussion has turned to COI, I should disclose that I do a lot of work where companies hire me to help them manage their COI and conduct themselves appropriately. I can't imagine how that would give me a COI with AfC templates, but I do have some perspective from "the other side of the fence" and can confirm Fluffernutter's statements are representative of things I've seen. CorporateM (Talk) 15:38, 22 January 2014 (UTC)
Thanks, CorporateM, for your disclosure. I would like to add that it's not always easy to tell from reading a short unsourced submission which topics will turn out to be notable. I agree that there are some obvious ones, and perhaps as well as the current decline reasons which state that notability is not demonstrated we need another separate one for totally never-could-be notable topics. However, in my experience many COI editors have no interest in hearing that their favourite topic is not notable, and if given no hope in Afc just recreate the article in mainspace, where, (to my surprise when I realized this) standards are considerably lower and a promotional, unsourced article usually just gets a couple of tags stuck on it. —Anne Delong (talk) 17:54, 22 January 2014 (UTC)
In my experience most of the "never going to be notable" submissions also fail at least one of the WP:NOT criteria. As indicated in the flowchart this criterion (Encyclopedic topic) should be evaluated before Notability. Perhaps the "no" path should fork into "definitely not encyclopedic" and "apparently not encyclopedic" with only the "apparently not" branch ending up at "Fix and resubmit". A WP:NOT violation is not an acceptable Speedy delete criterion so we are unfortunately forced to wait for G13 to clear them out. Roger (Dodger67) (talk) 07:44, 30 January 2014 (UTC)

repeat submissions

I'm new to AfC. Why do we have repeat submissions like this? It's been rejected four times in seven months and takes up space in the queue. Chris Troutman (talk) 04:32, 26 January 2014 (UTC)

Because there's a chance that the issues that have been identified as faults previously could be resolved with some TLC. Of course that's all dependant on someone resolving the faults. Being that they were a significant member of the military (General Major), involved with the space program training, I see enough of a nod for notability to continue letting the advocate for the article to re-submit till it's right. Hasteur (talk) 04:53, 26 January 2014 (UTC)
(edit conflict) Hi, Chris. Repeated submissions are the normal thing here. What is supposed to happen is that the submitters read the comments from the reviewers and improve their drafts before resubmitting. However, sometimes the repeatedness is the fault of the reviewer. For example, if the article is written as an advertisement and also has no references, if the reviewer declines it as an advertisement the submitter may fix the promotional language and resubmit. Then someone else will have to decline it for lack of references. Then if it's a biography and doesn't have citations, there we go again. It's best to leave a comment mentioning any additional problems when declining so that the new editor can work on them all at once. —Anne Delong (talk) 05:00, 26 January 2014 (UTC)

Chris troutmanWhat may also happen is that you select 'reason' in the select box, and type a human message, linking to the relevant diff and explaining that it does not address the previous issue, and that reviewers are consistent without a need to waste their time thrice. Gryllida (talk) 08:59, 29 January 2014 (UTC)

Help - Hasteurbot being triggered every few minutes, can't keep up, hundreds gone.

I am checking the nominated ones as fast as I can; will get back to that now. ([6]). No time to really check, so I'm likely postponing some that shouldn't be. —Anne Delong (talk) 18:48, 28 January 2014 (UTC)

Anne, did you think about you know, asking me about why instead of running off to here? These pages have had over 2 months in time between when they were notified on and today. I'm reaching in from the back and and triggering the process. The bot has been put on hold several times (Early november, between Cristmas and New years, last week). If the pre-screening was not running, then that's one thing, but the threshold for a refund is so low that I think that anything that is reasonable to be asked for again will be easily fufilled.
TLDR: Bot is playing catch up for the multiple holidays that it's been put on. These affected pages have had more than enough time for saving.Hasteur (talk) 19:26, 28 January 2014 (UTC)
There is no need for the bot to catch up, it's on May 2013, the youngest submissions available are in July. Rankersbo (talk) 19:40, 28 January 2014 (UTC)
And you're willing to suffer another externally coordinated dismemberment of the Project/Process when outside editors realize that we still have reams of unsuitable data that is eligible for G13? Are you willing to suffer another Administrator coming in with a backhoe and clearcutting all the G13 eligible articles? We're nearly to the maintenance level for G13 (30 days * 300 submissions). If we can show that we're managing the process instead of it being a significant backlog, people are more likely to stay out of the process. Hasteur (talk) 19:53, 28 January 2014 (UTC)
Hasteur, I really didn't think it was you doing it, since you had indicated that you would wait until the backlog drive was over. I thought it was an admin using your "nudge". I had no time to investigate; I was checking them as fast as I could all day. I was hoping that someone else would either help check them or find out where they were going. I posted here because most people involved with this have this page on their watchlist, and I didn't know who would be online. It's not really true that I have had two months to check these submissions, because I (and Rankersbo and DGG with a little help from others) was very busy checking the hundreds each day that were still being deleted. (Wikipedia:WikiProject Articles for creation/G13 rescue) I think that you are exaggerating the maintenance level; there are closer to 200 submissions on the average each day, and many of those are repeat submissions, or are accepted, or are deleted before six months for other reasons. Anyway, if I had realized it was you I would have posted on your page.
While on the subject, though, the first postponements that I made were in June; I have dealt with some of these and edited the rest, but as time goes on more of these will be re-eligible. I have them on my watchlist, so I am presuming that I will know when they are tagged, but once the backlog is gone will there be a delay between the tagging and the deletion so that they don't disappear while I am sleeping? I am presuming that the bot would notify the original editors 30 days in advance, but not me. If a delay isn't practical, I will cope by finding the postponements in my five-months old "contributions" and editing them in batches. —Anne Delong (talk) 21:53, 28 January 2014 (UTC)
You are correct in your assertion that the bot won't notify you if you're not the creator, however I can add code to the notification side to drop a short form notice on any editor who wants to be notified (probably as a WikiPage) talk page if they've ever made a registered edit to the page to give them a heads up that the article is being notified on "for stale" and is eligible for G13. Would that work for you? Hasteur (talk) 22:02, 28 January 2014 (UTC)
Anne Delong Even if you thought it wasn't me that was running it, you still could have come to my talk page asking me to pull the emergency brake. I have my tablet with me almost all the time I'm awake (and not in the bathtub) so I can yank the circuits out very quickly if something is very wrong. I've added User:HasteurBot/G13 OptIn Notifications as the opt in page, and will start developing the code to notify all the editors who have opted in tonight. I don't think adding every unique editor who has touched the page is a good idea, so the opt in is the compromise. For prolific AfC editors this means a lot of notifications that pages have became eligible. But I'm open to alternatives Hasteur (talk) 22:21, 28 January 2014 (UTC)
The notification would be very helpful. One comment on your discussion above about the submissions backlog: I think that the culling of the G13 backlog is actually contributing to the submissions backlog as editors who are reminded of their submissions edit them and resubmit, and other editors pick out old ones to improve and submit them. If I look over the record of the pages checked, it looks as though it's been taking about two weeks to delete a month's worth of stale submissions, so the maintenance pace should be about half as fast. When the bot slows down, the rate of resubmission should subside somewhat, although not quite back to pre-G13 days, because there are still the postponed ones to improve. I am happy to hear that you are open to slowing the bot; I didn't like to ask, since the last time you declined.

There's a difference here. We're almost to the 9000 G13-eligible count which is where I had my mental line when we could go from crunch time mass deletions to more reasonable pokey level deletions. Hasteur (talk) 23:17, 28 January 2014 (UTC)

That 9,000 number is a little off. For those interested, I've done some data analysis (you can see the rambling in this section of my talk page) that suggests that we are accumulating about 4,000 CSD:G13 eligible drafts per month. Technical 13 (talk) 23:31, 28 January 2014 (UTC)

Well, that means checking a little more than 100 a day, and I'm sure that we can deal with that. —Anne Delong (talk) 03:54, 29 January 2014 (UTC)
100/day, in divided batches is OK, playing catch up was not. It was a very poor idea, and not sensitive to the way in which people can check them. There's a factor of about 50:1 between checking carefully, and just deleting everything. One reckless admin can defeat all efforts of dozens of careful ones. (And in practice we have several reckless admins working on this, and only a few careful ones. The reckless admins have an unfortunate tendency to concentrate at CSD. Normally, the harm they can do is outweighed by the fact that someone else has to nominate the articles first--unless they're being hopelessly reckless indeed) This has in the past given more or less of a balance the last few years. (the reason for the divided batches is to diminish the effect of any single admin.)
What is especially distressing, Hasteur, is that you think you can increase the rate this way without even telling anyone, let alone consultation. The decision to go extra fast is not entirely up to you: you do not own the process.
The reason the working thru the backlog is adding to the submission delay is that some of us would be more active there if we didnt think that rescue was a priority. The pressure to delete is always a factor preventing careful work. I think in the end we may need more than 100/day--if all submissions go through there, speedy has always been more than 100/day. TWe will have to think how to do it when we make the transition. The emphasis there is on we, not you alone. DGG ( talk ) 01:12, 31 January 2014 (UTC)
DGG And how many months have the "Rescures" had to work on the pages that have been notified on? Assuming that you and Anne were doing your job during the multiple weeks when the bot was suspended then you should already bee into the August and September timeframe. The threshold to restoration is so pitiful that the few that do get steamrolled are the unfortunate side affect of the fact that we get ~300ish submissions a day. Hasteur (talk) 02:13, 31 January 2014 (UTC)
How many months indeed. Just as many months that you have been pushing a destructive process.
I do not think you understand the problems. The 2 or 3 or us doing all the screening have been each screening at least 200 a day--some days, like yesterday, I screened about 500, and I expect to need to do yet more today in order to keep up with the overload from the last week. There is a limit on what a few people can do when faced with thousands of articles-- at least, there is a limit to how fast one can work when one tries to do it properly. The amount of time available is large, but the number of items to deal with is much larger. I have been compensating by not doing much else, and everything else I do at WP is the worse for it, as well as many things in my off-WP life, and i think by what I am saying it is obvious that I very much resent having to do this, I have also been compensating by doing it less carefully than I would like--screening, rather than fixing; deferring the "might possibly be notable" instead of trying to figure out which way they are likely to fall. I know I must be making mistakes, and I do not like making mistakes, and I do not like being put in a situation where I have no choice but make mistakes, or let everything be lost altogether. But still I would rather do it however sketchily than lose every one of the good articles (trying to prevent losing good editors is hopeless by now--they have almost all gone,)
I do not know why you think I should be in the August timeframe. I'm trying to finish May. To keep up with the bot means reviewing about 4 or 5 days worth of submissions in one day, and only a bot can be expected to do that. Every time I think I've gotten a few weeks ahead, then a sudden burst des ends on us. And I'm not even trying to review everything. There seem to be many articles on notable athletes , for example, that are being lost,--for I'm not looking at these because I lack the background to make quick decisions, and there is no time to do searching. I don't know why you think I (and Anne) should need to give up everything else we do at WP to cope with the sorcerer's apprentice you have let loose upon us.
that they can be undeleted is almost irrelevant. They can be undeleted in the extremely rare chance that the person who has gone away for six months eventually returns, and has not given up on it. Nobody else will no about it--nobody else who might want to work on topic will know there is are the beginnings for an article already available. They're lost to newcomers, and they're lost to the existing community. DGG ( talk ) 03:44, 31 January 2014 (UTC)
So you're also willing to dump excrement on me as well for having to fight the good fight at ArbCom (and got sanctioned for it) when nobody else could look and see the precedent in an admin deciding to mass delete all the eligible G13s without any notifications or 30 day wait window? The bot doesn't have to edit at it's current pitiful rate. It can go back up to a firing every hour on the hour which it was authorized for. A editor can go in and start opening all the pages that are in the category and mass nominating them. Each time I compromise you ask for more. Where's the give from your side? And annother thing, what's the first thing that a user would do when they go in to create a new draft on a page address that had been G13ed in the past? They get a notice that there was a page that did exist at the location and instructions for how they might be able to get the content back, so no I don't think they're lost. Hasteur (talk) 03:55, 31 January 2014 (UTC)

I ran a check of the code to handle the User:HasteurBot/G13 OptIn Notifications functionality and am pleased with the changes. Next 0200 UTC (Saturday) the bot will send out paired notices to all the editors who have made at least one edit to the AfC submission and is on the list that the submission has just become eligible for G13. This is at the point where the "This page is eligible for G13" red banner shows up in the AFC submission template area and when the author of the page gets notified as well. I did give the page I tested a extension of a few days on it's bot nomination date. Hasteur (talk) 04:45, 31 January 2014 (UTC)

Maintainence level G13-eligible submission checking

I will start a new thread to follow the last one with a better thread name. Very soon now the Hasteurbot will begin nominating for deletion submissions which have just been tagged as eligible for G13. This will give no time for the rescuers to look them over. Can we have a process like this:

  • Each day the Hasteurbot identifies a group of submissions (likely 100-150) that have not been edited for five months (or is it six? whatever was decided) and the users are notified that they must edit their submissions within 30 days or they (the submissions, not the editors) may be deleted.
  • 30 days later the pink G13 notice goes on that batch of submissions and they appear in the category list, and are considered abandoned drafts.
  • Interested editors now have seven days to check this batch of submissions, notify appropriate Wikiprojects and receive replies about notability and reliability of sources, postpone, improve, historymerge, check for copyvios, and/or manually nominate for deletion any that have been pronounced non-notable, test pages, silly topics, etc.
  • At the end of the seven day period, the Hasteurbot nominates for deletion whatever is left of that day's batch, up to 50 at a time throughout the day if there are more than 50 left.

If this is done, and if Technical 13's estimate of 4000 per month is accurate, then there should be about 1000 items in the category at any one time, hopefully arranged in order by deletion date.

Once this process is in place, there should be no more arguments about the speed of deletion, and if any submissions go unchecked it will be only through lack of interest, since everyone will know what to expect. —Anne Delong (talk) 12:16, 29 January 2014 (UTC)

I think you are highly confused. Once the submission hits 6 months (or shortly thereafter) the bot will notify the creator that the page is eligible for G13 and could be deleted. Independent of the bot notifiying the user that the page is eligible for G13, the pink banner announcing that the page is eligible for G13 pops up. 30 days after the bot notified the creator (assuming that the submission hasn't been updated or deleted in the meantime) the bot will perform the CSD:G13 nomination on the page.
Having the bot add a hidden tracking category to the submission will only defer the eligibility for G13 annother 6 months as the only exception to the G13 rule (as far as I know) is the actual nomination doesn't automatically invalidate the nomination itself.
How would you expect the bot to programatically determine what Wikiprojects are eligible? Because this could lead to a great many page notices we need to get an official opt in of editors and projects who want to be notified.
Changing the bot's operating procedure is going to require a re-approval of both bot tasks which, as I am sure you remember, was very contentious and took nearly a month and a half to get approval.
For these reasons I am opposed to this change. I can see the case for adding code to notify users who opt in to the notifications and meet some other filtering criteria (edited the page), but this will lead to so many complications that it will lead to further "HasteurBot is doing it wrong" situations. Hasteur (talk) 13:34, 29 January 2014 (UTC)
  • (edit conflict) Not that I'm particularly opposed or for this proposal Anne, but what you are proposing is a change to turn CSD:G13 into more of a PROD than a CSD, and I think it is too soon still since the last discussion on how CSD:G13 will work for another discussion attempting to change the way it works. So, I'm proposing we hold off on this discussion for a little bit longer so that a more solid dataset can be obtained and we can have a better grasp on what's going on.
What I will propose at this point is a new tab at the top of the project page (or included somewhere on one of the existing tabs) that a new "G13" page of some type to be able to keep track of the data and to better organize the handling of these drafts. I have some ideas for thing that might go on this page such as stats of how many drafts are in each category by month and by year (kind of like what I did to show the total and average number of submissions per day on the category pages themselves), offer a table similar to Template:AFC statistics showing all of the G13 submissions (or at least a chunk of them the the option to expand) and important information about them; draft name (link to draft), size, notes, last modified (user, date), eligible for G13 (date, how long it has been eligible in minutes, ..., days, ..., or years), nominated for G13 (user, date). It might look something like:
There could also be tables for recently deleted and whatever... (Yes, I'm aware that if you are not in UTC, the time calculations may be a few hours off.) Technical 13 (talk) 14:16, 29 January 2014 (UTC)
EDIT: Made table collapsed by default here only, wouldn't be on actual page. Also, my "delay" times are inaccurate as I threw this together and posted it as quick as I could to get it up without too many (edit conflict) issues. I'll update now. Technical 13 (talk) 14:22, 29 January 2014 (UTC)
Wait... No... Those numbers are right. Those numbers represent time since the six months has expired, not time since eligible. Perhaps it would be worth listing both in that box? Obviously plenty of room for improvement and discussion to facilitate that... Technical 13 (talk) 14:26, 29 January 2014 (UTC)
What you are suggesting is more complicated than may be necessary for the small number of "rescuers", but may be useful information for others in the long run. All I was asking for that was different from the current process is that once the page is tagged the bot not nominate it for another week. The date of the last edit must already be available, since the decline template says "last edited by XXX, Y months ago", and I'm sure it's used by the Hasteurbot to figure out when to tag the page. It shouldn't be difficult to use the same calculation+one week when deciding which of the tagged ones to nominate for deletion. As to the comment about being a "Prod", not so; any editor could still nominate from the moment of tagging. As to the comment about the "tracking category", pages already show up in "Category:G13 eligible AfC submissions" and this doesn't seem to set them back six months. I wasn't suggesting another category; sorry if my post was misleading. It would be nice if the display of the items in the category could match the order of tagging, and maybe your suggested new page could help with this.
However My main concern is that there be a few days after the tagging and before automatic nomination. Up to now that hasn't mattered, because the backlog caused a large delay. As it is now, though, the page could be tagged and then almost instantly nominated by the Hasteurbot.
If your suggested new page had a list of articles organized by last decline date, and we could see which ones were about to be tagged, this would not be quite as good because, if one was found to be fatally flawed, it couldn't be nominated on the spot, and others might waste time checking the references again, or contacting the same Wikiproject, for example. However, it would be better than nothing, and would at least give time for investigation, history merges, Wikiproject contacts, etc. —Anne Delong (talk) 17:59, 29 January 2014 (UTC)
There's something that puzzles me about this process, which seems to potentially duplicate effort. Why isn't the decision about whether an article should be worth saving from G13 made at the point of first review? If articles were flagged as 'promising' at that stage it might be more encouraging to the submitter while they are potentially still around. Just a thought. --nonsense ferret 00:56, 30 January 2014 (UTC)
Hello, nonsenseferret. Some of the submissions are about obviously notable topics, but others need specialized knowledge or a lot of work searching through sources before such a determination could be made. Another thing that happens a lot, especially with celebrities of one kind or another, is that someone get excited an makes an article too soon, but when we check six months later there is lots of press. However, appearing among the G13's there are definitely a number of submissions that shouldn't have been left around for six months - gossip, tributes to one's pet, Hello World type pages, actors with one bit part, duplicates that should have been historymerged, etc. The process could definitely be improved, and is gradually being tweaked, but there is a lack of personpower. —Anne Delong (talk) 04:39, 30 January 2014 (UTC)

So, I did something stupid tonight... I wiped out my notification database, so for a few days I'm going to be out of the business of nominating until I can rebuild the notifications I've made. I'll keep you all up to date. Hasteur (talk) 03:12, 30 January 2014 (UTC)

Oops! That's too bad. I hope it's not a lot of work to recover. It reminds me of the time that I entered hundreds of records into a database, and then the power failed before I saved my file. I reentered the data (without even cursing), saved successfully, and THEN discovered that I was using one of those (at the time) newfangled programs that auto-saved.... —Anne Delong (talk) 04:39, 30 January 2014 (UTC)
Fortunately I came up with a clever way of mining the bot's contributions and re-populating the record that tells me what page was notified on, when the page was notified on, and who was notified. I most of the records back. The unicode accented characters make the mySQL engine cry, so I'll turn the notifications on again (They get annother 30-day stay from the bot). But I deleted ~11k records and now have just under 10k. Hasteur (talk) 05:45, 30 January 2014 (UTC)
  • Anne, the biggest point of the table is that it would let you focus on getting the G13 eligible that are already nominated for deletion out of the way first, then you could sort through the ones that have never been submitted in a systematic method of the ones that have been abandoned the longest. I had thought you had been asking for something like this at some point, and now I'm offering to build a bot, a coordination tab//page in project space, and a table to work from. I also think that if the tab and tables with other important info were available in this kind of format, it would encourage others to help try and rescue some of these as they would all basically be categorized and it would be real easy to find something of interest to each individual to try and rescue. DO you not think it would encourage participation here? Technical 13 (talk) 03:21, 30 January 2014 (UTC)
  • Technical 13, as I said, I do think your table would be helpful; organized and neatly/compactly displayed information is always easier to work with. I am presuming that the items could be sorted by number of days since last edit - I would find that useful. The decline reason might help certain people find articles they want - "corp" for companies, for example. I can't see any downside except that fewer submission titles will fit on a screen, and anyone who doesn't like that can always use the basic category page. One thing to keep in mind is that in the future we may be migrating to the Draft space; I presume that your table would work just as well there.
  • HOWEVER, please take note that all this has nothing to do with the problem for which I was wanting a solution: I want to be able to check the submissions after they are tagged, but before they are nominated, because that is the only time that the script will work for postponing. To do that, an assured time delay is needed between the two actions, which up to now has been provided by the backlog. Otherwise the script is useless - it won't work on submissions that haven't been tagged, and it won't work on submissions that have been nominated. Also, as I experienced earlier today, once submissions are nominated the whole batch of fifty are often deleted within five minutes, leaving no time for even a cursory glance - even if the checkers are not sleeping (or out at a jam session, for example) when it happens. Only a change in the nominating behaviour of the Hasteurbot can do anything to solve this. —Anne Delong (talk) 04:32, 30 January 2014 (UTC)

Anne Delong There's a minimum of 30 days between when the page is "tagged" on by the bot and when the bot "nominates".If the page is in the G13 eligible category, the bot either has or will soon "tag" the page. Hasteur (talk) 04:39, 30 January 2014 (UTC) Anne Delong As I've said multiple times before, once we're down to the day to day maintenance, the bot will be nominating based on the order that it is more consistent with pages becoming newly eligible (that the category sorts in) and not so much focused on the dates the submissions were put up for their AfC. Initially I seeded the date in order. Once I got the authorization and bot flag, I submitted a large collection of "Scan for notification" batches at the same time (The August 20th blast). From time to time I update the list of potentially eligible AFC categories (Adding newest categories at the bottom) so that we don't have silly requests in the collection (Requesting for days in 2015). Hasteur (talk) 04:49, 30 January 2014 (UTC)

  • I'm on my mobile and it's hard to respond. I don't think you understand how the process currently works... I'll make a visual flow chart tomorrow. Basically... Draft is created and worked on. It is tagged as {{AFC submission|t}} (draft) and worked on some more... It may or may not be submitted. Either way, the second {{AFC submission}} is applied to the draft "it is tagged". Once six months pass with no edits to the page, it goes into G13 eligible status. Then there is a few days to a month waiting for the job queue to officially put it in the category. At the six month mark, the page creator is notified that they have a month to make any edit. Between 6 and 8 months after the last edit, it is finally nominated. So, there's at least six months between "tagging" and nomination. At that point, any admin can delete at their discretion. Perhaps someone can clarify for me (and fix my spelling/formatting as mobile editing sucks)... If not, I'll do it tomorrow and offer a flow chart. Technical 13 (talk) 04:49, 30 January 2014 (UTC)
(edit conflict - written before reading the last post) Hasteur, when I say "tag", I mean that the pink notice appears on the page and the script with the "postpone" and "Tag for deletion" buttons start working. I had presumed that this would happen after 30 days, so that people wouldn't be nominating the pages for deletion before the 30 days are up. If instead the script starts working at the beginning of the 30 days, then T13 is right and I was "highly confused" and worried about a non-existent problem. Instead, I guess we'll have to warn rescuers not to nominate manually during the 30 day period. Having 30 days to check out and postpone is perfect, and I apologize to you both for making you explain it again. —Anne Delong (talk) 04:57, 30 January 2014 (UTC)
    • (edit conflict) Your assertion is correct Technical 13. We can do an example to show how it works (Wikipedia talk:Articles for creation/skylark studio)
      • ‎ Soumya3d decided to create an article in AfC space and uses some form of the {{AFC submission}} banner. In this case it was {{AFC submission/draftnew}}
      • The last edit was by Minna Sora no Shita at 20:56, 29 July 2013‎ UTC
      • My bot (as part of the notifying process) scanned over the submission category and found the page eligible for G13 (at least 6 months un-edited)
        • The bot performed a null edit on the page to trip over the template so that it shows the "This draft has not been edited in over six months and qualifies to be deleted per CSD G13." notice
        • My bot notified the creator of the page (Soumya3d) that the page is eligible for G13 and that it could be nominated for deletion "soon"
          • Soon here is a relative word as it could be 5 minutes if a editor does it due to the fact that the page is eligible right now under the rule and a editor or admin could take the action
      • At least 30 days after the notice, my bot will pull out enough nominations to push the Category:Candidates for speedy deletion as abandoned AfC submissions up to an estimated 50 active nominations.
        • In the case of this example, it would be 30 days from today.
      • At this point it is either the G13-rescue squad or the Admins that make the final decision about saving versus deleting.
    • There are some cases where the page is eligible for several days before my bot can get to it (ex. The distributed computing engine on WikiMedia Labs decides to "spontaneously kill" the job, I suspend notifications, WikiMedia Tool Labs is down, etc.) but all that would casue in negative impact is giving the submission extra time before the notification of eligibility. Hasteur (talk) 05:11, 30 January 2014 (UTC)
Also, there's nothing from preventing the G13 pre-screeners from nominating for G13 immediately if they don't think the 30 days of delay will have any benefit. Those nominations will come out of the bot's estimated size of the "Candidates for G13" category so if someone goes on a binge of nominating for G13 and pushes the category over 50 members, the bot won't nominate any. Conversely when the bot does come down to that notification record in it's database, it'll see "Oh, that page was edited less than 6 months + 30 days ago, Remove it from my reconing as it's not eligible" or that the page doesn't exisist any more so it doesn't make sense to create the page only to nominate it for G13. Hasteur (talk) 05:17, 30 January 2014 (UTC)
I think that last point is important. We do indeed very much need to screen during that 30 days, not the last minute. /What this requires is that those articles be listed separately and conspicuously somewhere, in proper chronological order by when the bot will get to them, in addition to wherver the normal chronological listing of submission is, and that all editors and reviewers be notified--especially the prior reviewers. If you are doing that now, I do not know where. If not, where do you propose to do it? DGG ( talk ) 01:17, 31 January 2014 (UTC)
The category that the G13 eligible is supposed to be sorted by last edit, but I can see how this might be confusing. I've slapped together a simple script that will fire off every 30 minutes that will give links to the next 400 nominations that the bot intends to process, that way you have the most up to date list of what the bot is going after next. Hasteur (talk) 02:04, 31 January 2014 (UTC)

So, question to Anne Delong and DGG, Do you want another admin blundering in like the last one and starting to draining the backlog simply because the drafts are eligible and broadcutting all the drafts that are eligible? Hasteur (talk) 02:16, 31 January 2014 (UTC)

Dearest Hasteur, do you really need an answer to that question? Since the drafts are eligible, I don't see whether it makes a difference whether it's an admin or some other editor who decides to delete them, it would still be a loss to the encyclopedia if they are not checked over first. If it happens, it happens; the overwhelming number of good faith editors will patch things up in time. I'm not familiar with the word "broadcutting", but if you mean mechanically deleting hundreds of submissions, you were doing that yourself yesterday. —Anne Delong (talk) 03:48, 31 January 2014 (UTC)
Anne Delong I'm referring to how Kafziel decided that pages had been in AfC too long and deleted them outright, decided to move them to article space so that the A series of CSD could be applied against them and deleted, and generally was much more destructive than I or the bot could be. The pages that were done were nominated where ones that had their 30 days notice expire on December 20th. We're at the end of January now, the process has been running for months, and the precedent for the pages being deleted was well over 6 months old at that point (CSD:G13 was authorized in March/April) and the pages were last edited in May. The editors had plenty of time to make even a minimal effort. I ask again, do you really want an administrator to start deleting articles directly from the "G13 Eligible" category page as they are eligible in order to drain the swamp of uncurably abandoned AfC drafts that are not ready? Do you really want outside editors to start coming into AfC and nominating following the strict interpertations of the CSDs? The finesse of the rules that we have currently lasts only as long as outside editors are willing to tolerate us. Hasteur (talk) 04:05, 31 January 2014 (UTC)
Hasteur, I am missing your point. Very shortly anything over seven months will be gone. The ones between six and seven months will be postponed/improved/merged/accepted/deleted or whatever by human editors one way or another. Anything over seven months will be crunched by the Hasteurbot. Is there something you think should be done differently? Are you suggesting that we stop checking and just dump the last 8,000? Or is it something else that is prompting your question?
I OBJECT MIGHTILY to your comment about having plenty of time to check with a minimal effort. During the last five months I have spent an estimated average of five hours per day working on this project. If this is minimal, it's the best I can do. Still, I was able to look at considerably fewer than half of the submissions before they disappeared. Luckily, other editors were also checking, but even between us it wasn't possible to look at, make a decision about, all 50,000, while taking time to do the postponements. I have other things that I would like to do, so I am looking forward to reaching the maintenance level, but not by throwing away unchecked submissions. Whether it's a disgruntled editor or the bot, a deleted submission is a deleted submission. As a person trained in statistical analysis, I look at it this way: the choice is between a 100% chance that 8,000 unchecked submissions are deleted after being rapidly nominated by the bot, or a much smaller percent chance that one or more people who don't like Afc will manually delete some number less than 8000, maybe, someday. And yes, I agree that everything we do anywhere on Wikipedia depends on other editors tolerating it. —Anne Delong (talk) 05:22, 31 January 2014 (UTC)
Anne Delong Because the submissions for eligible for G13, any editor can mass nominate the entire collection of G13 eligible submissions without the benefit of any further reviewing. Because the submissions are eligible for G13, any administrator can mass delete the entire collection of G13 elgible submissions without the benefit of any further reviewing. Multiple editors and Admins have expressed dissatisfaction at the fact that the project still has reams of abandoned content. Enough to the point that they're starting to grumble about taking actions into their own hands in terms of dealing with the backlog. I'm trying to light a fire under the rescuers to get the job done faster so the wrath of outside editors coming in and tearing down the finessed interpertations of the procedures and guidelines we have. A little hurt by an editor who is trying to work with the process is better than a greater hurt by an editor who is applying the strict global process. Hasteur (talk) 13:41, 31 January 2014 (UTC)
Anne DelongYou are right, I endorse you 100% here. Rankersbo (talk) 14:11, 31 January 2014 (UTC)
Well, Hasteur, besides these arguments (which are taking me away from the checking), what exactly are you doing to "light a fire"? I'm afraid that I can't be bullied into working faster; I have no more time. As you say, the submissions are eligible for deletion; we know that, and I don't see how deleting more unchecked ones is "working with the process". If there are grumblers (please add links to these recent grumbling discussions for our edification), they are holding off from action so far, and at any rate all any of us can do is express our opinions and go with the flow. —Anne Delong (talk) 14:43, 31 January 2014 (UTC)

A "Class=Draft" parameter should be added to WikiProject banner templates

I posted a suggestion at WT:WikiProject Council#Class=Draft that such a class parameter be created in the default parameter set so that pages in Draft-space can have WikiProject banners - I also explained the advantages of doing so. My suggestion received comments from two editors and then nothing... The WikiProject Council is, as usual, practically comatose. Please help put some life into the idea by commenting there (not here). Roger (Dodger67) (talk) 21:23, 28 January 2014 (UTC)

Krisana Lalai’s Biography

(Text removed) @Toey ch: You probably want to use the article wizard. You can find the old text here. davidwr/(talk)/(contribs) 03:31, 29 January 2014 (UTC)

2nd Chapter of Acts/ Prince Song

To whom it may concern; Would love to be able to access song, "Prince Song" just to listen to! Would this be possible?? Thanks. Elaine Jarvis. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 162.248.139.175 (talk) 20:08, 30 January 2014 (UTC)

In short, no. See WP:Copyright and WP:NFCC for reasons why not. davidwr/(talk)/(contribs) 04:09, 31 January 2014 (UTC)

Flowchart again

Can this help make the criteria clearer to both readers and reviewers?
Alternative version, rebuilt from input in the thread here. Further improvements welcome.
neutralBiography of Living PeopleReliable sourcesNotableVandalism/attack pageTest, blank, and nonsenseCopyright violationMergeDeletionTranswikiCorrect and submitTeahouseAFC talkCiting sourcesWikipedia is an encyclopedia
Third version, with Merge as a viable outcome
  • Hi all, discussion at Jimbo's talk page has brought up the flowchart previously put forward at Wikipedia_talk:WikiProject_Articles_for_creation/2013_4#Flowchart. Jimbo (and a few others, including myself) feel that there are too many occasions when the AFC reviewing criteria are not being followed, either by reviewers introducing their own criteria that are not based in policy, or by holding new articles to an overly strict interpretation of policy and guidelines. It is feared that such refusals may drive new editors away, leaving them confused by a process which should actually be more transparent than writing in main space. As such, I would like to reintroduce the flowchart as a recommended process for evaluating whether articles are worth moving to main space. To help new writers understand what is expected of them, this should be easily accessible to them, as well as reviewers. Hopefully this can help make the process less stressful all around. Thoughts? — Crisco 1492 (talk) 00:16, 16 January 2014 (UTC)
I agree that it's important not to keep submission too long. As soon as a submission will clearly become an article it should be passed out where it will attract willing editors to improve it. There's nothing wrong with a reviewer making suggestions for other improvements, but the message should clearly indicate which problems must be fixed and which are optional. —Anne Delong (talk) 00:29, 16 January 2014 (UTC)
  • Agree with that: suggestions are fine and valid (and should be welcomed), but submissions should not be held back because of suggestions which are "best practices" but not policy. — Crisco 1492 (talk) 00:38, 16 January 2014 (UTC)
All things being equal, When a volunteer accepts a submission into article space they're pledging their reputation to the submission. For that reason, any attempt to try and force a recommended process on reviewers to promote submissions early should be rejected. As soon as the article leaves the protective cloak of AfC it becomes subject to a great many more policies that could have the article deleted. Declining a submission is not a "No never", it's an opportunity for the advocate for the submission to improve the submission. If more editors who do have expertise *cough*Crisco 1492*cough* started reviewing submissions then there wouldn't be as many submissions that "overly strict" reviewers could get their hands on. In fact we could spend more time per submission because there wouldn't be a backlog of pending submissions that had been waiting for a review for over 4 weeks. Hasteur (talk) 00:46, 16 January 2014 (UTC)
Also Argumentum ad Jimbonem is not a way to win a consensus building event. As I recall, Jimbo has given up (or delegated) almost every single one of his privileges as the founder. Just because Jimmy Wales has expressed interest in an issue does not make it Founder Fiat (see also Wikipedia:Role of Jimmy Wales). Again I note that Jimbo pontificated on his talk page instead of doing the proper thing and engage with the project here indicates that he sees it as a curiosity and not as a issue that needs to be dealt with. I see the operating guidelines of a wikiproject as somewhat like an internal set of rules, defined by the members. Hasteur (talk) 00:56, 16 January 2014 (UTC)
  • Hasteur, I did not say "because Jimbo says so, we must do". I said "this discussion came up on his talk page and multiple people think there are issues". Seriously. Could we please focus on the proposal instead of the people? — Crisco 1492 (talk) 01:20, 16 January 2014 (UTC)
Part of understanding the proposal is seeing who is proposing it and if they have a pre-disposition to try to break or destroy the current process. You of all people should not be making this proposal as your viewpoints on what constitutes acceptable are well known. Hasteur (talk) 01:42, 16 January 2014 (UTC)
Again with the ABF. — Crisco 1492 (talk) 02:45, 16 January 2014 (UTC)
I agree with Hasteur that a reviewer shouldn't feel obligated to accept an article with which he or she would not like to be associated. I come across a lot of submissions like that. I just leave them for someone else. Many of the submissions that have been waiting a long time to be reviewed are ones like that (the rest are ones that need specialized knowledge). —Anne Delong (talk) 02:36, 16 January 2014 (UTC)
  • I think your approach is workable (I've done the same with GANs and FACs). It's much better than simply rejecting an article wholesale because one does not want to be the one who passed it. — Crisco 1492 (talk) 02:45, 16 January 2014 (UTC)
It makes sense to have a simple flow chart if one exists. Some people learn better by looking at pictures and diagrams. It's a very quick and immediate overview for people with little time. Though for me, the reviewer instructions (well at least, when I last looked) are quite clear and make some points that the flow digram doesn't show - for example there's no point in declining an article because of it's non-neutral tone if the subject is not notable. Sionk (talk) 01:43, 16 January 2014 (UTC)
Sionk, the order of precedence of the criteria is built into in the flowchart - The notability criterion is placed two steps before the NPOV criterion. Such an order of priority is an inherent characteristic of flowcharts - items are not just randomly slapped onto a page, flowcharts have definite start and end points and items and the connections between them are arranged logically. BTW why do you say "if one exists" when it is visible right here? Roger (Dodger67) (talk) 11:48, 16 January 2014 (UTC)
I thought this flow chart was for reviewers, not authors?? Sionk (talk) 02:55, 16 January 2014 (UTC)
  • Mainly, yes, but (as I state above) having this easily accessed to writers should allow them to figure out when an article is likely to be failed (or deleted) and thus hopefully cut back on the number of premature nominations (as well as have easy reference material in case they ask why an article was rejected/deleted etc.) — Crisco 1492 (talk) 03:03, 16 January 2014 (UTC)

About the pink "quick fail" area of the flowchart, as noted at Wikipedia_talk:WikiProject_Articles_for_creation/2013_2#Defining_Workflow_V2.0, vandalism hoaxes may be speedily deleted (CSD G3). The flowchart still recommends blanking these. Also (not mentioned before), nonsense may be speedily deleted under CSD G1, whereas the flowchart recommends rejection. Copyright infringement doesn't always mean the draft should be speedily deleted, as Wikipedia:CSD#G12 explains. Instead of "any copyright issues?" a better label for the decision node would be "irreparable copyright violation?", the results could be repairable, irreparable, or not a copyvio, and the repairable output could lead to a repair action. —rybec 02:09, 16 January 2014 (UTC)

I have incorporated your suggestions (see the new file). — Crisco 1492 (talk) 02:42, 16 January 2014 (UTC)
Crisco 1492, or anyone else who has the necessary skill and tools, could you edit the blue "Content review" area to connect all of the criteria via a "No" link to the "Rejected" red dot and in turn connect the "Rejected" dot to the green "Communication" box. I tried to edit the image but I don't have the correct tool(s) for the task. Roger (Dodger67) (talk) 11:48, 16 January 2014 (UTC)
  • Based on my reading, that's not the intent: the "rejected" in this box is intended as saying "it's never going to happen", whereas the "no" linked to the green box suggests further reviews (after correction) are possible. — Crisco 1492 (talk) 12:37, 16 January 2014 (UTC)
  • I'm afraid your "reading" is definitely incorrect though understandable because "Rejected" is actually the wrong term - "Declined" is the term actually used everywhere else at AfC, so that should also be changed. The only "never going to happens" in the review process are the Quick fail criteria that end at "Delete". Actually this misunderstanding explains why much of what you said about this topic over at Jimbo's page "clashed" with what the AfC regulars were saying. Roger (Dodger67) (talk) 13:12, 16 January 2014 (UTC)
  • Is it, now? "8th lamppost from the right" would be unencyclopedic, but conceivably pass everything in the red box (i.e. the subject/topic is not encyclopedic). That is different than an encyclopedic topic being written about unencyclopedically (essay, etc.), which can be fixed. — Crisco 1492 (talk) 13:22, 16 January 2014 (UTC)
Now, on purely policy terms, "written encyclopedically" should be in the blue box, and "encyclopedic topic" should be in the red box. That's fixable. — Crisco 1492 (talk) 13:32, 16 January 2014 (UTC)
What does "written encyclopedically" mean? There is no such criterion. The original intent with the division between the red "quick fail" box and the blue "Content review" box is that the red box is for the blatantly obvious problems that do not require closely examining the entire article to diagnose, the blue box criteria require the application of skill and judgement.
I really don't know why you are reacting with such a hostile tone to the idea that I might just be correct about the fact that "Rejected" in the flowchart does not mean "never going to happen". I have done several thousand AfC reviews, so you really can apply some AGF and accept that I am correct on this point. Roger (Dodger67) (talk) 14:18, 16 January 2014 (UTC)
I've uploaded the chart, see File:Flow chart for AFC 3.0.png. I've also removed the word "subject" from the bit about the draft being encyclopedic. — Crisco 1492 (talk) 14:35, 16 January 2014 (UTC)
  • That is a great improvement! The only problem is that lack of "Encyclopedic style" is not a valid decline reason. It is sufficient that it is in comprehensible English. With that exception, I think we've got the basics correct, the chart does follow and reflect the current policies, standards and practices applicable to AfC reviews. Roger (Dodger67) (talk) 16:12, 16 January 2014 (UTC)
Could various elements in the flowchart contain wikilinks to relevant pages, such as having each of the review criteria link to the policy and guideline pages they are based on and linking the "Delete" dots in the "Quick fail review" box to the relevant Speedy deletion rationales, etc? Roger (Dodger67) (talk) 12:35, 16 January 2014 (UTC)
  • Agree, adding links is the last step to complete the final accepted version of the flowchart. BTW, this place has become very quiet, only you and I here for the last few hours. We'd really appreciate more opinions and input from others. Roger (Dodger67) (talk) 16:12, 16 January 2014 (UTC)
Just because you're the only ones talking doesn't mean you're the only ones reading. I agree the chart envisions the overall process and clearly indicates the difference between a "No and don't try again" rejection and a "Not quite and here's what I see as a problem" decline. I would note that in some cases there may be problems that are questionable in the quickFail level but aren't at the level of quickfail that I've typically declined and pointed at the issue so as to coach the advocate for the submission on how to remedy the defect. Hasteur (talk) 16:45, 16 January 2014 (UTC)
  • How do you feel about "pure attack or vandalism", which is similar to the wording used at WP:G3 and WP:G10. We could also try "pure vandalism or attack page", which may be a bit clearer (assuming the text fits). I can't think of any situations where "test, blank, or nonsense" could not be considered deletable material, except for a single sentence which is gibberish in the middle of a decently written article (which can simply be removed). I don't mind an example that I'm wrong, however. — Crisco 1492 (talk) 23:24, 16 January 2014 (UTC)
  • I guess it's really shades of grey determination. A "Johnny is a poopyhead and walks around with brown racing stripes on his pants" is something that I'd probably decline it somewhere in the test/blp/vand category, but not auto-CSD it. If an article contains some phrases that seem as though they're written for annother site (or if I can the phrases on the other site) I'll Decline cv it, but deliberately uncheck the CSD box to indicate that there is a problem with the prose being much too similar to the other site while at the same time not making it a hopelessly un-salvageable mess that needs to be burnt to the ground before being rebuilt. Unfortunately I don't really have good examples at hand. A lot of it is trying to get a feel for if the article is salvagable and if it needs to be burnt to the ground now or in 6 months when the "Stale Draft" reaper comes along. Hasteur (talk) 23:38, 16 January 2014 (UTC)
  • The copyright issue was worked in with adding "irreparable" before copyright violation (i.e. a couple sentences which are closely paraphrased will not be an automatic deletion, but a wholesale copy and past from a book published in 2011 will). I agree that the close paraphrasing should be noted (for the writer to improve) and not deleted. Wouldn't "Johnny is a poopyhead and walks around with brown racing stripes on his pants" be a valid deletion under current CSD criteria? It doesn't have to be vicious attacks, just "include libel, legal threats, material intended purely to harass or intimidate a person or biographical material about a living person that is entirely negative in tone and unsourced." So "Crisco is a fat turd who spews chunks on his mother" or something similar would still be valid deletions. — Crisco 1492 (talk) 23:52, 16 January 2014 (UTC)

I mentioned this flow chart several times and even contacted the author (who didn't comment further). Many of the participants on the thread on Jimbo's page do not appear to be aware of the actual progress that has been made:

  • Creation of the Draft name space (opriginally an AfC initia
  • Consensus for a set of minimum 'qualifications' for reviewers, from which a clear set of reviewing criteria can now be established in order to ensure that reviewers are all singing from the same page.
  • Deprecation of the Incubator in favour of using the Draft namespace which does not mean that yet another new namespace or project area needs to be developed to replace it.

I get the impression that a lot of useful further progress has possibly been hampered by too many people spending their time developing different ideas for solutions without some group discussions as on where efforts could be best focussed. Due to the great similarities (and even some overlap) in the technical requirements of both AfC and NPP, I feel thet the suggestion to examine the possibility of cloning and adapting the New Pages Feed and its Curation Toolbar should now be acorded some weight. The problem with this is that the Foundation appears to be polarised, with some staff members insisting that AfC is not at all within the WMF's remit, while others are participating in AfC discussions - sometimes quite helpfully but at the same time conflating the discussions with their own ideas for what else can be done with the Draft namaspace. Kudpung กุดผึ้ง (talk) 04:27, 16 January 2014 (UTC)

Does merge to an existing article come up often enough to be useful in the flowchart? I know I usually considered it in my reviews (which were, admittedly, a few years ago.) --Hroðulf (or Hrothulf) (Talk) 11:10, 17 January 2014 (UTC)

  • We have place to include it, if we can agree that it is worth including. — Crisco 1492 (talk) 11:26, 17 January 2014 (UTC)
    • In the 'No' branch of 'Subject notable?', I suggest we ask 'Draft useful in another article?' with the No branch leading to 'Declined', and the 'Yes' branch to 'Merged'. The key question is, does it occur often enough to justify 2 extra nodes in the chart? (I would also merge an article that is too short standalone, as I don't like throwing stubs to the wolves, but I expect that is rare.) --Hroðulf (or Hrothulf) (Talk) 14:07, 17 January 2014 (UTC)

I think 'Declined' should be orange or yellow (not red and not all caps) to emphasize that it the draft may be redeemable. --Hroðulf (or Hrothulf) (Talk) 14:07, 17 January 2014 (UTC)

      • For the first point, we'll see how others feel. I think that should be doable. For the "Declined", new version coming ASAP. However, I think all-caps should be kept for legibility and standardization ("accepted" is also all-caps). — Crisco 1492 (talk) 15:14, 17 January 2014 (UTC)
But the 'Draft created' circle is not all caps. ;) I wanted a visual distinction from "it's never going to happen" that works for those with colour blindness. --Hroðulf (or Hrothulf) (Talk) 15:39, 17 January 2014 (UTC)
Done, uploaded over ALT1. — Crisco 1492 (talk) 16:07, 17 January 2014 (UTC)

Flowchart again - arbitrary break 1

Thought: We probably want to have a "Does a mainspace article by the same name and of the same subject exist by the same author? (Copy/Paste move)" branch with Yes pointing to a "REDIRECT/HISTMERGE" terminal point, "Name and Subject" pointing to "Decline Exists" terminal point, and no continuing in the hierarchy of reasons. The terminal points should not go back into the regular decline cycle as redirecting/Histmerging should be the end of the submission's life in AfC space and the Decline Exists should not invoke a new "refactoring" of the submission to try and get it accepted as we already have an article on that subject. Preference should be on the Redirect/Histmerge side as just Decline-Exists makes work for an eventual G13 nomination. Hasteur (talk) 15:40, 17 January 2014 (UTC)

  • There are two points here: first, fixing copy/paste moves, and second, AFC submissions which already have articles or related articles. The first is a purely administrative function, whereas the second may be useful for writers. To avoid sending the message "Oh, I can just copy and paste my submission if I want to", I don't think the first should work into this (after all, AFC reviewers generally understand what to do in such a case, and there is also the possibility that a copy/paste move needs to be deleted). The second should be worked in. — Crisco 1492 (talk) 15:52, 17 January 2014 (UTC)
I've added a flowchart with "Merge" explicitly a possible outcome; see ALT2 above. — Crisco 1492 (talk) 16:07, 17 January 2014 (UTC)
  • I am sorry that I haven't weighed in earlier. I haven't looked at this page for a while. Here are my thoughts, which may be dismissed if others disagree
  • I have a concern about the section which deals with "article exists". Right now it seems to me that the process is Existing article - copy paste? Yes -> merge, or No -> decline (the decline message suggest that the user add their material to the existing article).
  • I have a question about the "not English" case. It points to "transwikify". Now there are three situations: (1) The article was copied from another Wiki, perhaps in the hopes that someone would translate it - sending it back wouldn't be useful; shouldn't the process be notify translators (somehow) and decline? (3) The article is a fresh draft that would be accepted if it were in English - maybe the transwiki would work here (3)the draft has serious problems besides language - most other Wikipedias don't have an Afc equivalent, so where would you send it? Shouldn't it just be declined?
  • Inline citations - the chart makes it seem as though they are only needed for biographies of living people, but there are other cases. Maybe (About a living person) -> yes ->(complies with WP:MINREF}, or if no -> (Contains quotations or contentious statements) -> yes -> (complies with WP:MINREF}
  • The chart says what to do with irreparable copyright violations, but not reparable ones. The usual process I believe is to blank or remove the offending sections.
  • There is also "Another submission on the same topic exists" -> decline
  • The word "encyclopedic" is vague- I presume that you are trying to cover hoaxes, jokes, essays, advertisements, etc., all in one box, which is fine if there is a link to an explanation.
  • For "Encyclopedic", that is linked to WP:NOT, which defines what "encyclopedic" is meant to be by showing what it isn't. The chart isn't meant (at least, in my opinion) to show every possible outcome, but rather the more common ones that a writer might like to know. As such, I feel a general wording (without going into specifics, but without excluding them as well) would be best, with links to the proper policies/guidelines for further detail. Naturally, reviewers would be expected to know what to a bit better than we can represent in chart format without getting ridiculously detailed (the subclauses in the clauses, as it were). — Crisco 1492 (talk) 15:21, 20 January 2014 (UTC)
I agree with you about the transwiki element, but am at a loss for finding an elegant solution. My first instinct (though it is procedurely incorrect) is to have the arrow point to "Decline" (as transwiki is essentially declining the material a place on the English Wikipedia), perhaps with a suggestion to transwiki. Another idea would be welcome, of course. — Crisco 1492 (talk) 15:25, 20 January 2014 (UTC)

Should we Hard-fail blatantly non-notable and non-encyclopedic topics? I say "yes." I think we should explicitly change the "no" of "Topic is encyclopedic?" and "Subject notable?" to "maybe" with arrows pointing to "declined" as they are now, and add new arrows labeled "no" pointing to a new red circle labeled "declined as unsuitable" that does not have any links leading back to the green "communication" box. This "no" should be understood to mean "blatantly obvious" cases like "Jane Jones is an 3rd-grade teacher at Springfield Elementary ..." that will never make it into the encyclopedia unless something new happens like she gets to turned into a fictional character or nominated to be Secretary of Education or something else that would generate WP:RS references about her. If there must be a communication box coming out of this "declined as unsuitable" box it should be reserved for asking the decliner or another editor to explain why the topic is unsuitable and to listen to counter-arguments from the submitter, not to encourage the editor to continue to work on the submission. davidwr/(talk)/(contribs) 22:54, 20 January 2014 (UTC)

  • "Declined as unsuitable" is still a decline, and as such the arrow need not change. I think if a writer were to discuss a submission with a reviewer, the reviewer would be able to explain why it is unlikely to be accepted. — Crisco 1492 (talk) 23:07, 20 January 2014 (UTC)
  • @Crisco 1492: I think Davidwr is drawing a distinction between "decline (with explicit invitation to continue working on submission)" and "decline (with note to the effect of 'even if you continue working on this, it probably won't be suitable')", as two different types of responses to two different types of submissions ("This could be notable, but the submitter hasn't made a case for it" vs "This is clearly non-notable, period"). I don't know that a "hard" decline of the latter type should necessarily lead to immediate deletion the way other quick-fails do, but I do think implementing a hard-fail of this type, where we don't encourage the submitter to keep beating their head against the wall, will cut down on both reviewer and submitter frustration. A fluffernutter is a sandwich! (talk) 20:00, 22 January 2014 (UTC)
  • I feel that all "hard declines" should be based on CSD criteria - only say "this is never going to happen" if it would be eligible for speedy deletion per G or A criteria. I include A criteria because the whole point of a draft is to eventually get into mainspace, so even if it isn't deletable as a draft, if it would become deletable simply by being moved into mainspace there isn't really a meaningful difference. Of course this does not apply to anything that can be fixed before moving to mainspace, only problems inherent to the subject itself are valid "never going to happen" reasons. Roger (Dodger67) (talk) 20:19, 22 January 2014 (UTC)
  • What if, on the arrow between the orange "Declined" circle and the green box, we were to add the clarification "Consider" (i.e. think about the things in the green box, no necessarily do them). — Crisco 1492 (talk) 23:19, 23 January 2014 (UTC)
  • Well, except in cases of drop-in-and-run editing and bad-faith editing (e.g. PR-spammers) we don't want to leave the editor hanging. If continuing to work on the article is a waste of time, it's generally better to to tell them than to abandon a new editor who, if treated well, may pick a notable topic for his next draft. davidwr/(talk)/(contribs) 23:58, 23 January 2014 (UTC)
@Dodger67: In addition to hard-declining for un-repairable CSD reasons, "hard declines" are appropriate if there's less than a WP:SNOWball's chance that the subject matter will be shown to meet Wikipedia's notability criteria in the near future (say, within a year, maybe two). An article about a college football senior who doesn't meet WP:N but might be drafted? Tell the editor to wait but don't hard-decline. An article about the same person 3 years later, after he's given up on football and hasn't been reported on even in local media since? Hard-decline. The same football player when he was a sophomore? Hard-decline at AFC with a note to revisit the issue in a couple of years, and offer to userfy the page in the interim. davidwr/(talk)/(contribs) 00:04, 24 January 2014 (UTC)
  • I like a distinction between hard and soft declines for CSD A reasons (and possibly G reasons, though they could also be dealt with through blanking in some cases, not sure on that yet). I'm still not fully sure if notable is a good decline reason though. On the one hand, we don't want tons of cruft, especially not PR cruft - and that's exactly the vast majority of what we're getting now. On the other, no single Wikipedian should be able to be the judge of notability, especially since opinions can vary on the subject. Could some sort of n strikes for a half-hard decline for a subject you feel is not notabile, but is not "the third lamp-post in the street" be a good idea (I'm thinking three, but the number is always arbitrary)? Martijn Hoekstra (talk) 22:50, 28 January 2014 (UTC)

Proposal to accept the flowchart and include it as part of the Reviewing instructions

Proposed that: 1. The third version of the flowchart as above (File:Flow chart for AFC 3.1.png) including the image-map wikilinks, is accepted to be a faithful graphical representation of the current best practice procedures and routines used in reviewing submitted drafts. 2. This flowchart be incorporated into the Reviewing instructions page as an additional resource to guide reviewers.

  • Rationale: Part 1 - Active discussion of modifications and adjustments to the flowchart have not occurred for more than three days, thus it appears that this is, through absence of disagreement, a reasonably stable version. This silent assent should be made explicit.
Part 2 - Previous iterations of the flowchart became hidden and forgotten a number of times in the talk page archives without any resulting action to formally accept it as part of the guidelines for reviewers - this is addressed by Part 2 of the proposal.

Roger (Dodger67) (talk) 20:57, 28 January 2014 (UTC)

Support or Oppose Part 1

Support or Oppose Part 2

Close?

Can we close this as accepted and do the necessary - copy the flowchart to the reviewer guide - or does it need further discussion/development? Roger (Dodger67) (talk) 10:34, 7 February 2014 (UTC)

Script using jQuery, /text subpage

I have written a revised version of the helper script. The rationale was to have it depend on a /text subpage (at test.wikipedia.org), which contains the HTML markup and main parts of the interface text (default decline reason, canned responses). By not isolating the standard messages ("this is a copyvio", "this is an ad", "this lacks reliable sources") to a single param in the template (it simply supports «reason» decline type), the script allows providing more verbose feedback, on multiple points at once. Copyright, style, neutrality — tell the contributor when something of this is already ok instead of providing feedback on a single reason.

You can see installation instructions here: https://github.com/Gryllida/Afch2

WikiProject tagging of approved articles and viewing next submission in the queue are currently missing and are on the to-do list.

Please share feedback, pull requests, and especially code review ideas to improve readability and make the script easier to maintain in the long run.

Thanks, --Gryllida (talk) 11:12, 26 January 2014 (UTC)

  • Sorry it has taken me so long to reply. I've been stupid busy and I honestly have a hard time following what you're asking most of the time (it's just a language barrier and it's mostly my fault). I have some questions:
    1. Is the intent to make it easier for all WikiProject participants to edit the reasons?
    2. If so, what's to prevent unwanted vandalism of the list?
    3. If the /text page is protected, what level protection would it have?
    4. Would that protection level make it feasible for WikiProject participants to edit the reasons?
I look forward to the responses. :) Technical 13 (talk) 15:33, 31 January 2014 (UTC)

Technical 13 for all people yes; shown in next question; only reviewers can change this (the same user right which reviewing [new pages] needs); those wikiproject people who review these articles would be reviewers anyway and can change directly. --Gryllida (talk) 10:07, 5 February 2014 (UTC)

Afc submissions without active editors and Draft space

As I understand it, the main purpose of Afc is to provide a way for new or unregistered users to create articles. (I know it's also sometimes used by more experienced users who want a review of a particular article, but this is a bi-product). Because of this, Afc usually just declines rather than deletes submissions with lack of references, promotional content, etc., to give the new users time to get used to Wikipedia's policies. However, as mentioned in the section above, there are some cases where the leniency turns out to be unwarranted or at least ineffective. In particular, there are many submissions on notable topics which are declined with the hopes that the users will add references or remove promotional text, but instead the users lose interest, wander off after a while an never edit the submission again. At this point, unless other editors are made aware of these submissions they will sit incomplete until deleted under G13. In summary: Afc only works for submissions with active editors.

There are a large number of these "abandoned" submissions which have been postponed from G13 eligibility because at least one editor thought that they would make an acceptable article if improved a bit. They aren't ready for mainspace, but since they are no longer being worked on by their original submitters the Afc process isn't of much benefit to them. I have postponed quite a few of these; some I plan to work on myself. However, there are many on topics that I don't know well enough. I'd be interested to read opinions from others about the idea of having interested editors pick out one or more of these "postponed" articles which they believe to be on notable topics and move them to Draft space to work on. They'd then no longer be part of Afc's backlog. I've been contacting Wikiprojects for help with some of these, and I have found editors who want to make comments but aren't familiar with the Afc script, and would be happier working on a talk page. I'd like to hear about any logistical problems with this idea as well. —Anne Delong (talk) 14:12, 3 February 2014 (UTC)

Reading over Kudpung's comments about the Page Curation Tool, I am also wondering if this relatively small number of pages already known to be in need of improvement would make a good test group for the use of this tool in Draft space. —Anne Delong (talk) 14:35, 3 February 2014 (UTC)
Abandoned submissions are in the AfC system but I don't think they're not part of the backlog. I support moving promising abandoned drafts to draft namespace and handing them over to WikiProjects. ~KvnG 14:54, 3 February 2014 (UTC)
Moving them to Draft namespace doesn't eliminate the G13 eligibility on them. It is my understanding that as long as they have the AfC banner on them and they're 6 months unedited, they're eligible for G13. Shifting the backlog to some other location doesn't solve the problem of the backlog. I have tried to push for creation of a paralel draft namespace criterion(or finessing of the rules to allow us to use G13 to solve the Draft namespace problem), but have had significant pushback. Hasteur (talk) 15:03, 3 February 2014 (UTC)
Seems like there is a lot in common here with Wikipedia:Requested articles - wouldn't that be an appropriate place to provide lists of articles that are needing volunteers to redraft to appropriate standard. --nonsense ferret 15:08, 3 February 2014 (UTC)
Depiction of AfC workflow for declined submissions. Click here to see what a very high AfC backlog looks like in this world of similes. --Demiurge1000 (talk) 22:10, 3 February 2014 (UTC)
A large number of submissions are from drive-by SPA creators who assume that their articles will retained. We've just gotten rid of the Incubator and we don't want to create new backlogs out of old ones leaving articles to sit around like old aircraft in a desert boneyard. I fully understand the need to avoid deleting absolutely everything that the bot tags for G13, so does Anne, so does DGG, so does Hasteur but let's not kid ourselves that someone else is going to work on them unless the WP:ARS is willing to take them over. I think history has shown that most content contributors - at least those like me - are oly really interested in articles that we create ourselves or that are within our knowledge area. There a re some highly specialised and well organised projects such as MILHIST perhaps, or WP:FOOTY and WP:FILM for example, but things like general bios and much of what else makes up today's input (such as company listings) are too broad to raise interest. We have a long list of articles needing attention at WP:WPSCH where I am a coordinator, but nobody is working systematically through them in spite of a membership of over 300 and my time is mostly taken up with removing vandalism and unsourced content from the 10,000s of articles in that project's purview. Kudpung กุดผึ้ง (talk) 16:06, 3 February 2014 (UTC)
Well, I guess it would be a never-ending job. There are people willing to help, though - I've managed to get through about 80 new articles so far, many with the help of editing or advice from others (User:Anne Delong/Afc submissions for improvement). —Anne Delong (talk) 16:38, 3 February 2014 (UTC)
One way I think they'll be worked on is someone comes to WP, doesn't find an article, searches within WP, and finds the AfC/Draft, and decides to expand it. Many abandoned articles ere abandoned just because of problems with style, or insufficient references, where the subject is potentially WP-worthy. People are interested in the strangest things--as should be obvious to anyone who has been here a while--and it is very rash to predict that nobody else will ever want to work on a subject.
Another way I think the y can be handled is via the workgroups. About half of WP is covered by active workgroups, and they all maintain lists of needed articles, and needed improvements. There are many editors who find it easier to write from some sort of a preliminary version rather than from scratch, and many articles on such lists do get worked on.
There are also specialists. There are 2 or 3 people here who will work on any potentially likely classical musician article, and 2 or 3 who will do the same for 19th century literature. I and one or two others will take a look at anything about a professor--not that we'll work on every one, but we'll look at them and see. We need a way of getting these articles to the attention of the right people.
All of this has been very difficult, because of the hugh numbers of hopelessly unsuitable articles clogging up the system. As someone doing it, I can say how extremely discouraging it is to work through immense numbers of such articles, and still pay attention to the few good ones. But this first round will be getting rid of somewhere between 85 to 95% of the total, and that reduces the problem to a much more manageable size. DGG ( talk ) 20:12, 3 February 2014 (UTC)
Articles in Afc don't have talk pages, and that has the advantage of keeping all of the information in one place during reviews, but once the original editors are no longer involved, there's no one to submit or read the reviews and comments. Wikiproject banners on talk pages are one way to attract other editors to pitch in. I haven't had time to follow all of the discussions about the Draft space, but I'm sure that there must have been some discussion of "demoting" problem articles from mainspace back into the Draft space, where they would feel right at home among the ones we are discussing. Kudpung has expressed a legitimate concern that old drafts would hang around forever; it seems inevitable that if the Afc process moves to Draft space, the db-g13 criteria will have to be widened to cover that space, so the drafts would continue to fade away unless at least one editor showed an interest. —Anne Delong (talk) 21:48, 3 February 2014 (UTC)
Tagging Draft-space pages with relevant WikiProject banners is certainly a way to "notify" projects of the existence of the draft, however the article management and improvement systems used by WikiProjects depends on the banners containing various "class=????" parameters. The "class=Draft" parameter has been implemented as an "optional" feature that individual projects need to actively include in their banner templates. I posted a proposal to the WikiProject Council that the Draft parameter should be in the default set otherwise only those few projects that choose to include will benefit from the new Draft-space (and vice-versa). My proposal has been met with limited support drowned out by overwhelming apathy. Not making "class=Draft" a part of the default set of parameters will basically "sabotage" a major part of the rationale for the existence of Draft-space - drawing newbie editors into the WikiProject system and having WikiProjects actively involved in assisting editors to create new content in their subject areas by collaborative article creation (which AIUI is the whole point of wiki-pages). OK, so basically I'm appealing for more of us to help the WikiProject Council understand that their reluctance to act on the proposal is counterproductive and missing the point of Draft-space's existence. Roger (Dodger67) (talk) 22:38, 3 February 2014 (UTC)
Anne Delong I tried to get a positive assertion that G13 was appropriate for all drafts, but the consensus was that G13 will only be applicable for drafts that have an AfC banner on them. I tried to show how without designing a process to eventually remove drafts that nobody is working on, the Draft namespace will accumulate crap faster than any of it's predecessors. Hasteur (talk) 23:17, 3 February 2014 (UTC)
it might help to do our best to maintain a very clear identifiable distinction between AFC and non-AFC articles in draft so that AFC can then drop down to being only the second most whinged about backlog :) --nonsense ferret 23:37, 3 February 2014 (UTC)

Fixed unclosed 'small' tag. Kudpung กุดผึ้ง (talk) 00:16, 4 February 2014 (UTC)

Well, maybe until there's a deletion process we'd better keep our drafts and move them when the whole kit and caboodle moves; that way if we can show that the G13 process is keeping the backlog down, it will become popular for non-Afc drafts as well. —Anne Delong (talk) 23:56, 3 February 2014 (UTC)
  • I think the "class=Draft" parameter should be adopted by all projects for their banners. I don't see it as something needing a huge discussion. I didn't kow about it although I manage some projects, including a large one such as WP:WPSCH where as coord, I will get it added to the banner without further ado. There are hundreds of projects however, and maybe the best thing to do is either send a bot message to them all - or even be bold and simply add it to their banners. Kudpung กุดผึ้ง (talk) 00:09, 4 February 2014 (UTC)
BTW, this was also discussed here with a technical solution. Kudpung กุดผึ้ง (talk) 06:06, 4 February 2014 (UTC)
That "solution" does nothing to notify the relevant subject projects about the draft. They must enable the class=Draft parameter. Please help push this issue at the WikiProject Council. Roger (Dodger67) (talk) 14:33, 5 February 2014 (UTC)

New Draft Feed

An RfC has been started to propose a Draft feed system. See: Wikipedia:WikiProject Articles for creation/RfC to create a 'Special:NewDraftsFeed' system. Kudpung กุดผึ้ง (talk) 01:27, 4 February 2014 (UTC) Kudpung กุดผึ้ง (talk) 01:27, 4 February 2014 (UTC)

G13 Undelete

See Wikipedia talk:Articles for creation/Steve Fossen. FoCuSandLeArN (talk) 16:47, 5 February 2014 (UTC)

I've removed the submission banner, copied the appeal to WP:REFUND, commented giving guidance to the admins, and striked the appeal on the page that will now have to be deleted and a different version restored. Hasteur (talk) 17:23, 5 February 2014 (UTC)
There might be another case here. It seems we're getting a few of these recently; G13 is reaping what it sowed. I don't see why we should be wary about these, as long as they're worked on and resubmitted in a timely manner. Perhaps we should change the wording on G13 templates and logs directing users to the appropriate places so they don't submit their own requests at AfC, or is this already in place? FoCuSandLeArN (talk) 17:33, 5 February 2014 (UTC)
As evidenced by the notices Instructions are left for where the user should request the restoration of their article, the standard deletion log contains the message. I'm confused how much further we should go in holding their hand while they cross the street. Hasteur (talk) 16:43, 6 February 2014 (UTC)
Fair enough. That's even clearer than I expected! FoCuSandLeArN (talk) 20:42, 6 February 2014 (UTC)

Disappearing edits

Here's a side effect of the G13 deletions which effects mainly Afc reviewers. I noticed that recently my live edit count was going down, while the deleted edits were going up substantially. At first I was surprised, and then I remembered all of those submissions that I declined in last July's backlog drive, with comments added to each one and format fixes on many. I guess those submissions are now being deleted. I know that edit counts aren't that important, but a large number of deleted edits could be misinterpreted, so I'm glad I was able to explain it. —Anne Delong (talk) 21:03, 6 February 2014 (UTC)

That's a quirky observation. I guess we'll have to live with it, being AfC reviewers. FoCuSandLeArN (talk) 21:11, 6 February 2014 (UTC)

Closing Afc for a few days

Should we close AfC for a couple of days to truly eliminate backlog? Your thoughts?Fremantle99 (talk) 05:12, 9 February 2014 (UTC)

I don't think it would matter. First, I would guess the sheer number of inbound submissions outpace the reviewers' ability to address them. Secondly, declining a submission isn't making it go away. If this WikiProject deleted entries after two or three failed tries you could cut down the backlog but you'd still have some that won't be gone until they're officially abandoned. Finally, a backlog only exists if you think there should be none at all. I, for one, don't mind making IPs and new users wait a few weeks for their submission to be reviewed. I've found more than one instance where users submitted an article to AfC, got tired of waiting, and re-created the article in mainspace essentially leaving the backlog. Chris Troutman (talk) 05:34, 9 February 2014 (UTC)
  • I'm guessing you mean shut down people's ability to create new drafts through the wizard? If so, well, in any case, no, I do not think it would be a good idea. — {{U|Technical 13}} (t • e • c) 05:35, 9 February 2014 (UTC)
  • Bad idea. At "best" it would just push the backlog around to Draft: or main-space (WP:NPP). Prior to the creation of the Draft: namespace it would "break the Wiki," or at least break the idea that anyone, logged in or not, could create an article through some established process. davidwr/(talk)/(contribs) 05:47, 9 February 2014 (UTC)

No, just stop them from submitting articles and then we would not have 2000 backlog. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Fremantle99 (talk • contribs) 05:51, 9 February 2014 (UTC)

"Stopping submissions" = breaking the wiki. Absolutely, definitely not allowed. Roger (Dodger67) (talk) 15:38, 9 February 2014 (UTC)

ToDo list

Okay, so as promised, here is a preliminary todo list of what we need to get accomplished to get this project back on track and be able to start enticing more new reviewers into a stable environment:

  1. Release a new version of the AFCH tool to get us fairly up-to-date
  2. Have a Back-Log Drive
  3. Plan what to do with "Draft:"
    1. Create a new Article Creation Wizard to get better quality drafts into Draft:
      • Maybe create this as a Guided tour?
      • No blank submissions
      • No exists submissions
      • No duplicate submissions
      • No entirely unsourced submissions
    2. Release a new version of the AFCH tool
    3. Have a Back-Log Drive
  4. Determine exactly what the plan is for implementation of requiring permission to review drafts
    1. Implement whichever method is determined
    2. Release a new version of the AFCH tool
    3. Have a Back-Log Drive
  5. Finish the guide/training for new AfC reviewers
    1. Maybe create this as a Guided tour?
    2. Actively recruit new reviewers and attempt to re-interest reviewers that stepped away from the project due to the chaos
    3. Have a Back-Log Drive

This is just my preliminary list of things that should be done. Please feel free to add to it where you see a need. Feel free to strike through things that you don't think need to be done. Please start a new subheader section here to discuss anything that you think needs to be added or removed or relocated in priority on the list. Thank you. — {{U|Technical 13}} (t • e • c) 16:30, 9 February 2014 (UTC)

  • I think with Theo's new version of the AFCH mentioned below, adapting the curation toolbar isn't going to work that well. How would adapting the NewPagesFeed differ from doing some of these things as guided tours (which is a really awesome and very powerful tool at our disposal and I strongly feel we should try to utilize it as best we can). — {{U|Technical 13}} (t • e • c) 00:44, 11 February 2014 (UTC)
  • @Technical 13: Blank, duplicate, or drafts that collide with existing articles can be something that we could (and probably should) discourage or disallow programmatically within the namespace, regardless of whether a draft is submitted to AFC or not. On "no entirely unsourced submissions".. do you just mean that drafts could not be submitted for AFC review, or that they could not be saved at all without references? Also: if you want help designing and testing any guided tours, myself and superm401 can help. Steven Walling (WMF) • talk 20:45, 10 February 2014 (UTC)
  • I mean un-submittable. I obviously would want them to be able to save their draft if they had to run out for some reason before they put their sources in there. For the offer in helping with the Gtours, I may take you up on that. :) — {{U|Technical 13}} (t • e • c) 20:59, 10 February 2014 (UTC)
  • @Steven (WMF): Blanks should b discouraged from being submitted. Without a heuristic comparison engine, how would you be able to tell "duplicate" submissions? Drafts that collide with existing articles could be entirely valid (if someone is working on a new draft before making a big change) or the title of the subject has a common name. As much as we'd like to immediately reject any drafts that have zero references, it's just not feasable to expect a new submission to come in with references. I'd consider the gold standard (no hassle by the "wizard") if there's 2 inline citations in the text. The Silver would be a single inline citation. Bronze being at least one non-inline citation URL listed near the end of the submission. The Plastic standard is none of the above (which the wizard should require multiple passes of "I know that my submission has little chance of being accepted) with progression from the silver level down increasing the "Are you really sure" types of questions to help coerce the editors to do the right thing. Hasteur (talk) 21:10, 10 February 2014 (UTC)
  • Hasteur, I'm sure it would work something like tools:~earwig/copyvios or tools:~dcoetzee/duplicationdetector/ and if the match is greater than a certain threshold, it would be marked as a duplicate. The other option is if it the same title as an existing title, suggest they work on the existing article or offer a way to make a valid disambiguous title. — {{U|Technical 13}} (t • e • c) 21:18, 10 February 2014 (UTC)
    1. Toolserver... think about it and think how we're trying to get to labs and the restrictions there (i.e. not allowed to peak at the raw revision data)
    2. Running a simple query over one of the pending submissions took 5.5 seconds to get back a result. Think how much time that's going to be when every single submission is forcibly passed through it and how long it will take to get a response back. I don't think a new user is going to wait that long to get their draft saved. Hasteur (talk) 21:42, 10 February 2014 (UTC)
  • What does toolserver have to do with anything? I said that we have people that have built just such logic to compare one page to another (Special:ComparePages and mw:Extension:AntiSpoof may be other examples). I think the simplest approach (a simple page title check against other existing page titles) and popping back out with either "there's a possible match, why don't you focus on improving that article or if you think your topic is significantly different, fill in the form below and start a new draft" and the input line would ask simple questions that would allow a good disambig title per MOS to be created for the new topic with the same name. I don't see it as very difficult of a process at all. — {{U|Technical 13}} (t • e • c) 00:44, 11 February 2014 (UTC)
  • Just as a heads-up in regards to AFCH, I've shifted my development focus pretty much completely over to afch-rewrite. It's a rewrite using clean, highly-testable, object-oriented JavaScript with some pretty high code standards. I plan to finish in the next month or two (right now I'm the only person working on it...which is good at this point for rapid development :) ) with a sustainable system that we can use for the foreseeable future, given that the current version of the AFCH gadget is rather clunky and bloated. By rethinking the code structure from the ground up, we'll ideally be much more adaptable for future changes to the structure of AFC (whether that's Draft:, Wikimedia Growth team/whoever getting involved, etc). Theopolisme (talk) 22:56, 10 February 2014 (UTC)
  • I think most of the AFCH developers have been aware of this Theo, I can say that I know I have been aware of it anyway and it is accounted for in the above outline. I expect it to either come as 3.2 or 4.2 in the list above (which no-one is adding to, but there is some good discussion). — {{U|Technical 13}} (t • e • c) 00:44, 11 February 2014 (UTC)
  • Another item for the to-do list - Keep an eye on discussions at WT:Drafts and participate too. Some of the suggestions there look like they may be incompatible with the original intentions that we here at AFC developed to motivate the creation of the Draft-space. Roger (Dodger67) (talk) 23:20, 11 February 2014 (UTC)

Category:Articles created via the Article Wizard has been nominated for deletion

Listing Wikipedia:Categories for discussion/Log/2014 February 4#Category:Articles created via the Article Wizard to inform other members of the project of an ongoing CSD discussion for a category with 0 pages in it. — {{U|Technical 13}} (t • e • c) 00:58, 8 February 2014 (UTC)

Thanks for bringing this to our attention, Technical 13. The discussion was closed as Keep, for now, but the category may be discussed again after the Afc to Draft process is worked out. Is this category used by any of our current Afc processes or statistics pages? Would its deletion lead to a loss of useful information, or can we still track pages created through Afc in other ways? We should be prepared if this happens again to say whether or not the category is obsolete or still has value to Afc or to the encyclopedia as a whole. —Anne Delong (talk) 14:49, 12 February 2014 (UTC)
  • I'm unsure at this time. It shouldn't come back up anytime soon as multiple repeat nominations would be disruptive. I'll look into it more when I'm not quite so busy. — {{U|Technical 13}} (t • e • c) 14:52, 12 February 2014 (UTC)

What's this?

User:Gryllida/DraftsReview/v2.js? FoCuSandLeArN (talk) 11:12, 12 February 2014 (UTC)

Looks like a striped down version of the AFCH script. Have you considered approaching Gryllida about your discovery of the script? Hasteur (talk) 11:55, 12 February 2014 (UTC)
It doesn't really matter. I was just curious as to why it appeared in the queue, but I don't want to get involved with techie stuff. FoCuSandLeArN (talk) 18:58, 12 February 2014 (UTC)
See #New jQuery helper script, revisited topic below. Roger (Dodger67) (talk) 14:03, 19 February 2014 (UTC)

Just a heads up about these biographies. @Voceditenore: has been giving AfC a hand by expertly reviewing a dozen or so submissions. This is what she had to say: "As a rule of thumb if a person has a dedicated entry in a notable encyclopedia or biographical dictionary (and The Grove Dictionary of American Music (2 ed.) is very notable), they meet our criteria for inclusion. You might want to spread the word amongst your colleagues about that. Another thing they can do is click on the red link for the article and check if that page is linked to Wikipedia:Music encyclopedia topics. Example: Domènech Miguel Bernabé Terradellas.". Hope this helps with posterior reviews. Regards, FoCuSandLeArN (talk) 15:30, 13 February 2014 (UTC)

Thanks. I've used this quote to start a discussion at Wikipedia talk:Notability (music)#Need a table of dictionaries and encyclopedias. davidwr/(talk)/(contribs) 19:33, 14 February 2014 (UTC)
I don't think its particularly limited to the world of music. There are a significant number of 'who's who' type books - a listing or award from the majority of which is generally considered to be completely meaningless. A few of them are more discerning - I haven't seen a list which draws a clear distinction between the two, but it would be useful for reviewers that are not aware - see for example International_Biographical_Centre which is perhaps one of the least discerning --nonsense ferret 19:46, 14 February 2014 (UTC)
A list of biography books with comments beside the entries would be helpful. For example, there are some books where the people in the book have paid to have an entry and written it themselves, and it would be good to know that. —Anne Delong (talk) 05:40, 15 February 2014 (UTC)
I think davidwr's idea of creating a sub-page somewhere under Wikipedia:Notability would be very useful. Meanwhile, at Wikipedia talk:Notability (music)#Need a table of dictionaries and encyclopedias, I've listed a selection of reference books. (I use that term loosely in the case of the garbage churned out by the International Biographical Centre and their cohorts). I've made a distinction there between one that are "good", "not good" and "not good at all" for establishing notability, but the list is by no means exhaustive. I think DGG's input would be very valuable in this respect. Voceditenore (talk) 09:11, 15 February 2014 (UTC)
    • Grove's is not a who's who type of book. I;m very reluctant to accept books which are mere one or two line biographical listings & certainly we do not accept ones where the content is contributed by the individual. Neither of these is the least true of this particular reference, which is very highly selective and where the material is contributed by experts in signed articles. There are other works of similar prestige in other fields, but I don;t think any quite as well known as widely used as this, in any field. Most public libraries have access to it, even remotely, usually as part of Oxford Music online, so it's fairly accessible. We should certainly add other such subject encyclopedias, but it will take caution. As an illustration, a well-known example of what I would not add , is National Faculty Directory. DGG ( talk ) 10:03, 15 February 2014 (UTC)
Perhaps we could add this to the reviewing instructions as the flowchart was (under the 2nd step), once it's finished. FoCuSandLeArN (talk) 11:29, 15 February 2014 (UTC)
It's quite likely that a number of these biographical and "Who's Who" books have their own Wikipedia articles. If that's the case, would it be appropriate to add to these articles a sentence or two about how the articles in the book were chosen, if the introduction to the book states it or if a reliable secondary source can be found? —Anne Delong (talk) 14:15, 19 February 2014 (UTC)
Yes, please. --Hroðulf (or Hrothulf) (Talk) 20:12, 21 February 2014 (UTC)

When the page being declined is in a sandbox rather than an AfC page, the "If you would like to continue working on the submission, you can find it at..." link in the decline notice doesn't work correctly, e.g. here where instead of User:Jacob9596/sandbox it produces Wikipedia talk:Articles for creation/Jacob9596/sandbox. (In this particular example both are redlinks because it was speedied as vandalism). I remember reporting this before: if it cannot be fixed, reviewers should be warned that when declining a submission on a non-AfC page they need to correct the link manually. JohnCD (talk) 11:33, 15 February 2014 (UTC)

Up until recently, all of the Afc submissions were moved to Wikipedia talk:Articles for creation and there was no problem. For some reason some reviewers have recently stopped moving them. It's not surprising that everything doesn't work right for a process that isn't being done as intended. Not giving the submissions proper titles also leads to other problems such as not detecting duplicate submissions and inability of other interested editors to identify submissions in their area of interest. It's no more work to move the page than it is to go in and edit the link after declining. —Anne Delong (talk) 20:42, 17 February 2014 (UTC)

New jQuery helper script, revisited

Please view documentation at User:Gryllida/DraftsReview. Thank you. —Gryllida (talk) 09:13, 18 February 2014 (UTC)

Article wizard is broken

The article wizard is broken. It is currently making all links to create new pages invisible. See related discussion at WP:VPT#Article wizard is also broken for further details. -- 70.50.151.11 (talk) 07:33, 19 February 2014 (UTC)

Poison Works

Article text posted here
The following discussion has been closed. Please do not modify it.

Poison Works

Poison Works are the title to new art works by Iranian artist, filmmaker Daryush Shokof which was exhibited under the event name SHOCK OFF in Berlin , Germany on February 14, 2014. the event was announced as a "secretful" show of shokof,s most recent paintings and sculptures with a stress on revealing the "secret" on the opening night of the event.the exhibition was curated by Christian Zimmermann who started explaining the art works as new maximalist works by daryush shokof who actually coined the term maximalism in regards to the arts in 1990, in Germany. shokof was then to unfold the "secret" about these works.shokof revealed the shocking secret about his newest paintings by telling the stunned crowd that these works have been over blown giant size fragments from the deadliest and the most poisoneous forgs, fish, plants and other animals on planet earth.but the shock did not end there as he then continued with further shocking news that each work has actually been poisoned in a very small dot by the same deadly venom or potion from the animals or plants he had painted. he further revealed the fact that if any one would touch the art works on those specific points, the person would actually die in less than one hour. more shocking trembled the frozen viewers when he continued that there are absolutely no cure for any of the poisons used in the art works. soon afterwards the stunned crowd present in the gallery space either left the event and or stayed on to ask all sorts of questions regarding why poisoneous art works, and how he gets the poison, and or how would he make sure his own life would not be in danger while going through the process of poisoning the art works? his reply to all the very many questions reagarding the poison works were a simple writing under one of the works that wrote; "life will definitely kill you one day". the show was the most expensive independent art exhibition in Germany with an insured value of nearly 20 Million U.S.Dollars. the large works were priced at one million U.S.Dollars. the event exhibiting posion works will further travle to Paris, London, and Los Angeles in 2014. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 2A02:8109:8BC0:CE8:3168:D07:DD8:9A9 (talk) 13:36, 19 February 2014 (UTC)

This is not the correct place for writing an article. Please see Your first article for guidance on how to do it correctly. Roger (Dodger67) (talk) 14:06, 19 February 2014 (UTC)

Any plans to start a new February backlog drive?

AfC submissions appear to be perpetually backlogged. Any plans for a new backlog drive? It may be a good idea to have one every month.

Also, thanks to all of the participants at the concluded December 2013 - January 2014 Backlog Elimination Drive. Cheers, Northamerica1000(talk) 09:21, 1 February 2014 (UTC)

  • I didn't hardly get to participate nearly at all like I had hoped during this drive due to real life issues.  :( However, I'm opposed to a February drive at this time. Our reviewers really need a break here, and our AFCH developers need some time to release the next version of the reviewer script which can support Draft:. On that note, I think we still have a bit of discussion on what to do with Draft: now that we have it. We need to discuss how the wizard will get people putting submissions there, where discussions and review templates will go, and a few other things. I don't have time to go into great detail right now, so in a couple hours, I'll start a new TL;DR section below with what I envision and I'll ping a few people I know are good for discussion and ideas. Technical 13 (talk) 14:50, 1 February 2014 (UTC)
    • We had a October drive and a December - January drive. That we're no better off than where we started the drive I think it's time to strip off some of the limitations on AfC submissions as we can't seem to get ahead in the drive. If there is a Feburary drive, count me out. Hasteur (talk) 03:08, 2 February 2014 (UTC)
      • What do you mean by "limitations"? I think we need to find a way to prevent the worst rubbish from even entering the system in the first place. Roger (Dodger67) (talk) 07:29, 2 February 2014 (UTC)
        • Unless we can magically identify what is and is not "the worst rubbish" and write an edit filter to match it (with no false positives!) we can't keep it "from entering the system in the first place. davidwr/(talk)/(contribs) 08:41, 2 February 2014 (UTC)
          • Blank submissions should be quite easy to filter automagically, there is no content other than the submission template(s) or go by edit history, when the act of submission to AfC is the only edit, it will be a blank. My "gut feel" tells me that blanks are at least 5% of all "first round" submissions. User:ClueBot is very good at identifying "Johnny is a poopypants" type of content so maybe we could engage the controller(s) of that bot to design and execute a test run for us. Roger (Dodger67) (talk) 08:59, 2 February 2014 (UTC)
  • Blank submissions do not require a personal touch, what if the AFCH script made it easier to tag such things? What other reasons do not require a personal touch? exists, dup, joke, .?. Technical 13 (talk) 15:11, 2 February 2014 (UTC)
        • (RE to Dodger67) I mean the nominations that take at least 2 minutes to apply any of the quick-fail criteria on. Anything that is patently wrong and without a fundamental re-write won't pass and the submitter should be actively discouraged from re-submitting it without understanding what's wrong. When I see the same submissions landing in the 3 and 4 weeks old categories I get the distinct impression that we're not doing it right. Hasteur (talk) 15:49, 2 February 2014 (UTC)
          • Yes, we need a way to "kill off" the hopeless cases quickly and painlessly (without biting the newbies). Perhaps we can make a case for extending some of the "A" Speedy criteria to drafts - if it would be speedy deleted in mainspace for a reason that cannot be fixed while it is a "protected" draft then that protection is counter-productive. Roger (Dodger67) (talk) 20:45, 2 February 2014 (UTC)
  • I honestly think that is a waste of time (not a bad idea). I would rather focus on how we are going to get people creating drafts in the new Draft: namespace and prevent these types of drafts from being created in the first place. I'd like to see the wizard be redone as a guided tour that would disallow blank submissions and would require some sources in the drafts and I know that it can be done from a technical standpoint. I think worrying about deleting is too late in the process, and there is no way to delete in a non-bitey way... — {{U|Technical 13}} (t • e • c) 21:28, 2 February 2014 (UTC)
  • I concur with all suggestions to hold off on backlog drves now untill it had been decided how to use the Draft namespace:
  • Sending submissions from the Wizard to Draft - the technical requirement should not be difficult an will not need lengthy discussion. The Wizard itself is in need of revamping (but that could come later).
  • Concluding the current RfC on how to implement the AfC Reviewer permission.
  • "kill off" the hopeless cases quickly and painlessly (without biting the newbies). The vast majority of such cases are created by users who have no intention of contributing seriously to Wikipedia - not biting them is the least of our worries. The Draft namespace should enable tagging with most of the traditional CSD criteria.
  • Helper scripts etc.: I think it's really time now to look into the possible cloning and adapting the New Pages Feed into an AfC feed, and the Curation Toolbar into an AfC revievers' toolbar. To avoid the confusion sown by some contributors, this does not mean combining AfC and NPP together. The two systems although very similar are for different purposes.
After the initial flurry of activity to get the draft namespace created and a set of reviewer 'quallifications' established, the rest of AfC reform is taking far too long and at the current pace probably won't reach any state of readiness for another six months if discussion continue to be spread around numerous talk locations, and the Foundations's and/or Bugzilla's well meant but confusing participations (also spread around numerous Bugzilla cases). I realise that the suggestion to clone and adapt use the NPP software would be a challenge, but it is technically possible and would require intervention at MedWiki level, but it's time they refrained from debating their internal political issues there. The code, for anyone who wants to see it, is available. I think it's time to give the idea some serious consideration. Kudpung กุดผึ้ง (talk) 03:07, 3 February 2014 (UTC)
I agree with those in the above discussion who are against starting a new backlog drive. People who inquired about getting the Afc process moved to the Draft mainspace were told "Wait until the backlog drive is over". Starting a new one right away wouldn't be right under these circumstances. It will be a good thing when Afc submissions are in Draft space, because then when the mirror sites pick them up (as seems inevitable), the titles will not begin with the word "Wikipedia", giving them unwarranted legitimacy. —Anne Delong (talk) 14:12, 3 February 2014 (UTC)
It may be useful to draw a clear distinction between good and bad faith drafts. It's the bad faith ones that need to be killed of asap using mechanisms built into the script that runs when the "submit" button is clicked (simply refusing to execute on a blank page would be a good start with an error message that explains that blank submissions are pointless) or a bot that comes past soon after to sweep out the trash. I've mentioned it before but it bears repeating - Cluebot is very good at identifying vandalism and nonsense, we can learn from it. Roger (Dodger67) (talk) 07:15, 4 February 2014 (UTC)
I don't think there's a magic bullet here. The way to reduce the backlog is to recruit more reviewers. If that doesn't work, we can take comfort in the fact that the backlog is likely self-limiting. The longer an editor must wait for a AfC review, the more likely he is to abandon his submission. ~KvnG 15:05, 3 February 2014 (UTC)
And that is precisely why we need to avoid backlogs. And the reason why I thunk that using a feed system and a curation toolbar would speed the process up dramatically, attract more reviewers, and at the same time help ensure that all reviewers are applying the same criteria as near as possible. Kudpung กุดผึ้ง (talk) 16:10, 3 February 2014 (UTC)
@KvnG "The longer an editor must wait for a AfC review, the more likely he is to abandon his submission." - The effect of that is exactly the opposite of "self-limiting" because when the draft is abandoned it is added to the backlog, not removed. Drafts abandoned due to frustration with the backlog are not only poor quality ones - the small but significant amount of good material in the G13 pile is evidence of that and if the backlog increases that proportion is likely to increase. Every good draft that is abandoned represents not only a loss of content, it is also the loss of a good editor, which is even worse. Roger (Dodger67) (talk) 06:53, 4 February 2014 (UTC)
You think that editors abandoning their submissions is always a bad thing? Maybe on the first submission. Not necessarily on the second or third resubmission. A backlog can be a useful way to avoid WP:BITEs. ~KvnG 23:16, 3 February 2014 (UTC)
Please provide a diff where I said that. Kudpung กุดผึ้ง (talk) 00:13, 4 February 2014 (UTC)
Perhaps I misunderstand what is being referred to as backlog here. The backlog I'm referring to is articles submitted or resubmitted but not yet accepted or rejected by a reviewer. Many of the articles I have reviewed recently have been previously (and rightly) rejected by another reviewer. There appear to be many article creators that, once their submission is rejected, make minimal or no improvements and immediately resubmit. It is very likely they'll be rejected again. But if it take a month for this rejection to happen, they may not resubmit it again. Or if they know they only get one review per month, may be more motivated to make substantial improvements before resubmitting. This is what I mean by self-limiting backlog. If there is a longer wait for review, articles will be resubmitted less frequently. Does that make sense. ~KvnG 15:11, 4 February 2014 (UTC)
There's only so many submissions a reviewer can do before they get fed up. There are 2 directions to run the backlog burn in: From the front to capture the silly mistakes that are patently obvious not going to fly and from the back where you have to spend time actually considering the submission. Some days it's the fact that we're stuck with articles in the "Waited at least 4 weeks for a review", other days we have a glut of submissions at the "Just Submitted" end of the spectrum. Hasteur (talk) 15:27, 4 February 2014 (UTC)

level=6 align=right demo= type=

} The backlog keeps climbing back upward: 1,597 as of this post (see right). Regular backlog drives could sure help to keep this in check, and the last drive had many participants. Northamerica1000(talk) 15:43, 6 February 2014 (UTC)

We started the backlog at that level and ended at that level. A Perpetual state of backlog drive does not help us solve the problem of keeping the backlog clean to begin with. Until we can get more volunteers doing more reviews on the submissions we'll continue to fight the loosing battle until [:File:Kafziel flowchart AfC.jpg|editors get fed up] and start burning submissions to the ground. Hasteur (talk) 15:56, 6 February 2014 (UTC)

A drive in March?

By the way, @Fremantle99:, was there consensus to create another backlog drive in March? You created the page. I don't recall seeing a discussion about it. Chris Troutman (talk) 05:43, 9 February 2014 (UTC)

  • No The following things MUST be adressed first before we have annother drive
  1. AFCH tool must have a version bump across the board (Dev to Beta, Beta to Live) We had to hold off on supporting the draft space because we were in a lockdown on the tool untill the December - January drive completed.
  1. AFCH tool beta must remain stable for 30 days before we can promote it to live.
  1. ARCH tool must remain stable for 2 weeks before a proposed start of a drive
  2. The issue of how do we deal with # Submissions in >>> # submissions out is still not resolved. Either the curent volunteers need to take more submissions for review, or we need more volunteers to do reviews.
As such wee are at least 1 month + 2 weeks out from any drive unless we're going to make a rude gesture to the AFCH tool and not bother with support of the Draft Namespace and all the improvements that have been waiting. Hasteur (talk) 15:21, 9 February 2014 (UTC)
  • A March drive can still happen with the caveat that the participants know that this particular drive will include a new tool version roll-out. Now you say, "Either the curent volunteers need to take more submissions for review, or we need more volunteers to do reviews." and a backlog drive is exactly that, current reviewers taking more submissions for review. — {{U|Technical 13}} (t • e • c) 15:44, 9 February 2014 (UTC)
  • @Technical 13: As I'm sure you remember the AFCH team has been instructed not to deploy a new tool during a drive. As I'm sure you also recall that the tool must be stable for 2 weeks before a drive. As I'm also sure you recall that the AFCH production tool may only be updated if the "release candidate" has been reviewed for at least 30 days. Ergo, the earliest we could start a new drive with the support for the draft namespace (as I don't think we've pushed dev to release candidate yet) is March 25th. We need to resolve how to get the number of submissions out above the number of submissions in. Plain as fact. Otherwise we are in a state of perpetual backlog/backlog-drive. I strenuously object to any more backlog drives until we resolve that problem. Volunteers should be reviewing constantly, not only when there's incentive to do so. Hasteur (talk) 15:59, 9 February 2014 (UTC)
  • I am aware of and remember all of those facts, however, if there is a disclaimer on the drive right before it starts (more than two weeks away) then it falls under IAR as "they were warned". The resolution band-aid at this point, and likely for the next six to eight months or more is an every other month BLD. There is so much confusion with the new Draft: namespace, the changes that the tool is having to undergo to deal with this new namespace and the permission to use the tool restrictions, and a multitude of other little internal issues in the project that I believe we have been losing more reviewers than we are gaining and only those devoted to the project are still around. Also, as we are in this extreme state of chaos, I think that some people are afraid to review drafts because they are afraid of messing something up and only those that have been around awhile and are comfortable with being BOLD are still reviewing when not in BLD state. This BLD state gives a green light so to speak to those more timid. What really needs to be done is to make a chronological "todo list" for this project to get us through this chaotic time of massive change. I will start a proposed todo list below... — {{U|Technical 13}} (t • e • c) 16:11, 9 February 2014 (UTC)
  • Absolutely Not! We have previously committed the project to become fully operational in Draft-space before launching another backlog drive. I don't see it being ready before April, or even May at the earliest. Roger (Dodger67) (talk) 15:30, 9 February 2014 (UTC)
  • While I completely agree that we need to start using Draft: namespace, that is a process that could take six months or more and it would kill this project if we waited until it was "fully" functional to have another drive. We would have close to 10,000 submissions awaiting review. I expect the next two or three months of planning out the workings of Draft: are going to be mostly discussion and debate on what we should do, how we want to do it, and how it is technically feasible to do the things we want to do. Those processes can all run concurrent to a March drive. — {{U|Technical 13}} (t • e • c) 15:44, 9 February 2014 (UTC)
  • A formal drive is not required to continue doing reviews. A formal backlog drive puts a freeze on tool and procedure development and changes, thus it will actually prevent these actions from happening concurrently. Roger (Dodger67) (talk) 19:59, 9 February 2014 (UTC)
  • While you are correct that a formal drive is not required, it seems to be the only way to get a portion of our reviewers to do reviews. See above comment. Also, it does not put a freeze on tool or procedure development, as long as it is disclosed before the drive actually starts, again see above comment... — {{U|Technical 13}} (t • e • c) 21:12, 9 February 2014 (UTC)
  • If a March drive were to be arranged, the participants should be prepared to have it disrupted if a move to Draft space begins, and make no complaints if this means that the drive can't be completed or the reviews can't be properly counted. We can't use any drive-in-progress to delay changes, because we already asked for a delay until the previous one stopped, and we can't expect Excirial to keep adjusting the drive software to in-between states with perhaps unforseeable problems. If we find ourselves in the middle of a move at the end of February, any planned drive should be delayed until the move is complete, or at least then exact process is known so that we can tell if it will disrupt the drive. —Anne Delong (talk) 23:03, 11 February 2014 (UTC)
  • I agree with Technical 13 in that a drive would be the only way to get a larger number of reviews done—it seems to me (and I may be wrong) that the only effect of a backlog drive is to accelerate the number of reviews, which is a good thing. In the event that a mass move to Draft space begins, it shouldn't be that hard to continue scoring with minimal disruption. APerson talk! 21:20, 17 February 2014 (UTC)

Conclusion 1

So...will there, or will there not be a drive in March? (t) Josve05a (c) 17:52, 24 February 2014 (UTC)

  • There will be a March drive, led by Fremantle99, and if we've not scared him off, he will be the coordinator. If we have, I'll suck it up and take over coordinator. The terms of this drive (and all foreseeable drives in the next six months) will be that the drive will not hold up forward movement of the decisions and implementation of setting up and moving the project's drafts into the Draft: namespace, nor will any of the drives prevent standard releases of our AFCH reviewing tool. — {{U|Technical 13}} (t • e • c) 18:50, 24 February 2014 (UTC)
  • I thought the question was already settled. NO. Did any of the pre-requisites for the next drive get resolved: No. Did you take on any advice from other editors who suggested we look at why we can't get ahead of the reviewing curve: No. Did you try and get more volunteers involved without the necessity of a incentive: No. I contend right now that the March drive is against consensus and should be shut down prior to launching. Hasteur (talk) 18:55, 24 February 2014 (UTC)
  • Did any of the pre-requisites for the next drive get resolved:
  • There are no pre-requisites
  • Did you take on any advice from other editors who suggested we look at why we can't get ahead of the reviewing curve:
  • We can't get ahead of the curve because no-one is reviewing because everyone is afraid to review when there is no BLD in progress. The solution to getting ahead of the curve is to have a BLD.
  • Did you try and get more volunteers involved without the necessity of a incentive:
  • That's what this discussion was all about. Apparently incentive is needed.
  • Those who do not wish to participate in the drive are more than welcome to sit out and be bystanders while other review and attempt to drive the number's of pending submissions down into manageable numbers. Per your thoughts and the thoughts and proposals of everyone opposed to a drive, there would be no reviewing for 6-8 months as I've explained and waiting that long for a draft to be reviewed will drive contributors away and leave us with a backlog in excess of (at the rate of about 4K a month based on our G13 calculations) 24,000 - 32,000 drafts. That is entirely unacceptable and reviews can't wait until everything is settled an hunky-dory... — {{U|Technical 13}} (t • e • c) 19:23, 24 February 2014 (UTC)

Technical 13 So you're perfectly fine to completely ignore the ToDo list in the very next section? Glad to know that anybody can ignore any consensus and do whatever they want. We MUST update the AFCH program before the next drive, unless drive workers are willing to accept updates to the tool during the middle of the drive this is a complete non-starter. The AFCH tool MUST support the draft namespace prior to the start of the next drive. Users have been clamoring for a way to review draft namespace submissions. The pre-reqs aren't satisfied and have been enumerated multiple times. Users are supposed to do reviewing regardless of there being a backlog drive in progress. Only users who are wanting a pat on the head and a special medal for reviewing are not helping the project. Each time we have a backlog and do the post-morem we come out with the same conclusions (We've done reviewing but made progress of under 400 entries) with a few exceptions (Notably the August drive that led to re-evaluation of the review standards). Each time I ask the question: Why do we need a state of perpetual "backlog drive" to get any forward progress made on the queue. And every time I hear the exact same "That's a good question" only to see us doing the exact same actions again and again. Didn't Einstein say Insanity: doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results. Until we can change the inputs to the drive, I stand firmly against any further drives. Hasteur (talk) 19:58, 24 February 2014 (UTC)

  • Hasteur, I'll repeat it one more time in bold... ...the drive will not hold up forward movement of the decisions and implementation of setting up and moving the project's drafts into the Draft: namespace, nor will any of the drives prevent standard releases of our AFCH reviewing tool. per the section below (that I started and made that list). Insanity would be to stand around doing nothing and letting the queue fill up beyond a reasonable ability to review it back down to were the wait time for submitters is less than a month and expect the draft to review themselves. It's just not going to happen. I've answered the "Why do we need a state of perpetual "backlog drive" to get any forward progress made on the queue?" question multiple times, and I'll do it one more time for the benefit of those that seem to have missed it. We need a near perpetual BLD state to get any forward progress because we are short on reviewers, and with the great amount of chaos (lack of a proper reviewers' training guide or course, the move to draft, the new requirement to be "qualified" to review, and the multiple other "little things") many of the reviewers we have are hesitant at least to review for fear of being told that they did it wrong, they weren't suppose to review x draft because it was being used as a testcase to debug the script, or for any other reason whatsoever. So, since the drive is suppose to begin in four days, Fremantle99 do you have a BLD notice ready to be mailed out? I can send it with massmessage as I have the Mass message sender userright. — {{U|Technical 13}} (t • e • c) 20:19, 24 February 2014 (UTC)
    • T13, can we agree that there is NO consensus for a backlog drive at this time? There's a few editors that want a drive so that they can be incentiviced for working in a drive but several senior volunteers here who disagree that a backlog drive is completely inappropriate at this time. All you're doing is feeding into backlog fatigue. We don't need to have a indefinite drive for editors to start reviewing submissions. Having multiple (and back to back drives) only serves to reduce the effectiveness of a drive. So help me, if a drive does move forward I'm inclined to adopt Kafziel-style tactics and start moving the submissions out to force the question. Hasteur (talk) 20:53, 24 February 2014 (UTC)
      • @Hasteur: I agree that consensus is against having another drive so soon, although I appreciate Technical 13's insistence that forward progress is needed whatever the cost. But saying "Only users who are wanting a pat on the head and a special medal for reviewing are not helping the project" is a little harsh. I'm coming up on a year of being a Wikipedian and I'm eager to earn the trappings of accomplishment that users like you have earned over your years of participation. I encourage editors to review AfC submissions for the greater good but my participation needs to be bought. I have lots of articles needing work that I'm actually interested in so reviewing AfCs can wait until there's incentive. I still haven't received the barnstar I was promised from the last drive, anyway. Chris Troutman (talk) 21:21, 24 February 2014 (UTC)
Chris troutman Sorry, my bad. I have a lot of work in RL atm, but I'll get them out by the weekend (hopefully....) --Mdann52talk to me! 14:23, 25 February 2014 (UTC)

??? My reading is that there is no consensus for or against a March drive. I only got one AFC barnstar in my life, so it is not a big deal to me, but I still keep the star on my user page.

  • You don't need a consensus to have a drive, do you? Those that want a drive can be allowed to make it happen, and the rest can carry on with business as usual, unless I missed something. One drive invitation every 2 months can't generate much fatigue, can it?
  • When I get a drive message, I am prompted to stop by the AFC queue and tackle one or two articles. When my talk page is quiet, I tend to assume (wrongly) that the backlog is fixed and the regular reviewers are coping. Perhaps I am not the only one with that misconception.
  • Hasteur doesn't need consensus to adopt Kafziel's approach. If I read the ArbCom page correctly, Kafziel deleted a couple of allowable articles by mistake, and otherwise made a big difference to the backlog. I am sure Hasteur will make an even better effort of cleaning up the queue, and he doesn't need my permission or anyone else's. (Hasteur's suggestion set off my internal irony alarm.)
  • End of rant.
--Hroðulf (or Hrothulf) (Talk) 16:41, 25 February 2014 (UTC)
    • @Hroðulf: We came off a 2 month (December through January) drive last month after a October and a August and a March and a ... so yes we are experiencing drive fatigue. The purpose of a drive is to burn down the backlog so that we can start clean again. We started the December-January drive at around 1200 pending submissions and ended at 1600 submissions. This screams Declare Success in the face of Defeat. We still haven't tackled the underlying issue as to why very few reviewers are doing any reviews outside of backlog drive times. The normal reviwers are not coping with inflow vs outflow as we've added a net 1000 submissions since the last drive ended and we're under 4 weeks By Kafziel style tactics I mean "Use any means necessary to get the backlog burned down including promoting any potentially sub-standard submissions out of AFC Jail or giving trivial decline reasons". Since having a new backlog drive appears to be a foregone conclusion, adopting purposefully unhelpful reviewing strategies appears to be the only recourse. Hasteur (talk) 17:02, 25 February 2014 (UTC)
        • IMO the extra large backlog has been created because there has been so much change going on over the past few months that everyone's attention has been diverted. I know that my time, and that of several others, which would normally have been spent reviewing has been spent instead trying to check as many pages as possible before they were deleted under G13. This actually added to the backlog because 50,000 or so people were notified that their submissions were about to be deleted, and some of them started working on them again and resubmitting them. Also, the "rescuers" found some good ones and submitted them (I found one that had been declined by Techatology, then Bonkers, and then Arctic Kangaroo...). Now that the G13 queue has stabilized, maybe things will ease off in that area. Also, some editors have been busy with the new script and the new Draft space, and various other proposals. So maybe I shouldn't mention my big list of old submissions needing improvement... —Anne Delong (talk) 18:43, 25 February 2014 (UTC)
  • What about a special drive on Anne's list, instead of the regular queue?
  • If you see the backlog as a crisis, then use short decline reasons: it is nice to be thorough, but arguably nicer to avoid delay. A short (trivial?) decline reason is not as bad as article speedy deletion.
  • Hasteur can move potentially substandard submissions out of AFC jail if he wishes. If you make a mistake we have copyvio bots and CSD to deal with them.
  • If reviewers feel fatigued, they must not participate in the backlog drive.
  • It is only right that reviewers are encouraged to use their editorial judgment, as they do elsewhere in the encyclopedia.
(Sometimes the AFC tools just don't load on my browser, so I hit the Move button instead. Nobody got hurt.)
I still love AFC.--Hroðulf (or Hrothulf) (Talk) 19:08, 25 February 2014 (UTC)

Conclusion 2

Like an old record I ask: Will or will there not be a drive in March? (t) Josve05a (c) 19:24, 25 February 2014 (UTC)

NO. And changing the venue for the question again shows that you're attempting to fish/forumshop for a specific answer. Hasteur (talk) 20:03, 25 February 2014 (UTC)
Thanks for your clear answer. I read the above "discussion" and was confused, that was why I created another header. The March-drive-page should be deleted. (t) Josve05a (c) 20:05, 25 February 2014 (UTC)

User:Gryllida/DraftsReview/v2.js

For some reason this page is showing up in the Afc review queue, even though it doesn't appear to have a submit template showing. —Anne Delong (talk) 12:29, 21 February 2014 (UTC)

  • Yeah...
/*
 * Remove all 'review pending' tags from the MarkUp object
 * Also place the oldest (valuable! :) review-pending tag
 * into this.template_res, for later processing */
MarkUp.prototype.clean = function(){
	var data = this.data;
	// Find all 'review pending' templates on the page
	var templates = this.data.match(/{{AFC submission\|\|\|.*?}}/gmi);
 
	// Exit if no review pending is marked on the page
	if (templates == null){
		return false;
	}
 
	// Find the oldest 'review pending' teplace on the page; also, remove them all.
	var ts_min = Infinity;
	var template_res='';
	$(templates).each( function (index, template){ // template = '{{AFC submission|||ts=20140113103528|u=Daniels Wembley|ns=2}}'
		ts = template.replace('{{','').replace('}}','').split('|')[3].replace('ts=','');
		if (ts<ts_min){
			ts_min = ts;
			template_res = template;
		}
		data = data.replace(template, '');
	});
A snippit of Gryllida's code reveals the template usage on line 363. The system doesn't know it's only a comment. The easiest way to "fix" it is to change it to:
$(templates).each( function (index, template){ // template = '{'+'{AFC submission|||ts=20140113103528|u=Daniels Wembley|ns=2}}'

— {{U|Technical 13}} (t • e • c) 13:50, 21 February 2014 (UTC)

Semi-protected edit request on 22 February 2014

115.113.194.133 (talk) 09:35, 22 February 2014 (UTC)

Resolved
as you did not include a request. --Demiurge1000 (talk) 09:41, 22 February 2014 (UTC)

I was pinged to provide comments on Wikipedia:Articles for creation/Warren L. McCabe. I think the article is suitable for mainspace, so I figured I'd just do it myself. In the yellow box, I [show]ed the "Reviewer tools", and saw "Move:", but that itself was not a link. There was a blank space after it (as if a link for the actual move operation were missing?), followed by other links seemingly unrelated to moving (Run Reflinks, Run Citation Bot, etc.). DMacks (talk) 06:59, 23 February 2014 (UTC)

  • DMacks, I just had a look at the code for the tools section, and indeed it is coded so that there is no move link if the page is in "Wikipedia:":
-->{{int:dot-separator}}Move:<!--

--><!-- This comment
-- here (before a noinclude-tag) prevents an implicit newline.
-->{{unicode|&emsp;}}{{#ifeq:{{NAMESPACE}}|Wikipedia|
     |&nbsp;[{{fullurl:index.php|title=Special:MovePage/{{FULLPAGENAMEE}}&wpNewTitle=Wikipedia_talk:Articles+for+creation/{{#ifeq:{{lc:{{SUBPAGENAMEE}}}}|sandbox|{{urlencode:{{#titleparts:{{FULLPAGENAMEE}}|1}}/{{#titleparts:{{FULLPAGENAMEE}}||-1}}|WIKI}}|{{SUBPAGENAMEE}}}}&wpReason=Move+Articles+for+creation+submission+to+project+space}} To project space]
   }}<!--
I agree that it is unclear that moves are not desired to simply move from WP: to WT:, what would you propose that we put in the space for a filler? I'm thinking along the lines of ✘ — {{U|Technical 13}} (t • e • c) 14:08, 23 February 2014 (UTC)
I don't see a reason for moves to be disabled from WP to WT. I think we should just remove that if statement. Jackmcbarn (talk) 20:14, 23 February 2014 (UTC)
  • As long as it is in :Articles_for_creation/ project space, what does it matter if it is in WP: or WT:? For the record, I'm not the one that added that code (that I can remember). — {{U|Technical 13}} (t • e • c) 21:22, 23 February 2014 (UTC)
Okay now I'm confused (especially perhaps about AfC submission namespace). I would have thought that the desired move option is WP→(article), i.e., the submitted WP:AfC/PAGENAME item goes to mainspace. Why is the move item explicitly not exposed in this situation? DMacks (talk) 20:58, 23 February 2014 (UTC)
  • DMacks, that link is to move it into project space to be reviewed, not to approve the article and move it to mainspace. The proper way to approve an article is with the helper script. Manually accepting a draft is discouraged and soon to be entirely disallowed. — {{U|Technical 13}} (t • e • c) 21:22, 23 February 2014 (UTC)
Oh! Oh oh oh! Now I see. So the [move] is just an AfC-internal-process thing. So first, I'll leave it to others who understand that process to handle the details. But if this is the only Move action link that is to be included in this tool list, it doesn't make sense to include even that title if the link itself won't be there. May as well hide the "Move:" title as well if there will be no entries for it. Or even better, since this would just a one-time special-case feature (as I understand it, the submission was just misfiles in the wrong namespace?), would be better not to list it in the other content-related tools. Instead, a separate bold red "this submission is in the wrong namespace. [click here] to move it from [where it is] to [where it belongs]." That's a common kind of wording (and even nicer that there's a one-click fix) for, e.g., templates placed on article vs associated talkpage. DMacks (talk) 22:05, 23 February 2014 (UTC)
  • Which brings us back to my proposed filler of "✘" (which if you mouse-over explains Moving drafts from Wikipedia: to Wikipedia_talk: is unnecessary.). — {{U|Technical 13}} (t • e • c) 22:13, 23 February 2014 (UTC)
We had a big discussion a while ago, and the result was that WT is the preferred namespace, and submissions from WP should be moved to WT. Jackmcbarn (talk) 23:43, 23 February 2014 (UTC)

Isn't all this moot with the draft namespace coming and all? Gigs (talk) 17:39, 24 February 2014 (UTC)

  • Good question Gigs, and I'd say it is not moot. We'll still need to move drafts to "Draft:", and I support moving from "Draft talk:" to "Draft:" once we get there, I'm just not convinced that it is worth moving from "WP:" to "WT:" and Jackmcbarn I've dug through all of the archives and the only discussions I could find on this were about moving from User: to WT: and most of those discussions fizzled out and there was never any consensus reached. I couldn't find anything specific on moving from WP: to WT: and the closest thing I could find to a consensus in any of them is it is up to the reviewer if they want to move them or not. I'll say that my thoughts on moving from WP: or WT: to draft are that we should not move them and instead just review them out, at least for the first 9-12 months. I think that those drafts should only be moved once they've become eligible for CSD:G13 if the "rescuer" has deemed them worthy of postponing and attempting a rescue. — {{U|Technical 13}} (t • e • c) 18:40, 24 February 2014 (UTC)
I've satisfied the spirit of the original request here and there is no longer and empty un-explainatory space after "Move:" — {{U|Technical 13}} (t • e • c) 02:27, 25 February 2014 (UTC)

Mailing list

Okay, so I've just gone through and updated our official mailing list with a new template I just created (Template:Mailing list member) and have some questions I need some community consensus on.

  • Should blocked users be allowed on the mailing list?
  • Indefinitely blocked users?
  • Temporarily blocked? Length of block threshold? Should the template display "until" instead of "since" or should it display the whole range?
  • Not blocked but topic banned? Indefinitely? Temporary? Should the template distinguish and link to the ban discussion?
  • Should inactive members be allowed to be left on the list?
  • What should determine activity? Participation in project? Participation on wiki?
  • If no, should there be a grace period? How long?

Let's start with those questions, and maybe some more will surface in the course of discussions. — {{U|Technical 13}} (t • e • c) 18:06, 23 February 2014 (UTC)

As someone who is only mildly involved with the AFC project and no longer has a great deal of time available to contribute to Wikipedia, I would be opposed to removing "inactive" members from the mailing list as, inactive does not mean gone, and for someone like me at least, I do appreciate keeping up with what is happening with AFC even if I might not have the time to actively contribute much. As far as blocked users go, I would say remove indef blocked users, anything that has an expiration I don't see an issue with as they likely will be coming back. Best, Mifter (talk) 18:28, 23 February 2014 (UTC)
Indeffed should be removed, and temporary blocked users should stay. Inactive should be removed after a year, with a message letting them know that they have been removed. Kevin Rutherford (talk) 18:30, 23 February 2014 (UTC)
Take your best guess, if someone does not like what happened, they can find a way to remedy the situation as I just did by removing my name from the list. --:- ) Don 18:33, 23 February 2014 (UTC)
Indef Blocked: Remove
Temp blocked: Keep
Topic banned: (if it's for AfC) Remove until they've successfully overturned the ban, otherwise keep
Activity: Any editor with no edits in 1 year should be notified that they've been delisted from active membership and have been placed in Inactive. If an editor is listed in inactive and hasn't made any edits to WP 1 year afterwords (2 years no edits) then we remove them from the inactive list. Hasteur (talk) 18:36, 23 February 2014 (UTC)
  • I would suggest it would be efficient to create one list of AFC members for all purposes and allow them to opt in or out of communications. This would save a bit of effort on ongoing maintenance. People indeffed or topic banned should be excluded from the membership list anyway. I understand this doesn't allow anyone not a member of AFC to be receiving comms - I think that if someone has been at some point a productive and helpful member of AFC we probably shouldn't be rushing them out of the door anyway for merely being inactive for a bit anyway, and it might help us retain reviewers over a longer period by keeping them interested and on the membership list. --nonsense ferret 19:04, 23 February 2014 (UTC)
  • Comment on the way the template currently works. If a user is marked as inactive or blocked, they do not receive any mailings through the system despite their name being on the list. — {{U|Technical 13}} (t • e • c) 19:09, 23 February 2014 (UTC)

I'm only going to comment on the temporary and permanent block aspect of this discussion. My contribution is that if an editor has received a temporary block for whatever reason, then by all means keep them on the list. After all a permanent block will mean that the editor would not be able to contribute on there anywhere. Hope this helps!Cowhen1966 (talk) 19:19, 23 February 2014 (UTC)

An indefinite block is not the same thing as a permanent block. An indefinite block can be lifted at any time when the problem that resulted in the block has been resolved. Roger (Dodger67) (talk) 20:29, 23 February 2014 (UTC)
I support the ideas being expressed above. For people topic banned from AFC, take them off the list. They should also have their names removed from the active participants. But this does not happen that often. Graeme Bartlett (talk) 20:56, 23 February 2014 (UTC)
(edit conflict) According to the banning policy, a blocked editor is still a member of the community; they are just technically unable to edit. Blocks are technical measures imposed to prevent abuse. If an editor is blocked, regardless of length, they should continue to receive updates from the mailing list until they unsubscribe. (If they cannot unsubscribe, they can ask another editor to do it for them.) This is because the block may not have anything to do at all with reviewing at AfC. I think we are confusing blocking with banning. If a user is banned from editing Wikipedia, the community has determined that the negative consequences of their contributions outweigh the benefits. If a user is topic banned from AfC, then we should be obliged to take them off the mailing list. But if they are merely blocked, we should continue to treat them as a member of the community, and we shouldn't take them off the list unless they ask for it, or unless they are inactive for so long that they are automatically taken off the list (which is also under discussion here). Mz7 (talk) 21:01, 23 February 2014 (UTC)
I support the idea of keeping inactive members on the list for as long as we can – as mentioned above, it might be a prompt to get them back. I don't have strong views on the blocked members or enough personal experience of these situations to comment, so I'd bow to the consensus view here and also whatever is most practical for management/admin purposes. Thanks. Libby norman (talk) 11:22, 24 February 2014 (UTC)
I'm going to second you on this. I'm inactive on AfC, been so for close to two years. I might come back soon, and till then, would like to be in the loop. --Rsrikanth05 (talk) 12:40, 24 February 2014 (UTC)
Ditto Libby. FoCuSandLeArN (talk) 13:15, 24 February 2014 (UTC)

Mailing list break 1

So far, the status of the questions seems to be:

  • Should blocked users be allowed on the mailing list?
Currently no consensus
  • Indefinitely blocked users?
Currently no consensus
  • Temporarily blocked?
Consensus to leave on list
  • Length of block threshold?
No discussion
  • Should the template display "until" instead of "since" or should it display the whole range?
No discussion
  • Not blocked but topic banned?
Currently no consensus
  • Indefinitely?
Consensus to remove from list
  • Temporary?
Currently no consensus
  • Should the template distinguish and link to the ban discussion?
No discussion
  • Should inactive members be allowed to be left on the list?
Consensus to leave on list
  • What should determine activity?
No discussion
  • Participation in project?
No discussion
  • Participation on wiki?
No discussion
  • If no, should there be a grace period?
Consensus that there should be some grace period if inactive
  • How long?
Consensus seems to indicate that the lower limit for inactive should be 1 year
A weaker consensus seems to indicate that a possible upper limit of 2 years for inactivity

I hope this correctly summarizes the above section. I see a half a dozen or so have removed themselves from the mailing list. Another question/proposal has also been brought forth in this discussion that the mailing list and participant lists should be merged into one. I support this proposal and would go a little further to suggest that the "list" be reformatted into a table which would include a list of languages for each member of the project and up to three possible areas of interest. Adding information in the additional columns (and other possible columns) of course would be optional, but I think it would be useful to the development of the project to be able to refer specific drafts to specific reviewers or groups of reviewers with interest in the topic or knowledge of the language. What do others think of that idea? — {{U|Technical 13}} (t • e • c) 16:41, 24 February 2014 (UTC)

I think the latter's a fantastic idea. We were just discussing something of the sort with the guys from WikiProject Chemistry, given interest is most likely going to come from a few and not entire WikiProjects when we seek help. For that reason, I think said table should extend to participants from outside the Project who willingly review articles from their respective areas of expertise and have stated they would regularly do so (how these reviewers would find their subject-specific articles is another matter). With regards to the mailing list merger with this proposed table, the table should include the mailing list, but not be limited to it; i.e. the mailing list should be a subset of the table. That's all I have to say. Regards, FoCuSandLeArN (talk) 18:41, 24 February 2014 (UTC)
  • Question: If an editor either has his account compromised, forgets his password, or becomes "totally blocked" (no email, no talk page edit), he still needs a way to remove himself from the mailing list. I recommend having a mail-in account called "afc-blah-blah-unsubscribe" that will use some type of email challenge-and-response system to automatically (or "by human proxy" if automation isn't possible) remove someone from the mailing list if they are totally blocked. For those who are not totally blocked, we should have a category they can add their user talk page to in order to get the attention of a human (or bot) who can 1) verify that THEY added the category and 2) remove them from the mailing list. davidwr/(talk)/(contribs) 22:47, 24 February 2014 (UTC)
  • Category:Opted-out of message delivery will opt them out of all messages if placed on their talk page, so the second part of your suggestion already exists. For those with absolutely no access, if they wanted themselves removed (I don't see why we would allow them to remain once we knew about the block in the first place), I'm sure I'm not the only editor that has multiple ways to get in touch listed on their user page (mine). We also have #Wikipedia-en-afc connect where such requests could be made. Does that satisfy your suggestions/requests david? — {{U|Technical 13}} (t • e • c) 22:54, 24 February 2014 (UTC)
  • I think the opt out designation should be part of the block template, which I understand is supposed to remain on the talk page for the duration of the block. This would preclude all messaging while blocked, which I see as extraneous and allow the blocked user to remain on whichever selected lists they signed on for. The opt out categorization can theoretically be parsed out upon being unblocked so I would prefer seeing this kind of solution.—John Cline (talk) 02:42, 25 February 2014 (UTC)

Please disapply from Sandbox creation

AfC appears to be preventing new editors from creating their sandbox pages. This is not in Wikipedia's interests. Please fix urgently. Richard75 (talk) 09:50, 24 February 2014 (UTC)

Hello Richard. Can you clarify, please? How is AfC preventing the creation of Sandbox pages? Arthur goes shopping (talk) 10:48, 24 February 2014 (UTC)
+1 to Arthur goes shopping's assertion. Please give concrete examples beyond "It's broken". Ideally we'd have a prioritized order, but volunteers can elect to ignore priorities and pick whichever bugs interest them the most. Hasteur (talk) 13:42, 24 February 2014 (UTC)
I was referring to this, which has since become this. Richard75 (talk) 13:47, 24 February 2014 (UTC)
Have you contacted Transcendentalist01 to find out if they actually saved a effectively blank sandbox? 10 hours is a fair amount of time between Trans saved the page and when Aggie80 reviewed it and correctly declined the "submission" as blank. If Trans had wanted to add more text they had plenty of opportunity. So again, I'm confused. Your example doesn't lead much other than a new user failing to understand the "My First Page" instructions. Not a problem with AfC. Hasteur (talk) 13:52, 24 February 2014 (UTC)
I am still confused. I see two revisions in the history of that sandbox page. In the first revision, the user apparently creates a page (otherwise blank) with a request for AfC review on it. In the second revision, an AfC reviewer meets that request by declining the submission. What other reasonable response could the reviewer have made? How is AfC preventing anything from happening? Arthur goes shopping (talk) 14:03, 24 February 2014 (UTC)
Clearly the editor wasn't prevented (by AfC or anyone else) from creating a sandbox, because there it is, created in a single (and only) edit [7]—blank except for a submission template. The only glitch I can see is that those decline notices that go on users' talk pages can't handle a submission from a sandbox. Hence they produce:
If you would like to continue working on the submission, you can find it at Wikipedia talk:Articles for creation/Transcendentalist01/sandbox.
See [8]. - Voceditenore (talk) 14:09, 24 February 2014 (UTC)
And note that there is a title at the top of the box that will link correctly to the original sandbox.The Ukulele Dude - Aggie80 (talk)
I think that a new user who creates a blank sandbox page, intending to start writing on it, who is immediately confronted with a big template that says "Request review at WO:AfC. Review waiting... This may take several weeks, to over a month. The Articles for creation process is severely backlogged. Please be patient. There are 2445 submissions waiting for review" would assume that they can't do anything else with it until someone has given them permission to create the sandbox. That may not be how AfC actually works, but I think that the template creates that impression (I suppose I should have written "deterring" above rather than "preventing"). Can the template be re-worded, or better still, not show up in sandboxes in the first place? I can tell Transcendentalist01 he can keep editing in the meantime, but it will still affect other new users. Richard75 (talk) 14:30, 24 February 2014 (UTC)
I just went to create User:Arthur goes shopping/sandbox for the first time, and no such template got added to it. My conclusion is that the other editor added the AfC review request template themselves. What leads you to believe otherwise? Arthur goes shopping (talk) 14:35, 24 February 2014 (UTC)

Arthur, could that be because you are not a new user? After a certain number of edits I think that we can create new articles whenever we like, but new users can't. I can ask Transc01 whether he added the template himself, but I wouldn't expect a total newbie to know how to do that, or to think it was necessary for a mere sandbox. Richard75 (talk) 14:42, 24 February 2014 (UTC)

This is a common misunderstanding, and the documentation is not as clear as it might be. The documentation in question is just underneath Wikipedia:IP, and it says "Users who edit through an account they have registered may immediately create pages in any namespace..." (my emphasis) and the next section goes on to clarify that the only additional abilities in this regard granted to autoconfirmed (i.e. not new) editors are "to move pages, edit semi-protected pages, and upload files or upload a new version of an existing file". None of this would prevent someone from creating a sandbox, nor add an AfC review request template to a sandbox. Arthur goes shopping (talk) 15:05, 24 February 2014 (UTC)
I was wrong, I've just created a new sandbox page from a brand new account without the template coming up. I have asked Transc01 what he did, but it looks like he must have done it himself. However if this is a common misunderstanding, can the documentation be re-worded to make it clearer? Some people might not understand what "namespace" means for example. Richard75 (talk) 15:09, 24 February 2014 (UTC)
  • The only issue I see here Rich is that Transc used {{subst:submit}} instead of {{subst:AFC draft}} which submitted the blank page for review instead of just tagging it as a draft which isn't submitted for review. This is certainly user error and no reflection on AfC. At the moment, I wouldn't expect much change in the way that AfC templates and such work as we are in the process of creating a new and improved system for AfC using the new Draft: namespace. In the process of this, I welcome any comments or suggestions or ideas that I will consider all of them in drafting up my idea of the new system (still in the writing it all down on paper and drawing out flow charts and whatnot stage). — {{U|Technical 13}} (t • e • c) 17:13, 24 February 2014 (UTC)
We have been discussing - as part of the move to Draft-space process - various improvements to the tools. One suggestion is to adapt the code that performs the submission (the stuff that happens when a {{subst:submit}} is added to a page) so that it will first check if the page is blank and then abort with a message explaining that the page cannot be submitted if it has no content. Roger (Dodger67) (talk) 22:08, 24 February 2014 (UTC)

Template-protected edit request on 24 February 2014

In response to moving AFC submissions to draft space (and to encourage adoption of the new space) I propose the following. Apply the changes specified in the diff to support Draft space and encourage movement to the draft space. Hasteur (talk) 21:23, 24 February 2014 (UTC)

Diff:[9] Hasteur (talk) 21:25, 24 February 2014 (UTC)
  • Oppose as Draft: is not officially the preferred location, yet. I will draft up a counter proposal that does not push the Draft: namespace which has not been discussed as to how it will be used per the ToDo list above. — {{U|Technical 13}} (t • e • c) 21:39, 24 February 2014 (UTC)
The only way to get us over the institutional inertia is by forcing us to move along and deal with the issue. The consensus is we want to move to the draft space, editors can move the submissions to the draft space, and it appears the only way we'll get support for the Draft space in any reasonable time frame in the AFCH tool is by forcing the issue by having submissions in the draft space. Support for the draft space has been in the development tracker/Alpha version of the AFCH tool since October, yet we can't seem to get the gadget updates prioritized high enough before yet annother pointless backlog drive in which we must freeze the versions of both the Beta and Production gadgets. So If this gives a swift kick to the AFCH team, so much the better. Hasteur (talk) 21:47, 24 February 2014 (UTC)
That is because no one is working on the existing AFCH because Theopolisme is re-inventing the wheel re-writing the script from scratch. Legoktm, are you available to push beta to live and develop to beta please? Thank you. As far as this edit request goes, we still have lots of other discussion and development before Draft: is "ready" for mainstream submissions, as such, I'm deactivating the request. That said, I will implement part of the request within a few hours to allow recognition of Draft:. — {{U|Technical 13}} (t • e • c) 22:00, 24 February 2014 (UTC)
I object to the deactivation and ask for another user to evaluate. We've already decided that we're going there back before the namespace was even petitioned for at the wikimedia bugzilla. We were promised/and did promise that before we had annother backlog drive after the December-January drive that we were going to have full support. This is the only way I know to throw wood on the traintracks to get us to follow the commitments we've already made rather than the toddler-attention-span whims. Until we have support for the Draft namespace, we should be focusing our development and volunteer efforts there as it was promised back in mid December. Hasteur (talk) 22:07, 24 February 2014 (UTC)
So um, I've been out of the loop for a while now. Do I still need to update AFCH? Legoktm (talk) 23:54, 24 February 2014 (UTC)
Not done for now: I really think there should be a little more support for this before we go through with it. Jackmcbarn (talk) 22:15, 24 February 2014 (UTC)
Deactivating request answered by Jackmcbarn. — {{U|Technical 13}} (t • e • c) 23:01, 24 February 2014 (UTC)
  • Hasteur, I've done the partial completion of this request as I promised I would. "Draft:" is now an option, but it is still not the "preferred" option. — {{U|Technical 13}} (t • e • c) 02:25, 25 February 2014 (UTC)
    • I don't care any more... Since any editor can lead a consensus of one and rampage through anything I'll do AFC reviewing how I please and we can find ourselves in whatever pickle we do down the road. Hasteur (talk) 02:27, 25 February 2014 (UTC)

Wikipedia:WikiProject Articles for creation/RfC for AfC reviewer permission implementation

It's been more than 30 days since this RfC was opened. Is it time to close it? —Anne Delong (talk) 04:36, 25 February 2014 (UTC)

Due to the delay in closure and the general lack of admins that seem willing to close nuanced RfCs lately, I have taken the unusual step of posting a non-binding summary of consensus at AN/RFC. I consider myself somewhat involved so that is why I didn't make the closure "official". Gigs (talk) 17:12, 26 February 2014 (UTC)

Little blue numbers, empty submissions

Dear Reviewers: Just a reminder... While checking through old drafts I have been coming across a lot of submissions that have been declined for lack of reliable sources, but actually have references that are hidden by bad formatting or a missing or misplaced reflist. Please everyone, and in particular newer reviewers who may not have come across this, remember to check for reflist problems if you see little blue citation numbers, and also for text accidentally hidden in comments if the submission appears blank or very short. Also sometimes the references can look like external links because a submitter doesn't understand ref tags, but the links are actually to good reliable sources. In our efforts to be helpful to the new users we should fix up formatting messes that affect the accuracy of the review - add or move a reflist, put ref tags around links to good sources that are in paragraphs, fix unclosed comments, etc. Sorry to bring this up again, but it seems to need mentioning occasionally. —Anne Delong (talk) 02:22, 26 February 2014 (UTC)

Well said - I have seen this too.
Just one tweak: inline refs are optional if a reviewer is short of time. If the sources are good, make sure they are visible, check the other criteria, and accept the submission. Attempts to delete articles with visible sources or sources formatted as external links get short shrift at AFD.
Mainspace editors can clean up, as there is no deadline. (I wish the automatic citation tools still worked.)
--Hroðulf (or Hrothulf) (Talk) 12:12, 26 February 2014 (UTC)

Helper tools feature request - copyvio scan

Is this the right place to suggest a feature for the reviewer tools?

It would be a real timesaver for me (and reduce my errors) if a future release of the tools included a button to automatically submit the text to one of the automatic copyright/plagiarism check tools.

(Unless there is already an auto-submit gadget somewhere I don't know about.)

--Hroðulf (or Hrothulf) (Talk) 12:19, 26 February 2014 (UTC)

@Hroðulf: That is a perenial request for both the AFCH tool and the G13Bot. The problem is that most of the copyvio tools take somewhere in the order of 0.5 minutes to 1.5 minutes to come back with a result. I do not think you want to wait for the response to come back. Furthermore the pending submissions are, in therory, scanned on a semi frequent basis to look for (and tag) potential copyright violations. Hasteur (talk) 13:50, 26 February 2014 (UTC)
@Hroðulf: What are the other tools? I've notice copyvio errors out on me most of the time.
@Hasteur: Which bot does the semi frequest scanning? Is there any way to request the bot to scan a submission?
~~ Sintaku Talk 14:26, 26 February 2014 (UTC)
Misunderstanding here I think... — {{U|Technical 13}} (t • e • c) 14:55, 26 February 2014 (UTC)
  • @Technical 13: and if you had paid attention and read my response rather than scanning it you would have seen that I said that the query out to the copyvio tool to find out if the page is a copyvio takes somewhere between 30 seconds and 90 seconds to come back with its evaluation on a single fire request. Hasteur (talk) 15:39, 26 February 2014 (UTC)
  • No, Hasteur, I read that and unless you're saying that people aren't allowed to use those tools (via a button or link they would have to click), I don't see what difference it makes. They only way I see that "how long a query takes" as being relevant would be if the request was for automatic scanning on script load, which it is not (although I think it would be a reasonable request for a user option if people "really" wanted to do that). — {{U|Technical 13}} (t • e • c) 16:01, 26 February 2014 (UTC)
  • @Technical 13: IF the page is being scanned with some sort of regularity, then providing a link that will burn ~2 minutes of reviewer time for little/no benefit it does not make sense to include in the gadget. It's the calculus of efficency. If the value of time expended in volunteer idling while waiting for the copyright violation tool to come back with a determination is greater than the value of AFC passing out a copyright violation after a volunteer reviewed the submission for prose indicators of copyright violation (which I would hope the reviewers are doing) then we should add the link to the template, otherwise it's not worth the effort for the volunteer to check it. Hasteur (talk) 16:08, 26 February 2014 (UTC)
  • Hasteur, IF the page is being scanned with some sort of regularity, then not providing a link will burn an additional ~2 minutes of reviewer time (for a total of 3 or 4 minutes) for no benefit having to open an edit window to get the button anyways, it only makes sense to include it in the tool. — {{U|Technical 13}} (t • e • c) 16:22, 26 February 2014 (UTC)
(edit conflict)@Sintaku: When I last asked Earwig, when I was trying to incorporate their scan into the G13-bot I was informed that the pages are scanned on a semi-frequent basis. I don't know what time frame that is. Hasteur (talk) 16:08, 26 February 2014 (UTC)
It must not be too frequent because I'm still pulling obvious G12 copyvios off the back of the queue sometimes. Gigs (talk) 16:17, 26 February 2014 (UTC)
I was deliberately vague. I haven't used the copyvio tools lately, but I was hoping for something that would take me less effort than putting the submission sentence by sentence into Google for similar result. (I only put the most suspicious sentences in Google.)
T13's simple solution sounds great to me.
When the bot scans a page, does it tag the page to say it passed?
Asynchronous operation would be great, so I could continue working while the tool was searching. Even if the result comes back after I have accepted a submission, it will be blanked and tagged for deletion.
(T13 - thanks for the tip about the citation bot. Maybe that will replace my favorite citation tool, that no longer works.)
--Hroðulf (or Hrothulf) (Talk) 19:14, 26 February 2014 (UTC)

Milhist Project

Any idea on why we can't add one of the largest projects on this site as an option when reviewing? Kevin Rutherford (talk) 05:49, 28 February 2014 (UTC)

Also, it would be nice to be able to add project importances. Kevin Rutherford (talk) 05:59, 28 February 2014 (UTC)

Invitation to Participate in a User Study - Final Reminder

Would you be interested in participating in a user study of a new tool to support editor involvement in WikiProjects? We are a team at the University of Washington studying methods for finding collaborators within WikiProjects, and we are looking for volunteers to evaluate a new visual exploration tool for Wikipedia. Given your interest in this Wikiproject, we would welcome your participation in our study. To participate, you will be given access to our new visualization tool and will interact with us via Google Hangout so that we can solicit your thoughts about the tool. To use Google Hangout, you will need a laptop/desktop, a web camera, and a speaker for video communication during the study. We will provide you with an Amazon gift card in appreciation of your time and participation. For more information about this study, please visit our wiki page (http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Research:Finding_a_Collaborator). If you would like to participate in our user study, please send me a message at Wkmaster (talk) 18:26, 28 February 2014 (UTC).

Old userspace draft

Recently, while looking for information on Jules Crevaux, a French explorer in South America in the 1870s, I found this userspace draft: User:Rguccs/Jules Crevaux. That draft is nearly four years old, and the user only made a few edits and then nothing more since (a bot edited the draft and there was one other edit). There is a French Wikipedia article at fr:Jules Crevaux. What is the best thing to do here? Is there a place to list very old userspace drafts for review (I tend to check to see if the user is active or not, and maybe leave them a note if they might be around)? Should the draft have been in a review category of some sort? Carcharoth (talk) 12:01, 1 March 2014 (UTC)

@Carcharoth: Was it just a userspace draft or an article which is eligible for G13? A category where it might belong would be the ones in Category:AfC submissions by date, Category:AfC submissions in userspace and Category:AfC drafts in userspace. Also with the French article, translation or import options could be use. ///EuroCarGT 04:27, 2 March 2014 (UTC)
It appears to have been dealt with. It should have been clear from the above that I was looking for someone to review the userspace draft and move it into article space if it was suitable. Thanks to those who did that. From the deletion log, it appears to have gone via a particular route (through the AfC process?) to get into article space, but the important thing is that it is there now. As far as I am aware, it was never a G13 candidate, and it was not in one of the AfC userspace categories. I just happened to stumble across it. Now I need to work out how to add interwiki links now that those are handled by WikiData - I hope I don't have to add them one by one as the pop-up I got by clicking on 'Add links' implies. I've also added a couple more links from other articles to this one. I presume the messages left at User talk:Rguccs are templates generated by scripts in the AfC process? Luckily that user is likely not around to get confused by their submission being simultaneously accepted and rejected... Carcharoth (talk) 11:32, 2 March 2014 (UTC)
  • Yeah, I submitted this for review. And it was accepted by one reviewer and declined by another in a confusing ordeal. The script is not suppose to let two reviewers review the same draft at the same time... Well... It can't really stop the reviewing right now, but it is suppose to prevent both from submitting their findings, which I'll now have to look into better. I also noticed a bunch of other bugs in the current script that I'll be looking into over the course of the next month or so, which means there will be no script releases until all of these bugs are fixed which will likely not be until April. Carcharoth, I'm thinking that because of the title of the article, it may be appropriate to create redirects from alternate spellings such as Jvles Crevavx and Jules Crevavx; what do you think about that idea? — {{U|Technical 13}} (t • e • c) 14:31, 2 March 2014 (UTC)
    I wouldn't personally create those redirects (I do for accents but not for 'u' versus 'v' unless we are talking Latin), but if you want to you could. The interwiki links editing was much simpler than I realised. In the pop-up, I suggested the French article and the set-up appears to have immediately pulled the other language links from Wikidata and asked if I wanted to include those as well. I clicked 'yes' and it was all sorted. I presume it automatically put the English links on the other articles as well. Is it worth reverting the second and incorrect review? The impression given at Wikipedia talk:Articles for creation/Jules Crevaux is that the submission was declined when it was in fact accepted. I'll ping Buffbills7701 in case they want to go back and look at this. Clearly the article had been moved into mainspace by then - not sure why they didn't spot that the article they were rejecting as already existing was the same as had been moved into mainspace a few minutes earlier. Also, is there a reason why User:Rguccs is not credited in the page history? The attribution (required under the license) does exist at Wikipedia talk:Articles for creation/Jules Crevaux, but that is not immediately obvious from the edit summaries. Carcharoth (talk) 18:58, 2 March 2014 (UTC)
  • It is a really confusing mess. Best I can deduce is that one editor was reviewing the version that was on the User's page directly when I moved the submission to project space. Then, as soon as that move was completed, the other editor reviewed it. Well, the first reviewer at that point was reviewing a cached version in their browser which they accepted (from userspace) and the other edit declined the version that was in AFC project space as already existing in mainspace (which apparently they didn't check the history or they would've seen that it had just been accepted and moved there. Due to the fact that User:Rguccs is not credited as the page creator (because technically they are the creator of the version that is still sitting declined in AFC) I'm thinking we need to get an administrator to preform a history merge of the two. I'll post the appropriate templates... — {{U|Technical 13}} (t • e • c) 19:35, 2 March 2014 (UTC)
  • I know that the article was accepted, it's just that the template was still on the AfC, so naturally, I declined it. buffbills7701 21:32, 2 March 2014 (UTC)

Asking for more pain?

I notice there's a relatively new, big, "resubmit" button on the decline template. You can't help but ignore all that little text and look right at it. We've got a pretty huge backlog, is this really something we want so large and prominent? Gigs (talk) 18:03, 25 February 2014 (UTC)

  • Gigs, I've modified {{Clickable button 2}} to allow for custom CSS styling to be passed in and I've modified the padding and margins on the submit button on {{AFC submission/draft}} (as a starting point since I needed to add some other stuff to that anyways). Take a look and let me know if that button size isn't quite so "click me or die now" appearing. I can tone it down more, just don't want to go too far as we do still want people to submit. Thanks. — {{U|Technical 13}} (t • e • c) 23:34, 26 February 2014 (UTC)
  • Is there any adjustment you think should be made? With the modification I made to the template, we have full control over the style back. Thanks. — {{U|Technical 13}} (t • e • c) 20:55, 3 March 2014 (UTC)

Research

Some interesting research relating to AfC and page creation: m:Research:Article_creation. --LukeSurl t c 11:29, 28 February 2014 (UTC)

Thank's for pointing that out! It makes for an interesting read and partly suggests we've been doing a good job in reviewing . FoCuSandLeArN (talk) 11:54, 28 February 2014 (UTC)
"We were surprised to find that, in wikis that allow article creation by anonymous editors, their survival rate was/is substantially higher than that of recently registered new editors." - really? isn't that perhaps because it is impossible to know how experienced an ip editor is, and there are a number of fairly experienced editors who choose to be anonymous? --nonsense ferret 12:34, 28 February 2014 (UTC)
While your assertion could be true, I gathered the logic was that new editor engagement in AfC represented a collaboration that would improve the article so it could stay. New editors that become autoconfirmed and just created new articles seem more likely to get templated and blocked rather than those willing to be mentored. Note that in almost every wiki a large percentage of new articles are created by IPs or new users and that stat drops off for editors with a couple weeks experience until they're over the learning curve and return to creating new articles. Chris Troutman (talk) 18:50, 28 February 2014 (UTC)
No biggie, I'm just confused as to how we can draw conclusions from stats involving ip editors if we don't know experienced they are. --nonsense ferret 19:48, 28 February 2014 (UTC)
@Nonsenseferret: I don't believe that I drew any conclusions with regards to anon editor experience. But I do agree with you that anons article creators likely have more experience in general than newly registered users. Another thing that is unclear is the extent to which anon article creations were performed by users who simply forgot to log into their account when creating the article. Regardless, it was interesting and surprising result given that newly registered users can create articles (autoconfirmed status not required), but anons cannot -- and that the reason for this is due to the presumed lack of relative quality in anons' contribs [10]. --Halfak (WMF) (talk) 14:38, 4 March 2014 (UTC)

Any research which defines "success" as survival of an article without respect to whether the article is severely problematic is doomed, a priori, by its own design. --j⚛e deckertalk 20:24, 28 February 2014 (UTC)

Wikipedia is a work in progress. Creating the first version of an article that is good enough to pass AFC review, New Page Patrol, and perhaps deletion discussion is certainly a fine measurement of something that is worth continuing to edit and improve, even if it is probably is a flawed article. The point of the research is to measure creation of articles, not the quality of the encyclopedia overall and over the long haul. Steven Walling (WMF) • talk 13:09, 4 March 2014 (UTC)
@Joe Decker: If you have substantial concerns about the methods of the study, I'd welcome you to raise them on the study's talk page. If we can identify some potential confounds that might substantially affect the results/conclusions, I'd be down to extend the work. This stuff is important and I'd rather get it right. --Halfak (WMF) (talk) 14:47, 4 March 2014 (UTC)

Good news

We're below 2,000, have dropped 400 submissions in the last three days, and have completely cleaned out the "Very old submissions category"! Kevin Rutherford (talk) 22:33, 3 March 2014 (UTC)

w00t! --j⚛e deckertalk 23:52, 3 March 2014 (UTC)

I can't figure out where to make a submission

Maybe its supposed to be hard on purpose.

Anyway, I'll submit it here because I am giving up on trying to figure out where you officially make it.

This is my submission--

There should be an article about "Tayac"(which means "top chief" in the Piscataway Indian langiage) "Kittimundiq", who was paramount chief of the Piscataway Indian nation in Maryland when the first Maryland Colony was established. He ordered an Indian village cleared and sold the land to the settlers for the first Maryland Colony.

There are extensive historical citations on this and I can easily cite everything need if such an article were allowed.

Yaocomico village had formerly occupied the location, but the "Tayac" "Kittimundiq", paramount chief of the Piscataway Indian nation, ordered the village cleared and sold it to the English newcomers.[8][16] He wanted to develop them as allies and trading partners (especially because of their advanced technology - farming implements, metal-working, gunpowder and weapons, types of food and liquor, etc...).[16] For some time, the Piscataway, their tributary tribes, and the English Marylanders coexisted peacefully.

Thanks!2602:306:BDA0:97A0:466D:57FF:FE90:AC45 (talk) 00:28, 5 March 2014 (UTC)

Its not hard on purpose, there's just some workflows that the wiki technology doesn't make very easy. It sounds like you want WP:Requested articles though. AfC is a place where you can draft the complete article yourself and then have it reviewed before it is created. Gigs (talk) 18:47, 5 March 2014 (UTC)

Template

It's been a long time since I chipped in at AfC and I know there is a huge backlog (+ I need something to focus on while I regain my enthusiasm for History of public relations). So I circled back to do my share. But the very first article I came across was Wikipedia talk:Articles for creation/ DrivesWarehouse - an article about a single-location small business (you can see more on their website). My question is, am I going to get in trouble for doing this? CorporateM (Talk) 02:42, 6 March 2014 (UTC)

  • Get in trouble? No, probably not specifically, but I'm wondering what the purpose of that is. Also, IF you want to use something like that, it should probably be SUBSTituted so that a newbie can edit your template and vandalize every draft you've placed that template on in one shot (intentionally or accidentally). — {{U|Technical 13}} (t • e • c) 02:53, 6 March 2014 (UTC)
Currently the notability template says "Please improve the submission's referencing..." It's worded in a way that presumes the article can be improved in a way that would make it acceptable, but this is not true. CorporateM (Talk) 03:01, 6 March 2014 (UTC)
  • Perhaps you are using the wrong decline reason... Maybe nn or bio or crop, etc? There is a whole section that says "your topic is not notable, either come up with reliable sources or go away". Anyway, I have no problem with your template, but it sounds like for what you want you should be putting it in the "comment" box of a "custom" decline... AND SUBSTing it... — {{U|Technical 13}} (t • e • c) 03:37, 6 March 2014 (UTC)
Actually I think a custom decline reason would do the trick, so the template doesn't contradict my note. I'm going to see if I can scrounge up some non-COI ones I can work on to help with the queue. Thanks! CorporateM (Talk) 04:44, 6 March 2014 (UTC)
I kind of share your desire to have a more strongly worded decline that say "not not, and also probably not ever, unless the sources available out there change a lot". Of course you know this but please be careful with your COI in your AfC reviewing activities as well. I only say this because the article you tagged is in the same sort of space as many of the companies you represent (storage/cloud/etc). They may not be a direct competitor to any of your companies, but you may want to err on the side of caution. Gigs (talk) 16:58, 6 March 2014 (UTC)
Hah I should read more carefully... I saw "Hitachi drives" in the lead and assumed hard drives... in reality it's about industrial motors. Sorry about that. You are fine. Gigs (talk) 17:00, 6 March 2014 (UTC)

An idea for after this drive

So, I know that we have a recent articles page, and this page notes the total of edits on that page. Would anyone be against creating a hall of fame for contributors to the page similar to the DYK Hall of Fame? To be clear, I'm writing this not as the second-most contributing user to that page, but as someone who would like to recognize the contributions of some of the users who have done a rather impressive number of reviews. Kevin Rutherford (talk) 01:00, 5 March 2014 (UTC)

I have concerns about making it too big a deal. If we make it too much like a game, then we have the same sort of problem DYK sometimes has, people who are doing it just to rack up more credits. Someone with a 1% error rate at AfC has the potential to alienate a lot of new editors, or create a lot of work for other editors by approving non-notable/spam. I don't have all the answers, but I do know we have a conflict here... the recent RfCs and movement to make it harder to become an AfC reviewer, and the desire to encourage people to review to help the backlog. If we aren't careful, then AfC could easily turn into a sort of "walled garden" of regulars that are quantity focused and hostile to newcomer reviewers (aka the competition). I'm not sure this message fully makes sense, but that reflects my mixed feelings on the matter more than anything else. Gigs (talk) 16:52, 6 March 2014 (UTC)
  • While I don't necessarily think it is a good or bad idea, I think that due to the existing level of change and chaos doing something like this, which I would consider a novelty item, would be a bad idea for now. I would like to see the Draft: (new wizard), user permission for reviewing, and guided tour for how to perform an effective review hashed out and created and stabilized a little before adding stuff like this. I strongly encourage you, Kevin to bring it back up once some of those much more major issues are resolved (to some degree so they are stable). Thanks for the idea. :) — {{U|Technical 13}} (t • e • c) 16:59, 6 March 2014 (UTC)
  • I'm somewhat agree with the User:Technical 13 suggestions, specially "user permission for reviewing". In order to clear backlog it does not seem appropriate to me to let newbie users to approve non-notable/wp:not submissions. It should be a user right (similar to reviewer/rollbacker/autopatroller/filemover etc.) at WP:Request for permissions/AfC reviewer, granted to editors who have demonstrated acknowledgement of basic policy and guidelines (wp:conpol?). Anupmehra -Let's talk! 18:23, 6 March 2014 (UTC)
That all makes sense, and I'll be sure to try to remember revisiting that back in a few months. In terms of another right, can we just roll it into one of the above rights? I am pretty sure that I have most, if not all of the non-admin rights on the site, and am the only one to have this dilemma. I use them all, but I see no reason why "reviewer" cannot be a per-requisite to doing AFC, because having another right will only encourage hat collecting even more. Kevin Rutherford (talk) 19:53, 6 March 2014 (UTC)

Can't review

Wikipedia talk:Articles for creation/Omkar Gulvady. Why? Thanks, FoCuSandLeArN (talk) 14:49, 6 March 2014 (UTC)

  • Because the parameters were out of order, which shouldn't be an issue. Also, the implicit {{{1}}} and {{{2}}} are missing, but it is still working. Theopolisme, please make sure that the re-write doesn't care about the order of parameters... (which I'm pretty sure it doesn't). — {{U|Technical 13}} (t • e • c) 14:59, 6 March 2014 (UTC)
    Yeah, it doesn't care. The script uses Parsoid and an internal templating engine to be as flexible as possible (assuming the templates themselves are valid, of course!). BTW @T13, I've added some additional cleanup/mark features which you can check out on testwiki if you're interested... Theopolisme (talk) 01:04, 7 March 2014 (UTC)

Rejecting submissions for upcoming films

The custom decline reason in Wikipedia talk:Articles for creation/The Field (film) may prove useful during reviews. Here it is if you want to copy-and-paste it:

Per [[WP:NFF]] "Films that have not been confirmed by reliable sources to have commenced principal photography should not have their own articles, as budget issues, scripting issues and casting issues can interfere with a project well ahead of its intended filming date." Also from that same page, "Additionally, films that have already begun shooting, but have not yet been publicly released (theatres or video), should generally not have their own articles unless the production itself is notable per the notability guidelines." Please '''do not re-submit''' this film until it is released ''unless'' the production itself (not the film) becomes notable per [[WP:Notability]]. It is rare that the production itself meets Wikipedia's notability guidelines.

davidwr/(talk)/(contribs) 17:26, 8 March 2014 (UTC)

Just a minor correction, near the end of the text the wording should be: "Please do not resubmit this film draft until it is....". BTW has annone pinged the helper scripr editors about this? Roger (Dodger67) (talk) 11:59, 9 March 2014 (UTC)
Correcting the correction:
Please do not re-submit this draft until the film is released unless the production itself (not the film) ....
And here it is for copy-and-pasting:
Per [[WP:NFF]] "Films that have not been confirmed by reliable sources to have commenced principal photography should not have their own articles, as budget issues, scripting issues and casting issues can interfere with a project well ahead of its intended filming date." Also from that same page, "Additionally, films that have already begun shooting, but have not yet been publicly released (theatres or video), should generally not have their own articles unless the production itself is notable per the notability guidelines." Please '''do not re-submit''' this draft until the film is released ''unless'' the production itself (not the film) becomes notable per [[WP:Notability]]. It is rare that the production itself meets Wikipedia's notability guidelines.
davidwr/(talk)/(contribs) 20:10, 9 March 2014 (UTC)
I was going to leave the helper-script editors alone about this to see if a consensus developed to add it. In any case, they probably have their hands full with the whole change-over to Draft: namespace and shaking out the inevitable bugs resulting from that change-over. I expect we'll be seeing subtle bugs and the resulting bug-fixes related to that for months. davidwr/(talk)/(contribs) 20:12, 9 March 2014 (UTC)

Focus on Makro

What do we think of this talk page history from an AFC participant?

Let's see. I decline an AFC submission, the submitter asks me about it on my talk page (as the templates recommend), so I blank their question with no further response?

Makro seems still to be creating additional problematic declines/acceptances as well.

Makro's block log is also worth looking at in this context. --Demiurge1000 (talk) 21:59, 6 March 2014 (UTC)

coincidentally, I was also about to raise one of my ferrety eyebrows in a quizzical manner over some of the reviews done recently by this user - well worth someone having a look if they have the time. --nonsense ferret 22:45, 6 March 2014 (UTC)
We need to stop them from doing reviews immediately, and only because this is not being productive at all for the new users who have legitimate questions. I hate advocating for heavy-handed actions like this, but they do not seem to be interested in helping us out, and the blanking of questions from these users is only serving to be disruptive at the end of the day. Kevin Rutherford (talk) 03:12, 7 March 2014 (UTC)
If Makro doesn't wish to answer queries raised by new editors. He should display a template on his talk page directing users seeking answers to AfC Help desk. Should something be modified and more people engaged here discussing RfC for AfC reviewer permission implementation? Anupmehra -Let's talk! 09:39, 7 March 2014 (UTC)

I do answer questions posed by new reviwers to help them improve there creation skills. If they cant accept that there first page cant be accepted the first time then that is there problem.Makro (talk) 14:56, 7 March 2014 (UTC)

"I do answer questions" - could you point us to any examples, please? --Demiurge1000 (talk) 19:18, 7 March 2014 (UTC)
Dark-robed cabal --Demiurge1000 (talk) 19:33, 7 March 2014 (UTC)

Demiurge1000, there any particular reason why you skipped the very first step of dispute resolution, talk with the user? I don't see any threads on their talk page or in their talk page history. Might it be a good idea to talk it out with the user before you raise a complaint here? We wouldn't want to be seen as a dark robed cabal. Second, the actions you complain about sound very similar to my own with the exception that my talk page has a big editnotice (User talk:Hasteur/Editnotice) reminding users about my policy on responding to questions. Are you saying that I'm a bad reviewer too? I propose that this entire thread be tabled and threats of sanctions by ktr101 and Anupmehra be struck from the record as Makro's actions are significantly less disruptive than others that were sanctionable. Hasteur (talk) 15:18, 7 March 2014 (UTC)

Hello Hasteur- Thanks for you comment. Unfortunately it reads ambiguous to me. One as, "[..]threats of sanctions by ktr101 and Anupmehra[..]" and secondly as, "[..]Anupmehra be struck [..]". I'll chose to answer both one by one. First, I'm not sure how my words meant to avail an option consisting words, If Makro doesn't wish[..] and He should display a template[..] constitute a threat to someone. Second, I didn't mention any editing behaviour whether disruptive, test or vandal. If you re-read my comment again assuming good faith it would sound constructive. If he doesn't wish to[..], my suggestion voids the moment when he claims always being answerable of his actions to new editors. Later part is not related to anyone but a general call to draw attention to an ongoing conversation somewhat related to concerns raised into this section. Anupmehra -Let's talk! 16:24, 7 March 2014 (UTC)
Anupmehra I'm sure you would agree that Should something be modified and more people engaged here discussing RfC for AfC reviewer permission implementation? in the context of the rest of your statement is an implicit threat that the AFC reviewer permission should be constructed so that Makro be excluded and we become a closed door cabal. It's been enumerated several times that the permission should be easily attainable and should not be revoked except in the most dire of situations. Hasteur (talk) 16:42, 7 March 2014 (UTC)
Hasteur- I agree to disagree with your opinion. I didn't mean that a permission should be created to restrict Makro from AfC. It was much broader. And there's a "question mark" at the end of the line. I was wondering if people here talking about Makro and his edits would be interested to participate into a much broader discussion going on some other place somewhat related to the same they are discussing here. Anupmehra -Let's talk! 16:50, 7 March 2014 (UTC)
For the record, I don't have anything against Makro, but came out with that response because I don't believe that it is productive to ignore new users. Yes, it is a royal pain to answer all of those questions, but part of what AFC is is customer service. If we cannot do that, then we have failed the user. Kevin Rutherford (talk) 17:16, 7 March 2014 (UTC)
The wikipedia community helps those who help themselves, or as others would say "Lurk more". I would estimate that approximately 90% of people who ask a question about their AFC submission on my talk page show their ignorance in reading the decline reason (and the associated policies), therefore it is a infinitely loosing proposition for me to respond at all because they haven't understood the reason the decline happened. If the user is attempting to improve the submission I'll give more time, but we're always starved for time and the reviews never stop coming in at the same abysmally poor standard. Perhaps when we have 20 active reviewers and we're not under perpetual backlog drive burns and we're no more than 7 days behind on pending reviews we could have time to type out well researched and thoughtful responses to inquiries, but not now. Hasteur (talk) 18:53, 7 March 2014 (UTC)
At least in the questions that come to my talk page, I always am willing to review what they state, as I am human. Granted, I also created and tweaked an impressive edit notice years ago that directs users to this page. It helped cut down on the worst offenders from when I started, so now I'll just get a few queries a day when I'm doing many tens of reviews, and it is a lot better then when I would get up and answer ten messages a day before starting another batch of reviews. Kevin Rutherford (talk) 20:28, 7 March 2014 (UTC)
  • Wow... This is where I get really annoyed and frustrated... This discussion has fallen into the "RfC for AfC reviewer permission implementation" realm of whether this should be a closed door process and cabal and all that happy hoo-ra and the greater picture has yet again been ignored. I'm certain that Makro came to AfC with the best of intentions to help reduce some of the pending AfC submissions. Perhaps, as I suggested ten and a half months ago (where I also suggested a permission level that it has taken about ten months to get enough people to agree it is a good idea, but no consensus at this time on implementation methods), we should have a mentoring/tutorial process to teach people who are interested in reviewing the proper way to preform reviews. I know that Theonesean started something like this, and I know that Kudpung expressed some interest in the process, but I think it has gotten stale and users like Makro are why we need this. — {{U|Technical 13}} (t • e • c) 18:24, 7 March 2014 (UTC)
  • I will agree with Technical 13 on this point. Not only would it be a good idea to move forward with AfC permissions, but perhaps establishing a formal program like WP:GARC or WP:CVUA to train editors new to the program and current reviewers that could use some instruction. Chris Troutman (talk) 18:57, 7 March 2014 (UTC)
Yes, I don't know how to get it closed. It's been a long time now. —Anne Delong (talk) 19:31, 11 March 2014 (UTC)

Hi User:Hasteur, this and dozens of earlier such encounters are the reason why I didn't bother to engage Makro yet again when I knew deletion would be the result. What do you recommend, Hasteur? --Demiurge1000 (talk) 01:28, 9 March 2014 (UTC)

I'd like to weigh in as the creator of that declined article. I am not very experienced with this submission system as I don't recall such a system existing several years ago when I was more active in article creation. How can one person decide that an article stays or goes, and when declining, provide a reason that does not comply with Wikipedia policy? Whatever happened to the consensus discussions that used to take place when articles were flagged as questionable? I have not personally engaged Makro and it seems pointless to do so. However I was instructed to ask for help in the numismatics portal. Thanks to Chris Troutman for clarifying the situation to me there. Zup326 (talk) 01:38, 10 March 2014 (UTC)
I had a similar encounter when I asked about a decline and subsequent CSD copyvio nomination of an article sourced with offline PD sources (and no indication of where he thought it was copied from). Summary deletion when someone questions why you did something is not typical behaviour of someone who wants to learn. kelapstick(bainuu) 01:35, 9 March 2014 (UTC)
@Demiurge1000 and Kelapstick: If that's the case show where you notified them of the problem and where they silently disposed of the message to show that you've made a good faith attempt to resolve the issue. Then you'll have satisfied the attempt to discuss the problem with the user first. Hasteur (talk) 12:46, 10 March 2014 (UTC)
My questioning on CSD nomination, and deletion in the next edit. --kelapstick(bainuu) 12:51, 10 March 2014 (UTC)
Note I am not looking for a ritual hanging from the yardarms, I have seen some good reviewing from said user, and I know that AfC needs as many reviewers as possible. I would just like to see him more receptive to questions (from both submitters and regular editors). --kelapstick(bainuu) 13:03, 10 March 2014
I'm speechless as to some of the attitudes and actions taken by these guys Makro and Hasteur. It's no wonder people end up horribly frustrated when such apathetic views are given and the humanity behind fellow editors becomes overlooked and ignored. As such, the need to engage said people and converse with them becomes lost. After a simple look at some reviews done by Makro, it's plain to see that he has no problem accepting articles that are in line with his own interests, but swiftly declines nearly everything that he is not familiar with or is not interested with. A further 2-minute look at his talk history clearly shows that he deletes any questions raised, even those raised by fellow reviewers and not only regular or new editors! How can such actions be accepted? This current AfC system is clearly in need of some improvements, as it isolates editors, causes people to take sides, and creates a bureaucracy of good and bad reviewers. You have the bad faith reviewers and the good faith ones, which alienates editors and reviewers alike, at the same time overloading the good reviewers as good faith editors seek help and advice. It's likely that this matter would have to be addressed at some point when enough important names get effected by similar circumstances in the future themselves. Zup326 (talk) 16:47, 10 March 2014 (UTC)
  • A little birdy suggested I comment here. I've been editing this project for juat about ten years now and I can guarantee we wouldn't have a thousandth of the content herein if the action I witnessed by this so-called editor (AND THAT against a total newbie!) had been general back when... See my two barrels here for how disgusted he made me, and I'm a totally disinterested third party (innocently snooping to make sure a conversation had been finished by me.) As I summerized: Answered at User talk:Nedim Ardoğa... which check led me to see the way he tromped all over a newbie creating a fair stub article. I've begun many a page with less in these past ten years. Maybe he's insecure. SURE shouldn't be in authority over anyone! Best to all. // FrankB 07:24, 11 March 2014 (UTC)
  • So is there something we can do in-house to resolve this behavior or shall we go to ANI to get him to tap on the brakes? Talk page comments have achieved nothing thus far. Chris Troutman (talk) 07:56, 11 March 2014 (UTC)
  • I don't think either option is applicable at this point as the original poster themselves said they're not looking for a ritual hanging from the yardarm. Per the admin policy blocks are not to be used for cooling down purposes in addition to the ANI cabal will ask the question "What administrative action do you want from us?" with no real good answer short of blocking. TPO dictates that if a user archives a thread it is interperted as read. Frankly this entire thread transcended the conern to witchhunt at Zup's comment. I propose that this thread be closed down and noted in future cases where the will to dis-fellowship is stronger. Hasteur (talk) 12:43, 11 March 2014 (UTC)
It seems to me that as often happens there is a disconnect between the needs of the new users and the willingness and available time of the reviewers. Yes, the information that the new users are asking for is often already available to them, and it can be irritating to explain the same obvious (to us) stuff over and over again, but new editors are often confused by the profusion of links, talk pages, help pages, etc., and may genuinely be not able to find the decline reasons and comments by themselves. I personally enjoy explaining things to anyone (I know, you hadn't noticed), but if I didn't, I think the solution that I would adopt would be to create a preformed generic message, to the effect that the reason for the decline could be found at the top of the submission, and that additional questions would be answered at the Afc Help Desk or the TeaHouse. When a user left a query that I didn't want to answer, I would simply plop this reply after the query. Copy, paste, copy and paste their username link so they'll see the message, sign. Ten seconds at most. Of course, if I did this my unwillingness to answer queries would be obvious to all, and it would no longer be reasonable for me to complain that editors should contact me first before discussing my reviews here or at these locations instead of on my talk page. —Anne Delong (talk) 19:31, 11 March 2014 (UTC)

Categories

Life as a reviewer would be considerably easier, and one's time could be used more efficiently, if we could subdivide Category:Pending AfC submissions into categories for 'articles awaiting review', 'articles not yet ready for review', and 'articles reviewed and awaiting improvements'. Andy Mabbett (Pigsonthewing); Talk to Andy; Andy's edits 20:25, 9 March 2014 (UTC)

@Pigsonthewing: I'm confused. The Pending AfC submissions category only shows up when there's at least one "active" AfC template on the page (unless someone directly invoked the category). If there's a Active, a Declined, and a "Draft" banner on the page, the page will show up in all 3 categories. It's been my perspective that the Pending AfC submissions category is rather useless due to the fact that it's all submissions alphabetically. I prefer the Category:AfC pending submissions by age as it shows us the breakdown of submissions by age and allows us to work the oldest first. Hasteur (talk) 12:50, 10 March 2014 (UTC)
@Hasteur: I think it may be me who was confused; looking at a candidate like Wikipedia talk:Articles for creation/Forte Tenors, there is "declined" template showing, prominently, at the top of the page - but also another, "request" template at the bottom of the page, which I had overlooked. Thanks. Andy Mabbett (Pigsonthewing); Talk to Andy; Andy's edits 14:03, 10 March 2014 (UTC)
Yes, this is a weakness in the process. It's confusing at times for the submitters, too. The visual problem can be fixed up using the "clean" option in the script, but there's no need to do that if you are going to review the submission, since the cleaning process happens automatically when a review takes place. Hopefully, the new version of the script which is under development will include a process that "cleans" away the old grey draft template box, if present, and places the yellow submit template box at the top of the page. In the meantime, as Hasteur has pointed out, the categories seem to work well in selecting only those which need review. —Anne Delong (talk) 18:51, 11 March 2014 (UTC)
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