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Huge pause

Am I the only one experiencing extremely long delays with regards to the script finishing its algorith to the point where it shows the reload link? In fact some articles are taking forever and I just refresh them manually, so I don't even know if it actually finishes. E.g. Wikipedia talk:Articles for creation/Bill Thomson (pharmacist) or Wikipedia talk:Articles for creation/Gatekeeper (band). FoCuSandLeArN (talk) 22:37, 19 May 2014 (UTC)

FoCuSandLeArN, are you using the old script or the new rewrite? —Anne Delong (talk) 22:52, 19 May 2014 (UTC)
I'm using the preferences one, not the AFCHRW, although I'll start trying that one out tomorrow. FoCuSandLeArN (talk) 22:59, 19 May 2014 (UTC)
I have just declined a couple of submissions with the rewrite; it reloads automatically, doesn't remove the script option bar, so you have to reload again or refresh to get rid of it. This is apparently a design decision, but there wasn't a delay of more than a second or so. I haven't used the old script recently; maybe someone else can comment. —Anne Delong (talk) 23:36, 19 May 2014 (UTC)
"So you have to reload again or refresh to get rid of it": You can also just hit the "X" in the upper righthand corner. The reason for this decision (to not remove the script panel) is workflows like "submit -> accept" (additionally, auto-closing would, of course, remove the links to diffs and such, which can be useful). Theopolisme (talk) 00:23, 20 May 2014 (UTC)

Accepting articles other editors have declined?

Resolved

What's the process of accepting articles other editors have declined? I came across this at the Teahouse, looked at the article, and there are plenty of sources supporting WP:GNG so I want to accept it. Courtesy pinging Timtrent. --NeilN talk to me 16:14, 20 May 2014 (UTC)

It shouldn't be a big deal, since many previously declined articles are eventually accepted. Might be a good idea to talk to the decliner to make sure that they didn't catch something you missed. Gigs (talk) 16:20, 20 May 2014 (UTC)
Thanks. Josve05a already accepted the article before I could get to it. --NeilN talk to me 16:25, 20 May 2014 (UTC)
(edit conflict) I have accepted the article, since I found it to be notable and reliably sourced. I thought it would not be deleted in an AfD. (50 %-guidline). (t) Josve05a (c) 16:26, 20 May 2014 (UTC)
The answer is that each editor has as much right to choose to accept or decline as the next editor. We strive to use the same criteria and each make different errors. It doesn't matter if an article is promoted too soon because the community will take care of it. It doesn't matter if an article is declined by being over stringent, other reviewers will take care of it. What matters is a simple, straightforward approach, reasonable advice and a willingness to be shown to be incorrect.
Thank you for pinging me. Thank you for deciding to accept the article, and thank you for pleasing the article's creator by accepting it. In all of these things, including our being able to be wrong, Wikipedia is improved. Fiddle Faddle 17:01, 20 May 2014 (UTC)

Bonus points for reviewing older drafts

Adding Wikiproject banners to drafts

Dear reviewers: Now that a substantial number of AfC submissions are in the Draft namespace, we can start to take advantage of the accompanying talk page. When accepting a draft, there's a handy way of adding Wikiproject banners. If this were done earlier, soon after a draft was created or maybe when it is declined, it may draw Wikiproject participants to look at the drafts. Would it be a good idea to ask our script developer(s) to add an option to facilitate this? Can anyone see any problems that it might cause? One I can think of is that there would be a need to check which banners are already there to avoid duplication. —Anne Delong (talk) 11:30, 23 May 2014 (UTC)

I think its a very good idea to get Wikiprojects involved with Drafts as soon as possible. It should give us higher quality drafts and introduce new editors to the collaborative nature of Wikipedia earlier. It would be best to avoid directing people to inactive projects tho. Perhaps we could compile a list of Wikiprojects that are both active and have editors willing to help with drafts. --LukeSurl t c 11:54, 23 May 2014 (UTC)
Just putting my ideas out, but I think the existing wikiproject banner selector widget with the class automatically hardwired to draft. I agree that having detection of what project banners on the page is good and we also need to do the check on the Accept action to ensure that any new projects added are not duplicates/changing any existing project banners class to the same one that is assessed. Hasteur (talk) 14:02, 23 May 2014 (UTC)
--LukeSurl, I was more thinking that the placing of the banners would attract Wikiproject members to the drafts, but you are right that it would work the other way around too, although to a lesser extent since a lot of the new users might not know enough to look at the talk page. We wouldn't have to make a separate list of projects; the existing one that's displayed when accepting a submission should be fine. Checking it for inactive ones is a good idea. And Hasteur, the point about assessments is a good one. Assessments before acceptance would hopefully become rapidly outdated as the drafts improved. —Anne Delong (talk) 14:44, 23 May 2014 (UTC)
Would it be possible to have these added automatically? I'm thinking editors could choose from a drop down list of topics during the article wizard. It could save a lot of effort on our part. Sam Walton (talk) 16:03, 23 May 2014 (UTC)
There are a very large number of Wikiprojects. Right now the list autocompletes when you start typing the name of the project. That might be difficult for a new user. You are right that it would save work for the reviewers; we'd have to figure out how it could work. —Anne Delong (talk) 16:12, 23 May 2014 (UTC)
True, though we could always trim the list to a set of the most active between ourselves to make it easier on them. Sam Walton (talk) 21:30, 23 May 2014 (UTC)
  • Support - The addition of active WikiProject tags to draft talk pages is a positive step that will promote contributions and hopefully collaboration. Automation of the process is the optimal way to go. NorthAmerica1000 21:39, 23 May 2014 (UTC)
Well, I'm not reading any suggestions that this is a bad idea. What might be most useful, and this has been requested before for use outside AfC as well, is a gadget that could easily add Wikiproject banners to any article's talk page. Then any editor could use it without having to be an AfC reviewer, and it could be called by the article wizard, the AFCH script, the NPP script, or just used by anybody at all. —Anne Delong (talk) 23:14, 23 May 2014 (UTC)
That would be even better. I've actually looked into this before, and couldn't find an automated script to add WikiProject tags anywhere (other than the AfC helper script when accepting submissions). NorthAmerica1000 00:04, 24 May 2014 (UTC)
  • Please keep in mind that those wikiproject templates are what drives a lot of statistical information, so before adding templates it would be a good idea to understand what effects this would have aside from hypothetically drawing wikiproject members. How about asking at the WikiProject Council to get feedback from the people there? Risker (talk) 00:20, 24 May 2014 (UTC)
Good point, Risker. I have (1) posted a message to ‎Theopolisme, who has replied that he will look into it, and (2) left a message on the WikiProject Council talk page. —Anne Delong (talk) 04:49, 24 May 2014 (UTC)
In terms of a tool to easily tag pages with WikiProjects, can I suggest User:Kephir/gadgets/rater? --Mdann52talk to me! 07:29, 24 May 2014 (UTC)
Thanks, Mdann52. The instruction page for that is a little scary - have you (or has anyone else) tried it? —Anne Delong (talk) 12:01, 24 May 2014 (UTC)
A while back, I tried out User:YuviPanda/AssessmentBar, but couldn't get it to function. NorthAmerica1000 12:23, 24 May 2014 (UTC)
The only "snag" I can see is that the vast majority of WikiProject banners do not actually support "class=Draft" - it is displayed as "N/A" and as a result the class sorting system also does not handle them correctly - drafts are simply not recognized as such at all. The ability to do so is currently an "optional extra" addition to the "standard" set of "class=?????" parameters - very very very few Projects have yet bothered to add the option to their classification systems. Some time ago I proposed to the WikiProject Council that "class=Draft" should be included in the "standard" set of parameters instead of being an optional extra but my idea was greeted with utter indifference. Roger (Dodger67) (talk) 11:47, 24 May 2014 (UTC)
Roger (Dodger67), can you tell what kind of problems this may cause? I see one: the NA indicates to the raters that they needn't bother assessing the page. May be the class section could be left blank, resulting in "class=???" which indicates that classification is needed, but that's not ideal either, since a lot of the drafts aren't in a state to be rated yet. Interested editors can check out the pages marked NA and ??? on our own assessment page here: Wikipedia:WikiProject Articles for creation/Assessment. (oh, and rate a few while you're there). —Anne Delong (talk) 12:39, 24 May 2014 (UTC)
Anne the basic problem is that the projects have no way of explicitly identifying such pages as drafts, like they currently do for "Stub, Start, C-class....FA-class" - those tables would all get an extra line for Draft-class. Without it the Drafts are simply lumped together with all the other unclassified pages - and consequently get none of the "subject specialist editor" attention which is the entire rationale for adding WikiProject tags to Drafts as well as one of the reasons why Draft-space exists at all. Roger (Dodger67) (talk) 13:11, 24 May 2014 (UTC)
Well, draft space is new, and I have found that some things take a long time to change in the WikiUniverse, mainly because everything seems to affect everything else. Maybe it would be better to classify them properly class=draft, even if that has no effect right away; then Wikiprojects which had implemented adding draft to their classification system would begin to see a benefit, and if the idea gradually spread we wouldn't have to go back and reclassify. Of course, then the accept section of the script would have to be sure to change this on acceptance, whereas if they were "class=" there would be no complication at that point. I am also working on another way to attract specialist reviewers using a custom search box, but it only works for those who have added the new search in preferences. —Anne Delong (talk) 13:46, 24 May 2014 (UTC)
  • Something else to consider: It may not be a good idea to create a talk page for every draft. For one thing, if the draft has to be deleted (test pages, pages about one's cat, copyvios, etc.), the talk page is an extra thing to deal with. Also, if the page has been copy-pasted into mainspace, as often happens with these drafts by new editors, what happens to any Wikiproject banners, discussions, etc., when a history merge is done with a page that already has discussions on it? What if the draft doesn't show notability, but is sent to mainspace as a redirect to a topic that is, and already has a talk page? —Anne Delong (talk) 18:47, 25 May 2014 (UTC)

computer portal

i want some snaps of abacus please somebody provide it to me 

my e-mail id is

ahsan_nisar@rocketmail.com — Preceding unsigned comment added by 39.53.177.152 (talk) 15:35, 26 May 2014 (UTC)

Here's one:

An abacus
—Anne Delong (talk) 16:07, 26 May 2014 (UTC)
And here is an entire category full of pictures of abaci. -- Roger (Dodger67) (talk) 18:02, 26 May 2014 (UTC)
Or maybe he's a spy, after the secret details of Operation Abacus. Ga-a-a-ah! What have I done? —Anne Delong (talk) 19:15, 26 May 2014 (UTC)

Archiving

Due to the fact that Cluebot archiving threads which were less than 7 days from the last comment on the thread, I've evicted ClueBot from the archiving role for us. I am using User:Equazcion/OneClickArchiver to do the archiving manually, as it has the benefit of moving individual threads at a time instead of having to unmuck a great many at once. I'm respecting a "last commented more than 1 week ago" archiving routine. If others want to clean up the board as well, that's cool, but I'll probably check 2~3 times a week. Please let me know if you have thoughts. Hasteur (talk) 14:04, 20 May 2014 (UTC)

Article request

could anyone make a Christian Weston Chandler page so people could know about him?--99.6.100.235 (talk) 22:56, 24 May 2014 (UTC)
If Mr. Chandler has been written about extensively in news reports, magazine or journal articles, books, etc., then you can make an article about him yourself using the Article wizard. You can also leave a request at WP:Requested articles, but there is a large backlog. —Anne Delong (talk) 00:11, 25 May 2014 (UTC)

Help Desk needs help!

There are questions as old as four days that have not been answered yet! I would normally try to reply to as many as possible but unfortunately I'm studying for university exams so my time here is very limited for the next few weeks. Roger (Dodger67) (talk) 10:44, 27 May 2014 (UTC)

On it, buddy! FoCuSandLeArN (talk) 12:29, 27 May 2014 (UTC)

AFC helper script

Hi, declining nominations in userspace with the AFC helper script, such as User:Thekorbguy/Jrode Billy results in a link to the wrong place. Thanks, Matty.007 12:35, 27 May 2014 (UTC)

Yes, Matty.007, the script was never intended to review articles in userspace. The articles are still on user pages mainly because new users don't know how to move them or, if they're really new, don't have the permissions. It's unlikely that the script will be changed, since the script developers have turned their attention to the new WP:AFCHRW script which is under development and is now being used by many reviewers. Also, there is a pretty good consensus that soon all of the submissions will be located in Draft: space, so when I'm reviewing I first move them there. The exception is blank submissions, because it's difficult to give them a title. —Anne Delong (talk) 12:59, 27 May 2014 (UTC)
  • Actually, I have to note something here Anne... A big part of the creation of the Draft namespace consensus was that it would only be allowed if userspace drafts were still permitted and allowed. Moving an established user's draft to draft space is in violation of this, and should not be done. It may be okay to move a new editor's drafts if they are unable for any reason or apparently too new to be aware. If it is moved back however, that is an objection and it should not be moved again until it is accepted and moved into article space. — {{U|Technical 13}} (e • t • c) 14:13, 27 May 2014 (UTC)
  • Technical 13 *facepalm* There's a difference between a draft that a user is working on their own and one that has been submitted for AFC review. I may be wrong, but I recall that the plan was to leave individual userspace drafts alone, but move ones that display the AFC banner or other categorizing mark into the AFC space (which now includes moving it to Draft namespace). Category:Pending AfC submissions in userspace is an example where the template has detected that the page is in User space and the user wants a review of the page. For these the pending submission box indicates Warning: This page should probably be located at.... Are you saying that the instructions in our own template are wrong? I think Anne Delong's actions are correct for the simple reason that it reduces the possibility of errors, what with WP:IAR and WP:SOFIXIT and all. Hasteur (talk) 14:34, 27 May 2014 (UTC)
  • (ec)That applies only to userspace drafts that have not been submitted to AFC review. Once a draft has been submitted to AFC it makes no sense to arbitrarily prevent AFC from processing it properly. The act of submitting a draft is implicitly giving permission to the reviewer to do whatever is necessary to perform proper review - which includes moving it out of userpace. If that is not an acceptable, then the AFC Project still has the right to simply refuse to review submissions if the submitter is not allowing it be moved - however such a scenario requires actual insanity to ever really happen. AFC has no interest at all in userspace drafts that have not and will not be submitted. Roger (Dodger67) (talk) 14:45, 27 May 2014 (UTC)
  • I entirely disagree that the clause and meaning of that wording only applies to unsubmitted drafts. It applies to all unaccepted userspace drafts, and should not be loosely interpreted to only apply to one draft or another when it doesn't explicitly say that. The wording in the template was added to make it easier to move those drafts by new users that were unaware of the afc process and unaware of the wizard or are too new that they are unable to move the draft themselves. The fact of the matter is that if an established user wanted the page moved to draft space, they would have moved it themselves and if someone moves their draft back, then the object to it no longer being in their userspace and it shouldn't be moved again. Otherwise, what you end up with is pissed off people because we moved their draft that move their drafts back and remove the decline template and then work on it some more and just move it to mainspace themselves. This is a self-defeating tactic, and should be avoided. — {{U|Technical 13}} (e • t • c) 15:40, 27 May 2014 (UTC)
  • I assure you that I'm not being dense in the least, as this is my interpretation of the consensus and it is logical. Also, I might note that calling me dense is not productive to this conversation, and I'm requesting that you keep such thoughts to yourself. Thanks! — {{U|Technical 13}} (e • t • c) 17:21, 27 May 2014 (UTC)

Please, fellows, let's cut the constant bickering and work towards improving AfC. Technical 13 is correct in his literal interpretation, while Anne is following a pragmatic approach. None of them is wrong. These constant discussions go nowhere and to be quite frank it's frustrating to read my Watchlist and find a big chunk of the changes have to do with them. Shall we focus on moving forward? FoCuSandLeArN (talk) 17:30, 27 May 2014 (UTC)

  • {{citation needed}} You're telling me people can't follow redirects? I echo Gigs sentiment from 16:13, because your continued adherence to a very narrow interpretation leads me to publicly wonder if it might be time for one of us to take an extended leave to find a purpose for editing other than maintain the existing Process work.Hasteur (talk) 01:41, 28 May 2014 (UTC)
  • I linked the question asked on THQ, I don't know how much more clear I can be or more of an example/citation I can offer. As far as you wanting to take a break goes, I can't stop you, do what you will. — {{U|Technical 13}} (e • t • c) 02:15, 28 May 2014 (UTC)
  • And I said that the THQ thread does not prove your point. Now what about HD and VPx? Also what about the fact that redirects work just fine? My comment was a polite way of saying that you're so far off base in your assertions that I question your competence to hold any advanced privileges. Also if you wanted to fix the problem that was complained about at that THQ, you'd start by fixing Template:User sandbox, but you're more interested in pursuing a agenda than fixing Wikipedia. Hasteur (talk) 02:46, 28 May 2014 (UTC)
  • T13, you should not take my earlier comment as a personal attack, as it wasn't one. It seems like you are creating issues where there are none, for seemingly petty reasons. We have always moved drafts from userspace into AfC space. This is not a new practice. No one at the RfC had any concerns about this practice, the concerns were regarding forcing everyone to store every single draft in Draft space, which was initially floated and soundly rejected. Drafts submitted to AfC have been, and will be, moved to our staging area, which is now Draft:. This is not controversial. Gigs (talk) 16:20, 28 May 2014 (UTC)

http://reftag.appspot.com

I wish I had known sooner about this handy tool which makes Wikipedia citations out of Google Books URLs. —Anne Delong (talk) 19:03, 28 May 2014 (UTC)

Cool! Whatever version of Wikipedia:RefToolbar I'm using can do that too, although getting the cite button to show has been flaky lately. It gets page numbers out of the URL too, which is awesome. It also used to be able to do NYT articles (URL to pretty much everything filled out), although, again, I've had some flaky lately with that. --j⚛e deckertalk 23:08, 28 May 2014 (UTC)

Draft space XFD discussions

Please see the discussion ongoing at Wikipedia_talk:Miscellany_for_deletion#Draft_space_XFD_discussions. Thank you, — xaosflux Talk 20:54, 29 May 2014 (UTC)

The discussion has been transferred to Wikipedia_talk:DRAFT#Process_for_deleting_drafts. --LukeSurl t c 23:35, 29 May 2014 (UTC)

Research

I just found out that AfC is going to be discussed in the Research and Data showcase today. In case it's of interest: https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Analytics/Research_and_Data/Showcase#May_2014 I've been participating in AfC with my researcher-hat on and would be happy to discuss further (& especially to receive your feedback!) Jodi.a.schneider (talk) 16:40, 21 May 2014 (UTC)

Thanks, Jodi.a.schneider, for bringing this to our attention. Do you mean you will discuss it here, or there? —Anne Delong (talk) 17:12, 21 May 2014 (UTC)
Oh dear. Will slides or a non-video summary be available? Thanks for letting us know! --j⚛e deckertalk 17:20, 21 May 2014 (UTC)
Hi Anne, that's the monthly research call, on livestream video (generally archived later). meta:Research_talk:AfC_processes_and_productivity#Discussion would be the most obvious place to discuss. (Sorry there's not much there at the moment, I didn't know about the call till the announcement went out today.)Jodi.a.schneider (talk) 18:35, 21 May 2014 (UTC)
Hi j⚛e, Looks like Aaron's slides are here. Jodi.a.schneider (talk) 18:35, 21 May 2014 (UTC)
Thanks! Much appreciated! I've reviewed them (I saw them posted before), and will watch the video and give myself a day before responding. --j⚛e deckertalk 18:37, 21 May 2014 (UTC)
There is a major flaw in your assumptions, Jodi, that every "survived" article is desirable. Tens of thousands of articles that we probably shouldn't have are currently in mainspace. Put another way, our processes of scrutiny for new mainspace articles are not as good as you assume. We are pretty good at catching blatant vandalism and blatant spam, but there is a whole lot of other stuff that makes it in. I clicked random article a few dozen times. Joyce Muskat and BridgeHead Software with very marginal notability and Stan Valchek which is apparently part of an article series that includes pretty much every major fictional character in The wire, written "in-universe" on top of the notability issues. If I took these to AfD, most would not survive or be merged. I found this stuff in just a few minutes of searching. I would estimate probably 3-5% of main article space wouldn't survive an AfD, based on my quick random sample. Gigs (talk) 18:40, 21 May 2014 (UTC)
We used surviving article rate more as a signal for the creation of quality articles than as an assertion that all surviving articles are good articles. While I appreciate that you can find a few counter-examples, that doesn't suggest that it is a bad metric. --EpochFail (talk • contribs) 02:22, 23 May 2014 (UTC)
Actually, it does suggest it's a bad metric. It is my experience, and you are welcome to present data that refutes this, is that a *lot* more actively problematic crap (in particular, spam and copyvios) makes it into mainspace via live creation than AfC. Perhaps the reason more articles survive direct creation than AfC is a combination of (a) more experienced editors know how to avoid AfC, so the populations entering each creation method are simply different, and (b) more articles survive direct creation because more copyvios and advertisements survive. (Very few other types of problematic content are so frequent as to be material, I don't consider non-notability to be "deeply problematic" by itself.) -j⚛e deckertalk 17:54, 23 May 2014 (UTC)
Article lifetime for deleted articles. The density of time between creation and deletion is plotted for deleted articles created between 2008 and 2013 in the English Wikipedia.
I think we're talking about different things here. I understand that there are many problematic articles created in the main namespace, but most of them don't survive even a few minutes (m:Research:The Speed of Speedy Deletions). By filtering out the articles that are deleted in a reasonable amount of time, I'm getting rid of most of the articles that ever will be deleted. See the methods section here: m:Research:Wikipedia_article_creation#Successful_articles and the figure to the right. --EpochFail (talk • contribs) 20:31, 24 May 2014 (UTC)


"The Speed of Speedy Deletions" is cool research, but doesn't really get you to the conclusion you draw from it, since it never examines the question of how many articles which should have been deleted never were.The limitation of samples to users who have received a message from another user on their talk page (something that is true almost always for deletions which do happen) is also a source of selection bias with respect to the conclusion you attempt to draw from it. It is interesting, but I don't find it compelling at all, I've spent some time tolling the "dark matter" of the encyclopedia to believe that there isn't a serious weight of unaddressed problems -- largely undetected copyvios and promotional issues. (Contrary to some panic, I don't think we have much of a problem with biographical attack material in the "dark matter", however, as least in terms of frequency. I expect some of the work that's been done on searching for keyword to find attacks has been effective.)
If I believed we caught the vast majority of problems, I'd be satisfied. Those we do catch, I agree we catch quickly. Do you know what fraction of pages are never reviewed at NPP, but just fall off the end? That would an interesting (imperfect, I'm sure, but I think interesting) metric. --j⚛e deckertalk 20:01, 25 May 2014 (UTC)
Epoch, your graphs show that the average lifetime of "bad" articles has significantly shortened right along with the rise of AfC. Seems like your data supports my point more than yours. Gigs (talk) 16:53, 27 May 2014 (UTC)
Reading those slides, I think the 65.5% of reviews happening within 24 hours number might be misleading. While this may be true, a great proportion of the reviews that occur in this period are failures of obviously hopeless drafts (this will include almost all the times blank pages are submitted accidentally etc.). It would be interesting to see the corresponding histogram only for drafts that get accepted. --LukeSurl t c 18:41, 21 May 2014 (UTC)
Having watched the presentation, it seems the histogram on slide 49 kinda has 2 modes, a first bump which is probably the "quick fails" which peaks at a few hours, and a second mode of "serious" reviews with a peak at about a week. Turns out this data is 2009-2013 (I asked on IRC). My guess is a histogram of the last few months would show longer average wait times. --LukeSurl t c 19:57, 21 May 2014 (UTC)
This is a fair point and something that I might be able to account for by fitting a mixture model to the graph (e.g. m:R:edit sessions). Thanks for the feedback! --EpochFail (talk • contribs) 02:27, 23 May 2014 (UTC)


Reasearchers (Halfak (WMF)—Jodi.a.schneider): If I read the slides correctly (mainly because I'm at work and can't watch the video) the premise is that AFC fails because we can't solicit editors interested in helping the candidates for submissions from the general populace and proposes to provide those extra eyes by having some sort of indicator on pages that the user tried to access in main space that there is one or more Drafts that they might be looking for? Hasteur (talk) 19:46, 21 May 2014 (UTC)

That's the gist, yes. I was borrowing some of the ideas (mockups) designed by the WMF design team for the Drafts namespace to make the point that there are ways forward. Another example of a way to bring attention from potential collaborators to drafts is including draft articles in User:SuggestBot's postings. We've already been discussing this possibility with User:Nettrom, the bot's maintainer. --EpochFail (talk • contribs) 02:25, 23 May 2014 (UTC)
I quite like this idea. There's a natural tension between wanting to avoid broadly publishing unreviewed drafts (which provides a fertile attractant for SEO experts) and trying to encourage collaboration, and your indicator idea (and SuggestBot idea, too) cuts directly to the crux of it. Lovely, really. --j⚛e deckertalk 17:56, 23 May 2014 (UTC)


In terms of future efforts for Wikipedia, let me also say that the environment in which AfC reviewers do their work is probably part of any problem that exists. 9 out of 10 (a statistic I completely pulled out of my anatomy, but probably not far off) drafts entering AfC are not going to pass muster for, by Wikipedia standards, very simple reasons: Either a simple copyvio, directly promotional text, or a lack of sources evidencing notability. We lack functional automation that can even detect if a draft is *blank* and reject that before a reviewer has to work with it, never mind automated detection of articles without sources, or improvements to the copyvio-detection automation that does exist. CorenBot/MadManBot are great, but that nobody has approached Google to allow them to work together (Google and the bots, that is) is very unfortunate.

If better automation were in place, and/or if the page creation workflow actually educated writers that they needed to write in their own words, that they need to produce to reliable sources for each article at a bare minimum, that they have to actually write something.... *before* they created an article, we could spend less time on the 90+% of article drafts that were never ever going to become articles, we could easily spend more time on the less than 10% that could, and, as a bonus, the process would be more pleasant, probably attracting more hands to the task.

Unfortunately, the Foundation strongly opposes educating users before they create articles, to the extent that they oppose research which would demonstrate whether such an approach were effective. --j⚛e deckertalk 21:25, 23 May 2014 (UTC)

Do you mean like this, which was proposed here and languishes in my sandbox? —Anne Delong (talk) 14:55, 26 May 2014 (UTC)
Oh my, yes. Yes! Yes!
See also meta:Talk:Article_Creation_Workflow/Design#Interactivity_and_editor_retention has some thoughts on this from 2011, and if my memory were better I'm pretty sure I could find some other longer thoughts on this point, but .... yes. I believe that handing a new editor the ability to create a new article is the metaphorical equivalent of putting them in a field of landmines. Until we stop doing that, everything is going to suck. --j⚛e deckertalk 20:24, 27 May 2014 (UTC)
Well, I don't know that that's something we can change. "Everybody can edit" appears to be a pretty basic part of Wikipedia, and the whole purpose of AfC is to help new users create articles. —Anne Delong (talk) 21:07, 27 May 2014 (UTC)
Sadly, "Anyone can edit" is being badly gamed. I don't think it prevents anyone from editing to have to click through a handful of screens to learn "Write in your own words", "Don't talk crap about people without a reliable neutral source", and "This isn't a place for your corporate boilerplate." The idea that that is somehow at odds with "anyone can edit", to me, feels needlessly pedantic. (I don't think you're being that way, but I do think it's where the "Anyone can edit" slogan begins to fail.) --j⚛e deckertalk 21:11, 27 May 2014 (UTC)
Also, isn't AfC itself a failure of the "Anyone can edit" principle? --j⚛e deckertalk 21:17, 27 May 2014 (UTC)
I wasn't around when AfC was set up, but I'm presuming that there was some kind of problem that it was designed to solve - maybe thousands upon thousands of COI, silly, blank, test, copyvio, essays, attack pages, etc., flooding the main encyclopedia faster than the experienced editors could discover and remove them. —Anne Delong (talk) 21:24, 27 May 2014 (UTC)
indeed! Don't get me wrong, I'm predisposed to like the AfC concept. But the idea that "someone must approve your article before others can se it in the encyclopedia" seems, fundamentally, more at odds with "anyone can edit" than "you have to take a quick introduction to Wikipedia basics, in ten screens, before you edit" would be. I guess I was just saying I'm not strongly persuaded by the idea that "Anyone can edit" should be taken as an absolute. --j⚛e deckertalk 21:34, 27 May 2014 (UTC)

Sorry I'm late to the conversation—I was away in late May. Anyhow, from my reading of the history, the original reason for the AfC project was that in December 2005, Wikipedia changed its policy to allow only registered users to create articles directly. AfC was designed to allow IPs to submit drafts which would then get some extra eyes before going into mainspace. By the Spring of 2007, a huge backlog had built up, so WikiProject AfC was created to draw in editors who could start tackling the backlog systematically—from which gradually developed all the templates, scripts, "rules", etc. Then the Article Wizard was developed and started shunting even registered users to AfC with no option to put their finished article directly into mainspace. That's where all the problems started. The backlogs got even bigger, the reviewing was rushed and often poor by inexperienced editors, with even experienced ones lacking the subject matter expertise to adequatelly assess drafts in certain subjects. The original idea to save newbies from being discouraged when their articles got quickly proposed for deletion in mainspace, was exchanged for discouraging newbies by having their articles languish for ages at AfC before they got reviewed, followed by inappropriate declines by a lot of very poor reviewers, and no possibility of real help or collaboration on their drafts. In fact, in my experience, drafts on truly encyclopedic subjects with zero COI suffered (and continue to suffer) the most in that respect. So Aaron (EpochFail) and Jodi's findings don't surprise me. Some of those problems have been or are in the process of being ameliorated, and the Article Wizard now gives editors the option to go straight to mainspace (albeit strongly discouraging them) but progress is slow, and a lot of problems remain. Any proposal to make the drafts more visible outside the walled garden of AfC would be welcome, and frankly, I'd make AfC the less preferred choice for registered users on the Wizard. Voceditenore (talk) 09:57, 5 June 2014 (UTC)

Wikipedia talk:Articles for creation/Michelle Schmitt Suggestion

Can anyone help with the category coding of this AFC and remove it from "Content Policy" ? See Category:Wikipedia content policies. I can't find the code in the article, sorry, and thanks. -- Alanscottwalker (talk) 16:04, 31 May 2014 (UTC)

done --nonsense ferret 16:10, 31 May 2014 (UTC)

Reminder: Purpose of AFC/Drafts

Reminder: The purpose of AFC/Drafts is to give editors who need some assistance with improving their submissions. Not to decline once and then run off immediately to have the submission declined deleted. We're only supposed to use the MFD route to get rid of troublesome submissions when the editor is not making improvements and there's no hope for the acceptance after multiple attempts. Hasteur (talk) 00:21, 30 May 2014 (UTC)

Hasteur, did you mean, "and then run off immediately to have the submission deleted"? (As opposed to "declined")? --Demiurge1000 (talk) 21:29, 30 May 2014 (UTC)
Demiurge1000 yep. If you want some context, take a look at my recent commentary at MFD and you'll see why I was venting Hasteur (talk) 01:38, 31 May 2014 (UTC)
There's another route than MfD, with a different purpose: Speedy should be used to remove not just outright copyvios, but also outright advertisements that could not be rewritten, though the criterion should be much more flexible than in mainspace.We should also be using the G2 "test page" speedy criterion to remove material that is hopelessly unencyclopedic and could not conceivably be made into an article regardless of how much work might be done on it. I also do not completely rule out the use of MfD for other reasons. DGG ( talk ) 18:33, 2 June 2014 (UTC)

General note regarding the June 2014 AFC Backlog drive.

I want some too!

This is the first drive to use the Draft namespace so I would like to ask everyone to be extra vigilant in regards to the score count that AFCBuddy calculates. A few issues popped up so far, most notably me forgetting to add the draft namespace as a namespace AFCBuddy should check. Besides this there appears to have been an change in the Mediawiki API and a change in the summary for the AFCH Rewrite version of the review script that caused some undetected \ uncredited G12 deletions. In other words: The usual startup problems at the start of a new drive.

Since we're currently on the second day of the drive the amount of reviews is still limited so anything odd should still be somewhat easy to spot. If you notice anything strange in your score count or listed reviews, please let me know. Excirial (Contact me,Contribs) 18:35, 2 June 2014 (UTC)

Excirial I need more points. Can you help with that /sarcasam Hasteur (talk) 19:19, 2 June 2014 (UTC)
Why don't you mass review 700 reviews? FoCuSandLeArN (talk) 22:18, 2 June 2014 (UTC)

InceptionBot now searches Draft space – Whooppee!

Just a note to say that InceptionBot which alerts subscribing WikiProjects to new articles potentially within their scope now searches Draft space as well. This is a real boon both for subscribing projects and for AfC. I monitor the WikiProject Opera new articles list frequently and today found a recent draft that was very promising. I fixed it up, referenced it and moved it to article space. Since all the major WikiProjects subscribe to the bot, it perhaps relieves AfC from tagging draft talk pages with project banners, which I gather from above might be problematic. Inception Bot uses the User:AlexNewArtBot page where you can find out more information on how it works and which WikiProjects subscribe to it. Best, Voceditenore (talk) 09:27, 3 June 2014 (UTC)

Voceditenore Did you say Inception? Cue the Inception Horn! ;-) Hasteur (talk) 11:58, 3 June 2014 (UTC)

Mark as patrolled?

If a draft is declined, but is clear of copyvios or other CSD-worthy content, should I also mark the page as patrolled? --LukeSurl t c 11:08, 3 June 2014 (UTC)

In draft space, I'd say yes -- if there's something truly serious, it should be headed toward deletion, if not, I don't see the need to put more work on the limited hands at NPP. Just be mindful that nothing slips in-between "CSD" and patrolled, maybe serious BLP violations could get past the attack CSD, I don't care if you mark them as patrolled, but make sure they're blanked and/or MfD'd. Those are rare, though, most of the truly serious stuff here is either copyvios or egregious promotion, and CSD and blanking are a broad enough toolbox for those. --j⚛e deckertalk 21:48, 3 June 2014 (UTC)
  • Even when tagging something for deletion, I still mark it as patrolled, always. There is no reason to ever not mark anything that isn't in article space as patrolled as long as you are taking appropriate action on it. If it needs deletion, tag it for deletion and mark it patrolled, if it needs ce, tag it for ce (or just do it) and mark it as patrolled, etc.. you get the point. — {{U|Technical 13}} (e • t • c) 22:19, 3 June 2014 (UTC)
    I think your wording is clearer than mine, so, I'll just add that I agree. --j⚛e deckertalk 00:49, 4 June 2014 (UTC) — Preceding unsigned comment added by Mdann52 (talk • contribs)

Does copying a Wikipedia article count as a copyvio?

If an draft is copy-and-pasted from an existing Wikipedia article and does not give any form of attribution to the source, should this be dealt with as a copyvio? --LukeSurl t c 00:17, 5 June 2014 (UTC)

It merely has to be correctly attributed to avoid copyvio. However, if the article is the same, it can be speedy deleted as G^, duplicating existing article; if it is used as a basis for modifications, it should be declined and the contributor advised to instead edit the affected article. Unfortunately, follow-ups show this is rarely done, and we lose the material unless some other editor does it, just as if a draft that could potentially be an article if improved sufficiently is declined and not improved. But if it is used as the basis for an altogether superior and very different article, it should be history-merged, but doing this is difficult: there is no clear way to handle this, but I normally accept it asunder a slightly different title, and then make a redirect from the existing inferior article, leaving a note on the article talk page. The redirect serves to provide attribution. The guiding principle is NOT BUREAUCRACY. DGG ( talk ) 00:27, 5 June 2014 (UTC)

Over 100 potentially spurious reviews in 1 hour

Before his name was removed from the Active Participants list by an administrator earlier today, an editor who had just come off a block "reviewed" and declined over 100 drafts in the space of an hour. I have rescued the following three which he declined for completely false reasons: Washington State Auditor, Standard Theatre (Philadelphia), and Rainer Schmidt (landscape architect). Here's one rescued by another editor: Welcome Chinese. From the comments on the editor's talk page, those 4 are just the tip of the iceberg. In my view, every one of his declines should be reverted and resubmitted for a new review. But even there, the damage to the editors he declined with spurious advice on their talk pages cannot be completely undone. These are the ones that need checking and/or wholesale reverting:

Voceditenore (talk) 16:59, 5 June 2014 (UTC)

I fixed your "Reviews in Draft space" link. DMacks (talk) 17:38, 5 June 2014 (UTC)
  • It may be a good idea not to take away the reviews from a removed editor's drive page, because all of those on the list should be re-reviewed, and the drive page is good for ke eping track of which ones have already been checked and also the result of the re-review. —Anne Delong (talk) 17:35, 5 June 2014 (UTC)
  • @Anne Delong: it won't remove reviews listed on the editors drive page - it just won't update that page anymore. If required AFCBuddy can generator a drive page for any editor, participant or not (It just needs to be told to do so). So if we ever need an overview of an editors reviewing between a specific time period, AFCBuddy can easily generate it. Excirial (Contact me,Contribs) 18:53, 5 June 2014 (UTC)
Yes, Technical 13 that's who I'm referring to. The links above are to all the reviews he did today. They were done while his name was still on the Active Participants list. I'm simply saying that all those drafts on the lists need re-reviewing, and pronto in my view. I'm not sure what you mean by "excluded". If it's what Anne's referring to, I agree that the drive page should be kept. I didn't even know there was such a thing. Voceditenore (talk) 17:45, 5 June 2014 (UTC)
  • Cool. Excirial, I've removed him from the drive's participants list per your clarification. Anne, I don't see any reason to delete his drive page, and that would take an admin to delete it, which I'm not suggesting. We're all fine. :) — {{U|Technical 13}} (e • t • c) 17:51, 5 June 2014 (UTC)
  • Well, it seems that since Bonkers only reviewed the submissions very recently, there is no drive page for him yet because the AfC Buddy hadn't had a chance to run since the reviews were done. One would have to be deliberately created so that re-reviews could be done. —Anne Delong (talk) 17:58, 5 June 2014 (UTC)
  • Sorry, I did look for Bonkers' drive page and didn't find it; maybe the search engine index hadn't been updated. At any rate, I'm glad that's sorted out. I am remembering that Bonkers declined my first article... —Anne Delong (talk) 19:46, 5 June 2014 (UTC)
  • Thanks again Thaddeus. While they all seem to have been reverted, there are many that haven't subsequently been reviewed again. Those people already got notices, and although you may have apologized for that, I think it is only fair to them that those draft do in fact get reviewed as soon as is reasonable possible... I've started and taken out a chunk of them. I'll go through in a bit and try to finish up as many as I can, and I'll remove the "done" ones from the list. Happy reviewing! — {{U|Technical 13}} (e • t • c) 15:01, 6 June 2014 (UTC)

Observation: Only 5 days into the drive and we're already had our first case of review rigging. This is indicative in my mind that once this backlog drive is done, no more backlog drive should be commenced until we put better safeguards in place to make it more difficult for individual editors to disrupt the purpose of the drive. Hasteur (talk) 19:13, 5 June 2014 (UTC)

If I might, can we clean up the mess first? I don't disagree, but perhaps there are better places to begin. --j⚛e deckertalk 19:14, 5 June 2014 (UTC)
@Hasteur: What measures would have have been capable of preventing this particular incident from occurring? Bonkers passes the criteria set for the AFCH tool, and unless we would manually review every reviewer upfront i don't see how this could have been prevented (And even if we did review upfront, would we have declined Bonkers on the basis of his recent unblock in the first place?).
For me this highlight another concern though: During a drive we add a competitive element and keep tabs on the various reviewers involved trough peer reviews. If we catch so many instances of bad reviewing during a drive, what indication is this quality-wise for non-drive periods? We don't peer review each other as actively (or at all) outside the drives so these issues might not be limited merely to the backlog drives. The competitive element may be partially responsible for these incidents, but i think it is safe to conclude problematic reviews happen outside the drives as well - they are just not caught as readily. Excirial (Contact me,Contribs) 19:38, 5 June 2014 (UTC)

Not all "completely false reasons" as alleged

Does anyone seriously believe that it is "completely false" to suggest that a submission is "written like an advertisement" when it has the following text making up a substantial proportion of the lead:

The mission of the office... The mission supports the vision... The goal of this mission is to help governments ... Better government is the bottom line.

That's Washington State Auditor as declined by Bonkers.

His review of Rainer Schmidt (landscape architect) was still wrong, as the problems were much more minor, but that review can't reasonably be described as "completely false" either, as the submission as declined contained not only a massive list of twenty-seven projects and fourteen "publications", almost all of them apparently non-notable and none of them supported by inline citations to independent discussion of them, but also text like;

This inspired him to... major professional concern is to work comprehensively by holistic and multi-disciplinary approaches... This implies synthesis of cultural and natural sciences with artful and skillful application...

I'm not suggesting there aren't a lot of bad reviews here. In fact, I think Bonkers should stop reviewing for now (can't we deny his use of AFCH, these days?). And of course more than one review per minute is highly inappropriate. But I think we need to keep a sense of proportion about the scale of the problem. These look to be good-faith, if problematic, reviews. --Demiurge1000 (talk) 20:00, 5 June 2014 (UTC)

More or less, they either need to be rereviewed, or they don't. I felt the problems were bad enough, from the few I looked at, to put them in the first category, but you're welcome to revert my mass reversions if you disagree, I won't edit war over it. As far as "completely false" or whatever, I sort of feel like that's not really very relevant at this point. --j⚛e deckertalk 20:09, 5 June 2014 (UTC)
(edit conflict) Considering that the editor in question recently came off a Indefinite block using the Standard Offer argument, had been banned from DYK for one reason or annother, had a DYK nomination turned down because of the ban, could not help but comment on the DYK after they were reminded that even commenting about the DYK might be read by hard nosed admins as violating the ban, and then going on a poor quality review streak, I think using some of the less GF terminology to describe this user is well within reasonable discretion. Hasteur (talk) 20:13, 5 June 2014 (UTC)
I don't have a problem with the mass reversions (my thinking being that, if the clown had declined or accepted a submission and you revert, in either case that means the submission will be queued to be reviewed by someone else instead; which doesn't damage anything really.) --Demiurge1000 (talk) 20:47, 5 June 2014 (UTC)
Cool, thanks. --j⚛e deckertalk 21:21, 5 June 2014 (UTC)
Just my two cents, but surely reviewing at more than one per minute means that there is no opportunity to follow the workflow, check for copyvio etc. Even assuming good faith (which, per Hasteur, I don't), this cannot be anything but gaming the system to get shiny Barnstars. BethNaught (talk) 21:17, 5 June 2014 (UTC)
What makes you think that most reviewers follow the "workflow"? I certainly don't. I doubt JustBerry did/does either. --Demiurge1000 (talk) 21:57, 5 June 2014 (UTC)
What I meant is that some things must be done, such as check for copyvio, and you can't reasonably do that, plus clicking all the decline buttons and so on, in less than a minute, so clearly he didn't pay attention to the submissions. BethNaught (talk) 07:14, 6 June 2014 (UTC)
  • Bonkers has been blocked indefinitely for disruption. I support rolling back all his "reviews" and will now also remove the talk message sent to the users, which are likely more damaging than the poor reviews themselves. --ThaddeusB (talk) 21:20, 5 June 2014 (UTC)
  • Better to strike then explain, as they will likely get an email - including section headers - saying that the clown and then you commented on their talk page, and will thus be potentially very confused. --Demiurge1000 (talk) 21:57, 5 June 2014 (UTC)
  • I have now removed, striken, replaced, and/or apologized for all the clown's talk page edits. I have also reopened 10 or so AfCs not caught in previous reverts due to intermediate edits by other users. It took me about 2:15 just to undo the edits, and that was with most the the AfCs themselves already being fixed. That gives yet another idea of how much attention the clown was giving to the "reviews". --ThaddeusB (talk) 23:54, 5 June 2014 (UTC)
  • this one pretty much proves Bonkers wasn't even looking at the articles - the entire content was doubled and a declined message was already at the top of the page, but bonkers just happily declined the second notice (in the middle of the page). --ThaddeusB (talk) 23:15, 5 June 2014 (UTC)
  • I'm not following your logic. Why would the presence of an existing previous decline template, or duplication of content, imply that a reviewer should not act on a new submission template on the same page? Or that they had done so without reading the content? LinkedIn and such sources as were provided are certainly not what I'd term "reliable". --Demiurge1000 (talk) 07:20, 6 June 2014 (UTC)
Demiurge1000, obviously some of Bonkers's declines will have been be appropriate by sheer probability, since the majority of submissions are basically advertisements written with a COI and/or with completely inadequate references. However, you don't decline a draft which is basically encyclopedic for one or two infelicitous sentences. You look at the references carefully and assess the suitability of the article for mainspace and the degree to which any infelicities can be fixed by normal copyediting. In the case of the landscape architect, there were two books devoted to his work (not written by him) and several more with large sections devoted to it (with page numbers given). In the case of the Washington State Auditor, not only were there adequate references, you are talking about a major elected executive office in a US state with dozens of incoming links. In these cases, you move the draft to mainspace, remove the sentence, tag for any other clean up as necessary. It takes a minimum of 10-15 minutes to adequately review and assess a draft which is on an obviously potential encyclopedic topic with multiple references (albeit not optimally formatted). He took less than one minute. He declined the Standard Theatre (Philadelphia) which had multiple references to reliable sources and whose former site has an historical marker because he didn't like the alleged "informal tone". I'd bet my bottom dollar that he didn't even notice that where it did occur it was primarily in clearly marked and referenced quotations and paraphrases. And failure to adhere to neutral point of view? Again, not remotely a pervasive problem in that article. In my view, his reasons for declining the three drafts I re-reviewed were completely spurious. Voceditenore (talk) 08:32, 6 June 2014 (UTC)
  • The implication is that a person actually looking at the article attempt would see the duplicated content and template placement and fix it. No one would act on a template in the middle of a page if they were actually paying attention; a script, however, doesn't care where the template is. --ThaddeusB (talk) 14:13, 6 June 2014 (UTC)
  • No, if I were declining that submission because I believed it appropriate to do so, I would do the exact same. It is only if I were accepting the article that I would remove the duplicate (and the AFCH script would remove the templates for me). I think you'll find that in fact the vast majority of AFC declines are carried out using the AFCH script, so your point remains completely obscure, to me at least. --Demiurge1000 (talk) 20:02, 6 June 2014 (UTC)
  • I'm rather baffled that someone would intentionally leave the entire article text duplicated... In any case, another one I just saw was declined as "non-notable person" and wasn't even about a person... Is there really any doubt the Bonker's made no effect to actually review anything? He was clicking buttons as fast as he could to get points, with zero regard to what the declines would mean to anyone else. The fact that he sometimes clicked the correct button just means he guessed correctly sometimes, not that any actual effort was exherted. --ThaddeusB (talk) 21:47, 6 June 2014 (UTC)

I've had a look at a few of the reviews Bonkers did, and the problem with all of them is that they were a boilerplate AFCH template message, with no other comment. Even if he believed a decline was the correct response, he failed to indicate why and we are not mind readers. This is not acceptable - if you decline something, you must give the submitter something that will help them, and ideally praise the areas they did get right eg: "this one news source you've found is great - can you find anymore like that? We should be able to pass this then". Ritchie333 (talk) (cont) 10:34, 6 June 2014 (UTC)

I believe the majority of declines use the boilerplate messages from one of the options on the AFCH script, without further comment. (Some of mine do and some don't.) Some have argued that shouldn't be the case, but such arguments are not having much impact on the reviewing yet. If that was the biggest problem with the clown's reviews - and I don't believe it was - then it's a problem that affects AFC as a whole. --Demiurge1000 (talk) 20:02, 6 June 2014 (UTC)

Discussions at ANI and on Bonkers' talk page

There are discussion at ANI and on Bonkers' Talk page that look like he might be allowed back in under certain conditions. I have posted at both topics that he will not be welcomed back here at AFC. Unfortunately I phrased my comment in a way that looks like I was commenting on behalf of AFC and someone has already objected to the way I said it, (while I was already busy typing this post!) so I'm here to get a consensus on whether we are willing to welcome Bonkers back here as a reviewer. Roger (Dodger67) (talk) 07:52, 7 June 2014 (UTC)Roger (Dodger67) (talk) 07:32, 7 June 2014 (UTC)

There's no chance of the clown being unblocked anytime soon, so looking for reasons to badmouth him yet again here, in order to export that "verdict" back to his talkpage and to other places in order to get him banned or keep him blocked, is bad taste and quite frankly repulsive. Find something better to do with your time. I am beginning to see why people from the "global south" mostly don't bother trying to contribute on Wikipedia. The reason is behaviour like yours. --Demiurge1000 (talk) 08:03, 7 June 2014 (UTC)
Someone has proposed unblocking him, I have a right to express my opposition to that proposal. BTW I'm South African, so don't try to preach to me about the "Global South" ok. Roger (Dodger67) (talk) 08:11, 7 June 2014 (UTC)
Without wishing to be rude -- yes your background kind of shows. Sorry. --Demiurge1000 (talk) 08:21, 7 June 2014 (UTC)
Can we please keep on topic and avoid personal attacks! (t) Josve05a (c) 11:04, 7 June 2014 (UTC)
Yes, we should. Declaring a person "not welcome" is about as deep into personal attacks as we can go. --Demiurge1000 (talk) 12:07, 7 June 2014 (UTC)
Demiurge1000 When an editor causes so much disruption that we would be better off without their contributions is the basis for a Topic Ban. Declaring them Persona non grata is exactly what making them non-welcome is. In this case how many volunteer hours have been wasted on rectifying Bonker's mistakes. I do endorse the below rehabilitation plan (6 months incident/drama free, then a gradual/controlled return to reviewing AFC submissions). Hasteur (talk) 14:09, 7 June 2014 (UTC)
Demiurge - Shooting the messenger or what? 8-( Andy Dingley (talk) 01:05, 8 June 2014 (UTC)
Sometimes one has to be blunt in order to show people the damage they are doing, or could be doing. Sure we could ban everyone from Singapore or everyone that might be under the age of 18, but for now we don't plan to do that. And, in my opinion, shouldn't. --Demiurge1000 (talk) 21:13, 8 June 2014 (UTC)
  • I have no objections to letting him review drafts, under a certain set of conditions that is. First, he needs to go 3-6 months incident free onwiki being productive in other areas (there are so many, this should be relatively easy). By this I don't mean he can have disputes or disagreements, just that he needs to stay calm and resolve them appropriately without getting blocked. Second, if at that time he still wishes to come back and review drafts at AfC, then he needs to limit himself to 5 a day to start, all of which need to be rechecked by another reviewer, if this goes well for a couple weeks, the limit can be raised upon AfC community consensus. For each of his reviews, the answer that he gives should include a comment (unless blatantly obvious for things like copyvio, in which case he needs to make sure he lists the URL for checking), and this comment should be clear and concise as to what the editor needs to do to get the draft accepted on the next try. He will be banned from participating in any BLDs until he has exhibited competence in reviewing. I agree that these requirements are fairly stiff, but I think it is warranted. I'm willing to consider other ideas as well on the topic. — {{U|Technical 13}} (e • t • c) 11:34, 7 June 2014 (UTC)

Reza Ghorbani

Hello. A bit new to this. I've been attempting to go through some of the older articles, and have approved/rejected several today. However, I attempted to approve this article, since it now has some notable, reliable and independent sources, but after clicking on the "approve article" button, it simply says it's moving the article from the draft to the real article, but never finishes the move. Am I doing something incorrectly? Onel5969 (talk) 18:49, 5 June 2014 (UTC)

No, the move is failing because an admin protected the Reza Ghorbani article after repeated attempts to create the article, presumably in some problematic way. You might want to ask the protecting administrator, whose name you can find here, if they'd be willing to unprotect the article. --j⚛e deckertalk 19:11, 5 June 2014 (UTC)
Thanks Joe Decker, will do that. Onel5969 (talk) 00:46, 6 June 2014 (UTC)
See also Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Reza Ghorbani. No article should be created about this person without addressing the issues raised in the AFD or, in the alternative, going through WP:Deletion review. By the way, the reason for the salting probably has something to do with this user's behavior. davidwr/(talk)/(contribs) 22:16, 6 June 2014 (UTC)

Help desk changes

Hey everyone, I've been working on improving the flow of our very own help desk... I've created {{Lafc}} to be used on that page as part of our new preload template which is activated when ever someone new clicks on the big:

Click here to ask a new question.

link at the top of the page (of which this is a working copy of). I've also taken a moment to add to the lower left corner of the screen a static box that holds links to the very top of the page, the TOC, today's requests, and the very bottom of the page. I think this will make navigation much simpler.

What I'm looking for now is feedback. Do you like the new changes? Are there things that need to be fixed (I'm sure there are use cases or things I didn't test for)? Would you like other things added I hadn't thought of before? Any feedback is welcomed here. Happy reviewing! — {{U|Technical 13}} (e • t • c) 20:37, 5 June 2014 (UTC)

Oh, saving and sitting back, I'm reminded of the other thing I wanted to talk about. I find that only archiving once a week is resulting in a fairly long page. How would everyone feel about shortening that to once every five or even better in my opinion three days? I'm also thinking that we should have the "regular" archival bot archiving the page instead of scsbot. The reason for this is that using scsbot, everything gets archived (even active discussions) if they were started more than a week before the archival run. I'm thinking if we switch bots, cut the threshold down to three days of inactivity, then the page will be shorter and active discussions won't be getting archived for one.
The other reason I bring this up is that the new {{Lafc}} uses {{(pf)ifexist:}} which is an expensive parser function. This means that if for some reason we get more than 83 or so requests that have draft pagenames in them, then the template will quit working for any subsequent uses and we will get dumped into a bad place. I do not expect this to happen, even with the current setup, but archiving only the inactive requests more frequently should pretty much ensure it. — {{U|Technical 13}} (e • t • c) 20:44, 5 June 2014 (UTC)
Three days would be too short; we've had comments recently that some help desk queries don't even get answered for three days. --Demiurge1000 (talk) 12:25, 8 June 2014 (UTC)
  • I wouldn't have ever seen this if I hadn't seen in the history that you commented here. Anyways, I have no problem with just trimming it back by two days to five days and going from there. I don't often answer request there because the page is simply too big and feels somewhat overwhelming. I wonder how many other reviewers feel that way, and maybe by archiving more reviewer response will go up and response time will go down. If that happens, and things are getting answered quickly, we can revisit trimming it down more later. :) — {{U|Technical 13}} (e • t • c) 15:35, 8 June 2014 (UTC)
Update: I've also just updated {{AFC submission/declined}} to use the new setup for asking a question on our help desk... I was confused where all of the old style questions were coming from until I figured it out. Because I wanted to autopopulate the draft page name from all questions incoming from that link (which will make it easy to tell how people are asking questions), I created a custom preload template for that (which may end up being moved if I find further use from it, is there a link on the pending template? Hrmm. I'll have to look into that)... Anyways, it is currently located at Template:AFC submission/declined/HD_preload and I encourage people to try the link out with show preview (not actually saving help requests) so we can try and make it as easy to read (and follow the instructions) as possible. Thanks again for any feedback you can offer. I'm going to bed now, but look forward to a tone of notifications of me being mentioned to give opinions and advice (and I know you all have some, so don't be shy). :D — {{U|Technical 13}} (e • t • c) 02:35, 6 June 2014 (UTC)

Since someone decided that WP:BRD really means BRRD, I'm bringing this here. Do we honestly need a parade of arrows that puffs the Template:AFC submission/declined/HD_preload and when someone attempts to create a new Help Desk thread? I think WP:CIR means we shouldn't baby people who are using the help desk, therefore I ask if there is consensus to re-establish the change described here. Hasteur (talk) 14:12, 6 June 2014 (UTC)

  • I'm not impressed that you decided to start this as a personal attack against me. You were bold in changing "part" of the template, I reverted you, we're here discussing it. Seems pretty BRD to me. Anyways, does the chain of arrows for new users pointing down to where the Save page is that they have to click in order for their request to be saved is hurting anything? All of the comments and instructions are wrapped in {{subst:Void}} templates so that none of that extra initial instruction is left on the page for anyone else to have to see. You think WP:CIR means we shouldn't baby people who are using the help desk and I say that not babying them a little for things like Help Desks and the Teahouse and other new editor places is being too WP:BITEy. — {{U|Technical 13}} (e • t • c) 19:57, 6 June 2014 (UTC)
    • I disagree, your BOLD statement was wishing this template into creation, my action was reverting the addition of nonsense to make it more compact, your action of undoing my removal is a SECOND revert in contravention of BRD which you blithely decided to quote at me as justification for your revert. So, because you reverted without starting the discussion I get to frame the discussion. Now as you are well aware having content like your happy arrow pattern in the page is wasteful and could cause previews to fail because there's so much template parser data in it. I'd hope that any editor who created a AFC submission, and went to try and get feedback about their submission being declined (which is the only case this pre-load is being invoked from, would be able to know how to hit the save button (something they demonstrated the capability of before). But apparently we need to treat them like toddlers... Hasteur (talk) 20:08, 6 June 2014 (UTC)
      • Very good, I created a template, and you BOLDly changed it, I reverted your change, and here we are discussing it. (If you had reverted my change, there would have been no template, simple). Now, what on earth are you talking about template parser data? That would only apply here if the entire comment wasn't wrapped in {{subst:Void}} which means that it isn't transcluded once they hit save. It has zero residual impact once they hit save page. There is no waste there at all. Some of these AFC draft creators don't even have an account, or they do have an account and they are so new that it's their first day here and this may in fact be their second or third edit, ever... I have no crazy expectations that they should understand exactly what "You have to hit the save page button, which is at the bottom of this window, that you may not be able to see without scrolling down (I know I have to scroll down to see it with standard wiki settings)". For all you know, some of them may actually be toddlers, as there is no minimum age to edit Wikipedia. — {{U|Technical 13}} (e • t • c) 20:20, 6 June 2014 (UTC)
    • In addition please read the "Editing beyond your means", "Lack of Technical Expertiese", and "Newbie" sections of WP:CIR. If they were able to save a page before, why should we patronize them by drawing a arrow to the save button, which might be even more WP:BITEy. Hasteur (talk) 20:16, 6 June 2014 (UTC)

I think the chain of arrows is unnecessary; it will add a scroll bar to the text box for presumably most editors (unless their browser height is very tall with respect to their font height), causing them to scroll down looking for where the arrows point to, only to find they don't point to anything in the text box. Also, since there's other UI widgets between the text box and the "Save" button, it's not very evident that the "Save" button is being pointed to. I think this is more confusing than helpful. isaacl (talk) 14:29, 7 June 2014 (UTC)

A step-by-step guide like Wikipedia:WikiProject Medicine/How to edit with a video and screenshots illustrating the editing steps would be good to help complete newcomers. isaacl (talk) 14:40, 7 June 2014 (UTC)
I agree with User:Isaacl that the arrows are unnecessary: they've pressed the save button previously. A reminder in words may well be appropriate to jog the memory, but, again, the arrows could be more confusing than helpful, given how thick the bottom of the edit box is. BethNaught (talk) 21:45, 7 June 2014 (UTC)
@Isaacl and Beth: there have been no arrows in any of the preload templates for 5-10 minutes now (I'm guessing you are looking at a cached copy or look at it before my modifications). I've added a Save page to the edit notice so it is clear what they are looking for and have to press, so the arrows were no longer needed. I'm assuming everything else looks fine? — {{U|Technical 13}} (e • t • c) 21:50, 7 June 2014 (UTC)
The arrows are gone, fine. It's just a shame you and Hasteur seem to keep getting at each other. (No allocation of blame to either side implied.) BethNaught (talk) 22:00, 7 June 2014 (UTC)
  • I've been away for six month-ish and in that time a few things have changed around here, especially the help desk. I am broadly supportive of change but it seems some have not been properly implemented. It seems the new {{Lafc}} template causes problems for other templates as shown by the redlinks in the decline notification templates here. It also does not seem fully completable with {{AFCHD/u}} when placed via Twinkle. The redlinks in decline notification templates are particularly problematic as it will confuse submitters at AfC and quite likely lead to them creating duplicate submissions or complete crap directly in the mainspace. I have not yet formulated an opinion on the pros and cons of the new changes but can we please revert to the last stable version while all the bugs are ironed out? Bellerophon talk to me 10:28, 8 June 2014 (UTC)
    • Finally! Thank you Bellerophon! Some in-depth but to the point feedback!
      First, {{Lafc}} has nothing to do with the redlinks in the decline notification templates. That has been an on-going issue for years now (the problem before was always links to user page drafts showing up as "Wikipedia talk:Articles for creation/User:Example/draft"). With the introduction of the new Draft namespace, and certain people pushing for it's exclusive use, the problem has been compounded because now it also shows "Wikipedia talk:Articles for creation/Draft:Example". This means that more often than not, the pages aren't in WT:Afc/ anymore, and as such, the template no longer prefixes that (it expects a full page name to be passed every time). The AFCHRW properly passes the full page name to the template every time, as well does the AFCH beta version I believe. This has been a fix that we've been trying to do a slow transition on to make it a little less abrupt of a change with tons of issues all at once.
      Next, I wasn't aware that WP:Twinkle placed {{AFCHD/u}}, and will get on coming up with a pull request to fix that as soon as possible. No-one had advised me of that and there is no "This template is used by Twinkle" banner on the top of the template page like there is suppose to be. I'll correct that issue as well. I'm hoping that in the process of adding a guided tour for the entire AfC process to be able to offer links right on the help requests themselves to be able to send the user a notification using that template without having to go to their talk page and use Twinkle (a feature which has been discussed).
So, the only bug is that Twinkle is having an issue posting the template? I'm not sure how big of an issue that is, as most of the headers using the old format were broken misapplied anyways, and this is actually starting to create some consistency (which is what Twinkle will need to fix the problem correctly). — {{U|Technical 13}} (e • t • c) 15:18, 8 June 2014 (UTC)
@Technical 13: I understood most of what you said, but not all. To clarify, in the user talkpage I linked you to, why is the final decline notification template showing a redlink to mainspace (Sanaka Educational Trust's Group of Institutions)? I understand that there have been problems transitioning from WT:AFC to Draft: Is there a way that the template can intelligently handle links to both Draft: and WT:AFC namespace? The decline notification template is a core template to the AFC process (along with the accept notification template). I see it as a high priority that they work properly. You are right the issue with {{AFCHD/u}} and Twinkle is not a high priority. It was I who asked the Twinkle techs to make that template compatible with their noticeboard notification option in the Talkback system, so I'll take that one on the chin. Bellerophon talk to me 21:41, 8 June 2014 (UTC)
Thank you for the explanation. I will submit some more detailed feedback on {{Lafc}} at the helpdesk when I've got more used to it. Bellerophon talk to me 23:32, 8 June 2014 (UTC)
  • Okay, Bellerophon (and everyone else that has ever complained), on the decline template front... Since I find this issue unacceptable as well, and apparently there is a bug in the old script still, I've applied another patch to the {{Afc decline}} template itself so that there should never be another red link. I've tested it with the production version of the script with success on both Draft: pages and Wikipedia talk:Articles for creation/ pages and I've tested it with the beta version of the script with success on both Draft: pages and Wikipedia talk:Articles for creation/ pages and none of them are displaying redlinks (it's set up to not show the sentence at all and let them get the link from the header if the link is a redlink)... I should be able to make another edit to get the WT:AFC/ ones working with the proper link and then I'm going to bed. We can discuss it more tomorrow (approaching midnight and I might just wait until I'm awake tomorrow to fix this issue knowing there should be no more confusing redlinks). — {{U|Technical 13}} (e • t • c) 03:14, 9 June 2014 (UTC)
  • Halfak (EpochFail—Halfak (WMF)—PermaNoob—GLTester) -- I'm wondering if this kind of data that is just starting to become available is of any interest to your research project on ways to improve page creation through AfC. Thanks. — {{U|Technical 13}} (e • t • c) 17:28, 8 June 2014 (UTC)
    • Hey Technical 13, reading the above conversation, I'm not sure I see what data you are talking about. Can you give me a quick breakdown of the new data? --EpochFail (talk • contribs) 13:22, 9 June 2014 (UTC)
      • I'd be glad to EpochFail. The way I currently have it set up, if the user clicks on the link from the template in a declined draft, the pagename for the draft parameter is automatically populated as |declined=pagename; similarly, if the follow the link from the pending or draft templates, the pagename is automatically populated as |pending=pagename or |draft=pagename respectively. If the user does not follow a link from the draft itself, but they instead navigate to WP:AFC/HD directly and click on the big "click here to ask a question" link, then they need to manually enter the pagename, but it is stored in the implicit |1=pagename. I figured this would be useful data to see when new editors, new page creators are finding they are stuck and need assistance. It also gives a hint to the responding helper before they even look at the draft what the status of the draft is. I am still looking for other links that bring people here, and based on the last couple days, I think I found the big ones because I'm not seeing any of the old style headers. — 13:30, 9 June 2014 (UTC) — {{U|Technical 13}} (e • t • c)


Template:Lafc

Ok Technical 13, I've had some time to get my head around {{Lafc}} and the changes it has made to the helpdesk. It seems on a lot of occasions we are getting 'no draft specified' errors. I suspect that is because the user in question is not filling something in properly when they ask their question — unless you can tell me different? On that note, I have to say that these instructions are extremely daunting looking and confusing, even to me. I think we (collectively) need to work on those, but I haven't formulated any potential solution just yet. Having said that, the new headers which include the time, date and contributor are quite good for keeping track of things. Bellerophon talk to me 11:13, 9 June 2014 (UTC)

  • That's actually useful data that there is no draft specified as it means they are using the link at the top of this page instead of the one on the draft template itself. Also means the preloads need a little work. I agree that the editnotice isn't optimal yet, and I look forward to developing it as a community. — {{U|Technical 13}} (e • t • c) 12:50, 9 June 2014 (UTC)
Good stuff, I notice Scsbot is no longer adding date headers (as of the 7th June) to the help desk; is this related to the changes? Bellerophon talk to me 16:45, 9 June 2014 (UTC)
  • I'm unsure about that, but part of this discussion is how to move forward with archival of the sections on this page. I'm not sure if it isn't doing it because it doesn't know to, or because it has been beaten to it. Anyone know how to get in touch with the bot operator? I tried finding them on the 7th, but got distracted and forgot about it. Would be great to get some feedback from them on this. I'm seeing that almost all of the headers are using the new format (and for data collection purposes for now, the ones that use the link to start a new section are getting dmy headers and those using the editnotice instructions are getting mdy headers, in case you were wondering. This was an unintentional combination, but I think it might prove useful to leave it for now (I may adjust the template and notice slightly later to get the same header but still record how they are asking by having them use 2= from the edit notice and 1= from the link, but I'm in class right now (bio - 6 hours), so it will have to wait a little bit. — {{U|Technical 13}} (e • t • c) 17:00, 9 June 2014 (UTC)
Update: I've left a notice on the bot owner's talk page and apparently the semi-bot isn't archiving the regular help desk either. — {{U|Technical 13}} (e • t • c) 19:30, 9 June 2014 (UTC)
@Technical 13: Ah right, thanks for the update. On the subject of the editnotice and preload: It is possible to simply preload the header bar (the one that would appear if someone clicked 'new section')? Leaving the main text box free of code? Bellerophon talk to me 11:08, 10 June 2014 (UTC)

Edit request side topic

Enough already, this is not the venue for you two to air your grievances about each other. Either bitch at each other on your talk pages or dig you own graves at WP:AN/I. Bellerophon talk to me 10:21, 8 June 2014 (UTC)

The following discussion 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.

  • I agree Beth. Hasteur and I don't always disagree, but when we do... It is just that I'm (possibly overly) cautious when implementing changes and go slow, take my time and gather consensus by editing, and Hasteur wants what Hasteur wants when Hasteur wants it. This particular instance was that this is still very much a work in progress, (which is why I've been asking for feedback here and on the help desk itself), and I was simply waiting on a little more input before changing the initial development version to give everyone a chance to look at it. Isaacl also mentioned that there needed to be some kind of extra guidance (they suggested someone sit down and make a step by step instructional tutorial video, which I just don't have time for), but they weren't sure the arrows were helpful. I slept on it and a few hours ago, I implemented some changes to the editnotice so that the arrows wouldn't have to be here anymore. I was going to remove them tonight anyways, Hasteur is just a little too impatient sometimes. Anyways... Happy editing and I hope you have a wonderful rest of your day. — {{U|Technical 13}} (e • t • c) 22:10, 7 June 2014 (UTC)
  • BethNaught There's a difference between my objection and T13's deliberate moving forward with implementing something that was already contentious that could not be changed because the templates were protected. The action was against the requirements of Template-protected editor userright. When the underlying discussion was stymied by T13's non-response and him moving forward with adding the template further shows me that I'm going to have to kick and scream to get them to get the discussion moving. Hasteur (talk) 22:55, 7 June 2014 (UTC)
  • Okay, let's follow the chain of events for this for today, shall we?
  1. @15:31, June 4, 2014‎ (UTC); I started working on this project with a goal of Let's change the "Review of Wikipedia talk:Articles for creation/Your submission name here" default section header (which many don't fix), to ...
  2. @16:20, June 4, 2014 (UTC); I asked the community directly affected by these changes for input.
  3. @16:32, June 4, 2014 (UTC); Voceditenore gave their support for this little project.
  4. @17:41, June 4, 2014 (UTC); Timtrent gave their support for this little project.
  5. Between June 4, 2014 and June 7, 2014; I made multiple edits and ran multiple assorted test to accomplish my initial goal and improve upon it to make it easier for helpers on that help desk to assist new users.
  6. @14:40, June 7, 2014 (UTC); Isaacl said that they thought the chain of arrows was unnecessary, but there should be a step-by-step guide like Wikipedia:WikiProject Medicine/How to edit with a video and screenshots illustrating the editing steps would be good to help complete newcomers.
  7. @15:26, June 7, 2014 (UTC) [46 minutes later]; I made an edit to the editnotice showing what the Save page button looks like and giving instructions on how to post a request on the page for those not using a preload link.
  8. @19:41, June 7, 2014 (UTC) [4 hours 15 minutes later]; I made an edit to the core template that the page relies on to fix a minor bug where a non-existant page link to User:Draft was showing up on the AFC/HD. It took me a little while to get the right combination to fix the issue.
  9. @20:17, June 7, 2014 (UTC) [36 minutes later]; I created a new preload for those that are coming from.
  10. @20:19, June 7, 2014 (UTC) [2 minutes later]; I added a new parameter for those coming from pages tagged as "draft" as a start to being able to gain some more metrics for what point in the AfC process people are asking for help.
  11. @20:20, June 7, 2014 (UTC) [1 minute later]; I followed up by adjusting the draft template to use the new preload.
  12. @20:58, June 7, 2014 (UTC) [38 minute later]; Hasteur opened an edit request to undo two days worth of work because him and one other person don't like the arrows that show up only in the edit box for the new editor that may have never edited any page on Wikipedia before in their life and then disappear when the Save page button is pressed.
  13. @21:40, June 7, 2014 (UTC) [42 minutes later]; I removed the arrows from all four preload templates (not just the one that Hasteur actually requested and objected to) here, here, here, and here.
  14. @21:44, June 7, 2014 (UTC) [4 minutes later]; I closed the edit request as the arrows pointing first time users to the save page button were removed, which was what the whole complaint was based on.
  15. @21:45, June 7, 2014 (UTC) [1 minute later]; BethNaught agreed with Isaacl that the arrows may be unnecessary, based on a belief that they've pressed the save button previously, which I argue may not be true as it could be their very first edit.
— {{U|Technical 13}} (e • t • c) 00:14, 8 June 2014 (UTC)
TL:DR If the only way to get you to stop and talk is by filing restraining orders to undo your contentious changes, then that's what I'll do to protect AFC from a singular editor hellbent on their singular agenda. If you knew I objected to the way the Preload template worked and you refused to discuss, how did you expect pages wiring in that preload to be acceptable? To use another analogy, If someone objects to a specific banner being placed on a article, you don't go back and add inline or sections of the banner, you discuss it until there's a consensus. Plain and simple disruptive editing. I'd be much happier to see it gradually have been implemented rather than you taking a one man army and doing it. Oh and by the way, your maneuver of claiming that discussion was had at the help desk is BULLSHIT. Wikipedia:WikiProject Articles for creation/Help desk is the help desk, and if we go to the talk page of that page (where the discussion is to take place) we end up at Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Articles for creation which is because Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Articles for creation/Help desk is a redirect to it. So no, I don't think there was consensus for you to expand the help desk links. Hasteur (talk) 01:04, 8 June 2014 (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.

archiving strategy

Up above there were some comments about the AFC help desk's archiving strategy.
AFC/HD is currently archived by scsbot, an aging and nonstandard archiving bot operated by me.
If you would like a different archiving interval, develop a consensus here and I will be happy to implement it.
Or, if you would like to switch to a different archiver, that's perfectly fine, too; I won't be hurt. --Steve Summit (talk) 11:11, 15 June 2014 (UTC)

Also, AFC/HD is still using the old "transclude some archived content for a few days more" strategy, which has generally been phased out elsewhere.
I could remove that here, too, reverting to a straight archive-after-N-days policy. --Steve Summit (talk) 11:23, 15 June 2014 (UTC)

Merge?

What do you think about this? Regards, FoCuSandLeArN (talk) 20:52, 5 June 2014 (UTC)

Aaron Belz

Hello again. Sorry to be a pain in the butt, but I have another question regarding this article. With coverage from organizations like The Atlantic, HuffPo, and Writer's Digest, I think the editor has raised this poet to a sufficient level of notability. However, the citations are all incorrectly formatted. I had another one like that today, but I declined it, because all the citations were from obscure sources, or had been written by the subject of the article. I can't in good conscience decline the article based on sourcing, since the sources do seem to indicate notability, but their formatting is problematic. What action should I take? Onel5969 (talk) 00:57, 6 June 2014 (UTC)

You really have two choices, accept the article and don't fix the reference formatting, or accept the article and fix the reference formatting.  :) Sometimes I'll leave notes on the talk page with suggestions, e.g., the two links to disambiguation pages on that page, and the reference formatting could be one of those. But yeah, don't wait for great reference formatting. --j⚛e deckertalk 03:02, 6 June 2014 (UTC)
You might try adding a {{Format footnotes}} tag, too. I didn't know we had one of those. Look out, world! --j⚛e deckertalk 03:05, 6 June 2014 (UTC)
Thanks again Joe Decker! Will do that last option. Onel5969 (talk) 12:36, 6 June 2014 (UTC)
Looks like somebody beat me to it. And declined it. Not sure. It's no longer on the list, and it doesn't come up as an article.Onel5969 (talk) 12:40, 6 June 2014 (UTC)
Onel5969, if you think it's ready, resubmit it and accept it. I don't know about the old script, but the newly developed script gives you a choice of whom to name as the submitter. —Anne Delong (talk) 02:01, 8 June 2014 (UTC)
Thanks Anne Delong, but can't find it at this point. Onel5969 (talk) 06:26, 8 June 2014 (UTC)
[1] ? --j⚛e deckertalk 06:31, 8 June 2014 (UTC)

Orange is the new black...

Wooo!!!

The backlog counter just dipped below 1000, revealing a fetching shade of orange we haven't seen for quite a while! Still a fair way to go, but well done to everyone who's helped get it this far! --LukeSurl t c 22:39, 6 June 2014 (UTC)

Yellow! --j⚛e deckertalk 18:12, 8 June 2014 (UTC)
Wow! We hadn't seen that for a while. It will be bordeaux again in no time, rest assured. FoCuSandLeArN (talk) 19:00, 8 June 2014 (UTC)

Change to Template:AFC submission/draft

A template-protected edit request has been submitted at Wikipedia_talk:Article_wizard#Template-protected_edit_request_on_7_June_2014. As it is a AFC based template and request please feel free to express your viewpoint on this request. Hasteur (talk) 21:02, 7 June 2014 (UTC)

  • This request has been closed. This was an inappropriate attempt to cause disruption because the requester was too impatient to wait for a few other editors to comment to the discussion on the topic above. It caused a fragmented discussion, but that issue has been resolved. — {{U|Technical 13}} (e • t • c) 21:55, 7 June 2014 (UTC)

Comments versus Declining

Hi all. I'm new at this, and as I was going through the articles, I notice on some that editors have merely commented, without taking action to either approve or decline the submission. In some cases, I completely understand it, to give direction to the editor to improve the article before making a determination. However, in some instances, the comments clearly demonstrate that the submission could be declined (e.g. NPOV). Is there some rule or understanding regarding when a comment should be made, but not take action on the article? Thanks. Onel5969 (talk) 18:16, 8 June 2014 (UTC)

Declining might mean that a submission could spend several weeks more waiting for its next review, even if the submitter works out how to resubmit it and does so. This is often not desirable. A comment gives them an idea of things to focus their work on. --Demiurge1000 (talk) 18:30, 8 June 2014 (UTC)
Exactly, it's completely up to you, but except obvious declines, some sumbitters could use with a little nudge in lieu of a straight decline, which might actually put them off resubmitting. FoCuSandLeArN (talk) 18:58, 8 June 2014 (UTC)
There is definitely room for both. Given limited resources, I'm more often tempted to give the longer comments and additional time to articles that clearly belong in the encyclopedia than those who appear to at best hover at or below the bare edge of notability. Think of it this way -- am I more interested in keeping the editor working on *this* article, or more interested in keeping the editor working on the average submission just behind her or him in line? (I also often use comments to see if I can trigger improvements before a full review that will make it easier to review, in particular, comments regarding any sort of reference formatting so bad that it actually gets in the way of figuring out what's going on in the article.) I doubt that I'm consistent about this, though, and I will give the question of "what's the right strategy" a little more thought. --j⚛e deckertalk 19:06, 8 June 2014 (UTC)
Thank you all for your direction. I think I see how to be more effective at this now. In fact, in some instances (and JoeDecker helped me on one them) I could have used the comment in exactly this manner. I also think that this has some bearing on the latest discussion regarding backlog drives. I was under the impression that we needed to reduce the number of items in the queue, now I won't be as much concerned with that as in operating on the principles you three stated above. Thanks. Onel5969 (talk) 15:38, 9 June 2014 (UTC)
@Onel5969: Sometimes when I merely comment instead of accepting or declining, it's because I am not quite confident that I'm right. I've had other editors come back behind me and comment with the opposite opinion, and in at least once case in the past couple of months, I've had an editor accept or reject a page against my recommendation. When in doubt, two heads are better than one. davidwr/(talk)/(contribs) 23:58, 9 June 2014 (UTC)

Proposal: AFC submission and afc comments location on Draft namespace articles

The following discussion is an archived record of a request for comment. Please do not modify it. No further edits should be made to this discussion. A summary of the conclusions reached follows.
As this has had no comments for a while, I am closing this early. Consensus seems to be to keep the banner on the top (or near the top) of the draft page. There is also consensus to use the talk page of the draft for comments relating to future expansion - eg. Further sources or advice. --Mdann52talk to me! 06:17, 11 June 2014 (UTC)

There is a proposal on the table that as part of moving to the Draft namespace, all AFC submission banners and AFC comment banners on any AFC submission in Draft namespace should go on the paired talk page.

Support

  1. I would support the general idea of having a slimmed down banner above the submission and moving all comments and decline reasoning on the talk page. In order for this to work, it would be necessary for the banner to clearly link to the talk page. However the proposal by T13 would not be the right approach and would be disruptive. The transition needs to be more gradual and considered, to minimise confusion to contributors and reviewers. — Martin (MSGJ · talk) 20:30, 18 May 2014 (UTC)
  2. Support and I don't even understand why we are still discussing it as according to mw:Draft namespace#Minimum requirements point number two there will be " an accompanying "Draft talk:" page for each Draft page, to facilitate discussion." and it appears from all of this opposition that now everyone wants to go back on that. Wikipedia:Village pump (proposals)/Archive 107#Proposed new Draft namespace also needs to be considered where there are at least a dozen mentions of needing to move content off of talk pages and discussion on to them. — {{U|Technical 13}} (t • e • c) 22:43, 18 May 2014 (UTC)
    • So you claim that Anne's reanalysis below is invalid regarding the "VPP/Archive 107" thread? Ok, I looked over it again and I agree with Anne's assessment. Furthermore the mediawiki proposal only says There is an accompanying "Draft talk:" page for each Draft page, to facilitate discussion. It does not call for us to relocate banners off the AFC submission portion of the draft to the talk page. Furthermore the discussions here on enWP superceede the overall scoping discussions at the mediawiki page. Looking through our archives and the "organization of Draft namespace" archives (WT:DRAFT) I see no consensus discussion to split the banners off into the talk page. Your attempt to push through a clearly contentious change as something similar to the other proposals that were not contentious shows that you either have a hard time evaluating consensus or are willfully trying to make a point. Hasteur (talk) 23:24, 18 May 2014 (UTC)
      • Yes, discussion needs to be facilitated on the accompanying talk page. Very clear, this means that talk belongs on talk and draft content belongs in draft. If we're not going to follow the minimum requirements for the namespace having been created, we should have the namespace deleted and go back to the status quo that everyone seems to want so bad. If were not going to change and improve the system, there is no point in having this broken system any longer. — {{U|Technical 13}} (t • e • c) 10:38, 19 May 2014 (UTC)
  3. Support along the same lines as Martin. Ideally we should have clean drafts per T13's vision, but I do have some concerns about editors not being able to find things on the talk page without some kind of at least minimal notice on their draft itself. There's is plenty of room for streamlining things and I think that people should not get mired in the status quo just as a response to T13's more radical proposal and his hurry to implement it. I absolutely oppose the status quo of spewing what can be up to several pages of huge, redundant templates and comments straight into what is supposed to be a draft, and I think we need to make fixing that a priority. Gigs (talk) 21:50, 19 May 2014 (UTC)
    Gigs, you make a good point. We should consider this logically and find the best overall solution instead of just responding negatively to pressure. No need to shout, though. —Anne Delong (talk) 22:18, 19 May 2014 (UTC)
    I didn't consider it shouting, I just didn't want the most important part of my comment to get lost in the body. Probably should have just rewritten it to lead with the most important part instead. Gigs (talk) 16:15, 20 May 2014 (UTC)
  4. Support - Martin sums up my thoughts well. I've always been a bit annoyed by the huge "Submission declined" and "Review waiting" banners. They take up quite a bit of space and can distract from the actual content of the submission (often, I catch myself scrolling down past the templates to get them off my screen). It would certainly be better on everyone's eyes if this is converted to a smaller banner directing users to the talk page, where extended discussion can occur. You know, now that I think about it, it may even be demoralizing for new editors to have big red declined templates taking up space on their submission. Editors would be more inclined to work together and understand what tasks should be done to get a submission accepted if the templates and comments are moved to the talk page - a dedicated area for discussing improvements. To address concerns about users not being able to find the talk page, as Martin proposes, a smaller banner on the draft page directing users to the talk page will suffice. Mz7 (talk) 21:20, 30 May 2014 (UTC)

Oppose

  1. I strongly oppose moving the AFC submission banner and AFC comment banners of the AFC submitted article.

    1. It will break a great many tools we already have including the AFC Helper (review tool), the various AFC bots we have running around, the definition of what CSD:G13 means, and the categorization scheme we have

    2. It will break the existing AFC workflow to require a great amount of re-writing of documentation to support this new functionality.

    3. To navigate to the submitted article, the user will need to make an additional click to get to the page. This also means that when a user does an action with respect to the submission, they will have to open up multiple pages for editing. I do see a case for the AFC comments banners being moved to the talk page once the submission has been accepted, but absolutely not before. Hasteur (talk) 20:57, 17 May 2014 (UTC)

    • These tools should have all been fixed to accommodate this minimum requirement of creation of the namespace before pushing to get all of the drafts moved into the namespace, which is still not ready. You have no-one to blame except yourself for hastily forcing all of these drafts into an unprepared namespace. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Technical 13 (talk • contribs) 22:52, 18 May 2014 (UTC)
      There's a difference between deprecating options (Changing there the AFC output goes, where the AFC tools template makes suggestions about moving submissions to) and totally breaking process. Please show how the changes I've proposed and gained consensus for actually break the process? Oh yeah, you can't because removing those options don't break the existing AFC process. Your proposal on the other hand drastically breaks process and from every point regarding this I see minority viewpoints for it, but no explicit and broad consensus for this. Changing the way the process works so drastically (and putting the cart before the horse with the way you want to do it) only leads to knee-jerk reactions against your solution. Hasteur (talk) 23:03, 18 May 2014 (UTC)
  2. I see an entirely different issue: The authors themselves will have to be aware of (and check) talk pages, something we cannot take for granted with the new editors writing drafts. Having the submission template and, if necessary, the decline message and any reviewer comments at the top of the draft will significantly reduce the chances that they're overlooked. Huon (talk) 21:42, 17 May 2014 (UTC)
    • The reason for putting the submission template alone on the /editnotices page is so that they can be seen from the submission and the talk page in both view and edit modes. It's a simple technical adjustment to do so and should have been done before a bunch of submissions went into the namespace. — {{U|Technical 13}} (t • e • c) 22:52, 18 May 2014 (UTC)
  3. (edit conflict) I think that templates (such as the submission-template) should be at the "submission-main-page", while comments should be made at the talk-page. (t) Josve05a (c) 21:42, 17 May 2014 (UTC)
    • If the submission template is on either the draft page or the draft talk page, it won't be visible on the other, by placing it on the /editnotices page, it can easily be accessed by both pages.
  4. Here is what I envision: Anything that should be deleted when the article is accepted should stay on the submission page - the draft/submit/decline templates, and comments from the reviewers that are directly related to its acceptance. On the other hand, if a reviewer gets interested in a draft and has something to say that should not be deleted on acceptance (for example, suggestions for future expansion, advice on where to find references for that subject, etc. - the sort of thing that up until now has been put on users' talk pages), then those comments would be put on the talk page to be moved to mainspace along with the newly accepted article along with any posts by other editors. —Anne Delong (talk) 00:07, 18 May 2014 (UTC)
    • Nothing is really removed, it is just altered from being a WP:AfC banner to the banner of another WP:WikiProject, and those belong on the talk page. — {{U|Technical 13}} (t • e • c) 22:52, 18 May 2014 (UTC)
  5. Agree entirely with Anne's post above - everything that is removed during acceptance should stay on the draft page. The proposed change will break practically all of AfC's current systems and processes. Roger (Dodger67) (talk) 22:23, 18 May 2014 (UTC)
  6. Agree with Anne. --LukeSurl t c 10:26, 19 May 2014 (UTC)
  7. I am exited about the thought of having the ability to take *extended* discussions about the AfC draft to the "Draft Talk" namespace. However, I believe the banner, and generic comments, should stay on the "Draft" namespace. We want to make this easier for brand-spanking-new users, and I doubt their ability to intuitively navigate between the namespaces. I remember as a new user it took me a little bit to find the "talk" portion of Wikipedia. I may not be the brightest bulb in the room, but still... 78.26 (I'm no IP, talk to me!) 12:22, 19 May 2014 (UTC)
  8. Oppose moving the AFC submission banner and AFC comment banners per User:Hasteur and User:Anne Delong. The system is working fine as-is. No need to fix something that isn't broken. The talk page can still be used for extended discussion about drafts and moved to main namespace when submissions are approved. Also, new or inexperienced users may not know to check the talk page, which can cause confusion, "why was my submission rejected?" NorthAmerica1000 07:34, 20 May 2014 (UTC)
  9. Oppose on the basis it will completely confuse the new editors submitting the drafts and the absence of banners and comments on the draft will cause many new editors to believe that there are no comments or that their submission is already in the mainspace (breathe). Bellerophon talk to me 11:11, 8 June 2014 (UTC)

Comments

An editor (Technical 13) announced they were going to be making changes that implement the question at Wikipedia_talk:WikiProject_Articles_for_creation/Helper_script/Rewrite#Talk_pages.3F. 4 editors (Theopolisme—Josve05a—Anne Delong—Hasteur) disagreed with the change. Hasteur (talk) 21:05, 17 May 2014 (UTC)

Fixing ping with a new signauture. (t) Josve05a (c) 21:07, 17 May 2014 (UTC)

Anne Delong's analysis of the proposal to create Draft space

Technical 13 has announced HERE that he plans to “break the comments and AFC templates out of mainspace and put them in talk space like they are suppose to be next week”. When asked to provide a consensus that would justify this action, he provided a link to Wikipedia:Village pump (proposals)/Archive 107#Proposed new Draft namespace . I have just finished reading that entire proposal, including all of the comments and !votes. Then I went through again using the search words "talk page" in case I missed something. It took over an hour. In that entire mass of verbiage, there are three mentions of moving the review comments and templates to the talk page: One editor was in favour, one against (me) and a third one mentioned both pros and cons. None of the many other editors gave an opinion on this, and neither was it mentioned in the proposal itself, which only said, "AfC would continue to operate the way it currently does". There were other mentions of uses for the talk page: placement of OTRS notices, posting of Wikiproject banners, and content discussions between editors wanting to help with the development of the draft. There was not only no consensus that the AfC comments and templates should be moved, there was barely any mention of this. I can see three possibilities here:

  1. T13 read the proposal but was unable to understand it. – I reject this; his writing demonstrates a proficient use of English.
  2. T13 read the proposal, understood that it didn't support his proposed action, and decided to waste other editors' time in reading a long involved piece of text by indicating that it did. – I reject this, because that would be trolling, and I prefer to WP:Assume good faith.
  3. T13 didn't read the proposal, or read it long ago, and misremembered its contents. – I hope this is the correct interpretation.

In any case, please be assured that if this is the only justification for T13's plan to move the templates and comments on the existing AfC submissions at this time, before an appropriate consensus discussion here, then he has none at all. —Anne Delong (talk) 23:36, 17 May 2014 (UTC)

  • RE: Anne, this very much feels like an ABF post, and if you've gone through and read all of the discussions scattered all over Wikipedia, MediaWiki wiki, and Bugzilla, then you would have found the point I made above where using the talk space was minimum requirement point number 2 for creation of the namespace. There are also dozens of mentions in the proposals supports in archive 107 saying that this is something that needs to be done. — {{U|Technical 13}} (t • e • c) 22:46, 18 May 2014 (UTC)
Why, no, Technical 13, I haven't read every posting on every talk page on Wikipedia, and the other two places you mention, as far as I know, are not concerned with creating consensus about AfC. If you have a specific diff (not an entire discussion) you'd like to point out, fine. Otherwise don't intend to go looking again for evidence to back up your point of view. As for assuming good faith, that's the reason I spent the time reading that whole giant discussion that you said would support your intentions. I kept thinking if I just read a little further, surely I would come to the evidence you said was there. It didn't happen. The above posting is an expression of my disappointment at having my time wasted, and a desire to see that others don't have the same experience. —Anne Delong (talk) 03:22, 19 May 2014 (UTC)
Can't we just drop this debate and start working on a consensus solution to address the problems? It seems we have roughly developing consensus that we need at least a little something on the main draft page, to give users a hint that they need to look at the talk page. Lets work on a sleek and minimal template that shows them their submission status, and links them to the talk page for further details. Gigs (talk) 21:55, 19 May 2014 (UTC)
Gigs I'd love to drop the debate and start architecting a solution, but when one editor has announced that they intend to start breaking the process this week coupled with the fact that the editor in question has also become questionable at taking advice and reading consensus, we must have this consensus discussion to explicitly say that the proposed change is not endorsed by consensus. You don't have a philosophical debate about the uses of an axe when someone has an axe to your head. Hasteur (talk) 23:32, 19 May 2014 (UTC)
I guess the point is that there's plenty of wood that needs chopping, so we need the axe back. Gigs (talk) 16:17, 20 May 2014 (UTC)
The above discussion is preserved as an archive of the debate. Please do not modify it. No further edits should be made to this discussion.

AFC Backlog Drive

I'm glad that we're putting in place new processes to encourage users to work on the backlog, but I'm concerned about accountability and quality control. The top editors for the June 2014 drive have made reviews in the hundreds, and it's only been 8 days. Do we have any way of determining how long editors are spending on each article? We also don't appear to have prerequisites for editors who want to review articles. Given the Bonkers the Clown incident, I think we should reconsider our margin of error in terms of the variables I'd mentioned. It'd ensure accountability and make sure every draft submitter is receiving the same quality of help. It'd also save time on the #wikipedia-en-help connect where I and other editors are frequently correcting the mistakes of others. Looking forward to hearing all of your thoughts. Best, Blurpeace 19:25, 8 June 2014 (UTC)

  • Blurpeace, my basic interpretation of your comment here is that you are worried about accountability of reviewers. We've been discussing this topic for a couple years now, and we are making progress to improving this. We've just fairly recently attempted to cut back on the "accidental" misuses of the reviewing script to review articles, but we've not done much to directly cut back on the intentional misuses. I do believe there is a plan in place to at some point protect the participants list (which you are required to be on to use the script to review) so that only administrators (and possibly template editors) can add and remove people from the list, and there have been some arbitrary numbers thrown around of what minimum requirements to be a reviewer might be.
I personally have no problem with people doing a vast number of accurate reviews per day. I do suppose there could be a nag added to the script if people are moving at a pace the the community agrees of a threshold of what is too fast, although I expect having this community agree on what that threshold would be, or that it should exist at all would be a fairly large mountain to move.
I'd love to hear some of what you think would make good requirements to be a reviewer, and what thresholds you think are reasonable (remember, there will likely be people opposed to any limits and requirements. So picking a higher level to set them at will result in more of those people having a mindset of "Well, that's so high no-one will ever hit that anyways, so it's not worth my time to oppose" keeping in mind if it is just way too astronomically high they may have a mindset of "That's just a ridiculous waste of resources and script bloat."... And, we can always whittle them down later. ;)). — {{U|Technical 13}} (e • t • c) 20:07, 8 June 2014 (UTC)
I'll concur that it's great, but at the same time we only find the squeaky wheels, and they squeak particularly loudly when we have backlog drive. I think that outside of a backlog drive if you're reviewing more than ~100 a day you need to be strongly encouraged to do things besides reviewing. Hasteur (talk) 22:49, 8 June 2014 (UTC)
  • I agree with this sentiment, and am wondering if a tool can be made on labs so we can get some performance graphs of who's reviewed how many drafts per today, yesterday, last week, last month, overall out of still active users, all-time overall. I worry that such a tool would be misused to try and get the most overall reviews, although the shorter term ones would be good for finding reviewers having a tough time. I know ACC has graphs and tables for these kinds of stats, am wondering if you could make something like that for afc Hasteur. I'd be happy to work with you on it and show screenshots of what it might look like and get some code started. — {{U|Technical 13}} (e • t • c) 23:10, 8 June 2014 (UTC)
  • The real difficulty is while I am quite prepared to assist new reviewers, there is also the problem of dealing with established editors who do not know how to review properly & don't want to learn, or who even refuse to do it right. Some otherwise respected people have been telling me that they will not make personal comments beyond the templates because they haven't the time to follow them up. With that attitude, we will get nowhere unless someone is prepared to take action. The action I personally can and will take is to re-review their work and delete the stuff that they accepted wrongly, accept (after undeleting if necessary) what the accepted wrongly, and try to explain things to the individual who have been harmed by their comments and try to rescue them for WP.
But some things can be done with structure. I have finally thought of some practical initial steps (after a certain amount of consulting, including especially with Blurpeace, but he's not responsible if he doesn't like them) some I can do myself: 1. Is to rewrite all the template to make them shorter, concise, more exact, and free from jargon. I'm just going to do it and thopse who don;t like can revert, and we'll discuss it. 2. if necessary. remove all the reason templates and thus force people to write explanations. (I'm thinking of doing it via MfD., & well obviously need consensus) 3., for which I need help, is to have all notices & templates we do use always automatically placed on the user talk pages as well as the articles, 4., for which I also need help, is to notify people who have not worked on an article for a month that they should be getting back to it.,There will be more, but these will be a gentle way of startng . DGG ( talk ) 00:33, 9 June 2014 (UTC)
@DGG: Let me save everyone time and tell you that I'm reverting what you're suggesting. You would do well to observe the standards already in place at this WikiProject. Chris Troutman (talk) 01:01, 9 June 2014 (UTC)
What are you reverting? I have not yet done anything. You probably mean you will revert it. Well, we will then see what the consensus thinks, and I suggest you not make assumptions about the result. Remember about BRD? someone has to start it, and starting with B is entirely in order. I'm Bold, not reckless. I am going to proceed as I always do, slowly, by making or proposing changes I think will be acceptable--why do you assume that any change I might make in a template will be unsatisfactory? Why do you assume you will want to revert them, before you see them? You might like my changes--I have sometimes managed to find compact consensus wordings.
More important, I am highly amused that you tell me "to observe the standards of the wikiproject." You know very well I do observe the existing standards at Wikipedia. I absolutely as an editor and administrator observe existing standards here and everywhere. Like any sensible person who wants change, like WP itself trying to change the external world, I make a point of observing the existing standards even when I disagree with them, and anyone who has observed my work for the last 7 years knows it, and I further make a point when i give advice to give advice according to the existing standards, not according to what I want them to be. (That does not mean I do not mistakes--I rate my accuracy at about 98 to 99%, not 100%.) Nor am I talking from an armchair--I have reviewed and accepted, improved,, or deleted many thousands of article drafts, and intend to work on many thousand more.) The only way I differ notably from most of the people working here, is that i am willing to personally improve them.
More important yet, I remind you that every WPedian has an equal right to influence policy. We alll stand on equal terms. Within the project, nobody has OWNership. No one has ownership anywhere in WP. But I think from experience I probably will convince people here of a good deal (but not all) of what I suggest, though not immediately, I not expecting anyone will do anything on the basis of my sketch of a program above, but I will be proposing and explaining details. And if necessary, " the standards of this wikiproject," as arb com recently reminded us, are not set by this wikiproject alone. They are set by what the community as a whole accepts. DGG ( talk ) 02:53, 9 June 2014 (UTC)
Now, I do not want to do this. i want to improve the project. The "standards of this wikiproject " are in my opinion abysmal. They are abysmal in their actual application by many of those working here; they are abysmal in their structure; and they are abysmal in their results, with most potentially acceptable article being abandoned; and they come abysmally short of the purpose of wikipedia. The purpose of WP is to build an encyclopedia. To write and improve articles in an encyclopedia is a continuing process, which relies upon continually attracting, keeping, and developing new editors. Attracting, keeping, and developing new editors requires treating them with consideration and offering them substantial assistance. These editors in turn, will write and improve articles, and instruct newcomers. I did not learn things here all by myself: I am grateful for those established editors who offered me adequate help in getting started(my approach to teaching people here is derived from Kudpung and I try to help others in like manner. I keep learning, from the times when people I help tell me I could have helped them better. and I have learned not to immediately reject what others tell me, nor to immediate revert what they do without thinking about it. DGG ( talk ) 02:53, 9 June 2014 (UTC)
  • DGG, what's a bigger issue than established editors who do not know how to review properly & don't want to learn, or who even refuse to do it right is the fact that there still, after over a year of reviewers like me asking, and a couple attempts started, there is still no "How to review drafts" style reviewer training offered. I know that Theonesean started putting one together, and Kudpung (iirc) was helping him along here or there, but I've seen little to none from either of them for some time now. Becoming a reviewer is an intimidating process, and there really needs to be some kind of mentoring/training program put together like there is for NPP or CVUA or whatever or we're just not going to be able to obtain and keep good reviewers. Heck, I try to keep my reviewing to less than 5-10 a day except for quick declines when I'm testing something for fixing an issue with the script, and even then I second guess myself most of the time if I picked the "right" decline or if that crappy (albeit notable) article should really have been put in mainspace just because it would "probably" survive an AfD... DGG, how would you like to help tackle this issue and put together a training/mentoring course for new reviewers with me? — {{U|Technical 13}} (e • t • c) 01:57, 9 June 2014 (UTC)
  • Actually, I think the instruction at the tab "Instructions to reviewers" are a reasonable first start at this. But several people could usefully take a look to see if they can improve the wording, . I do not know to help people learn here by formal classroom style instruction; I know of nothing better than guided practice. For the first process here I became involved in, AfD, there is a way to practice--comment first on the easy and obvious articles listed, and see what people say, and then work towards the harder ones. It's easy and safe to practice there, because the beginner's single voice doesn't decide the result. Similarly at some other processes, like discussing copyright on sockpuppettry or Good articles. I learned this way, and in the outside world, I teach this way also: I show people what I do, and then let them try. I'm not sure how to set this up formally here, but I do suggest that several good reviews have learned by asking other reviewers questions about reviews they are unsure of. There's also the AfC help page--see what help others give, look at the AfCs in question, and make suggestions. (Of course , for this to work, it is necessary for the assistance to be ego-free, to be characterised by not to just a willingness to accept ones own mistakes, but an eagerness to find them and correct them.) There is one thing you say to be doing, that I think is excellent advice to us all: to limit sessions of reviewing to 5 or 10 at a time. I do this also, though I try to do it several times a day--but not that many people have time for that. (We'll do better getting more people doing 5, than getting a few to do 50.) . I learned it at New Page Patrol, when I noticed (and was rather emphatically told) that if I did many more than that at a time, I started making errors. And here, if I try to do too much, I end up being a good deal sharper in tone than I really ought to.. DGG ( talk ) 03:08, 9 June 2014 (UTC)

I gave up thinking about AfC roughly about the same time as I was forced by personal circumstances to absent myself completely from Wikipedia for a couple of months (nothing to do with Wikipedia). I got frustrated after expending so much energy in attempts to improve AfC through various suggestions and RfCs and finally realising that apart from DGG and a couple of others, almost (or so it seemed) every reviewer - and developer of improvement systems and scripts - was determined, for better or worse to do it their way. At the end of the day, the efforts at reform became stalemated, and lo and behold, now I'm back three months later and everyone is still talking about the same old same old, and still no tangible progress. IMO, backlog drives of this kind just invite less careful reviewing and possibly also from less experienced editors --Kudpung กุดผึ้ง (talk) 06:28, 9 June 2014 (UTC)

I echo DGG and Kudpung's concerns that backlog drives essentially attract people to perform as many reviews as possible and reward 'declines' as much as they reward 'accepts'. I'm also slightly resistant to the idea of 'a reviewers academy' as I believe the amount of work required to make it work would outweigh its productivity and feel that ultimately the focus could shift to that, rather than actually reviewing drafts. Similarly, I have found the approach of guided practice to be the most effective method of learning how to review. I welcome DGG's ideas for improvement, as a project I feel we need to be more open to ideas from the wider community if we are to increase participation (which is what is really needed to keep backlogs from forming). Bellerophon talk to me 09:00, 9 June 2014 (UTC)

The trouble with backlog drives is that they inevitably become "whack-a-mole" games due to the way the reward system is structured. As a result reviewers lose sight of why this project exists - to assist newbie editors to create articles that are good enough to exist in mainspace (and make sure that BLPvios and Copyvios don't get in). If a "reviewer" doesn't have the time to give newbies individual attention and advice then they should not be reviewing. Roger (Dodger67) (talk) 11:38, 9 June 2014 (UTC)

  • I will point out that it is almost always easier to decline than to accept a draft (accepting requires categorizing the article & generally requires additional cleanup as well). It is also easier to simply pick the low hanging fruit (e.g. obviously incomplete or blank drafts) from the newest submissions than work on the oldest drafts, which are mostly close calls. I am sure at least some of the top point getters do precisely that. That is not to say such reviews are not needed or useful, just that the backlog elimination drive point system is a poor reflection of actual work required. --ThaddeusB (talk) 15:17, 9 June 2014 (UTC)
  • Indeed, the "best" place for playing "whack-a-mole" is to sit on the zero-day category page and knock off the dross as it emerges from the "Fire Hose Of Crap" - quickly clearing away this "overburden" is useful, but trivially easy, work. I do this type of reviewing on my tablet while I'm watching tv. The tougher reviews take concentrated effort, maybe the scoring could be weighted by the "age" of the submission as "older = more difficult". It might even help improve the quality of reviews during a drive as it reduces the attractiveness of doing only "whack-a-mole" reviews. Roger (Dodger67) (talk) 16:41, 9 June 2014 (UTC)
  • To get at the issue of people who are on a "quest for gold," we will need to modify the scoring system to encourage people to take time with their reviews. One overly-simplistic way to do it is to limit the number of reviews and re-reviews per hour or day or week that count for "full" credit. The average "daily score" of the Silver and Bronze Wiki award winners for the last few backlog drives (Nov. '12 to March '14) ranged from 17.2/day in Jan. '13 to 31.4/day in March '13, with a weighted (some months have more days than others) of 25.8. I ignored the Gold winners on the assumption that they are outliers.
With this in mind, we can encourage editors to take their time by limiting points to 100 per 4-day period. This would allow for some level of "burstiness" but it would require that those motivated by the scorecard continually participate and it would give those who are motivated only by bling a dis-incentive to keep going "full blast" day-in-day-out once they hit their "4-day quota." While this may cost some good reviews it will save time in the cleanup of bad reviews and possibly allow us to catch and "help" (or boot out of AFC) the quantity-over-quality reviewers whose quality is unacceptably poor. davidwr/(talk)/(contribs) 00:21, 10 June 2014 (UTC)
  • As one of the editors who seem to be near the top of the list in number of reviews I am not altogether displeased to see this discussion, but I do think the good sentiment that started it is a little clouded by "How can all this be correct?" yet without investigation. The diffs with the reviews are there for all to see, as are the reviews of the reviews that have been carried out.
When reviewing other reviews I have found a very few that fall short of the standards required, but the sample I have checked, and I always record my thinking against the review, are good reviews. We will make mistakes, but these seem to be genuine errors, not anything bad.
It seems that we simply have some time, and have used that time to try to clear the then huge backlog of articles awaiting review. Regrettably, there have been many, far too many, that have required rejection.
Quality of review is important. Wherever possible we need to add a comment to help the author. Whenever possible I and the others I have reviewed do that.
I started at the back, at the place I have worked since starting to review. The oldest in the queue are the toughest because they are usually the ones that take the most thought. THey are the difficult ones. Others also started at the back. Have a look at Category:AfC pending submissions by age (purge it, probably), and see the numbers. There are two categories that need the most attention because the authors deserve it. They are old submissions. And they can really only be reviewed when one is not tired. These need priority attention. I try to give that to them. Some of the articles are beyond my knowledge, so I leave them alone.
So there is quality here. All reviewers have their actions open to scrutiny. That some folk have other views on a backlog drive and scores is fine. I was doing the oldest before the drive, am doing them during the drive, and will do after the drive. If too tired to review a difficult review I sometimes turn, for fun, to the newest, just to knock out the impossible submissions, and there are a good few.
If we are to have a drive then we need people to work hard, fast and accurately.
Or we could tie their hands behind their backs and keep the queue rising. Fiddle Faddle 07:46, 10 June 2014 (UTC)
  • By the way Blurpeace, it is a hugely challenging task to review articles for a backlog drive, something we would never need to do if folk did little and often reviewing more often, or with more folk. The leaderboard is a bit of fun. It's the only fun in the drive. Remove the trivial level of fun and it will never happen.
I felt personally discouraged reading some of this discussion. It seems that no good deed goes unpunished Fiddle Faddle 13:25, 10 June 2014 (UTC)
I hear you, Timtrent. There certainly have been issues with poor reviews, but a fair bit of the work that gets done here is actually pretty good, and the idea that we should defend even the best review when it takes 40 days and 40 nights to deliver is, when one thinks about it, laughable on its face. We can spend a lot of time, and we already have, debating the merits of moderate adjustments to point scoring systems, but that won't put more than a band-aid on the real issues we face. A truly functional AfC, one that provides decent reviews in a timely fashion to everyone who wants one, is going to require (a) a lot more reviewers, (b) a lot fewer submissions, or (c) some sort of requirement that editors know the Very First Thing about Wikipedia before hitting submit.
(a) is unlikely, (b) is in my view, undesirable.
As for (c), it's a (well, "pity" would be the nice word) that the Foundation has blocked, in one case, and has pulled support from, in another case, initiatives which would have taken us a step in that direction.
Lacking any of those three measures, this is and will always be a poorly-staffed triage effort, with people working too hard for limited thanks, and that poor environment will cause just this very sort of rushing around blame-finding. Fix the central problem, on the other hand, and we wouldn't need drives at all, and any ancillary problems they may cause would be fixed as well. Perhaps we should cut each other a little more slack.
In the meantime, thank you for your efforts here. --j⚛e deckertalk 15:29, 10 June 2014 (UTC)

All the other AfC stalwarts seem to have chipped in their 2c, so I'll chip in mine. I started working at AfC because I was fed up of people off-wiki complaining that they created articles only to find them speedy deleted 10 minutes later, and hoped the AfC was a nicer route into starting to edit Wikipedia. That's always being on the forefront of my mind, and what I really get a buzz out of is messages like this, not points on a backlog drive. As long as we always remember that we're here to help new users along, we'll be okay, and any process changes that can support that should be welcomed with open arms. In fact, AfC should really be a process, not a project.

We are making steps in the right direction with the draft namespace, and hopefully we can co-ordinate a bit more with NPP to see more new pages go in and out of draft, rather than the completely demoralizing situation of new editors waiting for 1 month or more only to be told they didn't add any references. Let's keep that in mind as we go forward. Ritchie333 (talk) (cont) 15:37, 10 June 2014 (UTC)

  • I like it when we help someone, too, Ritchie333. my talk page has expanded hugely since I started AfC reviews at all, and the backlog drive in particular. I tae the time to answer. I've helped on lady seek to prevent a marriage she seems not to want in the public domain by telling her the likely outcome of an autobiog she was submitting. She thought hard, then blanked it. I wish she had also said "Thank you" but I never expect it.
The help desk in AfC is a greta place to go to offer help. And yes, Blurpeace, some of us go there, some do not. I haven;t for a day or so. Perhaps I will later.
I've met some great folk during this drive, and I've met some not so great. Some very bright and with it, and some not so much.
The leaderboard is actually a QA place, too. You, anyone, can look at 100% of the accept/decline work during the drive and pass it or fail it.
Do I support higher points for older submissions? I did not, bit increasingly I think se sort of weight based not on it being new or old but a factor applied based on the overall work done, and a separate leaderboard for it. But we rely on a volunteer to create it, and we may have decades specifying what it ought to be.
Now, while we have a bit of fun in the project, who is joining me on the 4 week old and 3 week old ones? We need them down to zero. And they refill overnight! Is there a siong;e submission on the very old ones? Who will get that one? "Gotta catch 'em all" Fiddle Faddle 15:53, 10 June 2014 (UTC)
Good to see people chipping in on the help desk too. For a while it seemed like Huon (talk · contribs) and me were the only ones doing it. Don't forget to ping the submitter on their talk that you've replied, as new users tend to miss responses - {{AFCHD/u}} can help there. Ritchie333 (talk) (cont) 16:13, 10 June 2014 (UTC)
Can/does Twinkle place that? If not please will you ask the TW guys to include it? If it does I am blessed if I can see where or how to do it. Good point well made BTW. Fiddle Faddle 16:19, 10 June 2014 (UTC)

Ritchie333, you said something else that poked a memory, and it's dead on. "...rather than the completely demoralizing situation of new editors waiting for 1 month or more only to be told they didn't add any references." I couldn't agree more. What I would like to ask, however, is this. Has it ever occurred to anyone that detecting whether an article completely lacks references should be something that could be, in theory, entirely automated, and thus, with automation, be able to provide some feedback (imperfect though it might be) immediately rather than waiting a month for human review? --j⚛e deckertalk 17:49, 10 June 2014 (UTC)

results so far

I think we started with a smidgen under 3,000 submissions. Diligent reviewing by all parties, each giving what they wish to give to the drive has reduced that to a smidgen over 400. The maths is not simple, Many articles have been resubmitted and re-reviewed several times. A shedload of work has gone in and it's only 11 June

Some of the submissions are tough. We need more eyes on the older submissions. Getting the overall review period shorter and shorter ought to be the objective, not just 'getting through the work'. We ought to be able and willing to turn reviews round within a couple of days, not a couple of weeks. Catch the submitters while they still remember the article!

And quality - the quality of the reviews seems uniformly high. There are some mistakes. So what? No-one dies when we accept an article too soon or are over pedantic when we decline. We have to get it as right as we can. We are all imperfect. I will give you a guarantee that I have made mistakes and will do so again. Fiddle Faddle 22:32, 11 June 2014 (UTC)

Ordering of "Top" templates/banners after a "clean draft" has been executed

Context: While using the AFC rewrite gadget I came across some oddities in terms of what is at the top of the page, therefore I'd like to establish a consensus as to what needs to be above the AFC templates ({{AFC submission}} and {{AFC comment}}) on a page after a clean.

MFD Nominations

Justification: MFD is a much more time deliniated process in addition to being more important in the grand scheme of things when a editor or reader comes in and sees that the AFC submission is in danger of being deleted.

CSD nominations

Justification: Same as MFD nominations except a CSD is even shorter timeframe.

Discussion

Hasteur, can you link us to a couple of examples of what you are talking about? Some people need the visual in order to understand your context of what you are proposing. I have an idea of what I think you mean, but my ideas of what you mean are often entirely different than what you actually mean and I want to make sure that doesn't happen. If you mean what I think you mean, then I'm not sure we really need our own consensus on this as WP:MFD#How to list pages for deletion and WP:CSD#Introduction to criteria (expand collapsed section) clearly state Enter the following text at the top of the page you are listing for deletion (emphasis not mine) and place the relevant speedy deletion template at the top of the page or media file you are nominating respectively. — {{U|Technical 13}} (e • t • c) 16:19, 9 June 2014 (UTC)

Technical 13 Unfortunately, the original examples I had are long gone. I'm bringing it here to help clarify the request I made at Wikipedia_talk:WikiProject_Articles_for_creation/Helper_script/Rewrite#When_cleaning_what_goes_at_the_top_of_the_page, that I feel has not recieved the attention it needs. Constructing a step through to explain what I see as the problem:
A reviewer comes to an AFC submission that has a MFD banner and/or a CSD banner on it.

The reviewer either clicks Decline, Comment, or clean.

As part of the process of carrying out the user's request, the program takes all the AFC submission banners out of the page, and re-inserts them at the top of the page.

As you can visualize, this would cause the MFD or CSD templates to not be at the very top of the page, but be below any AFC process templates. If there is the existing larger consensus, then we must obey it, but also brainstorming about what other templates should be exempted from our banners taking top slot. Hasteur (talk) 16:46, 9 June 2014 (UTC)
If people think mock-ups would be useful, I can make a few? --Mdann52talk to me! 17:07, 9 June 2014 (UTC)
  • Well, I think that both Technical 13 and Hasteur are correct here. It's unlikely that anyone working here at AfC will argue that the AfC templates should go above the deletion templates, so Hasteur's thread needn't have been so formal; on the other hand, making sure that everyone is aware of this issue is important so that (1) the technical aspects can be checked to make sure that the deletion templates are not displaced, and (2) similarly anyone doing manual placing of AfC templates will be reminded to check for deletion templates and not displace them from their position of prominence. —Anne Delong (talk) 17:10, 9 June 2014 (UTC)
  • I'm just wondering why people are even bothering with drafts that are nominated for CSD? Either you contest it, in which case you simply remove the template and continue to process the draft, or you agree with the nomination and you move on to the next. MfD is a little different in the way that you're not suppose to remove the template if you contest it. If you agree with it, there is no sense in bothering to review it, however if you contest it, you need to post that on the discussion itself and the template should stay at the top of the page. I think cleaning pages (or any action) should remove CsD templates (a prompt for a while until everyone gets use to this action would be a good idea "Are you sure you want to remove the CsD template?") and should make sure the MfD one stays to the top of the page. — {{U|Technical 13}} (e • t • c) 17:19, 9 June 2014 (UTC)
Often when pages are under deletion review, other editors make an effort to save the page by improving it. Cleaning to remove sandbox notices, etc., may be done as part of this process (although in itself it wouldn't save the draft), and shouldn't remove an MfD. Also, when the script opens up a window for a comment or for the reviewer to select an AfC template to place, is it possible that another editor could come along and use Twinkle to place an MfD or CSD notice, which would then go unseen by the reviewer when they complete the edit? In other words does the script lock the page against edit conflicts as soon as it is called, or only when the reviewer is finished and presses the final button? —Anne Delong (talk) 17:35, 9 June 2014 (UTC)
  • Edit conflicts are tested based on when the page is loaded currently, so an edit conflict would occur if someone placed a template while reviewing the draft. — {{U|Technical 13}} (e • t • c) 17:54, 9 June 2014 (UTC)
  • (two days later) Technical 13, are you sure? I just called up the script, selected "Comment", wrote the comment but did not save it. Then I went to another tab, used Reflinks to fix up the references on the same submission, and then went back and saved my comment. Both edits were saved sequentially, with no edit conflict, even though the page and the script with an input box were open the whole time in the first window. To me this indicates that the edit conflict is based on when the page is loaded in edit mode, and that the script doesn't do that until you indicate that you are finished entering comments, selecting from drop-downs, filling in check-boxes, etc., which could be a long time. —Anne Delong (talk) 23:05, 11 June 2014 (UTC)
  • Using which version of the script? Can you offer the diffs? It's possible that there was no conflict because the changes made by reflinks didn't conflict (weren't to the same area of text) as the comment. This is likely because the comment is in a different section at the top of the page and wouldn't interfere with the references in the body and visa versa. — {{U|Technical 13}} (e • t • c) 23:12, 11 June 2014 (UTC)
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