This is an archive of past discussions with User:Insertcleverphrasehere. Do not edit the contents of this page. If you wish to start a new discussion or revive an old one, please do so on the current talk page.
Welcome to the twenty-first newsletter from the Growth team!
New project: Positive reinforcement
Mockup of the Impact module, redesigned to add Positive reinforcement.
The Growth team started a new project: Positive reinforcement. We want newcomers to understand there is an interest in regularly editing Wikipedia, and we want to improve new editor retention.
We asked users from Arabic, Bangla, Czech and French Wikipedia about their feedback. Some people participated at mediawiki.org as well.
We summarized the initial feedback gathered from these community discussions, along with how we plan to iterate based on that feedback.
The first Positive Reinforcement idea is a redesign of the impact module: incorporating stats, graphs, and other contribution information. This idea received the widest support, and we plan to start our work based on the design illustrated on the side.
"Add a link" available at more wikis ― Add a link feature has been deployed to more wikis: Catalan Wikipedia, Hebrew Wikipedia, Hindi Wikipedia, Korean Wikipedia, Norwegian Bokmål Wikipedia, Portuguese Wikipedia, Simple English Wikipedia, Swedish Wikipedia, Ukrainian Wikipedia, Abkhazian Wikipedia, Achinese Wikipedia, Adyghe Wikipedia, Afrikaans Wikipedia, Akan Wikipedia, Alemannisch Wikipedia, Amharic Wikipedia, Aragonese Wikipedia, Old English Wikipedia, Syriac Wikipedia, Egyptian Arabic Wikipedia, Asturian Wikipedia, Atikamekw Wikipedia, Avaric Wikipedia, Aymara Wikipedia, Azerbaijani Wikipedia, South Azerbaijani Wikipedia. This is part of the progressive deployment of this tool to more Wikipedias. The communities can configure locally how this feature works.
"Add an image" available at more wikis ― Add an image feature will be deployed to more wikis: Greek Wikipedia, Indonesian Wikipedia, Polish Wikipedia, Chinese Wikipedia. These communities will be able to configure locally how this feature works. [1]
Suggested edits
Selecting topics ― We have created an "AND" filter to the list of topics at Special:Homepage. This way, newcomers can decide to select very specific topics ("Transportation" AND "Asia") or to have a broader selection ("Transportation" OR "Asia"). At the moment this feature is tested at pilot wikis.
Changes for Add a link ― We have built several improvements that came from community discussion and from data analysis. They will be available soon at the wikis.
Algorithm improvements ― The algorithm now avoids recommending links in sections that usually don't have links and for first names. Also, it now limits each article to only having three link suggestions by default (limited to the highest accuracy suggestions of all the available ones in the article).
User experience improvements ― We added a confirmation dialog when a user exits out of suggestion mode prior to making changes. We also improved post-edit dialog experience and allow newcomers to browse through task suggestions from the post-edit dialog.
Community configuration ― We allow communities to set a maximum number of links per article via Special:EditGrowthConfig.
Future change for Add a link feature ― We will suggest underlinked articles in priority. [2]
Patrolling suggested edits ― Some users at Arabic Wikipedia, Spanish Wikipedia, and Russian Wikipedia told us that "Add a link" and "Add an image" edits can be challenging to patrol. We are now brainstorming improvements to help address this challenge. We have already some ideas and we started some work to address this challenge. If you have any thoughts to add about the challenges of reviewing these tasks or how we should improve these tasks further, please let us know, in any language.
Hi. Would you be able to quickly do a search similar to this 2018 activity report, but based on the last 12 months from 1 July 2021 up to and including 30 June 2022? It would be really helpful if you could and and post the link to it on my talk page. If you can't, let me know and I'll try to find someone else. Cheers, Kudpung กุดผึ้ง (talk) 01:28, 7 July 2022 (UTC)
Thanks. You've no idea how much I appreciate this. Like you, RL has got in the way of Wikipedia and I've had to drag myself out of semi-retirement to bully the NPPers into organising themselves into some semblance of coordination. MB is now doing a grand job, and I'll soon be able to return to my convalescence from a particularly long and distressing confrontation with a world-wide pandemic.
The New Pages Patrol queue has around 10,000 articles to be reviewed. As all administrators have the patrol right, please consider helping out. The queue is here. For further information on the state of the project, see the latest NPP newsletter.
When you gave out the barnstars last time, did you separate the redirects from the article reviews? If so, can you tell me the way to distinguish the two types of reviews i a quarry? -MPGuy2824 (talk) 04:42, 4 August 2022 (UTC)
An RfC has been closed with consensus to add javascript that will show edit notices for editors editing via a mobile device. This only works for users using a mobile browser, so iOS app editors will still not be able to see edit notices.
An RfC has been closed with the consensus that train stations are not inherently notable.
Administrators will now see links on user pages for "Change block" and "Unblock user" instead of just "Block user" if the user is already blocked. (T308570)
Arbitration
The arbitration case request Geschichte has been automatically closed after a 3 month suspension of the case.
Miscellaneous
You can vote for candidates in the 2022 Board of Trustees elections from 16 August to 30 August. Two community elected seats are up for election.
Wikimania 2022 is taking place virtually from 11 August to 14 August. The schedule for wikimania is listed here. There are also a number of in-person events associated with Wikimania around the world.
Tech tip: When revision-deleting on desktop, hold ⇧ Shift between clicking two checkboxes to select every box in that range.
After the last newsletter (No.28, June 2022), the backlog declined another 1,000 to 13,000 in the last week of June. Then the July backlog drive began, during which 9,900 articles were reviewed and the backlog fell by 4,500 to just under 8,500 (these numbers illustrate how many new articles regularly flow into the queue). Thanks go to the coordinators Buidhe and Zippybonzo, as well as all the nearly 100 participants. Congratulations to Dr vulpes who led with 880 points. See this page for further details.
Unfortunately, most of the decline happened in the first half of the month, and the backlog has already risen to 9,600. Understandably, it seems many backlog drive participants are taking a break from reviewing and unfortunately, we are not even keeping up with the inflow let alone driving it lower. We need the other 600 reviewers to do more! Please try to do at least one a day.
Coordination
MB and Novem Linguae have taken on some of the coordination tasks. Please let them know if you are interested in helping out. MPGuy2824 will be handling recognition, and will be retroactively awarding the annual barnstars that have not been issued for a few years.
Open letter to the WMF
The Page Curation software needs urgent attention. There are dozens of bug fixes and enhancements that are stalled (listed at Suggested improvements). We have written a letter to be sent to the WMF and we encourage as many patrollers as possible to sign it here. We are also in negotiation with the Board of Trustees to press for assistance. Better software will make the active reviewers we have more productive.
TIP - Reviewing by subject
Reviewers who prefer to patrol new pages by their most familiar subjects can do so from the regularly updated sorted topic list.
New reviewers
The NPP School is being underused. The learning curve for NPP is quite steep, but a detailed and easy-to-read tutorial exists, and the Curation Tool's many features are fully described and illustrated on the updated page here.
If you have noticed a user with a good understanding of Wikipedia notability and deletion, suggest they help the effort by placing {{subst:NPR invite}} on their talk page.
If you are no longer very active on Wikipedia or you no longer wish to be part of the New Page Reviewer user group, please consider asking any admin to remove you from the list. This will enable NPP to have a better overview of its performance and what improvements need to be made to the process and its software.
To opt-out of future mailings, please remove yourself here.
Hey ICPH. I hope you're doing well. I made a post in WT:NPPR and generated some traffic and new users to the NPP Discord server. I'm getting some requests to set up wikiauthbot so people can authenticate their wikipedia accounts. Would this be OK? If so, I can either handle everything (by assigning me the "manage server" permission) or you can add the bot at this link. Thanks. –Novem Linguae (talk) 17:10, 7 August 2022 (UTC)
Awesome. Thank you. One more request if I may. Currently no one except you can award the user right "Verified Patroller" because it is listed as the #1 rank in the list of permissions. Would you be willing to right click server icon -> Server Settings -> Roles and drag "Moderator" (a new rank I just created) to the top? And then drag "Coordinator or Admin" to #2? That should fix the issue. Or if you have other ideas let me know! –Novem Linguae (talk) 03:23, 8 August 2022 (UTC)
P.S. The only difference between "Moderator" and "Coordinator or Admin" is that a "Moderator" can assign new people the rank of "Coordinator or Admin". If you want to be the only person that does that, feel free to delete the "Moderator" role I created and just drag "Coordinator or Admin" to the top spot. –Novem Linguae (talk) 03:27, 8 August 2022 (UTC)
Insertcleverphrasehere, I assume that you didn't get this award, since you were the one giving out the barnstars that year.
You've also marked Anaxial as qualifying for a bronze for 2017, but not awarded, can you look at this and see if they deserve the award now? They haven't done any reviews since 2018. -MPGuy2824 (talk) 05:32, 17 August 2022 (UTC)
I think most NPPers are agreed that some new measures are going to be needed soon to stem the tide of dubious new articles in order to reduce the workload for patrollers and AfC. It's probably unlikely that we would be able to raise the bar as we did with ACTRIAL, which worked fine for a while, and the Foundation is still reluctant to do any more required enhancements to the PageTriage software they created in 2012 and updated in 2018. I'm working on an idea that might help without treading on the toes of diehard Wikipedia conservatives; I think there's a fair chance my idea would gain some traction - it would certainly get a lot of comment and I need a stack of stats to back it up:
Sample period: 12 recent months.
Number of new articles.
Number of new articles created by users with < 90 days/500 edits.
Number of new articles created by autopatrolled users.
Number of new articles draftified.
Number of new articles submitted to AfC
Number of new articles deleted (by any deletion process).
Number of NPPers who have not edited en.Wiki for 12 months.
Number of NPPers who have not done any reviews for 12 months.
Stats on one graph:
Number of new articles created by year over the last 5 years
Number of new articles created but deleted by year over the last 5 years
WP:QUERY is likely to be the best place to get this info. Most of this is SQL query-able. If ICPH agrees, maybe repost this there. If they decline to do it because we're asking too much at one time, I can knock out a couple of the easy ones. –Novem Linguae (talk) 08:36, 20 August 2022 (UTC)
@Kudpung I agree with @Novem Linguae; ask at WP:QUERY. The folks over there are ridiculously efficient at putting together custom queries for whatever info you might need. While I used to run a lot of queries, I actually know little to nothing about coding queries myself, and mostly just asked other people for help putting them together, and then cobbled others together using common sense. — Insertcleverphrasehere(or here)(or here)(or here)11:02, 20 August 2022 (UTC)
For those who may have missed it in our last newsletter, here's a quick reminder to see the letter we have drafted, and if you support it, do please go ahead and sign it. If you already signed, thanks. Also, if you haven't noticed, the backlog has been trending up lately; all reviews are greatly appreciated.
To opt-out of future mailings, please remove yourself here.
Here is a barnstar to show appreciation for the NPP reviews you did back in 2020. We realize this is late, but NPP fell behind in some coordination activities. We are just getting caught up. If you don't want to receive "old" barnstars, please just ignore this and reply (with a ping) to let us know not to send you any more. -MPGuy2824 (talk) 02:56, 25 August 2022 (UTC)
Here is a barnstar to show appreciation for the NPP reviews you did back in 2019. We realize this is late, but NPP fell behind in some coordination activities. We are almost caught up. If you don't want to receive "old" barnstars, please just ignore this and reply to let us know not to send you any more. -MPGuy2824 (talk) 06:58, 31 August 2022 (UTC)
A discussion is open to define a process by which Vector 2022 can be made the default for all users.
An RfC is open to gain consensus on whether Fox News is reliable for science and politics.
Technical news
The impact report on the effects of disabling IP editing on the Persian (Farsi) Wikipedia has been released.
The WMF is looking into making a Private Incident Reporting System (PIRS) system to improve the reporting of harmful incidents through easier and safer reporting. You can leave comments on the talk page by answering the questions provided. Users who have faced harmful situations are also invited to join a PIRS interview to share the experience. To sign up please emailMadalina Ana.
Arbitration
An arbitration case regarding Conduct in deletion-related editing has been closed. The Arbitration Committee passed a remedy as part of the final decision to create a request for comment (RfC) on how to handle mass nominations at Articles for Deletion (AfD).
The arbitration case request Jonathunder has been automatically closed after a 6 month suspension of the case.
Miscellaneous
The new pages patrol (NPP) team has prepared an appeal to the Wikimedia Foundation (WMF) for assistance with addressing Page Curation bugs and requested features. You are encouraged to read the open letter before it is sent, and if you support it, consider signing it. It is not a discussion, just a signature will suffice.
Thank you for supporting the NPP initiative to improve WMF support of the Page Curation tools. Another way you can help is by voting in the Board of Trustees election. The next Board composition might be giving attention to software development. The election closes on 6 September at 23:59 UTC. View candidate statement videos and Vote Here. MB03:30, 5 September 2022 (UTC)
Here is a barnstar to show appreciation for the NPP reviews you did back in 2018. We realize this is late, but NPP fell behind in some coordination activities. We have just caught up with giving out deserved barnstars. -MPGuy2824 (talk) 03:13, 7 September 2022 (UTC)
Growth team newsletter #22
Welcome to the twenty-second newsletter from the Growth team!
Newcomers tasks reach the 500,000 edits milestone — more data publicly available
As of the last week of June 2022, the newcomers of the world have completed over 500,000 newcomer tasks. In other words, newcomers have made over half a million Wikipedia edits via Growth’s “Suggested Edits” module.
About 30% of those edits were completed on mobile devices.
Usage continues to increase; in June 2022 almost 50,000 newcomer tasks were completed.
We have added some new data to Grafana. You can now check the number of edits and reverts by task types, or the number of questions asked to mentors. You can filter the data by wiki.
If you have any questions, or there is more data you want access to, please let us know.
Ongoing projects and explorations
The new impact module is part of the Positive Reinforcement project. The image displays the mockup for mobile we used for user testing.
We are continuing our work on our new project, Positive Reinforcement. User testing of initial Positive Reinforcement designs was just completed. Interviews were conducted in Arabic, English, and Spanish. The outcome has been published on the Positive Reinforcement page. We are now utilizing user testing feedback along with prior community feedback to iterate and improve designs.
We are exploring the idea of a Copy Edit structured task. We have tested copy edits in Wikipedia articles for arwiki, bnwiki, cswiki, eswiki (Growth pilot-wikis) and enwiki with two different methods: LanguageTool and Hunspell. We will share more details here and on the associated Copy Edit page once the evaluation is complete.
Newcomers who get the Add a Link structured task are more likely to be activated (i.e. make a constructive first article edit).
They are also more likely to be retained (i.e. come back and make another constructive article edit on a different day).
The feature also increases edit volume (i.e. the number of constructive edits made across the first couple weeks), while at the same time improving edit quality (i.e. the likelihood that the newcomer's edits aren't reverted).
Communities had expressed concern that newcomers whose initial edits were structured tasks wouldn’t go on to learn how to complete more difficult tasks. The Growth team data scientist conducted a Newcomer task edit type analysis to see if this was indeed the case.
Results from analysis indicate that this likely isn’t a significant concern. More than 70% of users who start with the easy task "Add a link" also make another task type. Read the full analysis and methodology here.
News for mentors
A new system for the mentors list
The configuration of the mentors list will change over the next weeks. In the future, mentors will sign up, edit their mentor description and quit using Special:MentorDashboard. This new system will make the development of new features for mentors much easier.
At the moment, the mentor list is a simple page anyone can edit, unless it’s protected. With the new page, mentors will be able to edit only their own description, while administrators will be able to edit the entire mentors' list if needed.
The deployment will happen first at the pilot wikis, then at all wikis. Existing lists of mentors will be automatically converted, no action will be needed from the mentors. [5][6]
Mentors will be informed about the next steps soon, by a message posted on the talk page of existing Mentor lists.
Did you know that mentors can filter their mentees' changes at Special:MentorDashboard (and star the ones that require attention)? This feature helps to keep an eye on newcomers' edits, helping mentors to fix minor details, and encourage them if necessary.
And did you know that mentors have special filters to highlight their mentees' edits at Special:RecentChanges? Look for the following filters in RecentChanges: Your starred mentees, Your unstarred mentees.
Other improvements
Some improvements will be made to the mentor dashboard in the coming weeks:
While we now offer some options for mentors to take a break, the option to quit mentoring was not easy to find. This will be improved. [7]
Mentors at wikis using FlaggedRevisions will have a way to discover their mentees' pending edits. [8]
Dashboard discovery for new mentors will be improved. [9]
Recent changes and fixed bugs
We moved to a new Image Suggestions API. This new API will allow us to deploy Add an Image to more wikis. [10]
Starting September 19, a few more wikis now offer Add an image to newcomers. These wikis are Greek Wikipedia, Polish Wikipedia, Chinese Wikipedia, Indonesian Wikipedia, Romanian Wikipedia. [11]
Add an image has been disabled for a few days due to technical issue. "Add an image" added a blank line instead of an image. This has been fixed. [12]
In order to know if Special:EditGrowthConfig is used by communities, we now instrument page loads and saves of configuration. [13]
Following an RfC, consensus has been found that, in the context of politics and science, the reliability of FoxNews.com is unclear and that additional considerations apply to its use.
The Articles for creation helper script now automatically recognises administrator accounts which means your name does not need to be listed at WP:AFCP to help out. If you wish to help out at AFC, enable AFCH by navigating to Preferences → Gadgets and checking the "Yet Another AfC Helper Script" box.
Arbitration
Remedy 8.1 of the Muhammad images case will be rescinded 1 November following a motion.
An RfC is open to discuss having open requests for adminship automatically placed on hold after the seven-day period has elapsed, pending closure or other action by a bureaucrat.
Tech tip: Wikimarkup in a block summary is parsed in the notice that the blockee sees. You can use templates with custom options to specify situations like {{rangeblock|create=yes}} or {{uw-ublock|contains profanity}}.
This is a standard message to notify contributors about an administrative ruling in effect. It does not imply that there are any issues with your contributions to date.
You have shown interest in COVID-19, broadly construed. Due to past disruption in this topic area, a more stringent set of rules called discretionary sanctions is in effect. Any administrator may impose sanctions on editors who do not strictly follow Wikipedia's policies, or the page-specific restrictions, when making edits related to the topic.
To opt out of receiving messages like this one, place {{Ds/aware}} on your user talk page and specify in the template the topic areas that you would like to opt out of alerts about. For additional information, please see the guidance on discretionary sanctions and the Arbitration Committee's decision here. If you have any questions, or any doubts regarding what edits are appropriate, you are welcome to discuss them with me or any other editor.
Hello! Voting in the 2022 Arbitration Committee elections is now open until 23:59 (UTC) on Monday, 12 December 2022. All eligible users are allowed to vote. Users with alternate accounts may only vote once.
The Arbitration Committee is the panel of editors responsible for conducting the Wikipedia arbitration process. It has the authority to impose binding solutions to disputes between editors, primarily for serious conduct disputes the community has been unable to resolve. This includes the authority to impose site bans, topic bans, editing restrictions, and other measures needed to maintain our editing environment. The arbitration policy describes the Committee's roles and responsibilities in greater detail.
Screenshot of the positive reinforcement module improvements.
Positive reinforcement: an improved impact module to test
The goal of the Growth team is to encourage newcomers to try editing for the first time, and encourage them to keep editing. We want to increase newcomers' motivation by showing them how impactful their edits are.
Newcomers have access to an impact module; you can find yours at Special:Impact. The revised impact module provides new editors with more context about their impact. It will display the number of edits, the number of thanks received, the last time they edited, the number of consecutive days they edited, and the number of views for the articles they edited.
This module will soon be available at our pilot wikis starting December 1. You can already test this new module at Beta Wikipedia. For safety reasons, do not use your regular account and password at Beta wiki. Create a new, specific account for this wiki, with a different password.
Structured tasks: improvements based on patroller feedback
After the deployment of Structured tasks, we received feedback from various communities regarding how patrollers of recent changes were feeling overwhelmed by an increase in edits to check, and how some edits were poor quality or of poor relevance.
We made several improvements based on the feedback we received. Several points of improvement have already been addressed:
Patroller fatigue:
By default, newcomers can complete up to 25 "add a link" tasks and 25 "add an image" tasks per day. If patrollers are overburdened, each community can use Special:EditGrowthConfig to lower that limit.
Quality of edits: what constitutes a "quality edit" is not a well defined concept. We initiated a discussion and summarized our findings. We also worked on the following improvements:
Underlinked articles are now prioritized, so it's less likely that newcomers are adding links to articles that are already have a lot of links.
The confidence score was increased, so suggestions are more likely to be accurate.
The default number of suggested links per article has been lowered to 3. This can be changed at Special:EditGrowthConfig. Communities can also exclude articles containing certain templates or categories from being suggested.
Lists will no longer receive "add an image" suggestions.
Disambiguation pages will no longer receive "add an image" suggestions.
We have many further improvements we plan to make to "add an image" in early 2023. [14]
The Positive Reinforcement project will also address some of the concerns around encouraging newcomers to progress to higher value edits. The Growth team will soon work on strategies geared at "Leveling up" newcomers so they progress from easy to more difficult tasks.
Recent changes
All Wikipedias now have the same onboarding experience. Previously, at a few wikis, 20% of new accounts didn't get the Growth features when they created their account. These 20% of new accounts were used as a control group, in order to know if the Growth features were changing newcomers' behavior. Experiments have shown that Growth features improve activation and retention, and as we want to provide the same onboarding experience at all Wikipedias, we have decided to remove the control groups. We will utilize control groups when testing new features, and German Wikipedia keeps a control group at their request. [15]
The quality score for "add a link" suggestions will change. We will suggest less links for each article, but they will be more accurate. We will first deploy it at our pilot wikis, and then to all other wikis where this feature is available. [16][17]
Growth's features FAQ has been updated and expanded. This page centralizes all the information about Growth features. We invite you to read it, and, if you can, to translate it.
News for mentors
All Wikipedias can now setup and manage a mentorship program in an easier way.
We changed the process to make it more reliable, easier to improve and easier to use.
Wikipedias where mentorship hasn't been enabled yet can turn mentorship on following a new process. When done, mentors can sign-up by visiting Special:MentorDashboard.
Wikipedias where the list of mentors already existed have been converted to the new system.
The Mentor dashboard's "Your mentees" module will have a new footer, called "Recent changes by your mentees". This footer will include a link to Recent changes, where mentors can see only edits made by their own mentees. [18]
Deployments
Add a link has been deployed to a 5th round of wikis. [19]
Improving this newsletter
We plan to have a more regular newsletter, every two months. We also want to know if the current format suits you! Let us know what you like, what you like less and your suggestions of improvements: leave us a comment, in your preferred language.
