This is an archive of past discussions with User:James Allison. 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.
This newsletter comes a little earlier than usual because the backlog is rising again and the holidays are coming very soon.
Getting the queue to 0
There are now 823 holders of the New Page Reviewer flag! Most of you requested the user right to be able to do something about the huge backlog but it's still roughly less than 10% doing 90% of the work. Now it's time for action.
Exactly one year ago there were 'only' 3,650 unreviewed articles, now we will soon be approaching 7,000 despite the growing number of requests for the NPR user right. If each reviewer soon does only 2 reviews a day over five days, the backlog will be down to zero and the daily input can then be processed by every reviewer doing only 1 review every 2 days - that's only a few minutes work on the bus on the way to the office or to class! Let's get this over and done with in time to relax for the holidays.
Want to join? Consider adding the NPP Pledge userbox.
Our next newsletter will announce the winners of some really cool awards.
Coordinator
Admin Barkeep49 has been officially invested as NPP/NPR coordinator by a unanimous consensus of the community. This is a complex role and he will need all the help he can get from other experienced reviewers.
This month's refresher course
Paid editing is still causing headaches for even our most experienced reviewers: This official Wikipedia article will be an eye-opener to anyone who joined Wikipedia or obtained the NPR right since 2015. See The Hallmarks to know exactly what to look for and take time to examine all the sources.
Tools
It is now possible to select new pages by date range. This was requested by reviewers who want to patrol from the middle of the list.
It is now also possible for accredited reviewers to put any article back into the New Pages Feed for re-review. The link is under 'Tools' in the side bar.
Reviewer Feedback
Would you like feedback on your reviews? Are you an experienced reviewer who can give feedback to other reviewers? If so there are two new feedback pilot programs. New Reviewer mentorship will match newer reviewers with an experienced reviewer with a new reviewer. The other program will be an occasional peer review cohort for moderate or experienced reviewers to give feedback to each other. The first cohort will launch November 13.
Second set of eyes
Not only are New Page Reviewers the guardians of quality of new articles, they are also in a position to ensure that pages are being correctly tagged for deletion and maintenance and that new authors are not being bitten. This is an important feature of your work, especially while some routine tagging for deletion can still be carried out by non NPR holders and inexperienced users. Read about it at the Monitoring the system section in the tutorial. If you come across such editors doing good work, don't hesitate to encourage them to apply for NPR.
Do be sure to have our talk page on your watchlist. There are often items that require reviewers' special attention, such as to watch out for pages by known socks or disruptive editors, technical issues and new developments, and of course to provide advice for other reviewers.
Arbitration Committee
The annual ArbCom election will be coming up soon. All eligible users will be invited to vote. While not directly concerned with NPR, Arbcom cases often lead back to notability and deletion issues and/or actions by holders of advanced user rights.
Community Wish list
There is to be no wish list for WMF encyclopedias this year. We thank Community Tech for their hard work addressing our long list of requirements which somewhat overwhelmed them last year, and we look forward to a successful completion.
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Upcoming: Next Linked Data for Libraries LD4 Wikidata Affinity Group call: Martin Poulter on Wikidata projects at the University of Oxford, 05, November. Agenda
SPARQL RC is showing the recent changes on items that are listed from a specific query. It is very useful to monitor the changes on a specific subset of data, for example data that you recently imported in Wikidata.
Made the Lua functions mw.wikibase.getBestStatements and mw.wikibase.getAllStatements faster if called more than once for the same statement on a single page
In order to decrease the size of what we store in caches we stopped storing the actual EntityUsage objects in ParserOutput and now just store minimal identifier strings (phabricator:T236749)
Panandâ, a mobile app powered by Wikidata (and Wikimedia Commons), won the top prize in the App for Social Good category in the Android Masters 2019 competition organized by Google Developer Group Philippines. Eugene, the app's developer, recently gave a lightning talk about the app at WikidataCon 2019.
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.
Join the global m:WikiForHumanRights Campaign by participating with WikiProject Human rights. The campaigns is focused on increasing coverage of human rights topics on Wikimedia projects through January 30.
Cradle enables editors to create a new item by completing a form. You can create a new form on the Cradle help page. Cradle forms can be used as templates to ensure that similar new items are structured the same way. This can be especially helpful for specific WikiProjects or datathons, and is a great timesaver if you are creating many similar items by hand.
Other Noteworthy Stuff
570k VIAF identifiers have been added to Wikidata items in an effort of synchronisation between the two databases, thanks to Bargioni. In order to report errors in VIAF an apposite page has been created. More information here.
Query Service lag now affects maxlag. You may need to retry/reset error multiple times when you run QuickStatement or OpenRefine in busy hours.
Wikidata now documented more than six million people, more than the number of articles in English Wikipedia
Alt Labels displays item labels in other languages when there is no label in your default language. You may click a label to add it as the label for your language. This tool is very helpful for labels for people, books, articles, or films that do not need their labels to be translated.
overpass: Embeds a map displaying features tagged with the current item in OpenStreetMap. Powered by overpass turbo. It helps check if the Wikidata object is mapped in OSM and also if it's correct.
Other Noteworthy Stuff
A WikiCite event will take place in May 2020 in Cologne. Call for contributions is now open (more info)
Recoin displays information about the relative completeness of a Wikidata item by comparing its statements with those found on other similar items. Especially useful for editors working in a knowledge area that is new to them.
This year's Reviewer of the Year is Rosguill. Having gotten the reviewer PERM in August 2018, they have been a regular reviewer of articles and redirects, been an active participant in the NPP community, and has been the driving force for the emerging NPP Source Guide that will help reviewers better evaluate sourcing and notability in many countries for which it has historically been difficult.
Special commendation again goes to Onel5969 who ends the year as one of our most prolific reviewers for the second consecutive year. Thanks also to Boleyn and JTtheOG who have been in the top 5 for the last two years as well.
Several newer editors have done a lot of work with CAPTAIN MEDUSA and DannyS712 (who has also written bots which have patrolled thousands of redirects) being new reviewers since this time last year.
Thanks to them and to everyone reading this who has participated in New Page Patrol this year.
(The top 100 reviewers of the year can be found here)
Redirect autopatrol
A recent Request for Comment on creating a new redirect autopatrol pseduo-permission was closed early. New Page Reviewers are now able to nominate editors who have an established track record creating uncontroversial redirects. At the individual discretion of any administrator or after 24 hours and a consensus of at least 3 New Page Reviewers an editor may be added to a list of users whose redirects will be patrolled automatically by DannyS712 bot III.
Source Guide Discussion
Set to launch early in the new year is our first New Page Patrol Source Guide discussion. These discussions are designed to solicit input on sources in places and topic areas that might otherwise be harder for reviewers to evaluate. The hope is that this will allow us to improve the accuracy of our patrols for articles using these sources (and/or give us places to perform a WP:BEFORE prior to nominating for deletion). Please watch the New Page Patrol talk page for more information.
This month's refresher course
While New Page Reviewers are an experienced set of editors, we all benefit from an occasional review. This month consider refreshing yourself on Wikipedia:Notability (geographic features). Also consider how we can take the time for quality in this area. For instance, sources to verify human settlements, which are presumed notable, can often be found in seconds. This lets us avoid the (ugly) 'Needs more refs' tag.
