Wikipedia:The future of NPP and AfC

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The growth of the NPP backlog until May 2017

The integrity of Wikipedia's reputation has to be repaired and maintained through control of its content. This is a major issue and one which will eventually lead to important restructuring of the way Wikipedia handles the fundamental control of newly created articles.

...AfC doesn't have as many issues to deal with from submissions. In particular, many CSD criteria don't apply to AfC submissions. But most of all it has to do with the fact that NPP has to be reactive rather than proactive. In the case of NPP, we have to act in the case of an improper submission, and the action has to be valid, with AfC the opposite is true, action is only taken when the submission is a good one, or else to give feedback (analogous to tagging for NPP). Improper submissions do not need to be rigorously evaluated for CSD criteria etc, because they are clearly not ready for main space. With AfC, except in rare cases such as copyvio or attack pages, you can generally just look at notability (only one section of this flow chart), and the responsibility is on the submitter to demonstrate notability. For NPP the responsibility is on the reviewer to demonstrate a lack of notability, which is more difficult and easier to get wrong.
— InsertCleverPhraseHere

A large amount of preparatory work has been done, spread out over the last 5 years. Now is the time to consolidate those efforts and for a dedicated work group to prepare the details for any Requests for Comment (RfC) that will need to be launched for debate by the broader community, to prepare the to do list that has been requested by the WMF for relatively minor tweaks and software repairs that do not require Community consensus, and to make the official requests for any required heavier engineering resulting from consensus.
The graph on the right is drawn from sources in a MediaWiki extension that was created by the Wikimedia Foundation, but the figures are disputed by WMF employees.

Background

Following the Foundation's 2005 decision to restrict the creation of new articles in mainspace to registered users, the en.Wiki community created a local project, Articles for Creation to provide a volunteer maintained entrance for users who choose not to register, or who have a conflict of interest, or who prefer to use the Article wizard.

In 2010 a group of editors realised that:

The huge backlog at New Pages Patrol, the only firewall against unwanted content (and a core MediaWiki extension), required immediate attention.
The poor quality of patrolling generally assumed to be by insufficiently experienced users required serious attention.
A proper landing page explaining to new users what they can and cannot write articles about, was a grave omission from the overall concept of Wikipedia.
The mantra the encyclopedia anyone can edit did not, in effect, mean the encyclopedia anyone can manage, tinker with, or bring into disrepute, as proven by the necessary restriction imposed by the WMF in 2005.

In 2011 to provide a complete solution including a modified use of Article Wizard, the community decided by consensus to restrict the creation of new pages to autoconfirmed users (editors who have made at least 10 edits and have been registered for at least 4 days).

Despite the huge precursor RfC with a two-thirds majority consensus from over 500 users participating, making it one of the largest in Wikipedia history, and the 2005 precedent demonstrating that the needs of Wikipedia are, and can be organic, the Wikimedia Foundation declined its technical implementation.

In the aftermath of what we now commonly refer to as ACTRIAL, in collaboration with a team of community volunteers the WMF conceded to develop WP:Page Curation to streamline the work flow of experienced editors who patrol new pages following the guidelines and recommendations at New Pages Patrol, and to develop a completely new landing page for new users wanting to create new pages. However, due to various internal Foundation issues this other half of the project was halted and repeated requests since 2012 for an update on its status were met with silence until March 2016. In June 2017 it was finally explained that the project was abandoned in favour of development of Echo, a user notification system that replaced the big orange 'You have messages on your talk page' banner. It had a mixed reception over its usefulness as a collaboration aid, and it does not address very serious issues surrounding the encyclopedia's content.

Recently Achieved

Roll out of the Draft namespace (December 2013)
Introduction of a user qualification for AfC (February 2015)
Introduction of a user qualification for NPP: (November 2016)
Restoration of NOINDEX for new, unpatrolled articles, for 90 days. (November 2016)

Moving forward

Due to increasing backlog at NPP and problems of reviewer consistency at AfC, discussions have recently (mid 2016) intensified around changes and improvements to the way in which new articles are controlled an processed. These revolve around:

Revisiting and completing the development of mw:Article Creation Workflow/Landing System
Updating, completing, and debugging the NPP software after 4 years of use.
Merging AfC with NPP (note that this is specifically suggested as a merge with and not a merge of one to the other).

Teamwork

Naturally, all 35,000 active editors can not be expected to collaborate to develop solutions in an appropriate time frame; some users have expressed a desire for the establishment of a more formal work group rather than what they contend to be idle talk because they may not have shown previous interest or been party to ongoing discussions

The official work group starts now

If you broadly support these changes and are interested in playing a proactive role in the development of these ideas and the drafting of Requests for Comment and requests to Phabricator, please add your name HERE.

Essential further reading (previous 'idle' talk)

Please read these discussions before you consider joining the work group:

Related projects

Background

Recently Achieved

Moving forward

See also

Essential further reading (previous 'idle' talk)

Related projects