Edit check

In the 2022–2023 fiscal year, the Editing Team is working on a set of improvements for the visual editor to help new volunteers understand and follow some of the policies and guidelines necessary to make constructive changes to Wikipedia projects.

Below, you can find information about the goals of this project, the history that has informed it, and why the Wikimedia Foundation's Product Department is prioritizing this work.

Objectives
Newcomers and Junior Contributors from Sub-Saharan Africa will feel safe and confident enough while editing to publish changes they are proud of and that experienced volunteers consider useful.

Informed by community conversations (still ongoing)   and a series of technical and design investigations  , during February the Editing Team became clear about the first version of Edit Check on mobile...


 * User Experience: the first version of Edit Check will introduce a new step within the mobile visual editor's publishing workflow that people will see if/when they add new content without a reference. Design for the desktop user experience is still underway. See T329579.
 * Usability Testing: to learn whether people understand and can intuitively navigate the mobile Edit Check workflow, we will soon begin a series of usability tests. See T327356.
 * Technical Investigation: Edit Check will use a "transaction-based" approach for determining what new content is added within a given edit session. Work on developing a way to detect individual sentences is ongoing in T324363.
 * Initial Heuristic: To start, the initial Edit Check heuristic will be relatively straightforward in so far as it will prompt people to decide whether the change they are making warrants a reference if/when they are adding a new paragraph and that paragraph does not already contain a reference. See T324730 and T329988#8654867.

Next up: the Editing Team will be implementing the initial Edit Check heuristic (T324730) and a corresponding hidden change tag (T324733) so that we – volunteers and members of the Editing Team – can evaluate the extent to which the reference check heuristic is getting initiated in expected cases.

Work on Edit Check is underway! Below you will find an overview of what the Editing Team is actively working on…


 * Community conversations: Between October 2022 and January 2023, the Editing Team hosted seven community conversations to learn what contributing to Wikipedia has been like for people living in and from Sub-Saharan Africa. Next week, you can expect the team to publish the findings from these conversations and how they will inform the work we do on this project.
 * Initial Focus: The first feature the team will be introducing is one that checks whether the new content people are attempting to add includes a reference. Learn more in the Strategy and Approach section below.
 * Design: The team is actively working on a proposal for what the mobile user experience for the first reference check could be like. In the coming weeks, we will be inviting volunteers to help us revise and refine these designs. In the meantime, you can follow along with this work in Phabricator.
 * Talking with experienced volunteers: for the "reference check" to be useful to inexperienced and experienced volunteers alike, it will need to guide people to cite references in ways that projects expect. In the coming weeks, we'll begin conversations with experienced volunteers to learn what these expectations are so that we can ensure Edit Check is configured in ways that align with them.
 * Technical investigations: For the "reference check" to work, the software will need to know when people are attempting to add new content, whether that new content warrants a reference, and whether it currently contains a reference. The Editing Engineering team is currently doing a series of technical investigations to decide how we will approach building this functionality.

Strategy and Approach
To equip newcomers and Junior Contributors from Sub-Saharan Africa with the know-how and tools to publish changes they are proud of and that experienced volunteers consider useful, the Editing Team will be introducing new functionality within the visual editor (desktop and mobile) that will check the changes people are attempting to make and present them with actions they can take to improve these changes in ways that will align with established Wikipedia policies and guidelines.

The first "check" the Editing Team will be introducing is one that will detect when people are attempting to add new content to an existing article without a corresponding reference and prompt them to do so. The functionality will be accompanied by a complimentary set of features that will enable Senior Contributors to customize the user experience newcomers and Junior Contributors will see to ensure the software is guiding them to take actions that align with project policies and conventions.

Challenges
The Visual Editor's growing popularity among people who are new to editing Wikipedia leads us to think that the editing experience has been reasonably successful at helping inexperienced volunteers learn the technical skills necessary to publish changes to Wikipedia.

The trouble is that the visual editor and other editing interfaces do not make people aware of the Wikipedia policies and guidelines they are expected to follow.

As a result, the changes inexperienced volunteers publish often break established best practices and lead to undesirable outcomes for inexperienced volunteers, experienced volunteers, and Wikipedia projects as a whole:


 * 1) Inexperienced volunteers become disappointed and frustrated when the good-faith change(s) they arrived to the wiki seeking to make are undone (read: reverted), deleted, and/or scrutinized in inequitable ways. These poor interactions are demotivating and drive these could-be volunteers and community members, and the knowledge that are uniquely positioned to offer, away.
 * 2) Experienced volunteers need to do more work reverting low-quality edits and posting messages on inexperienced volunteers' talk pages to make them aware of the policies and/or guidelines they are likely to have unknowingly broken. Continually needing to educate inexperienced volunteers and undo their changes can lead to experienced volunteers becoming skeptical of inexperienced volunteers and impatient with them.
 * 3) Wikipedia projects struggle to grow and diversify their volunteer populations and shrink the knowledge gaps present within Wikimedia wikis.

This project seeks to address the problems above offering people relevant guidance about Wikipedia policies in the precious moments when they are in the midst of making a change using the visual editor.

Theory of change
This project is built on the belief that by surfacing relevant guidance in the precious moments when people are in the midst of making a change to Wikipedia and equipping them with the know-how and tools necessary to apply this guidance, they will make changes they are proud of and that experienced volunteers value.

In the longer term, the Editing Team thinks that people who are new, particularly people who have historically been excluded from and harmed by established power structures, will feel safe and motivated making changes to Wikipedia if they can accurately predict whether the changes they are attempting to make are aligned with existing Wikipedia policies, guidelines, and/or cultural conventions.

More broadly, the EditingTeam thinks that to evolve towards a future where wikis' policies and cultural norms – and ultimately, content – reflect the diverse experiences of the people these projects are intended to serve, we first need to make legible and explicit the norms and standards that are currently in place. This way, volunteers can develop shared awareness of cases where these norms and standards are not having the impacts they were intended to have and decide what – if any – changes they think are worth making to them in response.

Primary audience
The Editing Team is centering the needs of people in this work who are:


 * 1) Experience: Learning the basics of contributing to Wikipedia
 * 2) * In the context of this project, we are considering people who are still "learning the basics" to be people who have published <100 cumulative edits to a single, or multiple, Wikipedias. This includes people who are editing Wikipedia for the first time.
 * 3) Location: Living in Sub-Saharan Africa
 * 4) Projects: Contributing to the English and French Wikipedias
 * 5) Motivation: Seeking to fill gaps they notice within Wikipedia

The four focus criteria listed above are outgrowths of:

Also see Editing team/Community Conversations.
 * Newcomers are two times more likely to live in Africa or Asia.
 * The movement struggles to retain editors who live outside Europe and North America.
 * People from Sub-Saharan Africa are underrepresented within the movement: people from Sub-Saharan Africa represent only 1% of active unique editors, despite representing 15% of the global population and 7% of the global internet population.
 * 80% of registered editors in Sub-Saharan Africa contribute to English or French Wikipedia.

Background
Volunteers throughout the movement have a long history of working to:

The Editing Team and this project have been inspired by these efforts, some of which are listed below. If there is a project or resource you think we should be aware of, please add it here!
 * Proactively educate and guide newcomers to make changes they feel proud of and changes that improve Wikipedia
 * Prevent people from publishing destructive changes, and
 * React to and moderate changes to Wikipedia articles.