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 African will feel safe and confident enough while editing to publish changes they are proud of and that experienced volunteers consider useful.

Challenges
The visual editor's growing popularity among people who 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.

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:


 * 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:


 * 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.

The Editing Team and this project have been inspired by these efforts, some of which of are listed below. If there is a project or resource you think we should be aware of, please add it here!


 * Edit Notices
 * Enables individual volunteers and projects to display a custom notice above the edit form, depending on the page, namespace, or other circumstances.
 * Page notices
 * Maintenance templates
 * Extension:AbuseFilter
 * Allows privileged users to set specific actions to be taken when actions by users, such as edits, match certain criteria.
 * ORES
 * Sugested Edits
 * CiteHighlighter by Novem Linguae
 * Highlights 1800 sources green, yellow, or red depending on their reliability.
 * Checkwiki: helps clean up syntax and other errors in the source code of Wikipedia
 * Edit Diff Tagging by Isaac (WMF)
 * Showcases all the different tags that can be automatically determined (generally via basic heuristics) for a given Wikipedia edit diff.
 * CivilityCheck by Deus Nsenga, Baelul Haile, David Ihim, and Elan Houticolo-Retzler
 * A project to evaluate the civility in the comments of Wikipedia discussions in order to address the problem of abuse that leads to declining editorship within the Wiki community.
 * BOTutor by it:User:ValeJappo
 * A bot that sends a message to people who attempt to publish an edit that triggers an existing set of rules
 * Gadget-autocomplete.js
 * Text reactions
 * A proposal that would make it possible for the editing interface to react to what the people enter in the editing area.
 * Editwizard by Ankit18gupta, Enterprisey, Firefly, and SD0001
 * A step-by-step process for guiding newcomers to source the content they are attempting to add to Wikipedia articles
 * User:Headbomb/unreliable by User:Headbomb
 * "The script breaks down links to various sources in different 'severities' of unreliability. In general, the script is kept in sync with WP:RSPSOURCES, , WP:NPPSG, WP:SPSLIST (not fully implemented yet) and WP:CITEWATCH, with some minor differences."
 * The Wikipedia Adventure
 * Game based on the tech of Extension:GuidedTour that teaches basic wikitext markup and the rules about reliable sources and neutral point of view. Research into its effectiveness is described at meta:Research:Impact of The Wikipedia Adventure on new editor retention.