Editing team/Projects

This page contains a list of the projects the Editing Team has worked on across time.

Talk Pages Project
The Talk pages project is an effort to make it easier for volunteers, across experience levels, to communicate with one another on Wikipedia by introducing new communication features for wikitext talk pages and evolving how they appear.

This project is the result of the Talk pages consultation 2019, a 5-month long effort that brought volunteers from 20 wikis together with staff from the Wikimedia Foundation to define a product direction for building better tools for on-wiki communication. This product direction was documented in Phase 2 of the Talk Pages Consultation.

Upcoming Project
In the 2022-2023 fiscal year, the Editing Team will be working on a set of improvements for the visual editor to help new volunteers understand and follow 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 that improve Wikipedia.

Challenges
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, 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: Edit Check 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.
 * 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) or scrutinized. These poor interactions are demotivating and drive these could-be volunteers and community members away.
 * 2) Experienced volunteers need to do more work reverting low quality edits and publishing 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 the changes they make 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.

Theory of Change
This project is built on the assumption 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 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.

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 that harm Wikipedia

The Editing Team and this project have been inspired by the 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
 * Page notices
 * Maintenance templates
 * Abuse Filters
 * ORES
 * Sugested Edits

VisualEditor on mobile
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2017 wikitext editor
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Visual diffs
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WikiEditor (aka 2010 wikitext editor)
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Citoid
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TemplateData
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CodeEditor
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VisualEditor
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