Topic on Talk:Page Curation

Thanks for busting this out! Some initial fly-by-the-seat-of-my-pants thoughts and interface nitpicking:

• I understand the idea of "zooming in" is the reason for the previous and next buttons being at the bottom or top, but the previous article button plus the large amount of space given to Article and User areas visually takes up a lot when I first scanned the page. I had a hard time parsing all that at first glance, and thus got "stuck" a bit before moving on to the detailed patrolling actions. Perhaps removing the metadata and just having the buttons would make it less distracting?
• Considering that the stats available suggest people mostly patrol from the front of the queue despite the fact that the documentation strongly suggests you should patrol from the back, I think making the oldest patrolled articles the default should be a priority, though we should include the option to see the most recent ones. The current interface encourages one to patrol articles that may be only minutes or hours old.
• Why are we showing edit section buttons but no main edit button the whole article? It should probably be all or nothing.
• The deletion section should actually say "Nominate for deletion". The language makes a difference especially if we're not restricting the tool to experienced users.
• I'd suggest "and..." instead of "But also". The caps on both lead-in instructions are a lot as well.
• Not that I think it's a bad choice, but what was the reasoning behind making the patrolling and deletion actions menu on the left? I feel like we're used to seeing article content start from the left after the sidebar, and I'm supposed to/naturally want to start reading from the left before my eye moves to the right to take action on the content I've just read.
• Would things like categorizing and page moves happen inside the tool? Or do the arrows indicate I would leave to do so?

Thanks again Brandon

Comments, in order:

• Having additional metadata was a strong request from everyone I talked to. Reading over all the NPP pages and how-tos, it seemed also that this was super-desirable. Investigating into the third party tools also showed that this was something that we wanted.
• Yes, I want to start from the back of the queue. The document itself should outline that process better; I'm working on it.
• A very good point. That screen there is really, and truly, a screen cap cut and paste. We'll have to massage it.
• Noted. Fixed in my copy.
• Noted. Fixed in my copy.
• We have most of our actionable "chrome" on the left. I'm not married either way. This interface is very clunky right now and not what I'm actually envisioning in the end.
• Yes, they would. It's not obvious (yet) but those actions will cause flyouts to happen where you add categories and/or rename the page. The arrows indicate that there are sub-menus.

One reason for focussing on the front of the queue is to quickly get rid of the attack pages. Currently this is one of the things NPP does very well, I'm more critical than most about the quality of tagging and the number of incorrect deletions, but I scarcely ever see an incorrect G10 tag. I occasionally see articles tagged as A7 or BLPprod that should be G10 and would have been deleted more quickly if they had been. But G10s at the back of the queue or in mainspace are thankfully rare.

Deleting G10s ASAP is important - some will be being used for cyber-bullying and if so we want them gone before everyone in the school has had the text linking them to the new Wikipedia article about one of the girls in the school being a pornstar or hooker. Shifting our focus from the front to the back of the queue can only be done if we first find an effective way to screen the G10s and ideally some of the G3s out.

A large proportion of the articles that get to the back of the queue are Goodfaith but borderline notability, somewhat spammy or on obscure subjects, the ones that are easy calls either to patrol or to delete are usually dealt with upfront. I'm pretty sure that most of the unpatrolled articles are actually looked at by a patroller at the front of the queue, otherwise we'd see more G10s at the back. So I'd be very uncomfortable encouraging some of our newest patrollers to shift to the back of the queue.

It's true that we do need to continue dealing with attack pages quickly, but considering that they're only about 5% of CSD (while A7 and G11 together are about 45%) that's a compelling reason for any new tool to obey the current instructions at WP:NPP and encourage people to start at the back of queue, though naturally there should be an option to switch to the front.

Personally I wouldn't lose sleep if we made a change that meant a thousand extra articles at any one time on Myspace bands who will have their first rehearsal next week if they can find a drummer, and bright new upcoming footballers who haven't actually played their first professional game. I really can't see that causing Jeremy Paxman to want to interview someone about that on Newsnight or the Information Commissioner summoning in the chair of Wikimedia UK for a meeting about the precise relationship between the chapter and the Foundation. But a change that meant up to a thousand extra attack pages on the site at any one time - I'd hate to be the person who had to justify that to the press. If we did it knowingly and deliberately I'd be embarrassed to be associated with the project.

The back of the queue often bumps up to the thirty day mark, though with most articles patrolled or deleted in their first few minutes the actual queue is rarely more than 10,000 or so unpatrolled articles. If you could shift the emphasis to the back of the queue and process as many articles a day then in theory you would have an extra 500 attack pages on the site as a result of this change. But the length of the queue oscillates widely as it depends on volunteer numbers - so sometimes it would be much more.

The 5% of new articles that are attack pages currently get deleted so quickly that most people take a while at NPP to realise how common attack pages are, and lots of people who haven't spent time at NPP or cat Speedy would be quite shocked to learn its as high as 5%.

This post was posted by 82.43.200.216, but signed as WereSpielChequers.

There is a danger, or even an irresponsibility in say only 5%. Let's say that most attack pages get deleted fairly quickly. The solution requested by the community at WP:ACTRIAL was not conjured up by a group of exclusionists as was suggested by the WMF at Bugzilla, but from far deeper concerns such as for example, that Sod's Law is that the one attack page that doesn't get quickly deleted is the one that could involve the Foundation in a litigation for millions of dollars. Since the deal was struck with Google to reference Wikipedia pages at the speed of light, this is not good. It's a risk we should neither be taking with donated funds nor with the inconsitency of amature patrolling at such a crucial stage of page creation. It's my guess that most patrollers are fascinated by the live feed in the side bar, and when those ten entries are lost from view, the unpatrolled pages rely on people working directly from special:new pages which as far as I understand has to be constantly manually refreshed.

The immediate problem therefore is not the number of patrollers who are available for work, but those who are totally incompetent to be doing it. Unfortunately there are no bots that can count the number of times I have deleted attack pages that were labelled A7 because the patrollers were not interested in taking time to read past the first sentence of the often long and carefully crafted pieces of libel.

Let's also not forget that there are, or have been times, that the 30 day period has been greatly exceeded, hence the creation of the Snotbot last fall as a desperate measure to get at least something done to track the unpatrolled pages.

These are all reasons why it is most important to listen to what the the mature editors and admins have to say who have had long and involved experience at NPP specifically to research its weaknesses.

Working from the back is indeed good advice for actually clearing out the backlog, but it shouldn't be forced on everyone. The wiki benefits from the fact that the advice is not always followed. The front of the queue always contains things that clearly shouldn't be on the wiki. Even if someone intends to work from the back, taking a short look at the front first can be greatly beneficial in keeping out attack pages and other wholly inappropriate content.

Of course, it seems that the real underlying problem is that we put attack pages which should truly be speedily deleted into the same queue as notability problems or promotional articles at all. We should also be figuring out a way to put the egregious, obvious CSD stuff at the front-and-center of people's attention immediately, but leave time for quality patrolling and editing of articles for things that deserve.

Agree. Patrolling for new attack pages should almost fall under vandalism patrolling and recent changes patrolling. It's almost as if there should be two levels of patrolling, one which is done as soon as possible after the article is created just to check that it's not a "dangerous" article (i.e. not an attack page or a copyvio, or otherwise worth of speedy deletion), and then a second level of patrolling to identify issues with articles that actually have a chance of sticking around. Noob patrollers should be more than capable of the first level of patrolling, but we don't want them to hit the "mark this page as patrolled" button when they're done, because they've only checked maybe 10% of the things that should be checked.

Two-tier patrolling is not a bad idea for speed, but who is going to do this checking as soon as possible after the article is created? It still does not address the problem that noobs far too often can't tell the difference between G10 attack, G3 hoax, G1 nonsense, A1 no context, and A3 no content.

I was going to say, this is assuming most NPPers can actually tell the difference. I watch CAT:CSD and frequently check the articles tagged G1; almost every single time, they're either G3 or G10. I frequently have to tell users to slow down so they can use the right criterion, because many of them try to go faster than they can (I move very quickly, but that's because my reading speed is in the top quarter of the 99th percentile; most people cannot read like that, and make bad mistakes when they try to move too fast). In short, there are only a very few NPPers I'd trust to accurately make the distinctions, and they're a small enough percentage that far too many pages run the risk of being miscategorized.

Right, so that confirms that we're basically back to square one with this sugestion of two-tier patrolling, i.e. patrolling the patrollers.

For an example everyone can view, see the history of The Mad Russian; tagged G1 but a clear G3 (I happened to know a good place to redirect it, but the edit history is there).

Blade, I'm not sure io this message of yours is complete. Should there be some links to something?

Yeah, fixed; not sure what happened. Just type it in on en.wiki, as I can't seem to link things from here.