Topic on Talk:Page Curation

While we don't know for certain why the community has gone off the boil since the rise of templating in circa 2007. I'm sure I'm not the only one who thinks that the drift from improving articles to templating them has been a major cause.

I'm not sure that this software is really going in the right direction if it is simply making it easier for editors to do more drive by tagging of articles rather than actually improving them. In particular we need to think of the newbies in this, it is self evidently more friendly to greet a newbie by categorising and wikifying their contribution than by adding a category needed or Wikify template. I'm pretty sure the newbie is more likely to learn the bit of coding you've just added to their article by seeing what change yu've made than by clicking the links in a maintenance template and reading the relevant policy. May I suggest that like hotcat this software should encourage the patroller to improve articles not just tag them.

A good point to consider. I think Brandon tried a first pass at a tool that (generally speaking) works with the activities happening in NPP currently, which of course includes improvement banners. But perhaps we could convert some of them into very specific User talk templates? For example: instead of applying {{One source}} and never telling the author what to do, we send someone a message which thanks them for their article, tells them what they did right, but then clearly invites them to add more sources. Just an idea...

I agree that the ideal activity of a patroller would be to fix all problems with the article instead of tagging them. However, there currently are not enough patrollers available to spend this amount of time on each article. If the problem of patroller quantity could be resolved, then I'm in complete agreement that the new patrolling interface should actively encourage fixing problems rather than tagging them. I also have a feeling that this would happen more or less naturally if the newpages queue wasn't always in jeopardy of being overrun.

In my experience some patrollers just tag and template, others do a lot of categorising typo fixing and so forth. I suspect that the system currently relies on those who tag and template to handle the sheer volume of newpages, and I wouldn't suggest simply withdrawing the templates because NPP as currently constituted would immediately get swamped. But as I read this proposal it is channeling patrollers into just tagging and templating articles - shifting the balance further towards templating and away from article improvement. I don't see that as healthy.

In an ideal world, we'd move from the "tagging an article using a template" system to "tagging an article using stored metadata tags" system, which we could make friendlier and less obtrusive.

I suspect that a lot of problems arise for new users who take "improvement templates" personally - like they are critiques upon their writing or whatever. Which they are - just not "hostile" critiques. As it were.

I'd like to introduce a system of "welcoming and appreciation" alongside of "tagging for improvement." There's another thread (started by User:Eloquence that goes into this more, and I want to modify the design to include it (though I haven't had any good time spent in The Cave to do so lately).

I've mentioned somewhere on this forum already that I very often place a custom message such as: Welcome to Wikipedia and thank you for contributing XXXXXXXXX. The article has been reviewed and a couple of points have been flagged for attention that could be resolved from your knowledge of the subject. Please consider returning to the page and addressing those items, and if you need any help, don't hesitate to ask me on my talk page. I have always wondered why it is not possible, or perhaps not desired, for Twinkle to do this for us when adding maintenance tags. This is just one tiny way we could help make the reception a little bit warmer for potentially serious new editors, and encourage them to clean up what they have started without waiting for therm to do something horrendously wrong before contacting them. I think it's a lot nicer than their first contact with us being a message to tell them that because it's not been referenced/is crap/is not notable, it's been PRODed/CSD'd/AfD'd, so clean it up or else.

I suppose if we could get the templates friendly enough this might be better than "Welcome I've tagged your article for deletion". But my fear would be that however friendly we started the templates, and however much we focussed them initially on entry level problems, within a year or so someone would have added more emphasis by adding the red stop sign warning we give vandals and rolled the process out to other maintenance templates that are less like newbie tasks - de-orphaning perhaps or infobox missing.

But maybe there's another group we could enrol here. A large proportion of new articles by newbies are uncategorised. If Hotcat had an option "If I categorise a new article contributed by an author with a redlinked talkpage, also welcome the newbie". Then a lot of newbies who'd get a message from someone that would be likely to perceive as a helpful collaborator.

Unfortunately I too have noticed that a lot of tinkering goes on with template messages at the UW template project, and many changes get slipped through with out much consensus. hence the reason why so many of those templates are absolutely TLDR, and are not necessarily written by people who have a fine touch for prose. I have sneakily improved a lot of them myself, but some are so complex with their layers of embedded php calls that I can't always find the location of the text block I wish to modify. I'm no stranger to php, but the way some of these templates are conceived is a real headache if you're not the original developer. It's a bugger for a lot of others too, because quite often the original template author has done a bunk.

Your Hotcat idea is good, and it brings me to another idea: I'm not too enthusiastic about Brandon's Zoom Inteface, but that's because it's too soon, and does not address the the main, and more urgent problems with the NPPers. It does however load some very interesting meta information about the new page and its author, and I think we could build on that. It does however have some distinct disadvantages over the tried and trusted Twinkle that people like you and I, SW, and Blade are using when patrolling, but I'll probably have to talk to Brandon separately about that. (one aspect I sorely miss is the analog list of new pages). If development of Zoom and development on a solution of either ACTRIAL or making NPP a user right could advance in tandem, and fairly quickly, I think we could make progress. That said, the more I look at Zoom, the more I actually like it, but it's still only going to be a tool for policy-savvy patrollers - and ones with a very wide monitor!