Overview:
Stage 1 is to make some minor expansions to some of the features of the Page Curation fly-out (doesn’t require a RfC, just the collaboration of a WMF engineer) to bring it in line with Twinkle. We do know that some users are still patrolling with Twinkle because its CSD criteria are more granular.
Stage 2 is to get a user right created for patrolling mew pages, i.e. access to the New Pages Feed and the Page Curation tool. This will also have the effect of providing feedback on who is actually patrolling pages and allow those who monitor the system to provide help to patrollers as requiredI’m suggesting 90/500 - it has to be higher than reviewer or rollback, or the 30/500 I got introduced for AfC. Grandfather only those who have patrolled at least 100 pages in the last 12 months. Deprecate the current New Page Patroller userbox. On successful adoption by the community of the user right, send a nesletter to all those who no longer automatically meet the new criteria, inviting them to reapply. User right to be requested at PERM.
Stage 3 is to deprecate the old new page feed and stop people using Twinkle , Stiki, and Huggle tp patrol pages in an attempt to get all patrollers singing from the same page.
Stage 4 (ultimately) Merge AfC with NPP. We actually already have a community consensus for this but it was decided to wait until the requirements for NPP have been established and rolled out.
Background
The reason why we have the staggering number of 6,629 pending changes reviewers on the English Wikipedia is because when it was first created, the right was accorded in early 2010 by a bot based on a very low threshold of criteria - the lowest requirement of all the minor user rights on en.Wiki. In the 2009 pre-RfC poll for Pending Changes it clearly stated that there is no comparison with flagged revisions (Pending Changes) and the Patrolling of New Pages, and that in any case, NPP does not lend itself well to being carried out by Huggle (or other mass-editing or speed-editing scripts as we now understand it).
The recommendation to admins is to grant the pending changes reviewer on a fairly liberal basis. Recent blocks or noticeboard threads should generally not be used as a reason to deny a user the right upon request. The reviewer right simply re-enables a tacit ability autoconfirmed editors possessed prior to the implementation of pending changes—the ability to approve anonymous edits. Essentially, Reviewers do not take responsibility for the correctness of edits they accept. A reviewer only ensures that the changes introduced to the article are broadly acceptable for viewing by a casual reader. the rights can only be removed by an administrator after a community discussion has taken place.
The next user-group minor right of the edit-quality-control kind is Rollbacker which was unbundled from Admin some years ago. Accorded by admin discretion following a fairly thorough examination of the user's experience, it is never given for less than 200 mainspace edits and at such a low level of experience, graduation through the Counter Vandalism Academy is recommended.
Finally, but not a MediaWiki controlled access, is the use of the Articles for Creation helper script, a development by a volunteer. AfC is a process that permits articles to be submitted through the Article Wizard or the Draft:Namespace by users who are otherwise technically or through sanctions are not permitted to create articles immediately in mainspace. AfC reviewing is a fairly complex process and while it is theoretically still possible for anyone with a registered account to accept or decline AfC submissions, the helper script is practically essential and a sub-routine developed by a volunteer prevents the use of the script by any user not having at least 30 days tenure and 500 mainspace edits - a requirement I suggested and proposed and which was accepted by a solid consensus, and passed the scrutiny of the AfC project members.
Landing Page (Article Creation Workflow/Design):
Many years ago, not knowing that ACTRIAL was going to be ruled out by the Foundation, in anticipation of ACTRIAL I began to develop a reworked Article Wizard as part of the ACTRIAL package. The WMF had not taken into account (at that time) the full package of the trial we had proposed and ruled the trial out without understanding the full scope of what the community had agreed to by an overwhelming majority on a very highly subscribed debate. As a result however, parallel to the development of Page Curation, and partly based on my ideas for an improved Article Wizard, Brandon began work on Article Creation Workflow/Design. Knowing what is required here, I would be happy to collaborate with the Foundation to get it, (or something like it) finalised; Brandon's ideas have enormous potential and could certainly be used as a starting point.
