Talk:Community Wishlist/FA5

Odd wish

Community Wishlist/Wishes/Указывать в статьях Википедии на какую целевую аудиторию они ориентированы./en doesn't make sense yet and hasn't been discussed at all. I am not sure why it is in this focus area already. Commander Keane (talk) 11:22, 21 October 2024 (UTC)

You have to trim the "/en" to view the discussion page, otherwise "Discussion" is a red link. A bot could create redirects but I haven't considered multi-language interaction. There has been discussion, here. Commander Keane (talk) 07:15, 24 October 2024 (UTC)

Not sure why Community Wishlist/Wishes/Reconsider the strict adherence to policies that defy common sense is bundled into this focus area. It's a complaint about an en.wp-local Notability outcome, detailed at en:WP:BFDI. Notability guidelines vary widely across projects and are based on local consensuses, so there's really no global action that can help with this except maybe creating space to foreground links that the local communities find especially relevant. Folly Mox (talk) 16:38, 6 February 2025 (UTC)

Article Creation Guidance

There is a full project at en.Wiki which addresses this issue complete with images, wire frames for the UI pages and templates. As it requires only a minimum of coding in js and no creation of a MediaWiki extension, it can be handled locally by en.Wiki volunteers. Kudpung (talk) 08:15, 4 March 2025 (UTC)

Hi @Kudpung which project are you referring to? JWheeler-WMF (talk) 21:37, 4 March 2025 (UTC)

This: Newcomer experience + new article creation. I believe it was led on the WMF side by Kerstin Stoller. It's an en.Wiki project and more specifically addresses the growing crisis at New Page Review commonly referred to as NPP. Collaboration with the WMF appeared to have lapsed during my absence as we were given to understand that this would not fall into the sphere of the Wishlist, and Growth has other priorities. As the issue is a local en.Wiki one and requires no work on Media Wiki or an extension the general feeling is that this can be addressed more quickly and more suitably by en.Wiki NPP volunteers. Among them there are a +2 MediaWiki specialist and experts in UX and UI design. Project pages have been consolidated and workshoping is expected to begin soon. This is not to be confused with any newcomer onboarding projects or mentorship schemes that the Growth Team may currently be focused on. Let me know if you would like further information.Kudpung (talk) 04:12, 5 March 2025 (UTC)

@User:KStoller-WMF and JWheeler-WMF. I am surprised that the WishList and Growth teams have not combined/communicated the projects that were in discussion 2 years ago, and I am surprised that Jwheeler has not acknowledged my reply above. Kerstin made some encouraging comments at that time but we were left with the overall impression that the WMF were not interested as it did not fall within the scope of their project planning and/or allocated budget. The community project is so simple but would be so effective that I do not understand why it appears to have been fiedled to the WishList by the WMF. Maybe this is just a way of consolidating the various overlapping wishes/suggestions by community individuals.

Please see these two pages of the project: New landing page proposal and its workshop page. Please read them thoroughly rather than a cursory glance. All the elements of this project exist already but simply need to be coded in Wiki markup and some .js Kudpung (talk) 01:18, 24 May 2025 (UTC)

Hello @Kudpung, thanks for following up. No need to worry, @JWheeler-WMF and I are in contact, and I was actually the one who drafted the summary for this Wishlist focus. You'll notice that the two pages you linked are already included as the first references in the "supporting evidence" section. I believe @JWheeler-WMF was simply checking whether there might be an additional related project we were unaware of.

As you noted, the Growth team’s focus has primarily been on helping brand-new account holders begin editing, and we haven’t yet had the capacity to focus on article creation workflows, which, as you rightly point out, are not ideal entry points for most newer editors. That said, I completely agree that article creation is a fundamental and high-impact area. I understand it may be frustrating that this work has not yet received sustained attention from WMF teams, and I appreciate your patience and persistence.

It’s my understanding that another Product team may take on this focus area in the upcoming fiscal year, as part of the 2025–2026 Annual Plan: Wikimedia Foundation Annual Plan/2025-2026/Product & Technology OKRs#Vital Knowledge (WE2)

I’ll connect with that team and ensure they’re aware of and review the pages you’ve shared. Your work and the expertise of the NPP community are clearly valuable here, and I hope this leads to closer collaboration going forward. Best, - KStoller-WMF (talk) 22:10, 24 May 2025 (UTC)

@KStoller-WMF, @JWheeler-WMF, @STei , and @Onel (FYI): as Kerstin has correctly concurred, article creation is ...a fundamental and high-impact area. Indeed, but more than that, article creation is the very core of building an encyclopedia. Whatever other goals the WMF 'movement' has, the en.Wiki is its flagship project and major source of funding. It is essential that the en.Wiki strives to maintain the quality of its content, which means addressing two audiences: the creators of new articles and the teams that curate the articles (or drafts).

The Curation tool remains one of the most important maintenance user-facing tools ever developed by the WMF devs at community request; when it was rolled out in 2012 it significantly helped speed up the reviewing process. However, due to the kind of new articles created today, NPP is now in greater crisis than ever, reviewers are facing greater challenges to stave off promotional, paid, and LLM pages and they are patrollers overloaded.

The NPP user right has one of the most demanding skill sets, but NPP is nevertheless one of the most uninspiring and totally thankless but necessary tasks to the extent that less than 10% of the 842 New Page Reviewers are active. Backlog drives both at NPP, and WP:AfC (the article draft processing function which must be used by new or unregistered editors), are not helping and the backlogs continues to grow - much to the frustration of the creators of genuine articles which is not conducive to user retention despite any mentoring schemes, and to the retention of Reviewers who are constantly the targets of unpleasant blowback from affected new users.

Suggestions are now unfortunately being made to simply allow unsuitable/inappropriate or hard to review new content to remain unreviewed and be automatically indexed by search engines. That would satisfy the movement's metrics for growth of articles in sheer numbers, but does not reflect the quality of a reliable encyclopedia and is antithetical to the purpose of vetting new content.

These issues are not new. Indeed ever since a small group of us initiated the development of the Page Curation system back in 2011 it has been a constant challenge for many years for the NPP to obtain the continued collaboration of the Foundation to address this vital function. After three long years of testing various methods to increase the activity of the reviewers by making the curation tools even easier and more attractive to use, empirical evidence (which the WMF teams do not, and cannot have) clearly shows that the only remaining solution for the backlogs is to address the issue at its source: the newly registered users whose sole intent is to create an article rather than any interest to become regular editors.

The linked The Annual Plan 2025–2026 section to is vague and conveys no indication of which growth areas are likely to be addressed in the upcoming tranche and by whom, and various comments from the WMF have made it fairly clear that this specific issue is not likely to be a special focus any time soon. Hence the volunteer community - which has qualified skills in UX and UI design - has come up with a perfectly viable solution which is almost ready to go (research and stats are available and do not need to be repeated by the paid devs). Where we are aware that the Growth team is primarily focused on Wiki-agnostic developments, this solution does not require the creation of any new extensions and it can be used by any Wikimedia project that wants it.

We are open to whatever level of collaboration the WMF can provide; what we need now is to fast track the solution, and what we want to avoid is an unnecessary duplication of effort. The volunteers, for their part, do not wish to see their efforts wasted. While a minor part of this solution will benefit from partial integration into the Growth team's major onboarding project, going forward, a video meeting would be indispensable to examine how this could work. See also this 2018 special report. Kudpung (talk) 22:33, 27 May 2025 (UTC)