Welcome, subscribers, to the second Discontent Content newsletter! Discontent Content is a newsletter aiming to collate and improve Wikipedia articles in need of more eyes and hands to get them in shape. Its unique trimodal structure allows editors to work where they feel comfortable -- with stubs and starts needing to be brought to standard, mid-quality articles with Good or Featured potential, or quality-assessed articles needing help to maintain their status.
Category 1
Articles in this category are those that need to be brought up to a minimum quality standard. Some will be stubs; others will be longer articles that nonetheless have significant concerns putting them far below B- or C-class adequacy.
This issue's Category 1 articles are:
Michael Krasnow: A recent AfD survivor, this article is currently a single-paragraph stub, but has substantial expansion potential in online, print, and archival sources alike. This piece is a particularly useful starting point for such a unique article.
Injury: A start-class Vital Article with the common problem of medical articles of list-formatted content that'd work better as prose.
Fetish Con: This eccentric topic that I absolutely do not apologise for placing right under "Injury" survived AfD in March. Though currently in poor stub-and-table shape, the AfD made it clear substantial expansion potential exists.
Category 2
Articles in this category, while in better current shape than Category 1, are still missing something. They have the potential to be truly high-quality content, and may have been at one point. With work, they can be brought up to dizzying heights.
This issue's Category 2 articles are:
Home: Another start-class Vital Article, this one is at level 2, making it one of the 100 core topics. It's also...I think it's a Million Award candidate? Honestly, man, I don't know, I checked three years and they all had frankly weird charts. This one has good bones, but the internal sections are all in need of expansion. Someone able to work on them could certainly take this to GA.
Tea: The world's most popular drink (inb4 water) was an FA back in the Brilliant Prose era, but no longer. Attempts since to bring it back to standard have failed. Will you succeed?
Mazes and Monsters: Tom Hanks' first leading role, an early DYK, and an unusual quirky topic, this article bears real potential for expansion.
Category 3
Articles in this category have been assessed through a content review process in the past, but may require work to be brought up to current GA/FA standard. Editors can help bring them to a level where the star or plus near their names can once again shine.
This issue's Category 3 articles are:
Death Cab for Cutie: This GA is up for GAR primarily due to uncited text. A motivated editor could save this article's plus sign by hunting down verification.
Doctor Who missing episodes: An FA at FAR and in danger of moving to FARC without engagement. This significant chunk of television history has tons written on it, and yet a number of the sources in the article are subpar. Can you save it?
Windows RT: Though this GA has been recommended for GAR since last September, it hasn't been brought to the process. No reasons are given on the talk, but the lead looks in need of a trim to bring its information to the body, and there's more than a bit of WP:OVERCITE.
Letter from the Editor
Updates on articles from last issue:
Grunge has been delisted following an unsuccessful FAR. Anyone who wants to get this important article back to FAC is strongly encouraged.
Reader suggestion: BOZ, a founding member of the new WikiProject Cemeteries, has an additional suggestion for anyone looking for further inspiration:
Bohemian National Cemetery (Chicago): A Czech cemetery in Chicago and the first I've heard of with an area dedicated specifically to fans of a given baseball team, this cemetery has ties to outsider art, historical shipwrecks, and one of the city's founding ethnic communities.
Thank you all, once again, for your subscription and your work on Wikipedia!
Vaticidalprophet 18:33, 26 April 2021 (UTC)[reply]
Note: All columns in this table are sortable, allowing you to rearrange the table so the articles most interesting to you are shown at the top. All images have mouse-over popups with more information. For more information about the columns and categories, please consult the documentation and please get in touch on SuggestBot's talk page with any questions you might have.
SuggestBot picks articles in a number of ways based on other articles you've edited, including straight text similarity, following wikilinks, and matching your editing patterns against those of other Wikipedians. It tries to recommend only articles that other Wikipedians have marked as needing work. Your contributions make Wikipedia better — thanks for helping.
The user group oversight will be renamed to suppress. This is for technical reasons. You can comment at T112147 if you have objections.
Arbitration
The community consultation on the Arbitration Committee discretionary sanctions procedure was closed, and an initial draft based on feedback from the now closed consultation is expected to be released in early June to early July for community review.
Tattooing among women of the Koita people of Papua New Guinea traditionally began at age five and was added to each year. The V-shaped marks on the chest, with certain others, indicate that the woman is marriageable. Photo taken in 1912.
Welcome, subscribers, to the third Discontent Content newsletter! Discontent Content is a newsletter aiming to collate and improve Wikipedia articles in need of more eyes and hands to get them in shape. Its unique trimodal structure allows editors to work where they feel comfortable -- with stubs and starts needing to be brought to standard, mid-quality articles with Good or Featured potential, or quality-assessed articles needing help to maintain their status.
Category 1
Articles in this category are those that need to be brought up to a minimum quality standard. Some will be stubs; others will be longer articles that nonetheless have significant concerns putting them far below B- or C-class adequacy.
This issue's Category 1 articles are:
Gambling in Nevada: An unusual move -- a redirect? But if you look at the history, you'll see why. This sweeping and expansive topic about the home of Reno and Las Vegas was recently converted to a redirect due to its almost complete lack of useful content. Nonetheless, this subject is bursting with potential and can have a full article written about it.
SpongeBob SquarePants: Original Theme Highlights: This recent AfD survivor was the first soundtrack written for the popular series. More unorthodox, for a children's animation album, it features songs by Pantera and Ween and was given a vinyl re-release in 2016 for the...ironic market? Certainly some market. There's a fair amount of coverage here to write a solid article on.
Death by misadventure: A surprisingly major topic to be a one-paragraph stub, this is a legal and colloquial term both. The article is currently sourced in whole to a single page in a single book!
Category 2
Articles in this category, while in better current shape than Category 1, are still missing something. They have the potential to be truly high-quality content, and may have been at one point. With work, they can be brought up to dizzying heights.
This issue's Category 2 articles are:
Rope (film): Hitchcock's classic attempt to shoot an entire film in a single shot, Rope is both a significant note in cinematic history and, in recent years, conceptualized as an important piece of Hays Code-era gay cinema. It's a good watch, and the article should be just as solid. Currently it's a C-class with some unsourced content and an overreliance on block quotes.
Rachel Pollack: One of the major occult writers of the 20th and 21st centuries (a book of hers is prominently involved in my quixotic "bring the Major Arcana to FT" plan), not to mention a significant fiction and comics writer collaborating with names such as Neil Gaiman and Grant Morrison, Pollack's article has quite a bit of room for improvement to quality-assessed levels. Though her article's lead is short and the work as a whole underreferenced, plenty of opportunities exist to improve it.
Narrative paradigm: Despite this article's High or Top importance across multiple wikiprojects, it's in a sorry state. Perhaps unsurprisingly, it was subjected to a WikiEd course some time back. Significant potential lies within the idea that all human communication is narrative; the article must be accordingly strong.
Category 3
Articles in this category have been assessed through a content review process in the past, but may require work to be brought up to current GA/FA standard. Editors can help bring them to a level where the star or plus near their names can once again shine.
This issue's Category 3 articles are:
Jaime King: This GA on a famous model of the 1990s has been recommended for GAR. Unreferenced sections and low-quality references are a problem for this BLP.
Dartmouth College: This FA is at FARC and on the brink of delisting, but the issues mentioned -- accessibility, WP:LEADCITE compliance, and overreliance on primary sources -- are far from insurmountable, and an editor could certainly polish off this star.
Tamil language: Another FARC, this is the native language of 75 million people (including my own stepmother) and the language of one of the world's great classical traditions. It's afflicted by a lack of sourcing and particularly issues with inline citations.
Letter from the Editor
This issue's subscriber suggestion, again from BOZ, is:
Dice: This former GA was delisted in 2009. It's a big topic to a lot of different subjects, and deserves a top-quality article.
This is ridiculously late, and I apologise -- I've been writing articles :) I've also, excitingly, landed a couple 'real publishing' writing gigs, which I'll be plenty excited to talk about when they're published. Due to the current increased amount of writing I have to do on a regular basis both on- and off-wiki, I'm planning to drop this down to monthly so I can spread out my responsibilities a bit. Vaticidalprophet 09:08, 15 May 2021 (UTC)[reply]
Welcome, subscribers, to the fourth Discontent Content newsletter! Discontent Content is a newsletter aiming to collate and improve Wikipedia articles in need of more eyes and hands to get them in shape. Its unique trimodal structure allows editors to work where they feel comfortable -- with stubs and starts needing to be brought to standard, mid-quality articles with Good or Featured potential, or quality-assessed articles needing help to maintain their status.
Category 1
Articles in this category are those that need to be brought up to a minimum quality standard. Some will be stubs; others will be longer articles that nonetheless have significant concerns putting them far below B- or C-class adequacy.
This issue's Category 1 articles are:
Lineage (anthropology): A shocking subject to be a sourceless stub, this Vital 4 obviously has so much more to write about than its three sentences. In this state, even a basic improvement would do a ton.
Police memorabilia collecting: Survived AfD not long ago, with plenty of sources given in the discussion to use in the article. "Further reading" may in particular be of use.
Koror City: Palau may be a small island nation, but having its largest city by far be a stub is unacceptable. (We've managed to write much more about it over at Wikivoyage, where it's guide-class and about to make a Main Page appearance.) Vital 5 with a healthy couple hundred pageviews a day, the widespread use of English in its native land makes it a more accessible topic than editors afraid of working in countries they're unfamiliar with might worry.
Category 2
Articles in this category, while in better current shape than Category 1, are still missing something. They have the potential to be truly high-quality content, and may have been at one point. With work, they can be brought up to dizzying heights.
This issue's Category 2 articles are:
List of premature obituaries: A former FL, an eccentric and popular topic, and a refreshing change from the sports statistics and "list of awards received by X" that populate FLC. This list was demoted in 2009 for sourcing concerns, which even at the time were mentioned as potentially fixable.
War: Let's just jump straight into the Overtopics, shall we? This Vital 2 really shows what "Top-importance to the whole encyclopedia" means. Currently B-class -- more B- in my estimate, maybe -- it stands out that non-editor readers on the talk page have qualms with the scope, in particular omissions they expected to find.
The Picture of Dorian Gray: Once GA, now C. Still relatable. This seminal work of literature can certainly be returned to where it was.
Category 3
Articles in this category have been assessed through a content review process in the past, but may require work to be brought up to current GA/FA standard. Editors can help bring them to a level where the star or plus near their names can once again shine.
This issue's Category 3 articles are:
Byzantine Empire: From the metapedian perspective, this is perhaps our most important FA -- the oldest, promoted in 2001 (older than some of this newsletter's subscribers!), to retain FA status unbroken to the present day. Speaking exopedianly, it's still decidedly vital, with nearly three million page views in the last year. FAR was suggested late last year; it hasn't been brought to the chopping block yet, but an article this important both inside and outside of the project deserves to remain in top shape.
Underoath: This GA is recommended for GAR, with complaints about long-unaddressed maintenance tags and sections in dire need of updates. The article gets hundreds of views a day and is translated across plenty of projects.
Acute myeloid leukemia: Medical articles aren't scary! Really! They're not! If I can work on them, so can you! That aside, this FA was given a FAR notice in January. There are sourcing concerns, conveniently assisted by sources left on the talk page. Non-editor readers on the talk have raised concerns about inaccurate prognostic statements.
Letter from the Editor
This issue's reader suggestion is brought to you by Sennecaster:
Margery Wolf: Perhaps the fastest GA delist known to the project, this article was delisted two days after promotion upon discovery of foundational copyvio. Though it was reduced to just four short paragraphs, the sourcing obviously exists to create a high-quality article.
Yes, I know I said I was going to switch to monthly. Let's just go "Vat doesn't really Get Time" and run with it.
The Core Contest is on its last day of entries, and I've picked articles here with an eye to that. It's the first time it's running since 2017, and I for one am looking forward to overhauling Prehistoric religion. If you feel inspired by anything here, get in there quick! Vaticidalprophet 17:06, 30 May 2021 (UTC)[reply]
Wikimedia previously used the IRC network Freenode. However, due to changes over who controlled the network with reports of a forceful takeover by several ex-staff members, the Wikimedia IRC Group Contacts decided to move to the new Libera Chat network. It has been reported that Wikimedia related channels on Freenode have been forcibly taken over if they pointed members to Libera. There is a migration guide and Wikimedia discussions about this.
Welcome, subscribers, to the fifth Discontent Content newsletter! Discontent Content is a newsletter aiming to collate and improve Wikipedia articles in need of more eyes and hands to get them in shape. Its unique trimodal structure allows editors to work where they feel comfortable -- with stubs and starts needing to be brought to standard, mid-quality articles with Good or Featured potential, or quality-assessed articles needing help to maintain their status.
Category 1
Articles in this category are those that need to be brought up to a minimum quality standard. Some will be stubs; others will be longer articles that nonetheless have significant concerns putting them far below B- or C-class adequacy.
This issue's Category 1 articles are:
Isolar – 1976 Tour: A substantial musical event for one of the most influential albums of its era, but with a rather spindly, table-focused article (I also note no one seems to have given post-inflation numbers for any of the figures).
Occultism (Islam): "Major topic that's a literal stub because it's about something outside the comfort zone of the average editor" of the day. Esotericism in one of the world's major exoteric religions is, of course, something which can be written about extensively.
G & G v Wikimedia Foundation Inc: Going meta for a moment...This is an interesting case, and it's a shame we discuss it only as a paragraph. It would be fascinating to read further on this topic.
Category 2
Articles in this category, while in better current shape than Category 1, are still missing something. They have the potential to be truly high-quality content, and may have been at one point. With work, they can be brought up to dizzying heights.
This issue's Category 2 articles are:
Misophonia: A concept, symptom, or disorder -- no one's quite yet drawn the borderlands -- where people are unusually upset at noises such as chewing sounds. The idea may sound odd, but it does distress people with it and those around them. The subject is very popular, with Half Million Award-tier page views, but the readers are served by a rather weak article.
Sparks (band): This eccentric, creative band was a GA long ago, but delisted in 2010. Though undersourced, the article certainly has potential to return to its old status.
Han Xin: One of the great military leaders of ancient China is graced by a massively undersourced article. Several sections have none at all.
Category 3
Articles in this category have been assessed through a content review process in the past, but may require work to be brought up to current GA/FA standard. Editors can help bring them to a level where the star or plus near their names can once again shine.
This issue's Category 3 articles are:
Wind: This FA is on a huge, important topic, but its star needs some polishing. FAR notice has been given for significant uncited passages. To quote the talk page, the article has good bones, and it can certainly be restored to modern FA status if anyone is able to work on it.
Jeopardy!: The article for perhaps one of the most famous game shows of all time is at GAR for citation issues. Most of the issues brought up can be fixed quite easily, such as locating page numbers.
French fries: Tasty, but needs more sauce. The GAR discusses unsourced sections and unreliable sourcing; I also notice some pretty blatant prose issues and a spindly lead.
Maasai people: The Vital 4 article for this major East African ethnic group was recently significantly reduced due to copyvio. It needs urgent work to restore cored-out content, but the references are still available in the article to simplify the process.
One topic I've been broadly thinking about lately is the concept of GA sweeps. There hasn't been one in well over a decade; discussion of a new one is traditionally stymied by the sheer number of GAs that would need sweeping, considering there are over ten times as many as there were at the last sweep. Nonetheless, there's no dispute that many GAs don't really count as 99.5th percentile articles, or even decent-quality articles (whether one's own personal reading of WIAGA is closer to the former or the latter, and how different those things are, is an exercise for the reader).
I've been brainstorming ideas, and I've been wondering if we can tackle the problem with limited-scope sweeps. One idea would be sweeping popular or vital articles -- those that get enough views to make up a significant proportion of the "GA experience" to readers. Another would be focusing on shorter GAs, which might trend towards a less in-depth treatment of the topic than could really justify the rating. There may very well be a path here to maintaining GA standards, and either of those would have the benefit that they might be more likely to encourage people to work on rather than simply delist articles -- popular topics with lots of interested parties willing to help, or smaller topics that don't seem like too big a challenge to pick up.
Vaticidalprophet 04:16, 21 June 2021 (UTC)[reply]
Consensus has been reached to delete all books in the book namespace. There was rough consensus that the deleted books should still be available on request at WP:REFUND even after the namespace is removed.
AnRfC is open to discuss the next steps following a trial which automatically applied pending changes to TFAs.
Technical news
IP addresses of unregistered users are to be hidden from everyone. There is a rough draft of how IP addresses may be shown to users who need to see them. This currently details allowing administrators, checkusers, stewards and those with a new usergroup to view the full IP address of unregistered users. Editors with at least 500 edits and an account over a year old will be able to see all but the end of the IP address in the proposal. The ability to see the IP addresses hidden behind the mask would be dependent on agreeing to not share the parts of the IP address they can see with those who do not have access to the same information. Accessing part of or the full IP address of a masked editor would also be logged. Comments on the draft are being welcomed at the talk page.
Arbitration
The community authorised COVID-19 general sanctions have been superseded by the COVID-19 discretionary sanctions following a motion at a case request. Alerts given and sanctions placed under the community authorised general sanctions are now considered alerts for and sanctions under the new discretionary sanctions.
Welcome, subscribers, to the sixth Discontent Content newsletter! Discontent Content is a newsletter aiming to collate and improve Wikipedia articles in need of more eyes and hands to get them in shape. Its unique trimodal structure allows editors to work where they feel comfortable -- with stubs and starts needing to be brought to standard, mid-quality articles with Good or Featured potential, or quality-assessed articles needing help to maintain their status.
Category 1
Articles in this category are those that need to be brought up to a minimum quality standard. Some will be stubs; others will be longer articles that nonetheless have significant concerns putting them far below B- or C-class adequacy.
This issue's Category 1 articles are:
Floating match on card: This famous magic trick is a microstub with an empty section and no meaningful discussion of its methods or effects. Some useful information is available on the talk page.
Erotic horror: A significant literary (or, well...look, you know) genre with significant academic and critical coverage, which you wouldn't know from reading its three-sentence article.
Black ribbon: Currently in poor shape, with unnecessary lists attracting spurious examples, this article nonetheless has potential to cover a coherent topic on a sensitive subject.
Category 2
Articles in this category, while in better current shape than Category 1, are still missing something. They have the potential to be truly high-quality content, and may have been at one point. With work, they can be brought up to dizzying heights.
This issue's Category 2 articles are:
Violin: This twice-candidate at GAN has good bones, but suffers from expanses of uncited content (and indeed expanses of "people slapping CN tags on literally every sentence"). Much of this information should be citable, and potential exists for this article to stand tall amongst other core music articles.
Art museum: Though this looks a little underrated as a soi-disant "Start", it's nonetheless an important cultural article with significant improvement potential. This was a former candidate for the Team-B-Vital campaign ran by members of the Wikimedia Discord to bring Vital Articles to B-class status, and while not selected, it has strong potential for anyone interested in working on it.
Grocery store: Daily life has always been one of Wikipedia's coverage gaps. Though this topic is something virtually anyone deals with on a regular basis, the article struggles with cleanup tags, sandwiching, and the weird fear of prose that drives people to put everything they can in a list. With hundreds of views a day, readers deserve an article with a stronger core.
Category 3
Articles in this category have been assessed through a content review process in the past, but may require work to be brought up to current GA/FA standard. Editors can help bring them to a level where the star or plus near their names can once again shine.
This issue's Category 3 articles are:
Slackers CDs and Games: This GA hasn't had significant content edits since 2008. As much of its content references then-recent controversies, it needs a good look for updating.
Potential superpowers: GA with a multiple issues template, with concerns of outdated information, lack of citations, and potential OR.
Alzheimer's disease: This major medical FA is at FAR due to outdated information, an unfortunately common scourge of medical articles over time. Such an important article needs people willing to get it in good shape.
Letter from the Editor
After my prior thoughts on GA sweeps and their viability, work is beginning to break down what parts of the backlog can be tackled. Planning is beginning at User:Vaticidalprophet/GA reform and its talk; feel free to give your opinion, participate in current GARs, and assess articles. The current plan is to look at GAs with outstanding cleanup tags as our first priority.
Sorry for the delay this time around -- I've been having A Month healthwise. I expect to maintain this at an approximately monthly schedule and will try not to let it slip further. I'm enthused by the work going on at GAR lately and hope to work something excellent out of it. Vaticidalprophet 01:54, 26 July 2021 (UTC)[reply]
AnRfC is open to add a delay of one week from nomination to deletion for G13 speedy deletions.
Technical news
Last week all wikis were very slow or not accessible for 30 minutes. This was due to server lag caused by regenerating dynamic lists on the Russian Wikinews after a large bulk import. (T287380)
Adiscussion is open to decide when, if ever, should discord logs be eligible for removal when posted onwiki (including whether to oversight them)
ARfC on the next steps after the trial of pending changesonTFAs has resulted in a 30 day trial of automatic semi protection for TFAs.
Technical news
The Score extension has been re-enabled on public wikis. It has been updated, but has been placed in safe mode to address unresolved security issues. Further information on the security issues can be found on the mediawiki page.
Arbitration
A request for comment is in progress to provide an opportunity to amend the structure, rules, and procedures of the Arbitration Committee election and resolve any issues not covered by existing rules. Comments and new proposals are welcome.
The past is the set of all events that occurred before a given point in time. Pictured is the oil on canvas painting Everything is in the past, painted by Vassily Maximov in 1889.
Following an RfC, extended confirmed protection may be used preemptively on certain high-risk templates.
Following a discussion at the Village Pump, there is consensus to treat discord logs the same as IRC logs. This means that discord logs will be oversighted if posted onwiki.
Amotion has standardised the 500/30 (extended confirmed) restrictions placed by the Arbitration Committee. The standardised restriction is now listed in the Arbitration Committee's procedures.
Following the closure of the Iranian politics case, standard discretionary sanctions are authorized for all edits about, and all pages related to, post-1978 Iranian politics, broadly construed.
The Arbitration Committee encourages uninvolved administrators to use the discretionary sanctions procedure in topic areas where it is authorised to facilitate consensus in RfCs. This includes, but is not limited to, enforcing sectioned comments, word/diff limits and moratoriums on a particular topic from being brought in an RfC for up to a year.
Miscellaneous
Editors have approved expanding the trial of Growth Features from 2% of new accounts to 25%, and the share of newcomers getting mentorship from 2% to 5%. Experienced editors are invited to add themselves to the mentor list.
The community consultation phase of the 2021 CheckUser and Oversight appointments process is open for editors to provide comments and ask questions to candidates.
Phase 2 of the 2021 RfA review has commenced which will discuss potential solutions to address the 8 issues found in Phase 1. Proposed solutions that achieve consensus will be implemented and you may propose solutions till 07 November 2021.
Unregistered editors using the mobile website are now able to receive notices to indicate they have talk page messages. The notice looks similar to what is already present on desktop, and will be displayed on when viewing any page except mainspace and when editing any page. (T284642)
The limit on the number of emails a user can send per day has been made global instead of per-wiki to help prevent abuse. (T293866)
The already authorized standard discretionary sanctions for all pages relating to the Horn of Africa (defined as including Ethiopia, Somalia, Eritrea, Djibouti, and adjoining areas if involved in related disputes), broadly construed, have been made permanent.
Following consensus at the 2021 RfA review, the autopatrolled user right has been removed from the administrators user group; admins can grant themselves the autopatrolled permission if they wish to remain autopatrolled.
The functionaries email list (functionaries-enlists.wikimedia.org) will no longer accept incoming emails apart from those sent by list members and WMF staff. Private concerns, apart from those requiring oversight, should be directly sent to the Arbitration Committee.
The user group oversight will be renamed suppress in around 3 weeks. This will not affect the name shown to users and is simply a change in the technical name of the user group. The change is being made for technical reasons. You can comment in Phabricator if you have objections.
The Reply Tool feature, which is a part of Discussion Tools, will be opt-out for everyone logged in or logged out starting 7 February 2022. Editors wishing to comment on this can do so in the relevant Village Pump discussion.
A RfC is open to discuss prohibiting draftification of articles over 90 days old.
Technical news
The deployment of the reply tool as an opt-out feature, as announced in last month's newsletter, has been delayed to 7 March. Feedback and comments are being welcomed at Wikipedia talk:Talk pages project. (T296645)
As of February, 300,000 suggested edits have been completed since the feature was first deployed in December 2019.
Add a link is the team's first structured task, deployed in May 2021. It has improved outcomes for newcomers. The team is now working on a second iteration based on community feedback and data analysis. Improvements will include: improved algorithmic suggestions, guardrails to prevent too many similar links to be added, and clearer encouragement for users to continue making edits. After adding these improvements, we will deploy this task to more Wikipedias.
Add an image is the second structured task built by our team. It was deployed in November 2021 to four pilot Wikipedias. This is a more challenging task for newcomers. However, it adds more value to articles (so far, over 1,000 images have been added). We are currently learning from communities and from the data on what is working well and what needs improvements. The project page contains links to interactive prototypes. We are very interested to hear your thoughts on this idea as we build and test the early versions. We will soon deploy this task to more Wikipedias as a test.
"Add a link" and "Add an image" now both have a limitation on how many of these tasks newcomers can do per day. It is meant to discourage careless newcomers from making too many problematic edits.
Over the last two years, the Growth team has focused on building suggested edits: easy tasks for newcomers to start with. We have learned with this experience that these tasks help many newcomers to make their first edits. Now, the team is starting a new project : "positive reinforcement". Its goal is to make newcomers proud of their editing and to make them want to come back for more of them. With the positive reinforcement project, we are considering three kinds of features:
Impact stats: give newcomers the ability to see how many people read the articles they edit.
Leveling up: encourage newcomers to progress from easier tasks to harder tasks.
Personalized praise: encourage mentors and other editors to "thank" and award newcomers for good work.
This project is just beginning, and we hope for community thoughts on the direction. We know that things can wrong if we offer the wrong incentives to newcomers, so we want to be careful. Please visit the talk page to help guide the project!
The mentor dashboard is available at all wikis. It helps mentors see who their mentees are and keep track of their activity. It is automatically activated where a list of mentors has been created. If you need assistance to create a list of mentors, please contact us.
The mentor dashboard has a new module: settings. It is now possible for mentors to define their status (active or away). They can specify the volume of questions they want to receive, and they can claim mentees in an easier way. It is also possible for mentors to quit, which will automatically reassign their mentees to other mentors.
We are working on an ability for a mentee to opt-out (and back in) to having a mentor.
Previously, in the table that displays mentees activity, the filters displayed all mentees, even the ones with zero edits or lots of edits. We have changed this so that only mentees with between 1 and 500 edits are visible by default. Mentors can change this value in their filters.
Previously, at most Wikipedias, only 80% of newcomers were getting the Growth features. This was done for experimentation, to have a control group. We have changed this setting. Now 100% of new accounts at all Wikipedias get the Growth features (except a few, kept as test wikis). We invite communities to update their onboarding documentation and tutorials. Please include the Growth features in it. To help you, we have created an help page that can be translated and adapted to your wiki.
Do you have questions about the Growth features? This translatable FAQ contains answers to the most common questions about the Growth team work. We regularly update it.
Interface translations are important for newcomers. Please help for your language, by translating or copyediting interface translations for the Growth features.
Access to Special:RevisionDelete has been expanded to include users who have the deletelogentry and deletedhistory rights. This means that those in the Researcher user group and Checkusers who are not administrators can now access Special:RevisionDelete. The users able to view the special page after this change are the 3 users in the Researcher group, as there are currently no checkusers who are not already administrators. (T301928)
When viewing deleted revisions or diffs on Special:Undelete a back link to the undelete page for the associated page is now present. (T284114)
Following an RfC, a change has been made to the administrators inactivity policy. Under the new policy, if an administrator has not made at least 100 edits over a period of 5 years they may be desysopped for inactivity.
A public status system for WMF wikis has been created. It is located at https://www.wikimediastatus.net/ and is hosted separately to WMF wikis so in the case of an outage it will remain viewable.
Arbitration
Remedy 2 of the St Christopher case has been rescinded following a motion. The remedy previously authorised administrators to place a ban on single-purpose accounts who were disruptively editing on the article St Christopher Iba Mar Diop College of Medicine or related pages from those pages.
Administrators using the mobile web interface can now access Special:Block directly from user pages. (T307341)
The IP Info feature has been deployed to all wikis as a Beta Feature. Any autoconfirmed user may enable the feature using the "IP info" checkbox under Preferences → Beta features. Autoconfirmed users will be able to access basic information about an IP address that includes the country and connection method. Those with advanced privileges (admin, bureaucrat, checkuser) will have access to extra information that includes the Internet Service Provider and more specific location.
Mockup of the Impact module, redesigned to add Positive reinforcement.
The Growth team started a new project: Positive reinforcement. We want newcomers to understand there is an interest in regularly editing Wikipedia, and we want to improve new editor retention.
We asked users from Arabic, Bangla, Czech and French Wikipedia about their feedback. Some people participated at mediawiki.org as well.
Wesummarized the initial feedback gathered from these community discussions, along with how we plan to iterate based on that feedback.
The first Positive Reinforcement idea is a redesign of the impact module: incorporating stats, graphs, and other contribution information. This idea received the widest support, and we plan to start our work based on the design illustrated on the side.
"Add a link" available at more wikis ― Add a link feature has been deployed to more wikis: Catalan Wikipedia, Hebrew Wikipedia, Hindi Wikipedia, Korean Wikipedia, Norwegian Bokmål Wikipedia, Portuguese Wikipedia, Simple English Wikipedia, Swedish Wikipedia, Ukrainian Wikipedia, Abkhazian Wikipedia, Achinese Wikipedia, Adyghe Wikipedia, Afrikaans Wikipedia, Akan Wikipedia, Alemannisch Wikipedia, Amharic Wikipedia, Aragonese Wikipedia, Old English Wikipedia, Syriac Wikipedia, Egyptian Arabic Wikipedia, Asturian Wikipedia, Atikamekw Wikipedia, Avaric Wikipedia, Aymara Wikipedia, Azerbaijani Wikipedia, South Azerbaijani Wikipedia. This is part of the progressive deployment of this tool to more Wikipedias. The communities can configure locally how this feature works.
"Add an image" available at more wikis ― Add an image feature will be deployed to more wikis: Greek Wikipedia, Indonesian Wikipedia, Polish Wikipedia, Chinese Wikipedia. These communities will be able to configure locally how this feature works. [1]
Selecting topics ― We have created an "AND" filter to the list of topics at Special:Homepage. This way, newcomers can decide to select very specific topics ("Transportation" AND "Asia") or to have a broader selection ("Transportation" OR "Asia"). At the moment this feature is tested at pilot wikis.
Changes for Add a link ― We have built several improvements that came from community discussion and from data analysis. They will be available soon at the wikis.
Algorithm improvements ― The algorithm now avoids recommending links in sections that usually don't have links and for first names. Also, it now limits each article to only having three link suggestions by default (limited to the highest accuracy suggestions of all the available ones in the article).
User experience improvements ― We added a confirmation dialog when a user exits out of suggestion mode prior to making changes. We also improved post-edit dialog experience and allow newcomers to browse through task suggestions from the post-edit dialog.
Community configuration ― We allow communities to set a maximum number of links per article via Special:EditGrowthConfig.
Future change for Add a link feature ― We will suggest underlinked articles in priority. [2]
Patrolling suggested edits ― Some users at Arabic Wikipedia, Spanish Wikipedia, and Russian Wikipedia told us that "Add a link" and "Add an image" edits can be challenging to patrol. We are now brainstorming improvements to help address this challenge. We have already some ideas and we started some work to address this challenge. If you have any thoughts to add about the challenges of reviewing these tasks or how we should improve these tasks further, please let us know, in any language.
The New Pages Patrol queue has around 10,000 articles to be reviewed. As all administrators have the patrol right, please consider helping out. The queue is here. For further information on the state of the project, see the latest NPP newsletter.
An RfC has been closed with consensus to add javascript that will show edit notices for editors editing via a mobile device. This only works for users using a mobile browser, so iOS app editors will still not be able to see edit notices.
An RfC has been closed with the consensus that train stations are not inherently notable.
Administrators will now see links on user pages for "Change block" and "Unblock user" instead of just "Block user" if the user is already blocked. (T308570)
Arbitration
The arbitration case request Geschichte has been automatically closed after a 3 month suspension of the case.
Miscellaneous
You can vote for candidates in the 2022 Board of Trustees elections from 16 August to 30 August. Two community elected seats are up for election.
Wikimania 2022 is taking place virtually from 11 August to 14 August. The schedule for wikimania is listed here. There are also a number of in-person events associated with Wikimania around the world.
Tech tip: When revision-deleting on desktop, hold ⇧ Shift between clicking two checkboxes to select every box in that range.
A discussion is open to define a process by which Vector 2022 can be made the default for all users.
An RfC is open to gain consensus on whether Fox Newsisreliable for science and politics.
Technical news
The impact report on the effects of disabling IP editing on the Persian (Farsi) Wikipedia has been released.
The WMF is looking into making a Private Incident Reporting System (PIRS) system to improve the reporting of harmful incidents through easier and safer reporting. You can leave comments on the talk page by answering the questions provided. Users who have faced harmful situations are also invited to join a PIRS interview to share the experience. To sign up please emailMadalina Ana.
Arbitration
An arbitration case regarding Conduct in deletion-related editing has been closed. The Arbitration Committee passed a remedy as part of the final decision to create a request for comment (RfC) on how to handle mass nominations at Articles for Deletion (AfD).
The arbitration case request Jonathunder has been automatically closed after a 6 month suspension of the case.
Miscellaneous
The new pages patrol (NPP) team has prepared an appeal to the Wikimedia Foundation (WMF) for assistance with addressing Page Curation bugs and requested features. You are encouraged to read the open letter before it is sent, and if you support it, consider signing it. It is not a discussion, just a signature will suffice.
Welcome to the twenty-second newsletter from the Growth team!
Newcomers tasks reach the 500,000 edits milestone — more data publicly available[edit]
As of the last week of June 2022, the newcomers of the world have completed over 500,000 newcomer tasks. In other words, newcomers have made over half a million Wikipedia edits via Growth’s “Suggested Edits” module.
About 30% of those edits were completed on mobile devices.
Usage continues to increase; in June 2022 almost 50,000 newcomer tasks were completed.
We have added some new data to Grafana. You can now check the number of edits and reverts by task types, or the number of questions asked to mentors. You can filter the data by wiki.
If you have any questions, or there is more data you want access to, please let us know.
The new impact module is part of the Positive Reinforcement project. The image displays the mockup for mobile we used for user testing.
We are continuing our work on our new project, Positive Reinforcement. User testing of initial Positive Reinforcement designs was just completed. Interviews were conducted in Arabic, English, and Spanish. The outcome has been published on the Positive Reinforcement page. We are now utilizing user testing feedback along with prior community feedback to iterate and improve designs.
We are exploring the idea of a Copy Edit structured task. We have tested copy edits in Wikipedia articles for arwiki, bnwiki, cswiki, eswiki (Growth pilot-wikis) and enwiki with two different methods: LanguageTool and Hunspell. We will share more details here and on the associated Copy Edit page once the evaluation is complete.
Newcomers who get the Add a Link structured task are more likely to be activated (i.e. make a constructive first article edit).
They are also more likely to be retained (i.e. come back and make another constructive article edit on a different day).
The feature also increases edit volume (i.e. the number of constructive edits made across the first couple weeks), while at the same time improving edit quality (i.e. the likelihood that the newcomer's edits aren't reverted).
Communities had expressed concern that newcomers whose initial edits were structured tasks wouldn’t go on to learn how to complete more difficult tasks. The Growth team data scientist conducted a Newcomer task edit type analysis to see if this was indeed the case.
Results from analysis indicate that this likely isn’t a significant concern. More than 70% of users who start with the easy task "Add a link" also make another task type. Read the full analysis and methodology here.
The configuration of the mentors list will change over the next weeks. In the future, mentors will sign up, edit their mentor description and quit using Special:MentorDashboard. This new system will make the development of new features for mentors much easier.
At the moment, the mentor list is a simple page anyone can edit, unless it’s protected. With the new page, mentors will be able to edit only their own description, while administrators will be able to edit the entire mentors' list if needed.
The deployment will happen first at the pilot wikis, then at all wikis. Existing lists of mentors will be automatically converted, no action will be needed from the mentors. [5][6]
Mentors will be informed about the next steps soon, by a message posted on the talk page of existing Mentor lists.
Did you know that mentors can filter their mentees' changes at Special:MentorDashboard (and star the ones that require attention)? This feature helps to keep an eye on newcomers' edits, helping mentors to fix minor details, and encourage them if necessary.
And did you know that mentors have special filters to highlight their mentees' edits at Special:RecentChanges? Look for the following filters in RecentChanges: Your starred mentees, Your unstarred mentees.
Other improvements
Some improvements will be made to the mentor dashboard in the coming weeks:
While we now offer some options for mentors to take a break, the option to quit mentoring was not easy to find. This will be improved. [7]
Mentors at wikis using FlaggedRevisions will have a way to discover their mentees' pending edits. [8]
Dashboard discovery for new mentors will be improved. [9]
We moved to a new Image Suggestions API. This new API will allow us to deploy Add an Image to more wikis. [10]
Starting September 19, a few more wikis now offer Add an image to newcomers. These wikis are Greek Wikipedia, Polish Wikipedia, Chinese Wikipedia, Indonesian Wikipedia, Romanian Wikipedia. [11]
Add an image has been disabled for a few days due to technical issue. "Add an image" added a blank line instead of an image. This has been fixed. [12]
In order to know if Special:EditGrowthConfig is used by communities, we now instrument page loads and saves of configuration. [13]
Following an RfC, consensus has been found that, in the context of politics and science, the reliability of FoxNews.com is unclear and that additional considerations apply to its use.
The Articles for creation helper script now automatically recognises administrator accounts which means your name does not need to be listed at WP:AFCP to help out. If you wish to help out at AFC, enable AFCH by navigating to Preferences → Gadgets and checking the "Yet Another AfC Helper Script" box.
Arbitration
Remedy 8.1 of the Muhammad images case will be rescinded 1 November following a motion.
AnRfC is open to discuss having open requests for adminship automatically placed on hold after the seven-day period has elapsed, pending closure or other action by a bureaucrat.
Tech tip: Wikimarkup in a block summary is parsed in the notice that the blockee sees. You can use templates with custom options to specify situations like {{rangeblock|create=yes}}or{{uw-ublock|contains profanity}}.
Screenshot of the positive reinforcement module improvements.
Positive reinforcement: an improved impact module to test[edit]
The goal of the Growth team is to encourage newcomers to try editing for the first time, and encourage them to keep editing. We want to increase newcomers' motivation by showing them how impactful their edits are.
Newcomers have access to an impact module; you can find yours at Special:Impact. The revised impact module provides new editors with more context about their impact. It will display the number of edits, the number of thanks received, the last time they edited, the number of consecutive days they edited, and the number of views for the articles they edited.
This module will soon be available at our pilot wikis starting December 1. You can already test this new module at Beta Wikipedia. For safety reasons, do not use your regular account and password at Beta wiki. Create a new, specific account for this wiki, with a different password.
Structured tasks: improvements based on patroller feedback[edit]
After the deployment of Structured tasks, we received feedback from various communities regarding how patrollers of recent changes were feeling overwhelmed by an increase in edits to check, and how some edits were poor quality or of poor relevance.
We made several improvements based on the feedback we received. Several points of improvement have already been addressed:
Patroller fatigue:
By default, newcomers can complete up to 25 "add a link" tasks and 25 "add an image" tasks per day. If patrollers are overburdened, each community can use Special:EditGrowthConfig to lower that limit.
Quality of edits: what constitutes a "quality edit" is not a well defined concept. We initiated a discussion and summarized our findings. We also worked on the following improvements:
Underlinked articles are now prioritized, so it's less likely that newcomers are adding links to articles that are already have a lot of links.
The confidence score was increased, so suggestions are more likely to be accurate.
The default number of suggested links per article has been lowered to 3. This can be changed at Special:EditGrowthConfig. Communities can also exclude articles containing certain templates or categories from being suggested.
Lists will no longer receive "add an image" suggestions.
Disambiguation pages will no longer receive "add an image" suggestions.
We have many further improvements we plan to make to "add an image" in early 2023. [14]
The Positive Reinforcement project will also address some of the concerns around encouraging newcomers to progress to higher value edits. The Growth team will soon work on strategies geared at "Leveling up" newcomers so they progress from easy to more difficult tasks.
All Wikipedias now have the same onboarding experience. Previously, at a few wikis, 20% of new accounts didn't get the Growth features when they created their account. These 20% of new accounts were used as a control group, in order to know if the Growth features were changing newcomers' behavior. Experiments have shown that Growth features improve activation and retention, and as we want to provide the same onboarding experience at all Wikipedias, we have decided to remove the control groups. We will utilize control groups when testing new features, and German Wikipedia keeps a control group at their request. [15]
The quality score for "add a link" suggestions will change. We will suggest less links for each article, but they will be more accurate. We will first deploy it at our pilot wikis, and then to all other wikis where this feature is available. [16][17]
Growth's features FAQ has been updated and expanded. This page centralizes all the information about Growth features. We invite you to read it, and, if you can, to translate it.
All Wikipedias can now setup and manage a mentorship program in an easier way.
We changed the process to make it more reliable, easier to improve and easier to use.
Wikipedias where mentorship hasn't been enabled yet can turn mentorship on following a new process. When done, mentors can sign-up by visiting Special:MentorDashboard.
Wikipedias where the list of mentors already existed have been converted to the new system.
The Mentor dashboard's "Your mentees" module will have a new footer, called "Recent changes by your mentees". This footer will include a link to Recent changes, where mentors can see only edits made by their own mentees. [18]
We plan to have a more regular newsletter, every two months. We also want to know if the current format suits you! Let us know what you like, what you like less and your suggestions of improvements: leave us a comment, in your preferred language.
An RfC on the banners for the December 2022 fundraising campaign has been closed.
Technical news
A new preference named "Enable limited width mode" has been added to the Vector 2022 skin. The preference is also shown as a toggle on every page if your monitor is 1600 pixels or wider. When disabled it removes the whitespace added by Vector 2022 on the left and right of the page content. Disabling this preference has the same effect as enabling the wide-vector-2022 gadget. (T319449)
Arbitration
Eligible users are invited to vote on candidates for the Arbitration Committee until 23:59 December 12, 2022 (UTC). Candidate statements can be seen here.
Tech tip: A single IPv6 connection usually has access to a "subnet" of 18 quintillion IPs. Add /64 to the end of an IP in Special:Contributions to see all of a subnet's edits, and consider blocking the whole subnet rather than an IP that may change within a minute.
Voting for the Sound Logo has closed and the winner is expected to be announced February to April 2023.
Tech tip: You can view information about IP addresses in a centralised location using bullseye which won the Newcomer award in the recent Coolest Tool Awards.
The Growth team partnered with other WMF teams to conduct several experiments around increasing account creation and new editor retention.
Results from four of these experiments are now available:
Thank you pages & banners - Encourage donors to create accounts through thank you pages and banners.
Marketing experiment - Run ads on-wiki and off-wiki to see how this impacts account activation.
Several communities suggested improving "add a link", by suggesting underlinked articles first. We released this change to Growth pilot wikis. We will review the data and collect feedback before considering releasing it to more wikis. [20]
The deployment of the "add a link" to all Wikipedias is still in progress. Suggested links use a prediction model, which has to be trained. The deployments will resume after we finish training all models. [21]
When someone wants to signup as a mentor, they are now informed if they don't meet the defined criteria. [22]
Workshop hosts asked us to have workshop attendees assigned to them. They can soon use a custom URL parameter. This way, workshop hosts will continue mentoring the event's attendees after the workshop. It will be available in February. [23]
Have you considered to help new editors on your wiki, by signing up to be a Mentor?
Please visit Special:MentorDashboard to check on the conditions to be a mentor, and sign up.
If your wiki does not have Mentorship enabled, consider setting it up. The Growth team can provide advice and assist as needed. Please ping Trizek (WMF) for assistance.
Newsletter translation: We are looking for translators for this newsletter. If you are interested and have the needed English language proficiency to assist, then please add your name to this list. You will receive an invite on your talk page to translate the newsletter when it is ready.
Voting in the 2023 Community Wishlist Survey will begin on 10 February 2023 and end on 24 February 2023. You can submit, discuss and revise proposals until 6 February 2023.
Tech tip: Syntax highlighting is available in both the 2011 and 2017 Wikitext editors. It can help make editing paragraphs with many references or complicated templates easier.
Following a request for comment, the Portal CSD criteria (P1 (portal subject to CSD as an article) and P2 (underpopulated portal)) have been deprecated.
The Terms of Use update cycle has started, which includesa[p]roposal for better addressing undisclosed paid editing. Feedback is being accepted until 24 April 2023.
In this test, we use post-edit dialogs (pop-ups shown after publishing an edit) and notifications to encourage new editors to try new types of newcomer-friendly suggested edits.
Community Ambassadors completed an initial evaluation that confirmed that prioritizing underlinked articles resulted in better article suggestions. We then evaluated the change on Growth pilot wikis, and results suggest that more newcomers are successfully completing the task and experiencing fewer reverts. We have now deployed the new prioritization model to all wikis with "add a link" enabled. [25][26]
We continue the deployment of "add a link" to more wikis. These changes are regularly announced in Tech News. To know if newcomers at your wiki have access to this feature, please visit your Homepage.
The Impact module was deployed on our pilot wikis, where we conducted an A/B test. We published initial findings, and a data scientist is now completing experiment analysis. [27]
Donor Thank you page experiment – Donors land on a “thank you” page after donation, and that landing page now includes a call to action to try editing: Example Thank you page in French. This promising feature is tested at several Wikipedias (French Wikipedia, Italian Wikipedia, Japanese Wikipedia, Dutch Wikipedia, Swedish Wikipedia).
The rollback of Vector 2022 RfC has found no consensus to rollback to Vector legacy, but has found rough consensus to disable "limited width" mode by default.
Arequest for comment about removing administrative privileges in specified situations is open for feedback.
Technical news
Progress has started on the Page Triage improvement project. This is to address the concerns raised by the community in their 2022 WMF letter that requested improvements be made to the tool.
We passed the 1 million Suggested edits milestone in late April!
The Suggested edits feature (AKA Newcomer tasks) increase newcomer activation by ~12%, which flows on through to increased retention. (source)
Suggested edits increase the number of edits newcomers complete in their first two weeks and have a relatively low revert rate. (source)
Suggested edits are available on all Wikipedia language editions.
Newer Suggested edits, like Add a link and Add an image, aren’t yet deployed to all wikis, but these structured tasks further increase the probability that newcomers will make their first edit. (source)
The new Impact module was released to Growth pilot wikis in December 2022, and we are now scaling the feature to another ten wikis. [32]
The Leveling up features are deployed at our pilot wikis.
The Personalized praise features were deployed at our pilot wikis on May 24. Mentors at pilot wikis will start to receive notifications weekly when they have “praise-worthy” mentees. Mentors can configure their notification preferences or disable these notifications.
We are progressively releasing Add a link to more wikis. [34]
After adding Thanks to Recent Changes, Watchlist and Special:Contributions, we investigated Thanks usage on the wikis. There is no evidence that thanks increased after the feature was added on more pages.
We shared an overview of Growth annual planning ideas, and have started community discussion about these potential projects. We would love to hear your feedback on these ideas!
Welcome, subscribers, to the seventh Discontent Content newsletter! Discontent Content is a newsletter aiming to collate and improve Wikipedia articles in need of more eyes and hands to get them in shape. Its unique trimodal structure allows editors to work where they feel comfortable -- with stubs and starts needing to be brought to standard, mid-quality articles with Good or Featured potential, or quality-assessed articles needing help to maintain their status.
Category 1
Articles in this category are those that need to be brought up to a minimum quality standard. Some will be stubs; others will be longer articles that nonetheless have significant concerns putting them far below B- or C-class adequacy.
This issue's Category 1 articles are:
Exile: An unexpectedly poor article for a major form of historical punishment, and one of those few where anyone can agree the "In popular culture" section is far too sparse. Even a relatively minor improvement to reflect the historical and sociological literature could really improve this article's usability.
Scratching post: A major element of cat ownership (if you ever want to own furniture), this article lies right on the sub-start border and is supported by exactly one ref. Arguably, there may be few serious investigations of the subject :) Some information seems split between it and the related article cat tree, and they may be better off handled under a single more fleshed-out title.
Agnathia: A two-sentence stub on an unusual deformity (absence of part of the jaw). Even in its incredibly short length, the article manages to conflate two different things, the absence of the jaw entirely and the presence of missing sections. This article could become significantly more useful with even minor improvements any non-specialist editor could do, such as discussing causes (e.g. treatments for certain cancers) or finding more prevalence data.
Category 2
Articles in this category, while in better current shape than Category 1, are still missing something. They have the potential to be truly high-quality content, and may have been at one point. With work, they can be brought up to dizzying heights.
This issue's Category 2 articles are:
Firefox: An ex-FA, a Million Award candidate, and the best browser (don't @ me). This article has good bones, and could certainly be brought to a quality-assessed status. A problem noticeable in the ref section is the advancing age of many sources.
Cyclone Tracy: One of the biggest disasters in Australian history, Tracy notoriously levelled the whole city of Darwin over Christmas 1974, with people unable to evacuate due to the demands of the holiday season. This ex-FA is still a confronting look at the tragedy that forced the complete rebuild of the country's northernmost capital, but some work needs to be done to improve sourcing, particularly around the Aftermath section.
East Asian religions: A disappointingly sparse article on the religious history of over a fifth of the world's population. This was a GA once, prior to the 2009 sweeps, but has had little serious improvement in the past fourteen years.
Category 3
Articles in this category have been assessed through a content review process in the past, but may require work to be brought up to current GA/FA standard. Editors can help bring them to a level where the star or plus near their names can once again shine.
This issue's Category 3 articles are:
History of Singapore: A 2006 GA now at GAR, this highly important article draws close to a quarter million views a year. The GAR notes significant missing citations and dead links.
Dungeons & Dragons (album): This 2007 FA is now at FARC, the last stop before delisting. The talk page hashes out source reliability; the article may be closer to salvation than it looks, for someone who can get a hold of the contemporary zines.
The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (radio series): The one that started it all! The talk page for this FA at FAR gives extensive and fully actionable notes on the article's issues, mostly prose-related. Serious improvements could be made by following the recommendations. It would be a shame to see the article delisted because of the original writer's lack of time to work on it.
Letter from the Editor
I LIVE.
Hi, guys. Great to see you. I felt like doing this again. Will I do more? Let's find out. I hope you're all well, you beautiful people. Vaticidalprophet 12:39, 4 June 2023 (UTC)[reply]
Following an RfC, editors indefinitely site-banned by community consensus will now have all rights, including sysop, removed.
As a part of the Wikimedia Foundation's IP Masking project, a new policy has been created that governs the access to temporary account IP addresses. An associated FAQ has been created and individual communities can increase the requirements to view temporary account IP addresses.
Technical news
Bot operators and tool maintainers should schedule time in the coming months to test and update their tools for the effects of IP masking. IP masking will not be deployed to any content wiki until at least October 2023 and is unlikely to be deployed to the English Wikipedia until some time in 2024.
Arbitration
The arbitration case World War II and the history of Jews in Poland has been closed. The topic area of Polish history during World War II (1933-1945) and the history of Jews in Poland is subject to a "reliable source consensus-required" contentious topic restriction.
We shared our annual plan, for the period July 2023 - June 2024.
Our first project of the year will be Community configuration 2.0, which helps editors with extended rights transparently and easily configure important on-wiki functionality.
After we finish work on Community configuration 2.0, we will hope to fit in one of the following projects:
Article creation: This project aims to provide new editors with better guidance and guardrails in the article creation process, with the intention of lightening the load of new page reviewers.
Non-editing participation: This project aims to create low-risk ways for readers to participate in Wikipedia with the intention of funneling more readers into contributing to the Wikimedia movement.
Suggested Edits are now receiving topic predictions via the new Language-Agnostic Topic Classification. This change affects non-English Wikipedia wikis. It will ensure newcomers receive a greater diversity of task recommendations. Before, as this feature was a test, English Wikipedia was used to select topics. The change is gradual as lists of topics are refreshed when they become empty. The Research team will evaluate the impact in a few months. [36]
Starting on August 1, a new set of Wikipedias will get "Add a link": Georgian Wikipedia, Kara-Kalpak Wikipedia, Kabyle Wikipedia, Kabardian Wikipedia, Kabiyè Wikipedia, Kikuyu Wikipedia, Kazakh Wikipedia, Khmer Wikipedia, Kannada Wikipedia, Kashmiri Wikipedia, Colognian Wikipedia, Kurdish Wikipedia, Cornish Wikipedia, Cornish Wikipedia.
The Growth team provides dedicated features to establish a mentorship program for newcomers. Every newcomer gets a volunteer mentor who provides encouragement and answers questions. Communities can set up or join this mentorship system by visiting Special:ManageMentors. This mentorship system is configurable by the community at Special:EditGrowthConfig.
More communities have implemented mentorship. A Wikimedia Foundation data scientist will be looking at the impact of Mentorship. We will look at the impact on Spanish and English Wikipedia. [37]
The Growth team will also host a Mentoring new editors on Wikipedia session at Wikimania 2023 in Singapore. Workshop attendees will help brainstorm improvements to Growth’s mentorship features.
We will share more complete experiment analysis for all the three parts of the Positive reinforcement project soon. At the moment, the new Impact module, Leveling up, and Personalized praise are still being A/B tested on the Growth team's pilot wikis.
In the meantime, initial leading indicators for the Personalized praise project have been published. Although this is still a relatively small sample, results seem healthy. They show that Mentors are indeed receiving notifications and clicking through to view their praise-worthy mentees.
The Growth team is currently focusing on IP Editing: Privacy Enhancement and Abuse Mitigation. It is a project that touches many different Wikimedia Foundation teams. The Growth team will focus on temporary accounts through two main points:
the user experience of a logged-out user, that switches to a temporary account,
change Growth-owned extensions and features, so that they work as expected with temporary accounts. [38]
Following an RfC, TFAs will be automatically semi-protected the day before it is on the main page and through the day after.
A discussionatWP:VPP about revision deletion and oversight for dead names found that [s]ysops can choose to use revdel if, in their view, it's the right tool for this situation, and they need not default to oversight. But oversight could well be right where there's a particularly high risk to the person. Use your judgment.
The SmallCat dispute case has closed. As part of the final decision, editors participating in XfD have been reminded to be careful about forming local consensus which may or may not reflect the broader community consensus. Regular closers of XfD forums were also encouraged to note when broader community discussion, or changes to policies and guidelines, would be helpful.
Miscellaneous
Tech tip: The "Browse history interactively" banner shown at the top of Special:Diff can be used to easily look through a history, assemble composite diffs, or find out what archive something wound up in.
Community Configuration 2.0 is a feature that will enable Wikimedia communities to easily customize and configure features to meet their unique needs. This approach provides non-technical moderators with more independence and control over enabling/disabling and customizing features for their communities.
Initial designs are drafted for two different approaches (see images). We will soon demo interactive prototypes to interested admins, stewards, and experienced editors (T346109). Please let us know if you have feedback on the design approach, or want to participate in prototype testing.
The Growth team has been working on several updates to ensure Growth maintained features will be compatible with future IP Masking changes. This work has included code changes to: Recent Changes (T343322), Echo notifications (T333531), the Thanks extension (T345679) and Mentorship (T341390).
Before December, the Growth team will initiate community discussions with the goal of migrating communities from Flow to DiscussionTools. This move aims to minimize the necessity for additional engineering work to make Flow compatible with IP Masking. (T346108)
We continue the deployment of the structured task "add a link" to all Wikipedias. We plan to scale the task to all Wikipedias that have link suggestions available by the end of 2023.
We plan to scale the new Impact Module to all Wikipedias soon, but first we are investigating a bug with the job that refreshes the Impact Module data. (T344428)
At some wikis, newcomers have access to the "add an image" structured task. This task suggests images that may be relevant to add to unillustrated articles. Newcomers at these wikis can now add images to unillustrated articles sections. (T345940) The wikis that have this task are listed under "Images recommendations" at the Growth team deployment table.
After a 2.5 years-long collaboration with Bangala Wikipedia, we have decided to start a collaboration with another wiki. Swahili Wikipedia is now a pilot wiki for Growth experiments.
Following a motion, the contentious topic designation of Prem Rawat has been struck. Actions previously taken using this contentious topic designation are still in force.
Following several motions, multiple topic areas are no longer designated as a contentious topic. These contentious topic designations were from the Editor conduct in e-cigs articles, Liancourt Rocks, Longevity, Medicine, September 11 conspiracy theories, and Shakespeare authorship question cases.
Following a motion, remedies 3.1 (All related articles under 1RR whenever the dispute over naming is concerned), 6 (Stalemate resolution) and 30 (Administrative supervision) of the Macedonia 2 case have been rescinded.
Following a motion, remedy 6 (One-revert rule) of the The Troubles case has been amended.
An arbitration case named Industrial agriculture has been opened. Evidence submissions in this case close 8 November.
Miscellaneous
The Articles for Creation backlog drive is happening in November 2023, with 700+ drafts pending reviews for in the last 4 months or so. In addition to the AfC participants, all administrators and New Page Patrollers can conduct reviews using the helper script, Yet Another AFC Helper Script, which can be enabled in the Gadgets settings. Sign up here to participate!
This first meeting language will be English, but we plan to host conversations in other languages, and about other topics. Please visit the conversation page on-wiki for the details on how to join. You can also watch the page, or suggest ideas for upcoming conversations there.
At the beginning of November 2023, the Growth team deployed the New Impact Module to all Wikipedias. We recently released a follow up improvement to how edit data was displayed based on editor feedback. [42]
When a mentor marked themselves as "Away", they were not getting their name assigned to new accounts when they returned. This has been fixed. [46]
We improved the message received by newcomers when their mentor quits, to reduce confusion. [47]
We worked on ensuring that all mentees are assigned to an active mentor. This required reassigning mentees with no mentors to a new mentor. We paused this as the clean-up script confused some editors. We will resume it when the identified blockers are resolved. [48]
It is now possible to create an Abuse Filter to prevent one user from signing up as a mentor. [49]
Following a talk page discussion, the Administrators' accountability policy has been updated to note that while it is considered best practice for administrators to have notifications (pings) enabled, this is not mandatory. Administrators who do not use notifications are now strongly encouraged to indicate this on their user page.
Arbitration
Following a motion, the Extended Confirmed Restriction has been amended, removing the allowance for non-extended-confirmed editors to post constructive comments on the "Talk:" namespace. Now, non-extended-confirmed editors may use the "Talk:" namespace solely to make edit requests related to articles within the topic area, provided that their actions are not disruptive.
The Arbitration Committee has announced a call for Checkusers and Oversighters, stating that it will currently be accepting applications for CheckUser and/or Oversight permissions at any point in the year.
Following a motion, the Arbitration Committee rescinded the restrictions on the page name move discussions for the two Ireland pages that were enacted in June 2009.
AnRfC about increasing the inactivity requirement for Interface administrators is open for feedback.
Technical news
Pages that use the JSON contentmodel will now use tabs instead of spaces for auto-indentation. This will significantly reduce the page size. (T326065)
Arbitration
Following a motion, the Arbitration Committee adopted a new enforcement restriction on January 4, 2024, wherein the Committee may apply the 'Reliable source consensus-required restriction' to specified topic areas.
Community feedback is requested for a draft to replace the "Information for administrators processing requests" section at WP:AE.
A vote to ratify the charter for the Universal Code of Conduct Coordinating Committee (U4C) is open till 2 February 2024, 23:59:59 (UTC) via Secure Poll. All eligible voters within the Wikimedia community have the opportunity to either support or oppose the adoption of the U4C Charter and share their reasons. The details of the voting process and voter eligibility can be found here.
Community Tech has made some preliminary decisions about the future of the Community Wishlist Survey. In summary, they aim to develop a new, continuous intake system for community technical requests that improves prioritization, resource allocation, and communication regarding wishes. Read more
The Toolforge Grid Engine services have been shut down after the final migration process from Grid Engine to Kubernetes. (T313405)
Arbitration
Anarbitration case has been opened to look into "the intersection of managing conflict of interest editing with the harassment (outing) policy".
Miscellaneous
Editors are invited to sign up for The Core Contest, an initiative running from April 15 to May 31, which aims to improve vital and other core articles on Wikipedia.
The Growth team will now send quarterly reports to keep you in the loop. Growth team weekly updates are available on wiki (in English) if you want to know more about our day-to-day work.
If you want to receive more general updates about technical activity happening across the Wikimedia movement (including Growth work), we encourage you to subscribe to Tech News.
Growth features are currently configurable at Special:EditGrowthConfig. This quarter we are working on making Community Configuration accessible for other MediaWiki developers while also moving Growth feature configuration to the new CommunityConfiguration extension.
An early version of Community Configuration can be tested at Spanish Beta Wikipedia. We plan to release the new Community Configuration extension to pilot wikis (Arabic and Spanish Wikipedia) in early May, 2024. The first non-Growth team feature to utilize Community Configuration will be Automoderator.
In parallel with the development, the Growth team will propose Community Configuration usage guidelines, Community Configuration design guidelines, and provide technical documentation.
The Growth team conducted an experiment to assess the impact of the “Add an Image” structured task on the Newcomer Homepage's "Suggested Edits" module. This analysis finds that the Add an Image structured task leads to an increase in newcomer participation on the mobile web platform, particularly by making constructive (non-reverted) article edits:
The likelihood that mobile web newcomers make their first article edit (+17.0% over baseline)
The likelihood that they are retained as newcomers (+24.3% over baseline)
The number of edits they make during their first two weeks on the wiki (+21.8% over baseline)
A lower probability of the newcomers' edits will be reverted (-3.3% over baseline).
This feature was developed for Mentors as part of the Growth team's Positive Reinforcement project. When A/B testing on Spanish Wikipedia, we found no significant impact on retention, but we found a significant positive impact on newcomer productivity. However, we concluded that the results weren’t positive enough to justify the time investment from Mentors. We plan to discuss this feature with our pilot wikis, and consider further improvements before scaling this feature further. Meanwhile, communities willing to test the feature can ask to have it deployed. (T361763)
As in previous years, donors were directed to a Thank you page after donation (example). However, this year we tested a new “Try editing Wikipedia,” call to action on the Thank You page. This call to action linked to a unique account creation page. From this account creation page we were able to track Registrations and Activation (editing for the first time). During the English banner campaign, the Donor Thank you page led to 4,398 new accounts, and 441 of those accounts went on to constructively edit within 24 hours. (T352900)
The Growth team and the Editing team will work on the WE1.2 Key Result in the coming fiscal year. We will start initial discussions with communities soon to help finalize our plans. (T361657)
We plan to A/B test adding a new Community Configurable module to the Newcomer Homepage that will allow communities to highlight specific events, projects, campaigns, and initiatives. We are early in the planning phase of this project that will take place first at our pilot wikis and wikis volunteering. We welcome community feedback on initial designs and plans, in any language at our project talk page.
Partial action blocks are now in effect on the English Wikipedia. This means that administrators have the ability to restrict users from certain actions, including uploading files, moving pages and files, creating new pages, and sending thanks. T280531
Administrator changes
Enchanter • Carlossuarez46
Interface administrator changes
Guideline and policy news
Technical news
Arbitration
Ashleyyoursmile • Less Unless
Miscellaneous
Jake Wartenberg
Ashleyyoursmile → Viridian Bovary
lists.wikimedia.org) will no longer accept incoming emails apart from those sent by list members and WMF staff. Private concerns, apart from those requiring oversight, should be directly sent to the Arbitration Committee.
CheckUser changes
Oversight changes
Bureaucrat changes
