User:MB/draft1

New Page Patrol newsletter August 2022

Hello MB,

NPP_backlog_August_2022.jpg

Backlog status

After the last newsletter (No.28, June 2022), the backlog declined another 1,000 to 13,000 in the last week of June. Then the July backlog drive began, during which 9,900 articles were reviewed and the backlog fell by 4,500 to just under 8,500 (these numbers illustrate how many new articles regularly flow into the queue). Thanks go to the coordinators Buidhe and Zippybonzo, as well as all the nearly 100 participants. Congratulations to Dr vulpes who led with 880 points. See this page for further details.

The bad news is that most of the decline happened in the first half of the month, and the backlog has already risen to 9,400. Understandably, it seems people are taking a break from reviewing and unfortunately, we are not even keeping up with the inflow let alone driving it lower. We need the other 600 reviewers to do more! Please try to do at least one a day.

Coordination: MB and Novem Linguae have taken on some of the coordination tasks. Please let them know if you are interested in helping out. MPGuy2824 will be handling recognition, and will be retroactively awarding the annual barnstars that have not been issued for a few years.

Open letter to the WMF: The Page Curation software needs urgent attention. There are dozens of bug fixes and enhancements that are stalled (listed at Suggested improvements). We have written a letter to be sent to the WMF and we encourage as many patrollers as possible to sign it here. We are also in negotiation with the Board of Trustees to press for assistance, and an article is scheduled to appear in The Signpost at the end of this month (August). Better software will make the active reviewers we do have more productive.

TIP - Reviewing by subject: Reviewers who prefer to patrol new pages by their most familiar subjects can do so from the regularly updated sorted topic list.

New reviewers: The NPP School is being underused. The learning curve for NPP is quite steep, but a detailed and easy-to-read tutorial exists, and the Curation Tool's many features are fully described and illustrated on the updated page here.

Reminders

Consider staying informed on project issues by putting the project discussion page on your watchlist.
If you have noticed a user with a good understanding of Wikipedia notability and deletion, suggest they help the effort by placing {{subst:NPR invite}} on their talk page.
If you are no longer very active on Wikipedia or you no longer wish to be part of the New Page Reviewer user group, please consider asking any admin to remove you from the list. This will enable NPP to have a better overview of its performance and what improvements need to be made to the process and its software.
To opt-out of future mailings, please remove yourself here.

NPP lobbying the WMF to provide better Page Curation software support

Page Curation, the primary software tool used by New Page Reviewers, is essentially unmaintained by the WMF. Bugs go unfixed, (except for a few patches provided by NPP volunteers), and there have been no enhancements to it in years. Dozens of Phab reports are stalled at "unassigned" or "needs triage". A letter has been written asking that resources be allocated to the maintenance of this tool. As there are too few active reviewers to promptly address the constant inflow of new articles, software improvements are imperative. You can read the letter here, and even offer your support by adding your signature.