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New Page Review newsletter July-August 2019

Hello EdChem,

WMF at work on NPP Improvements

More new features are being added to the feed, including the important red alert for previously deleted pages. This will only work if it is selected in your filters. Best is to 'select all'. Do take a moment to check out all the new features if you have not already done so. If anything is not working as it should, please let us know at NPR. There is now also a live queue of AfC submissions in the New Pages Feed. Feel free to review AfCs, but bear in mind that NPP is an official process and policy and is more important.

QUALITY of REVIEWING

Articles are still not always being checked thoroughly enough. If you are not sure what to do, leave the article for a more experienced reviewer. Please be on the alert for any incongruities in patrolling and help your colleagues where possible; report patrollers and autopatrolled article creators who are ostensibly undeclared paid editors. The displayed ORES alerts offer a greater 'at-a-glance' overview, but the new challenges in detecting unwanted new content and sub-standard reviewing do not necessarily make patrolling any easier, nevertheless the work may have a renewed interest factor of a different kind. A vibrant community of reviewers is always ready to help at NPR.

Backlog

The backlog is still far too high at between 7,000 and 8,000. Of around 700 user rights holders, 80% of the reviewing is being done by just TWO users. In the light of more and more subtle advertising and undeclared paid editing, New Page Reviewing is becoming more critical than ever.

Move to draft

NPR is triage, it is not a clean up clinic. This move feature is not limited to bios so you may have to slightly re-edit the text in the template before you save the move. Anything that is not fit for mainspace but which might have some promise can be draftified - particularly very poor English and machine and other low quality translations.

Notifying users

Remember to use the message feature if you are just tagging an article for maintenance rather than deletion. Otherwise articles are likely to remain perma-tagged. Many creators are SPA and have no intention of returning to Wikipedia. Use the feature too for leaving a friendly note note for the author of a first article you found well made or interesting. Many have told us they find such comments particularly welcoming and encouraging.

PERM

Admins are now taking advantage of the new time-limited user rights feature. If you have recently been accorded NPR, do check your user rights to see if this affects you. Depending on your user account preferences, you may receive automated notifications of your rights changes. Requests for permissions are not mini-RfAs. Helpful comments are welcome if absolutely necessary, but the bot does a lot of the work and the final decision is reserved for admins who do thorough research anyway.

Other news

School and academic holidays will begin soon in various places around the Western world. Be on the lookout for the usual increase in hoax, attack, and other junk pages.

Our next newsletter might be announcing details of a possible election for co-ordinators of NPR. If you think you have what it takes to micro manage NPR, take a look at New Page Review Coordinators - it's a job that requires a lot of time and dedication.


Stay up to date with even more news – subscribe to The Signpost.
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MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 04:38, 30 June 2019 (UTC)

WikiCup 2019 July newsletter

The third round of the 2019 WikiCup has now come to an end. The 16 users who made it to the fourth round needed to score at least 68 points, which is substantially lower than last year's 227 points. Our top scorers in round 3 were:

  • Norfolk Island Cas Liber, our winner in 2016, with 500 points derived mainly from a featured article and two GAs on natural history topics
  • South Carolina Adam Cuerden, with 480 points, a tally built on 16 featured pictures, the result of meticulous restoration work
  • Cascadia (independence movement) SounderBruce, a finalist in the last two years, with 306 points from a variety of submissions, mostly related to sport or the State of Washington
  • United States Usernameunique, with 305 points derived from a featured article and two GAs on archaeology and related topics

Contestants managed 4 (5) featured articles, 4 featured lists, 18 featured pictures, 29 good articles, 50 DYK entries, 9 ITN entries, and 39 good article reviews. As we enter the fourth round, remember that any content promoted after the end of round 3 but before the start of round 4 can be claimed in round 4. Please also remember that you must claim your points within 14 days of "earning" them, and it is imperative to claim them in the correct round; one FA claim had to be rejected because it was incorrectly submitted (claimed in Round 3 when it qualified for Round 2), so be warned! When doing GARs, please make sure that you check that all the GA criteria are fully met.

If you are concerned that your nomination—whether it is at good article nominations, a featured process, or anything else—will not receive the necessary reviews, please list it on Wikipedia:WikiCup/Reviews Needed (remember to remove your listing when no longer required). Questions are welcome on Wikipedia talk:WikiCup, and the judges are reachable on their talk pages or by email. Good luck! If you wish to start or stop receiving this newsletter, please feel free to add or remove your name from Wikipedia:WikiCup/Newsletter/Send. Godot13 (talk), Sturmvogel 66 (talk), Vanamonde (talk) and Cwmhiraeth (talk). MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 20:12, 2 July 2019 (UTC)

EdChem, this DYK nomination has been waiting for a while for you to provide the two quid pro quo reviews required for a double nomination. Please stop by the nomination as soon as possible, and let us know how soon the QPQs can be expected. Many thanks. BlueMoonset (talk) 23:17, 24 June 2019 (UTC)

Please see new note on your DYK nomination. Yoninah (talk) 22:45, 27 June 2019 (UTC)
If you could please stop by one more time, it would greatly be appreciated. Thank you very much. BlueMoonset (talk) 03:19, 12 July 2019 (UTC)

EdChem, could you please stop by and say whether you intend to do the QPQs or not? If not, we do have an offer to donate, but only if you won't be supplying them. It would be nice to get the nomination passed and into prep; it's waited a long time. Thank you very much. BlueMoonset (talk) 15:41, 16 July 2019 (UTC)

Your GA nomination of Trifluoroperacetic acid

The article Trifluoroperacetic acid you nominated as a good article has been placed on hold . The article is close to meeting the good article criteria, but there are some minor changes or clarifications needing to be addressed. If these are fixed within 7 days, the article will pass; otherwise it may fail. See Talk:Trifluoroperacetic acid for issues which need to be addressed. Message delivered by Legobot, on behalf of Example -- Example (talk) 14:21, 28 July 2019 (UTC)

Nice

I largely agree. Should Wikipedia be a safe space? No. But a respectful space, absolutely. Things we can't control - terminology used, and how people react to it - we can't fix. Things we can control - how we label things for browsing and organisation - we can, and should. Guy (Help!) 23:30, 3 August 2019 (UTC)

Even better! Guy (Help!) 07:29, 4 August 2019 (UTC)

Precious anniversary

Precious
Six years!

--Gerda Arendt (talk) 06:47, 16 July 2019 (UTC)

... in sympathy about the death in your family --Gerda Arendt (talk) 14:46, 5 August 2019 (UTC)

Adminship

I don't think I'm the first to suggest this, but; would you consider running for adminship? You have a record of content creation, of work at DYK (which could always use more admins), and of helpful contributions to heated disputes; you've also been here a while. I'd be willing to nominate you; so would others, I'm sure. Vanamonde (Talk) 22:52, 3 August 2019 (UTC)

Y U NO ADMIN? Guy (Help!) 23:30, 3 August 2019 (UTC)
Thank you, both. I have been thinking about, though the WMF's recent Fram efforts were close to seeing me leave. I do wonder how my inconsistent history would be seen – RfA can be a very nasty place :( EdChem (talk) 02:28, 4 August 2019 (UTC)
RFA can indeed be a nasty place. How your activity will be seen is a fair concern; but a) it isn't actually that sporadic, and b) given your particular areas of activity, I'd say less of a concern (for instance, promoting a DYK prep typically takes an hour or so of work, and then if it's done properly, it's done; you can disappear for a week and it's still a good contribution; it's the same with offering opinions at the noticeboards, though perhaps not so much when actually sanctioning users) which wouldn't be the case if you wanted to work speedy deletions, for instance. I suspect that addressing this upfront of your own accord would minimize opposition over this question. As for framgate: my personal attitude is that I didn't come here because of the WMF, and I'm damned if I'm leaving because of them; but it is disheartening, so I can't argue much about that. Think on it, if you would; my offer of a nomination was entirely serious. I seem to remember Dweller making such an offer some time ago, too; that surely couldn't hurt your prospects. Vanamonde (Talk) 02:49, 4 August 2019 (UTC)
I'd forgotten you aren't an admin already, which is a great sign. My usual advice is to read User:Dweller/Tips for aspiring future admins, in particular the Questions section. --Dweller (talk) Become old fashioned! 10:13, 4 August 2019 (UTC)
Thanks, Dweller and JzG and Vanamonde93. I won't be pursuing this right now as I have just learned of a death in my family and that takes precedence. I'm sure you all understand. EdChem (talk) 07:18, 5 August 2019 (UTC)
{{wikihug}}. Take care. Guy (Help!) 06:57, 6 August 2019 (UTC)

Wishing you condolences. Of course that's a priority. --Dweller (talk) Become old fashioned! 08:19, 5 August 2019 (UTC)

I'm sorry to hear that, EdChem; wishing you all the best. Real life takes priority, always. Vanamonde (Talk) 13:49, 5 August 2019 (UTC)

DYK for Matthew H. Todd

Cas Liber (talk · contribs) 12:02, 24 August 2019 (UTC)

DYK for Alice Motion

Cas Liber (talk · contribs) 12:02, 24 August 2019 (UTC)

WikiCup 2019 September newsletter

The fourth round of the competition has finished in a flurry of last minute activity, with 454 points being required to qualify for the final round. It was a hotly competitive round with two contestants with over 400 points being eliminated, and all but two of the finalists having achieved an FA during the round. Casliber, our 2016 winner, was the highest point-scorer, followed by Enwebb and Lee Vilenski, who are both new to the competition. In fourth place was SounderBruce, a finalist last year. But all those points are swept away as we start afresh for the final round.

Round 4 saw the achievement of 11 featured articles. In addition, Adam Cuerden scored with 18 FPs, Lee Vilenski led the GA score with 8 GAs while Kosack performed 15 GA reviews. There were around 40 DYKs, 40 GARs and 31 GAs overall during round 4. Even though contestants performed more GARs than they achieved GAs, there was still some frustration at the length of time taken to get articles reviewed.

As we start round 5, we say goodbye to the eight competitors who didn't quite make it; thank you for the useful contributions you have made to the Cup and Wikipedia, and we hope you will join us again next year. Remember that any content promoted after the end of round 4 but before the start of round 5 can be claimed in round 5. Remember too that you must claim your points within 14 days of "earning" them (some people have fallen foul of this rule and the points have been removed).

If you are concerned that your nomination, whether it be for a good article, a featured process, or anything else, will not receive the necessary reviews, please list it on Wikipedia:WikiCup/Reviews Needed (remember to remove your listing when no longer required). If you want to help out with the WikiCup, please do your bit to help keep down the review backlogs! Questions are welcome on Wikipedia talk:WikiCup, and the judges are reachable on their talk pages or by email. If you wish to start or stop receiving this newsletter, please feel free to add or remove yourself from Wikipedia:WikiCup/Newsletter/Send. Godot13, Sturmvogel 66, Vanamonde and Cwmhiraeth MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 18:44, 1 September 2019 (UTC)

Community Insights Survey

RMaung (WMF) 16:38, 10 September 2019 (UTC)

New Page Review newsletter September-October 2019

Hello EdChem,

Backlog

Instead of reaching a magic 300 as it once did last year, the backlog approaching 6,000 is still far too high. An effort is also needed to ensure that older unsuitable older pages at the back of the queue do not get automatically indexed for Google.

Coordinator

A proposal is taking place here to confirm a nominated user as Coordinator of NPR.

This month's refresher course

Why I Hate Speedy Deleters, a 2008 essay by long since retired Ballonman, is still as valid today. Those of us who patrol large numbers of new pages can be forgiven for making the occasional mistake while others can learn from their 'beginner' errors. Worth reading.

Deletion tags

Do bear in mind that articles in the feed showing the trash can icon (you will need to have 'Nominated for deletion' enabled for this in your filters) may have been tagged by inexperienced or non NPR rights holders using Twinkle. They require your further verification.

Paid editing

Please be sure to look for the tell-tale signs of undisclosed paid editing. Contact the creator if appropriate, and submit the issue to WP:COIN if necessary. WMF policy requires paid editors to connect to their adverts.

Subject-specific notability guidelines' (SNG). Alternatives to deletion
  • Reviewers are requested to familiarise themselves once more with notability guidelines for organisations and companies.
  • Blank-and-Redirect is a solution anchored in policy. Please consider this alternative before PRODing or CSD. Note however, that users will often revert or usurp redirects to re-create deleted articles. Do regularly patrol the redirects in the feed.
Not English
  • A common issue: Pages not in English or poor, unattributed machine translations should not reside in main space even if they are stubs. Please ensure you are familiar with WP:NPPNE. Check in Google for the language and content, and if they do have potential, tag as required, then move to draft. Modify the text of the template as appropriate before sending it.
Tools

Regular reviewers will appreciate the most recent enhancements to the New Pages Feed and features in the Curation tool, and there are still more to come. Due to the wealth of information now displayed by ORES, reviewers are strongly encouraged to use the system now rather than Twinkle; it will also correctly populate the logs.

Stub sorting, by SD0001: A new script is available for adding/removing stub tags. See User:SD0001/StubSorter.js, It features a simple HotCat-style dynamic search field. Many of the reviewers who are using it are finding it an improvement upon other available tools.

Assessment: The script at User:Evad37/rater makes the addition of Wikiproject templates extremely easy. New page creators rarely do this. Reviewers are not obliged to make these edits but they only take a few seconds. They can use the Curation message system to let the creator know what they have done.

DannyS712 bot III is now patrolling certain categories of uncontroversial redirects. Curious? Check out its patrol log.

Go here to remove your name if you wish to opt-out of future mailings.

MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 22:15, 11 September 2019 (UTC)

Today's Wikipedian 10 years ago

Awesome
Ten years!

--Gerda Arendt (talk) 15:01, 17 September 2019 (UTC)

Reminder: Community Insights Survey

RMaung (WMF) 15:39, 20 September 2019 (UTC)

Reminder: Community Insights Survey

RMaung (WMF) 20:40, 3 October 2019 (UTC)

WikiCup 2019 November newsletter

The WikiCup is over for another year! Our Champion this year is Better far to live and die / Under the brave black flag I fly Adam Cuerden (submissions), who over the course of the competition has amassed 91 featured pictures, including 32 in the final round. Our finalists this year were:

  1. Better far to live and die / Under the brave black flag I fly Adam Cuerden (submissions) with 964 points
  2. England Lee Vilenski (submissions) with 899 points
  3. Norfolk Island Casliber (submissions) with 817 points
  4. Wales Kosack (submissions) with 691 points
  5. Washington (state) SounderBruce (submissions) with 388 points
  6. Antarctica Enwebb (submissions) with 146 points
  7. United States Usernameunique (submissions) with 145 points
  8. Indonesia HaEr48 (submissions) with 74 points

All those who reached the final will win awards. The following special awards will be made based on high performance in particular areas of content creation. So that the finalists do not have an undue advantage, these prizes are awarded to the competitor who scored the highest in any particular field in a single round, or in the event of a tie, to the overall leader in this field. Awards will be handed out in the coming weeks. Please be patient!

Congratulations to everyone who participated in this year's WikiCup, whether you made it to the final rounds or not, and particular congratulations to the newcomers to the WikiCup who have achieved much this year. Thanks to all who have taken part and helped out with the competition, not forgetting User:Jarry1250, who runs the scoring bot.

We have opened a scoring discussion on whether the rules and scoring need adjustment. Please have your say. Next year's competition will begin on 1 January. You are invited to sign up to participate; the WikiCup is open to all Wikipedians, both novices and experienced editors, and we hope to see you all in the 2020 competition. Until then, it only remains to once again congratulate our worthy winners, and thank all participants for their involvement! If you wish to start or stop receiving this newsletter, please feel free to add or remove yourself from Wikipedia:WikiCup/Newsletter/Send. Godot13, Sturmvogel 66, Vanamonde and Cwmhiraeth 14:18, 2 November 2019 (UTC)

New Page Review newsletter November 2019

Hello EdChem,

This newsletter comes a little earlier than usual because the backlog is rising again and the holidays are coming very soon.

Getting the queue to 0

There are now 804 holders of the New Page Reviewer flag! Most of you requested the user right to be able to do something about the huge backlog but it's still roughly less than 10% doing 90% of the work. Now it's time for action.
Exactly one year ago there were 'only' 3,650 unreviewed articles, now we will soon be approaching 7,000 despite the growing number of requests for the NPR user right. If each reviewer soon does only 2 reviews a day over five days, the backlog will be down to zero and the daily input can then be processed by every reviewer doing only 1 review every 2 days - that's only a few minutes work on the bus on the way to the office or to class! Let's get this over and done with in time to relax for the holidays.
Want to join? Consider adding the NPP Pledge userbox.
Our next newsletter will announce the winners of some really cool awards.

Coordinator

Admin Barkeep49 has been officially invested as NPP/NPR coordinator by a unanimous consensus of the community. This is a complex role and he will need all the help he can get from other experienced reviewers.

This month's refresher course

Paid editing is still causing headaches for even our most experienced reviewers: This official Wikipedia article will be an eye-opener to anyone who joined Wikipedia or obtained the NPR right since 2015. See The Hallmarks to know exactly what to look for and take time to examine all the sources.

Tools
  • It is now possible to select new pages by date range. This was requested by reviewers who want to patrol from the middle of the list.
  • It is now also possible for accredited reviewers to put any article back into the New Pages Feed for re-review. The link is under 'Tools' in the side bar.
Reviewer Feedback

Would you like feedback on your reviews? Are you an experienced reviewer who can give feedback to other reviewers? If so there are two new feedback pilot programs. New Reviewer mentorship will match newer reviewers with an experienced reviewer with a new reviewer. The other program will be an occasional peer review cohort for moderate or experienced reviewers to give feedback to each other. The first cohort will launch November 13.

Second set of eyes
  • Not only are New Page Reviewers the guardians of quality of new articles, they are also in a position to ensure that pages are being correctly tagged for deletion and maintenance and that new authors are not being bitten. This is an important feature of your work, especially while some routine tagging for deletion can still be carried out by non NPR holders and inexperienced users. Read about it at the Monitoring the system section in the tutorial. If you come across such editors doing good work, don't hesitate to encourage them to apply for NPR.
  • Do be sure to have our talk page on your watchlist. There are often items that require reviewers' special attention, such as to watch out for pages by known socks or disruptive editors, technical issues and new developments, and of course to provide advice for other reviewers.
Arbitration Committee

The annual ArbCom election will be coming up soon. All eligible users will be invited to vote. While not directly concerned with NPR, Arbcom cases often lead back to notability and deletion issues and/or actions by holders of advanced user rights.

Community Wish list

There is to be no wish list for WMF encyclopedias this year. We thank Community Tech for their hard work addressing our long list of requirements which somewhat overwhelmed them last year, and we look forward to a successful completion.


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A survey to improve the community consultation outreach process

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The Wikimedia Foundation is seeking to improve the community consultation outreach process for Foundation policies, and we are interested in why you didn't participate in a recent consultation that followed a community discussion you’ve been part of.

Please fill out this short survey to help us improve our community consultation process for the future. It should only take about three minutes.

The privacy policy for this survey is here. This survey is a one-off request from us related to this unique topic.

Thank you for your participation, Kbrown (WMF) 10:44, 13 November 2019 (UTC)

ArbCom 2019 election voter message

Hello! Voting in the 2019 Arbitration Committee elections is now open until 23:59 on Monday, 2 December 2019. All eligible users are allowed to vote. Users with alternate accounts may only vote once.

The Arbitration Committee is the panel of editors responsible for conducting the Wikipedia arbitration process. It has the authority to impose binding solutions to disputes between editors, primarily for serious conduct disputes the community has been unable to resolve. This includes the authority to impose site bans, topic bans, editing restrictions, and other measures needed to maintain our editing environment. The arbitration policy describes the Committee's roles and responsibilities in greater detail.

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A beer for you!

Thank you for taking the time to write that long post at ANI; your summation of the situation nailed it. Cheers! Levivich 03:51, 12 December 2019 (UTC)

Thank you for the acknowledgement and appreciation, Levivich, and it is great to see / hear that others have found my contribution helpful and accurate.  :) EdChem (talk) 01:05, 13 December 2019 (UTC)

I second Levi's sentiments (came here for a similar reason and saw their post). Your summary of the FPaS/SR situation on ANI was eloquent and true. Thank you. Schazjmd (talk) 15:27, 14 December 2019 (UTC)
Kudos from me as well. I didn't want to further derail the closure discussion, but you raised some excellent big-picture concerns about how civility/conduct complaints are derailed by excessive scrutiny of the other editors' behavior. This is one of several recent cases where the discussion and closing statement focus heavily on behaviour that would have been dismissed as unproblematic or non-actionable if it had been brought to ANI in the first place. –dlthewave 18:56, 14 December 2019 (UTC)
Thank you, Schazjmd and Dlthewave. I appreciate you both stopping by to provide some positive feedback. Sadly, it is clear that ANI is unable to function when an influential admin acts inappropriately. My hatting of obviously off-topic comments was met with bad faith and a distressing inability to see the situation with any clarity – as confirmed in a subsequent discussion at user talk:Johnuniq. Even SV's final close noted the unproductive comments but did not see anything of value in the other contributions. Beyond letting SR know that she was not invisible and her distress was evident (for which I was criticised by FP@S for "cuddling" SR), I struggle to see having contributed as anything but a depressing waste of time and effort.  :( EdChem (talk) 12:54, 15 December 2019 (UTC)

Asking again

In reading through that thread on ANI, I was pleasantly surprised to see your name appear, at the bottom of a very perceptive comment. I can't help but wonder if, since you're back, you've considered this proposal some more. Also, I hope you've found the time and mental space to deal with the bereavement you mentioned; that's never easy. Best, Vanamonde (Talk) 13:51, 13 December 2019 (UTC)

Hi Vanamonde, thanks for your comment on my ANI comments. I have been lurking watching the ACE process and when I read the ANI thread about SR, I felt the need to comment on the unfairness that I perceived. FP@S may be right about SR's article space issues, I have avoided checking, but that doesn't justify his "rule" - which I did take as an attempt at admin action, and I am glad he's acknowledged being INVOLVED. I hope it ends well as FP@S does a lot of good but also loses perspective at times, and refusing to recognise that SR's OCD is a basis for compassion and understanding rather than a basis for criticism and imposing unrealistic expectations is a really upsetting example of exclusion of someone with a disability tat I believe diminishes us a community.
As for me, since we last spoke I have started a business (not going to write an article on it, though!), been helping my partner with his divorce, damaged my right wrist and burned my left arm (in the same week), and nearly passed out while working twice in two days. I remain doubtful as to how an RfA would be seen given my inconsistent editing and am unsure about the time available in the immediate future. I do really appreciate your confidence in me and I would probably run if it were really no big deal and the process were less negative. There are aspects of WP editing that I find fulfilling and affirming, and areas where I am shocked by the behaviour of some people, so I have really mixed feelings about WP at times. EdChem (talk) 01:34, 14 December 2019 (UTC)
Follow up @Vanamonde93: I've just read the latest version of the ANI and see that my hope for a good ending is (at best) extremely unlikely. I'd offer a closing statement but I suspect that it wouldn't be worth the electrons inconvenienced to display it. Makes me wonder why I bothered.  :( EdChem (talk) 01:51, 14 December 2019 (UTC)
Yes, there was somewhat less closure (not literally; there were two closes, both challenged...) than I had hoped for. I intended to close it myself yesterday, but had to log off while I was still reading through. Having worked in very many of the nastiest parts of it, I fully understand your frustrations with Wikipedia. You're still here, though, and ultimately the mop is just a means to make the time you spend here more productive for everyone (for instance; you could have closed that ANI thread, . Inconstant activity can be a reasonable concern, so I wouldn't suggest running for at least three months anyway; but until then, keep it in mind, if you would. I won't press you further than that. Your last few months sound quite eventful; I hope you've had a chance to recuperate from those accidents. Best, Vanamonde (Talk) 10:28, 14 December 2019 (UTC)
Vanamonde, I couldn't have closed the ANI thread even if I were a sysop as I had contributed and would not have considered myself uninvolved. I know there are some in the admin corps who wouldn't have seen that as a problem, but unfortunately I have integrity. I reflect on the ANI thread and see that FP@S has avoided any consequences simply by ignoring most of the discussion, which happens too often. My hatting of off-topic comments was met with bad faith did not stick as an uninvolved contributor couldn't see the obvious. The various warriors battling over tangential issues derailed the discussion and suffered no consequences, burying everything to the point that even SV, an admin I generally respect, chose to ignore everything contributed that wasn't off-topic, as if none of the comments had the slightest value. SR has left as a disillusioned editor, which will be celebrated by some. ANI has again proved itself incapable of acting on a case of poor behaviour from an influential admin and the WP editing community is left looking callous and unable to self-regulate. I have received a positive comments from others at ANI, a few nice messages above, and thanks for some edits, so I know I am not completely alone in being appalled at this. Despite this, I am really struggling to see anything positive in any of this.  :( The upcoming RfC on harassment will need to be guided to stay on topic and better achieve something (and I am increasingly skeptical) or self-governance is going to be a thing of the past. EdChem (talk) 13:12, 15 December 2019 (UTC)
Well sure. I mean you could have closed instead of commenting: unless you had a pre-formed strong opinion, reading through the entirety of the thread and assessing the diffs presented with respect to policy is exactly what a closer should do. Closing after commenting could be a problem, yes. That case did bother me quite a bit; I haven't had personal interactions with FPAS, but I think we have a serious problem with how many of our experienced folks treat many (relative) newbies; or, indeed, each other. The most famous example of this you know as well as I do, and I won't go into that; but it's the phenomenon, rather than the editors, that I think are the problem. I agree completely about the harassment RfC; I think it's going to be a critical time. As a counterpoint, though, I'd offer two thoughts. First, that the nasty interactions are always the most visible. Our best editors do their best work quietly and without fuss; and very often, it's collaborative work, too (incidentally, this is why I rarely venture to the drama boards; they depress me. Content work does the opposite). Second; the culture within the experienced editors is more malleable than you might think, because the body of editors isn't as large as you might think. Sane voices make a difference; and if those sane voices happen to wield mops, so much the better. Vanamonde (Talk) 17:15, 15 December 2019 (UTC)
Chin up lads, the closure is yet to come. I've been diff diving and will make a proposal at ANI for a formal community-issued civility warning later today. I'm not sure how it'll go but we need an option between "banhammer" and "do nothing but bicker" when these issues come up. Maybe we can set a healthy new precedent here. Stay tuned. Levivich 17:40, 15 December 2019 (UTC)
Could you ping me when the closure proposal and harassment rfc are up? I can't stand keeping ANI on my watchlist but I'm interested in working on improving our response to civility/harassment issues. –dlthewave 18:10, 15 December 2019 (UTC)
With apologies, I'm not going to do that, just out of an abundance of caution and concern that the thread not be derailed by accusations of canvassing. I'm only going to do the usual notifications to editors named in the report. Sorry :-/ Levivich 20:27, 15 December 2019 (UTC)

New Page Review newsletter December 2019

A graph showing the number of articles in the page curation feed from 12/21/18 - 12/20/19

Reviewer of the Year

This year's Reviewer of the Year is Rosguill. Having gotten the reviewer PERM in August 2018, they have been a regular reviewer of articles and redirects, been an active participant in the NPP community, and has been the driving force for the emerging NPP Source Guide that will help reviewers better evaluate sourcing and notability in many countries for which it has historically been difficult.

Special commendation again goes to Onel5969 who ends the year as one of our most prolific reviewers for the second consecutive year. Thanks also to Boleyn and JTtheOG who have been in the top 5 for the last two years as well.

Several newer editors have done a lot of work with CAPTAIN MEDUSA and DannyS712 (who has also written bots which have patrolled thousands of redirects) being new reviewers since this time last year.

Thanks to them and to everyone reading this who has participated in New Page Patrol this year.

Top 10 Reviewers over the last 365 days
Rank Username Num reviews Log
1 Rosguill (talk) 47,395 Patrol Page Curation
2 Onel5969 (talk) 41,883 Patrol Page Curation
3 JTtheOG (talk) 11,493 Patrol Page Curation
4 Arthistorian1977 (talk) 5,562 Patrol Page Curation
5 DannyS712 (talk) 4,866 Patrol Page Curation
6 CAPTAIN MEDUSA (talk) 3,995 Patrol Page Curation
7 DragonflySixtyseven (talk) 3,812 Patrol Page Curation
8 Boleyn (talk) 3,655 Patrol Page Curation
9 Ymblanter (talk) 3,553 Patrol Page Curation
10 Cwmhiraeth (talk) 3,522 Patrol Page Curation

(The top 100 reviewers of the year can be found here)

Redirect autopatrol

A recent Request for Comment on creating a new redirect autopatrol pseduo-permission was closed early. New Page Reviewers are now able to nominate editors who have an established track record creating uncontroversial redirects. At the individual discretion of any administrator or after 24 hours and a consensus of at least 3 New Page Reviewers an editor may be added to a list of users whose redirects will be patrolled automatically by DannyS712 bot III.

Source Guide Discussion

Set to launch early in the new year is our first New Page Patrol Source Guide discussion. These discussions are designed to solicit input on sources in places and topic areas that might otherwise be harder for reviewers to evaluate. The hope is that this will allow us to improve the accuracy of our patrols for articles using these sources (and/or give us places to perform a WP:BEFORE prior to nominating for deletion). Please watch the New Page Patrol talk page for more information.

This month's refresher course

While New Page Reviewers are an experienced set of editors, we all benefit from an occasional review. This month consider refreshing yourself on Wikipedia:Notability (geographic features). Also consider how we can take the time for quality in this area. For instance, sources to verify human settlements, which are presumed notable, can often be found in seconds. This lets us avoid the (ugly) 'Needs more refs' tag.

Delivered by MediaWiki message delivery (talk) at 16:10, 20 December 2019 (UTC)

Welcome to the 2020 WikiCup!

Happy New Year, Happy New Decade and Happy New WikiCup! The competition begins today and all article creators, expanders and improvers are welcome to take part. If you have already signed up, your submissions page can be found here. If you have not yet signed up, you can add your name here and the judges will set up your submissions page. We are relaxing the rule that only content on which you have completed significant work during 2020 will count; now to be eligible for points in the competition, you must have completed significant work on the content at some time! Any questions on the rules or on anything else connected to the Cup should be directed to one of the judges, or posted to the WikiCup talk page. Signups will close at the end of January, and the first round will end on 26 February; the 64 highest scorers at that time will move on to round 2. Good luck! The judges for the WikiCup are Sturmvogel 66 (talk · contribs · email), Godot13 (talk · contribs · email), Vanamonde93 (talk · contribs · email) and Cwmhiraeth (talk) 11:43, 1 January 2020 (UTC)

Thanks for fixing Perfluorooctanoic_acid. The equation I removed wasn't even slightly close to balanced. Yes there is a mixture of products, but it is possible to write an equation for that, and they didn't. And even assuming a mixture of products, it still didn't balance. Gah4 (talk) 05:49, 1 February 2020 (UTC)

Hi, Gah4. I looked at the equation that you removed with an eye to fixing it, but agree that it wasn't worth trying to keep. So, I instead modified the surrounding text to remove reference to the flawed equation that you had already (and reasonably) removed. Cheers! :) EdChem (talk) 06:45, 1 February 2020 (UTC)

An automated process has detected that when you recently edited Bridget McKenzie, you added links pointing to the disambiguation pages John McVeigh and Michael McCormack (check to confirm | fix with Dab solver).

(Opt-out instructions.) --DPL bot (talk) 12:07, 3 February 2020 (UTC)

New Page Reviewer newsletter February 2020

Hello EdChem,

Source Guide Discussion

The first NPP source guide discussion is now underway. It covers a wide range of sources in Ghana with the goal of providing more guidance to reviewers about sources they might see when reviewing pages. Hopefully, new page reviewers will join others interested in reliable sources and those with expertise in these sources to make the discussion a success.

Redirects

New to NPP? Looking to try something a little different? Consider patrolling some redirects. Redirects are relatively easy to review, can be found easily through the New Pages Feed. You can find more information about how to patrol redirects at WP:RPATROL.

Discussions and Resources
Refresher

Geographic regions, areas and places generally do not need general notability guideline type sourcing. When evaluating whether an article meets this notability guideline please also consider whether it might actually be a form of WP:SPAM for a development project (e.g. PR for a large luxury residential development) and not actually covered by the guideline.

Six Month Queue Data: Today – 7095 Low – 4991 High – 7095

To opt-out of future mailings, please remove yourself here

16:08, 13 February 2020 (UTC)

WikiCup 2020 March newsletter

And so ends the first round of the competition. Everyone with a positive score moves on to Round 2, with 57 contestants qualifying. We have abolished the groups this year, so to qualify for Round 3 you will need to finish Round 2 among the top thirty-two contestants.

Our top scorers in Round 1 were:

  • New York (state) Epicgenius, a WikiCup newcomer, led the field with a featured article, five good articles and an assortment of other submissions, specialising on buildings and locations in New York, for a total of 895 points.
  • England Gog the Mild came next with 464 points, from a featured article, two good articles and a number of reviews, the main theme being naval warfare.
  • United States Raymie was in third place with 419 points, garnered from one good article and an impressive 34 DYKs on radio and TV stations in the United States.
  • Somerset Harrias came next at 414, with a featured article and three good articles, an English civil war battle specialist.
  • Pirate flag CaptainEek was in fifth place with 405 points, mostly garnered from bringing Cactus wren to featured article status.
  • The top ten contestants at the end of Round 1 all scored over 200 points; they also included United States L293D, Venezuela Kingsif, Antarctica Enwebb, England Lee Vilenski and Nepal CAPTAIN MEDUSA. Seven of the top ten contestants in Round 1 are new to the WikiCup.

These contestants, like all the others, now have to start scoring points again from scratch. In Round 1 there were four featured articles, one featured list and two featured pictures, as well as around two hundred DYKs and twenty-seven ITNs. Between them, contestants completed 127 good article reviews, nearly a hundred more than the 43 good articles they claimed for, thus making a substantial dent in the review backlog. Contestants also claimed for 40 featured article / featured list reviews, and most even remembered to mention their WikiCup participation in their reviews (a requirement).

Remember that any content promoted after the end of Round 1 but before the start of Round 2 can be claimed in Round 2. Some contestants made claims before the new submissions pages were set up, and they will need to resubmit them. Invitations for collaborative writing efforts or any other discussion of potentially interesting work is always welcome on the WikiCup talk page. Remember, if two or more WikiCup competitors have done significant work on an article, all can claim points. If you are concerned that your nomination—whether it is at good article candidates, a featured process, or anywhere else—will not receive the necessary reviews, please list it on Wikipedia:WikiCup/Reviews.

If you want to help out with the WikiCup, please do your bit to keep down the review backlogs! Questions are welcome on Wikipedia talk:WikiCup, and the judges are reachable on their talk pages or by email. Good luck! If you wish to start or stop receiving this newsletter, please feel free to add or remove yourself from Wikipedia:WikiCup/Newsletter/Send. Godot13 (talk), Sturmvogel 66 (talk), Vanamonde (talk) and Cwmhiraeth (talk). MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 16:46, 1 March 2020 (UTC)

WikiCup newsletter correction

There was an error in the WikiCup 2020 March newsletter; United States L293D should not have been included in the list of top ten scorers in Round 1 (they led the list last year), instead, United States Dunkleosteus77 should have been included, having garnered 334 points from five good articles on animals, living or extinct, and various reviews. MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 09:30, 2 March 2020 (UTC)

Arbitration case opened

In 2018, you offered a statement in a request for arbitration. The Arbitration Committee has now accepted that request for arbitration, and an arbitration case has been opened at Wikipedia:Arbitration/Requests/Case/Jytdog. Evidence that you wish the arbitrators to consider should be added to the evidence subpage, at Wikipedia:Arbitration/Requests/Case/Jytdog/Evidence. Please add your evidence by March 23, 2020, which is when the evidence phase closes. You can also contribute to the case workshop subpage, Wikipedia:Arbitration/Requests/Case/Jytdog/Workshop. For a guide to the arbitration process, see Wikipedia:Arbitration/Guide to arbitration.

All content, links, and diffs from the original ARC and the latest ARC are being read into the evidence for this case.

The secondary mailing list is in use for this case: arbcom-en-b@wikimedia.org

For the Arbitration Committee, CThomas3 (talk) 17:13, 9 March 2020 (UTC)