Wikipedia:Edit check

Tracked in Phabricator
Task T265163

mw:Edit check is a 2023 project by the Wikimedia Foundation's Editing team. The first visible result will be a prompt to encourage editors to add an inline citation before publishing new information to an article. Additional behaviors (e.g., adding links) may be explored later.

To start, Edit check will only be made available to people using the visual editor on either the mobile or desktop site.

Status

March 2023

What will happen (first version):

The first version will appear only in the mobile visual editor. (Follow phab:T329579 for the desktop experience.)
If you add a new paragraph without an inline citation, the first version will ask you to choose whether to add a citation before publishing your changes (phab:T324730 and phab:T329988#8654867).
The first version is expected to have a low false-positive rate (i.e., if it suggests a citation, you probably should to add one) and a high false-negative rate (i.e., it won't suggest any improvements to edits that would benefit from adding a citation).
As of March 2023, the new tool is still being designed. There are no prototypes or testing sites available yet.

Approach

The goal for this project is to lead people from Sub-Saharan Africa who are new to contributing to Wikipedia to publish changes they are proud of and that experienced volunteers consider useful.

Ideally, improving compliance with content policies (e.g., by encouraging the addition of inline citations) will reduce disappointment among inexperienced editors and reduce the workload for experienced editors who patrol Special:RecentChanges, while improving the overall quality of Wikipedia's contents.

Although the Editing team expects this software to be useful and available to everyone, they are centering the challenging experiences of editors from sub-Saharan Africa, which is a growing and underrepresented group in the Wikimedia movement. Altogether, 80% of editors in sub-Saharan Africa contribute to the French and English Wikipedias. Many African contributors are newer editors, and a high proportion of them edit from smartphones. They also face structural barriers that the Editing team will not be able to address directly, such as being disproportionately affected by IP range blocks.

Configurability

The Editing Team thinks it is crucial that experienced volunteers be empowered to configure when, and for whom, Edit Check becomes activated. This way, they can be confident the software is promoting behavior they deem to be productive and modify the software when it is not.

In line with the above, and drawing inspiration from how the Edit filter and Growth Team Community configuration systems afford volunteers the ability to audit and configure how they function on-wiki, Edit Check will enable volunteers, on a per project basis to:

Audit and edit the logic that determines when the reference Edit Check becomes activated and
Review the edits people who are shown Edit Check are making

Work to implement the above is ongoing in T327959.

Design

The first version of Edit Check will introduce a new step within the mobile visual editor's publishing workflow that people will see if/when they add new content without a reference.

First version – mobile site (March 2023)
Prompt people to decide whether to add a reference
Positive feedback if they elect to add a reference
Invite people to share why they didn't add a reference
Overview of workflow

Reference detection

To start, the Editing Team is pursuing an approach with Edit Check that minimizes the likelihood of false positives. The team is also planning ways for volunteers, on a per-project basis, to configure and evolve the heuristic to become more robust over time.

This strategy amounts to the initial reference Edit Check becoming activated if/when all of the following conditions are met:

A minimum of one new paragraph of text is added to the article someone is editing
The "new paragraph(s) of text" someone has added does NOT include a reference

You can learn amore about the assumptions that informed the thinking above in T329988#8654867.

Community discussions

mw:Editing team/Community Conversations – watch this page to learn about upcoming meetings