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Op-ed

Articles for creation needs you

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By Chris Troutman
Chris Troutman is one of the many volunteers fielding questions at the WikiProject Articles for Creation help desk. He also thanks Hasteur, Kvng, and Nonsenseferret for their input on this op-ed.

Ever since the Wikipedia Seigenthaler biography incident in 2005 triggered the restriction against un-registered editors creating new pages, WikiProject Articles for Creation (AfC) has stood in the breach. The WikiProject's purpose is to review draft submissions from IPs (and frequently new registered editors) to sort the wheat from the chaff. The policy change at this time nine years ago shifted the burden to AfC from the New Page Patrol, whom Jimbo at the time called "very brave people (which they are) standing in front of a firehose of nonsense (which it can be)".[1] AfC has necessitated the work of hundreds of editors reviewing drafts, automating the review process, and fielding new editor questions about drafts at the AfC help desk. The work of AfC upholds Wikipedia's claim that "anyone can edit."

AfC submissions
Random submission
~6 weeks
1,068 pending submissions
Purge to update
AfC is very much an incubator. Whereas policies about verifiability, notability, and copyright lead to article deletion in the article namespace, within the draft namespace deletion procedures aren't typically used because the slack helps new editors learn rather than penalize their ignorance. Reviewers typically provide comment when they decline a submission, letting the author know if they need to improve their use of in-line citations, tone down promotional language, or tighten the copy to what the sources actually support. Each declination of a submitted draft has a reason explicitly attached to help new editors learn what Wikipedia expects. Most drafts require a few if not several attempts before acceptance.

Wikipedia garners wide interest from a variety of would-be editors. The in-flow of drafts has continually been more than the members of AfC can keep up with. The pool of pending submissions has had over nine hundred potential articles for at least the past year. Recently the backlog has toggled in and out of "out of order" status, which indicates more than three thousand waiting submissions. The reasons for the growing number of drafts remain unclear. Efforts like the article wizard to make draft submission easier seem to have succeeded in their goal, increasing the number of submissions beyond the limit of reviewers to manage. The size of the pool of submissions correlates to a delay in response to each draft. Eager would-be editors waiting for their first draft to be accepted may lose interest as the wait passes from days, to weeks, to more than a month or longer. Those who thought their Wikipedia careers would start with a draft article may quit Wikipedia before they receive outreach. As a result, AfC's most pressing need is for reviewers. For editors with even a little editing experience (500 un-deleted mainspace edits and registration more than 90 days ago) you can add yourself to the participants' list and start reviewing drafts.

Typically, WikiProjects hold backlog drives to reduce the burden of overdue tasks. I and others have opposed starting another drive, as the last two drives (in March and again in June) were marred by the results of gamification. AfC seeks to be fair with each and every review and simply pressing "accept" or "decline" isn't sufficient. My primary reason for opposing a backlog drive despite how badly such a drive is needed is that unlike some WikiProjects, AfC is rudderless and adrift without a coordinator. My exemplar for WikiProjects is WikiProject Military History and they hold regular elections for a group of coordinators, who then take responsibility for the functioning of the WikiProject. I know other WikiProjects do this as well and I think an elected coordinator or group of coordinators could lead AfC out of its current state.

Of course, every draft submitted to AfC comes from an editor with a purpose in mind. Some editors with open conflicts of interest bring drafts to AfC to ensure neutrality in their submissions. Some number of college students submit the sandbox entries they wrote for class to AfC by clicking the button on {{User sandbox}}. Wikipedia's ubiquity and #7 Alexa rank represent a public relations goldmine and everyone from up-and-coming academics to business start-ups are writing ad copy for deployment on our wiki.

Floating in this sea of drafts alongside the detritus about garage bands and the latest candidate to stand for election are some well-written articles. These articles could help improve our encyclopedia and members of each WikiProject should be interested in fishing out these draft articles. Technical subjects like classical nucleation theory (a recently accepted draft) would benefit by the review of a specialist. Joe Reviewer at AfC won't necessarily have the same appreciation for a given draft that you might, so your participation is not only wanted, but also vital.

The views expressed in these op-eds are those of the authors only; responses and critical commentary are invited in the comments section. Editors wishing to submit their own op-ed should email the Signpost's editor.
  1. ^ Jimmy Wales (December 5, 2005). "[WikiEN-l] Experiment on new pages". lists.wikimedia.org. {{cite web}}: |author= has generic name (help)
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  • "These articles could help improve our encyclopedia and members of each WikiProject should be interested in fishing out these draft articles." Perhaps, where AfC reviewers don't feel competent to judge a draft on a particular technical topic, they could tag it for review by the relevant project? Andy Mabbett (Pigsonthewing); Talk to Andy; Andy's edits 20:30, 16 January 2015 (UTC)[reply]
Thats been thought of, Andy, but it didn't work out. Very few projects actually perform as well as, for example, MilHist or GOCE. --Kudpung กุดผึ้ง (talk) 12:33, 17 January 2015 (UTC)[reply]
  • Possibly the review options could benefit from more choices than just "submission accepted" / "submission declined"? Maybe one or two more options to give some gradation between "Sorry but this is totally inappropriate" to "Really close, just needs attention to one or two issues"? I'm afraid I don't have the time or inclination to contribute much to AfC, but I do sometimes come across declined articles (e.g. where the reviewer has posted to the talk page of a WikiProject I watch) for which "Submission declined" seems overly negative and discouraging, as they're really not far off. Particularly submissions that have been revised, just not quite enough. Qwfp (talk) 20:59, 16 January 2015 (UTC)[reply]
  • Also, once a submission is accepted, we need a big "create Wikidata entry" button. Andy Mabbett (Pigsonthewing); Talk to Andy; Andy's edits 21:06, 16 January 2015 (UTC)[reply]
  • The OpEd paints a cosy picture, but AfC is riddled with bitter infighting, and newbies are hovering over their edit count to reach 500. For those in the know, AfC is in a shambles and teetering on extinction. One of the problems is that while there may not be a formal infrastructure, there is a clear line of ownership. Problem #2 is that AfC is more of a playground for coders who are still tinkering with all sorts of bots and scripts after all these years. #3 is that some good natured reviewers confuse AfC with WP:ARS. AfC has served its purpose, we now have the Draft namespace so now is the time to take it someplace where the work can be done without all the background noise. --Kudpung กุดผึ้ง (talk) 12:33, 17 January 2015 (UTC)[reply]
    • @Kudpung: I guess I'll take that as a back-handed compliment. I wrote this op-ed primarily to be informative and I deliberately avoided addressing the issue of how clique-y AfC reviewers can be or that AfC is a bug-zapper. I soft-pedaled my opinion that 99% of the drafts we get are promotional. If it were up to me IPs and new users wouldn't be allowed write new articles. Anyone that's WP:NOTHERE probably shouldn't be editing articles at all, let alone write new ones. The entire "anyone can edit" ethos needs to go. But much as I love the sound of my own voice I thought The Signpost would better appreciate a toned-down approach. Chris Troutman (talk) 17:11, 17 January 2015 (UTC)[reply]
I never thought I'd live to hear such true words again. We'll talk more about this someplace where there is less background noise. --Kudpung กุดผึ้ง (talk) 17:42, 17 January 2015 (UTC)[reply]
I had never gone through AFC when I started, and I heard nothing but negative things from users, reviewers, and administrators. I'm glad to see the comments reflect that reality. Perhaps there's a place where we can talk about what procedure or system would replace it. kosboot (talk) 22:48, 17 January 2015 (UTC)[reply]
Kosboot, central discussion seems like the most obvious candidate for forum to me, with notices posted at WP:VPP and WP:VPI. It's worth noting though that those parties who take on the task of creating an entire new process are looking at no small task. Snow talk 10:18, 22 January 2015 (UTC)[reply]
      • The entire "anyone can edit" ethos needs to go. This mindset, and all the mind-numbingly pedantic behavior which results from it, is why I went from being highly active to nearly inactive as an editor. My only solace is that the so-called culture of consensus in Wikipedia is actually a wordocracy (those who write, and read, the most on talk pages generally get their way), so getting rid of what you call an "ethos" and I call the cornerstone of Wikipedia's ideals is highly unlikely.--~TPW 13:31, 19 January 2015 (UTC)[reply]
  • I too think AfC not just useless, but worse than useless. Literally worse, because it prevents good articles getting into the encyclopedia, gives bad advice about improving poor articles, and is much to slow to delete promotionalism and nonsense. It is as much as we can do to deal with incoming articles on a single track, and NPP is the best we have. What we do need is a way for putting articles in need of being further worked on--we used to employ user space subpages for this, but the problem was that things there got ignored totally. We could use draft space for this, but we will need to establish some simple procedures for keeping track of things. We should;t need approval to move things out of draft--they would just go into New Pages, and be dealt with in the normal way. All we really need is a check that they are being worked on, and a way for the ones not being worked on to be made visible to the community for others to improve. The basic principle of WP is that articles get improved by the community, and for articles to get improved the community needs to see them.
I have a proposal for step One: No further articles should go to AfC, and all mention of it removed from the various instruction pages, except for working through the current material in there. I do not think it necessary to have a new procedure in its place first. We would be better off simply abolishing it straightaway, and making some needed improvements to NPP gradually. The proposed use of draft space could be set up separately. DGG ( talk ) 21:53, 19 January 2015 (UTC)[reply]
As for "anyone can edit, as I recall last time around the WMF refused to program a restriction on entering new articles. This can be seen either as justified as our attempt to interfere with the foundational principles of WP, which no individual Wikipedia should do, or unjustified as their interference with our local routines for accepting articles, which the foundation should leave to the individual WPs. I don't know which is the right way to look at it, but my own view is that the ability to immediately create an article is one of the major attractions in getting new editors, and should not be lightly abandoned. However, we don't have to decide that immediately. What we can do immediately is stop the entry of materials into AfC. That is under our control. DGG ( talk ) 21:58, 19 January 2015 (UTC)[reply]
  • Ok, having seen the title and lead-in for this story a bit over the last week (but not having yet come here to read the full text or the above comments), I decided to go volunteer some time there today, and these are my initial thoughts, having now read the article here. The space is just not, at present, terribly user friendly. I think the word I'm looking for is "over-engineered". For starters it operates in a manner different from virtually every other process area on Wikipedia -- I know of no other space which places such a heavy emphasis on utilizing a particular gadget as the medium for contributions, and it took a complete scouring of the project's byzantine structure to finally dig up a template buried at the bottom of one of numerous, lengthy subpages on how to submit or review, though even then I had to know (from previous contributions there years ago) that you place it on the draft page and not the associated talk page. I think this little stumbling block to usual workflow, especially the strong dependence on a gadget, probably discourages a lot of people who might have just dropped in to volunteer some time to the project (some of whom would get in the habit of contributing there); I imagine a lot of people just aren't interested in loading a gadget for each and every one of the (potentially dozens) of procedural spaces they contribute to, and even that portion (potentially also large) who think nothing of it, they still might decide it's not worth the hassle in the moment and might never get around to it. And if the process is that tedious for experienced and broadly-capable editors, imagine how inaccessible it might be for new users (and how poor a primer for our usual editorial processes).
But the whole project just seems (ever-so-slightly) insular. For example, the project places requirements on involvement in the project over and beyond those which are required by actual policy, which is not really appropriate. Considering community consensus on these issues, and the fact that in recent years ArbCom has come down on WikiProjects that try to create their own independent policy for their working space, this is a pretty serious gaff for such a high-profile space. Especially when you consider that this is not a prohibition on any particular kind of content but on any kind of critical participation at all. The restriction on creating new articles applies only to non-autoconfirmed users (not those with less than three months editing experience and 500 edits) and aside from a a very minute handful of high-level procedural forums, all spaces on the project are meant to be openly accessible to contributions from every user. Needless to say, this is not a blank check for abuse (obviously it would be regarded with suspicion if a new user referred another to ANI with their very first edit), and all editors are advised to familiarize themselves with policy and procedure for a given area before contributing there, but they technical retain the right to do so, pretty much with ubiquity across the project, and not matter how minimalist the members of this particular project find their standards, I don't think those requirements are consistent with policy.
All-in-all, to the extent that AfC is suffering man-power shortages (at least, over and beyond what we are suffering everywhere on the project right now), I get the impression it might be partly of the project's own making. I have no insight into the comments above as to the inside operation in general (though the chatter doesn't seem friendly, in any event), but as someone coming at the space and the process "fresh" as it were, without activity there in a long while, it just seemed like a convoluted, non-intuitive, and inefficient methodology. Snow talk 03:36, 22 January 2015 (UTC)[reply]
  • Fact: In the various WMUK editathons I have attended as a helper, in each one a part of the standard script has been to advise new editors not to go within a country mile of AfC. Instead editors are being advised to work up pages in their own sandboxes, and then put them directly into mainspace.
The impression I get from the team in the UK office involved with leading such events is that they believe AfC is so badly broken, that the experience for a new editor with any kind of clue is likely to be so negative that it is more likely to drive them away than anything else; so that once new editors have had a briefing on what armour an article needs to be provided with to survive in mainspace (some sources, some indication of significance, some rudimentary adherence to WP structure), newbies are best kept as far away from AfC as possible. And WP gets more and better new content if it is simply added for revision, rather than lost in the blocked sink of AfC. The view is that the best place to tidy up patchy submissions, and to encourage involvement, is mainspace -- not some unvisited ghetto. Jheald (talk) 17:01, 24 January 2015 (UTC)[reply]
The Signpost is looking for new talent.
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