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SwisterTwister blocked

Unfortunately SwisterTwister has gone and gotten themselves indeffed as a sockpuppeteer. They are a very active AfC reviewer, so this may have an adverse effect on the already dire backlog here. When they reduced their activity at NPP last year, where they used to be similarly prolific, it led to a significant increase in the backlog. Hopefully the situation will be resolved, but otherwise, and in the mean time, the rest of the reviewer pool may need to take up the slack. – Joe (talk) 22:07, 29 December 2017 (UTC)

That is so unfortunate. I really enjoyed the work they did on the project. CookieMonster755✉ 22:18, 29 December 2017 (UTC)
No comment on ST, whom I didn't know, but the project is doing a grand job in getting new reviewers so the situation may not be quite so bleak. KJP1 (talk) 22:27, 29 December 2017 (UTC)
Yes KJP1, it is wonderful to see the progress of this project over the years. One of my favorites. CookieMonster755✉ 22:30, 29 December 2017 (UTC)
​After seeing the news about SwisterTwister yesterday, I knew that something needed to be done to help get some more people to replace him, so I sent out ~300 invites (people I had already vetted and invited to NPP). There are actually plenty of people with the skills and willingness to help, all we have to do is ask. — Insertcleverphrasehere (or here) 22:37, 29 December 2017 (UTC)
@Insertcleverphrasehere: Awesome! Let's hope it works as well as at NPP. I have had the feeling that here and there is like a see-saw: as we're making progress at NPP, the AfC backlog has been growing to scary numbers. – Joe (talk) 00:17, 30 December 2017 (UTC)
Should we remove SwisterTwister from the participants list then, as he was blocked? If so, then we should also remove him from the "rollbacker" and "patroller" (new page reviewer) groups. He was already removed from the "autoreviewer" (autopatrolled) group. GeoffreyT2000 (talk) 23:14, 29 December 2017 (UTC)
No real reason to imo, he'll be back soon enough most likely. This was a shocker. ProgrammingGeek talktome 23:29, 29 December 2017 (UTC)
@GeoffreyT2000: I don't see why we would. ST is a very experienced AfC reviewer with a proven track record as long as anyone's. Obviously the sockpuppeting was a mistake but there's no evidence he did it in connection with AfC and as ProgrammingGeek says, he'll hopefully be unblocked soon enough. – Joe (talk) 00:17, 30 December 2017 (UTC)
You should work on the basis SwisterTwister will not be returning. Nick (talk) 00:25, 30 December 2017 (UTC)
To echo Nick but be a bit more blunt: I think it is highly unlikely that the committee would permit a CU block on a user that socked to harass another user to be lifted anytime soon. I appreciate the work ST did and the intent of everyone here, but I do think it is best to move on. TonyBallioni (talk) 00:39, 30 December 2017 (UTC)
Oh yup. Definitely not within the six months when get removed for inactivity completely from the list. Galobtter (pingó mió) 04:46, 30 December 2017 (UTC)

TS was using socks to "stuff" delete !votes in AfDs. Given such extreme and inappropriate deletionism, their rejection of AfC candidates should be reviewed. Sadly, that is not easy, as some (many?) have been speedily been deleted as G13. See concerns raised at Wikipedia:Village pump (idea lab)#SwisterTwister. Andy Mabbett (Pigsonthewing); Talk to Andy; Andy's edits 00:57, 31 December 2017 (UTC)

Andy, this sock-collusion was only for the last two months or so.Whilst that is condemnable, let it not overshadow the good work that he has churned out throughout his editorial career.And, to be frank, AFC simply doesn't have enough manpower to comprehensively re-review 12000 reviews.That is cleanly impossible.Winged BladesGodric 03:41, 31 December 2017 (UTC)
  • That explains things. SwisterTwister's tortured English in rapid fire knee jerk rejection of drafts was embarrassingly, for Wikipedia, so rude to the newcomers. I had been mystified for years, how can SwisterTwister be more or less right on so many judgements, but be nearly pathologically incapable of explaining these judgements, or corresponding like a human with newcomers. I quickly presume he was simply of poor English, but occasionally English fluency broke through. I guess, it's because it was the assumed persona of the puppet. The game was played for at least ten years. If SwisterTwister's rapid fire AfC reviewing was essential for keeping AfC working, that's clear evidence for AfC needing a very critical review. Again, as I have noted elsewhere, my observation of young people putting their toe into Wikipedia is that they are drawn to AfC, encouraged to write a draft article without experience or assistance, and then, ... nothing. I still think, despite the good drafts that do occur, newcomers should be required to get autoconfirmed first, and then write directly into mainspace, where there is a clear expectation that quality references are present in the first save. "Anyone can edit" does not imply "anyone can write a new article". --SmokeyJoe (talk) 00:53, 2 January 2018 (UTC)
  • From a "numbers" perspective, ST has been averaging barely more than 100 reviews per month (with that number decreasing over time). I do not think we need to concern ourselves with a sudden hike in the backlog (they have not given "huge" review numbers since they were temporarily removed from the list last year). Primefac (talk) 20:05, 2 January 2018 (UTC)

Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Zayyam

The discussion at Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Zayyam includes some AfC-related procedural questions and has just been relisted. More opinions would be helpful. – Joe (talk) 13:29, 8 January 2018 (UTC)

Resubmit button

The way it is right now, it's far too easy, when a draft is declined, to just click the "Resubmit" button again without improvements to the article, thus clogging up the review process and delaying the review of worthy submissions. Shouldn't there be some sort of barrier to doing this? A lad insane talk 20:40, 29 December 2017 (UTC)

Like what? A puzzle? – Joe (talk) 20:49, 29 December 2017 (UTC)
No, I was thinking more a time minimum between decline and resubmission, or a minimum number of edits, or both. The edit count one would be easy to game though. A lad insane talk 21:03, 29 December 2017 (UTC)
A less WP:BITEY means of preventing overly-eager resubmits is to prevent overly-eager reviews. Perhaps there should be a delay between when a draft is submitted and when it is available for anyone to review. ~Kvng (talk) 21:11, 29 December 2017 (UTC)
That could work. A lad insane talk 21:33, 29 December 2017 (UTC)
No it could not. Because it teaches the trigger-happy submitter anything. There should be a warning message to a submitter. Staszek Lem (talk) 17:32, 2 January 2018 (UTC)
Good point. A lad insane talk 03:32, 5 January 2018 (UTC)

Also, is submitting recorded in article history? If yes, then a reviewer must check the difference, and if the changes are cosmetic only, then reject it on the spot. Staszek Lem (talk) 17:32, 2 January 2018 (UTC)

Tendentious resubmissions is grounds for deletion, and/or blocking of the editor for disruptive editing. And yes, an immediate resubmission is grounds for an immediate decline. If it happens two or three times I just start undoing their submit instead of declining it. It saves on pointless decline notices and (after I leave them a note) it gets across the point that they can't just spam us with requests. Primefac (talk) 20:02, 2 January 2018 (UTC)
Yes submitting and reviewing are in the article history. Search history for "decline" and diff from there to current state. If previous review looks competent and there is no significant improvement since, you have found a button pusher. This is the teaching opportunity Staszek Lem is looking for. Leave a polite comment explaining the situation and some of the potential consequences mentioned by Primefac above. ~Kvng (talk) 16:41, 9 January 2018 (UTC)
By the time the user has created, submitted and resubmitted their draft, chances are they've already become autoconfirmed and if they've figured that out then it's likely they'll have also realised that pressing on with the AfC process won't be of use, especially if doing so has already earned them threats of getting blocked. – Uanfala (talk) 19:27, 9 January 2018 (UTC)
A bit dramatic, I'd say (and I sorta dislike telling people how to avoid scrutiny). And given how many drafts we have, I find it unlikely that all of these users are suddenly becoming cognizant of the minutiae of Wikipedia policy. Primefac (talk) 19:32, 9 January 2018 (UTC)

Wikiproject Template

Template:WikiProject_Articles_for_creation currently has The project works to allow unregistered users to contribute quality articles and media files to the encyclopedia and track their progress as they are developed. Well, it's also for non-autoconfirmed now, and also for COI editors etc. Should probably be The project works to allow new users to contribute quality articles.. or something more general about those who can't/shouldn't put stuff directly in mainspace. Galobtter (pingó mió) 05:36, 10 January 2018 (UTC)

Nice catch. I've dropped all of the qualifiers, since anyone can use the AFC process (new users, COI editors, PAID, editors, old editors who just aren't sure if the subject is notable, etc). Primefac (talk) 14:22, 10 January 2018 (UTC)

Decline message

I strongly recommend that the pre-made decline reason, "Submission is about a person who does not meet notability guidelines", be changed to "Submission is about a person who has not been shown to meet notability guidelines". It's a small thing, but it would probably help prevent people from becoming upset. DS (talk) 15:34, 10 January 2018 (UTC)

That's actually a really good idea. Done. Primefac (talk) 15:40, 10 January 2018 (UTC)
On a second look, I can't actually find the text you're referring to. Looking at my own declines, it appears that the edit summaries do show the latter text. DragonflySixtyseven, am I missing something? Primefac (talk) 15:45, 10 January 2018 (UTC)
... apparently I was looking at older declines, from before that change was made (Special:Undelete/Wikipedia_talk:Articles_for_creation/Vaughn_Stewart and Special:Undelete/Draft:Mark_Feierstein, for instance). DS (talk) 16:12, 10 January 2018 (UTC)

For what it's worth, the change to the script seems to have happened in February 2016, as discussed here. NewYorkActuary (talk) 23:18, 10 January 2018 (UTC)

editor Chetsford

Closing this - nothing actionable, and thus we're running the risk of diminishing returns. Primefac (talk) 14:55, 11 January 2018 (UTC)

The following discussion is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.

I notice that editor Chetsford has reviewed over 100 articles in 24 hours on his first day of AFC reviewing, with 21 in one hour during that time. 2 to 3 minutes per draft is hardly time for most editors to even read over the draft and do a copyvio check. It looks like perhaps his speed has made the AFC process and wikipedia suffer, much less the probable loss of many first time editors. Is this normal? I remember reading about fast reviewing in a post by Uanfala awhile back, but I was wondering how everyone felt about this issue. I checked over a few of his reviews and found two with blatant copyright violations, one was speedy deleted and the other was fixed by Primefac. Another I looked at had been improved, I improved it more, and accepted it for publication. Very shortly after this editor nominated it for deletion here:[1] I hesitate to look at any others to publish for fear of immediate nominations for deletion. I think this issue needs more eyes on it. Thanks. (sorry posted to wrong page) Lacypaperclip (talk) 22:21, 9 January 2018 (UTC)

  • I have concerns about Lacypaperclip's reviews. H/she quickly approved James D. Zirin for AfC, an WP:AUTOBIO by an editor previously blocked for making legal threats, after it had been rejected five times in a row, despite almost no change or improvement. This WP:BLP has seven sources, five of which are WP:RSSELF and two of which are cursory mentions of the subject (book reviews in which he's simply acknowledged as the author of the text in question). This seems to indicate limited time spent reviewing the article or an erroneous understanding of GNG. I was astonished and flabbergasted to see this was green-lit in its current state and immediately submitted it to AfD. I note h/she has been making repeated errors in addition to this, such as speedy deletions which have been rejected [2], and during peak periods of activity is reviewing an average of one AfC every ~2.5 minutes (e.g. [3], [4], [5]). Combined with a pattern of past issues [6]h/she's experienced correctly identifying notability in articles, demonstrated by a 59% "hit" rate at AfD, some additional scrutiny may be warranted.
When I rejected the article at the core of this dispute I spent 20 minutes typing out a long and thoughtful iteration of issues on the creator's Talk page [7], and later engaged him on my own Talk page to answer his questions. Lacypaperclip seems to have just barreled through all this with a cursory 'approve' click in a way that does not demonstrate best practices in cautious and methodical reviewing of AfC.
I hesitate to look at any others to publish for fear of immediate nominations for deletion. I assure you, I hesitate to nominate any more of your articles for deletion for fear it will result in retaliatory WP:FORUMSHOPing like here: [8], [9], [10]. Chetsford (talk) 22:49, 9 January 2018 (UTC)o
  • Oh dear Galobtter (pingó mió) 05:38, 10 January 2018 (UTC)
  • A quick look through, and nothing too bad in Chetsford's reviewing. Should check for copyvios (open the tool in a new tab while doing the rest of checking, and look out for close paraphrasing), however there is no obligation to improve articles, and many of the declines look reasonably easy in that it's pretty obvious that there's nothing in the sources (especially for companies)(so could be done in 2-3 minutes if one was fast about it) Looking at his talk It doesn't qualify for an article on Wikipedia with its current sources, I'm afraid. Sorry. Chetsford (talk) 3:26 am, Today (UTC+5.5) (reply) - should give more explanation as help has been specifically asked- how IMDB isn't a source, and more indepth sources offline are needed etc. However I've only taken a quick look. Galobtter (pingó mió) 05:48, 10 January 2018 (UTC)
  • The decline at James D. Zirin seems fine (could be as too little citations for BLP, but nothing in the sources there yet showing notability) Galobtter (pingó mió) 05:53, 10 January 2018 (UTC)
Thanks, Galobtter! I am pretty fast and efficient, but I do also strive for accuracy as I think my 96% match rate on CSDs [11], 92% match rate on AfDs,[12], and net average of one DYK every two weeks [13] also demonstrate. I appreciate both your feedback and affirmation of the validity of the decline. Chetsford (talk) 07:49, 10 January 2018 (UTC)
  • Speed alone is no reason to fault someone, so long as he isn't being hasty. It seems like this particular editor brought this all up because of a dispute on a single page, so I think it is best to keep it on the page in question. say what you need to say at the AfD and back away from the conflict... anything else just isn't worth it. And Chetsford the opprobrium is just part of the hazing ritual; totally normal and nothing to see here. :D — Insertcleverphrasehere (or here) 11:11, 10 January 2018 (UTC)
Ha, good advice! I guess I was just surprised at how hard and fast Lacypaperclip decided to come at me over a very minor error of hers I'd noticed. But, yes, I'd agree with your observation it seems s/he came here because of a content dispute as opposed to genuine concern. I appreciate the explanation. Chetsford (talk) 11:41, 10 January 2018 (UTC)
I agree speed alone is not a problem, but when you combine it with missing at least two copyright violations over two articles it does become a problem. Saying "how hard and fast Lacypaperclip decided to come at me" is ridiculous. I simply posted an inquiry at AFC asking for other eyes on the situation. I posted on the wrong page then posted here. Of course I participated at the AFD. That is not forum shopping it is posting to see what others might think. Funny, Chetsford has pointed out an article he published at AFC to say I made a mistake on notability speedy declining it because I nave a problem recognizing notability, when the truth is what I recognized was copyright violations that he missed. Primefac dealt with the copyvio as seen here in the listing. [14] The diff is not viewable since he revdelled the copyvio. So the mistake was that he missed the copyright violation. Whether someone is notable is of no concern when there is a copyright violation. The copyright violation needs to be taken out and rev delled. I came because of a concern about Chetsford's first day at AFC reviewing where he sped through the drafts at 2-3 per minute rate, where he had at least two copyright violation misses. I did not review all 144 of his AFC reviews. Who knows what else may be out there? He blew this all out of proportion and attacked me for pointing out my concerns. Playing the, oh she is attacking me game is just some kind of histrionics over a simple paragraph of concern. Re-read the paragraph I wrote, it was simply a note of concern which Chetsford has not reacted well to. Instead he has tried to turn the tables around to attack me in an effort to take the focus and scrutiny off himself. Lacypaperclip (talk) 14:09, 10 January 2018 (UTC)
Lacypaperclip I understand you have concerns, but they would have been much better raised on Chetsford's talk page rather than starting an inquisition here (regardless of your intent, it looks a bit that way). While biting newbies is an issue, biting our reviewers is also a concern. With the backlog issues at the moment the last thing we need is to be driving away experienced editors that are willing to help. In future if you notice that someone made a mistake, I'd recommend bringing it up with them directly as a first step. As Primefac says below, everyone makes mistakes, and while there might have been some on both sides here, it is nothing we need to cause a kerfuffle over. — Insertcleverphrasehere (or here) 14:45, 10 January 2018 (UTC)
  • Okay, let's not get too geared up about this. I can see Lacypaperclip's arguments and they seem to be valid concerns, so please do not fault her for coming here and asking.
As for the meat of the inquiry - we all make mistakes. There are drafts that I've reviewed/accepted where I later find I missed out on some copyvios (the tool doesn't always pick it up). Missing 2 drafts out of 144 isn't the end of the world (and 1% ain't bad). I've found that a quick "hey just to remind you" note on the reviewer's talk page helps if it looks like a persistent issue.
As for the timing thing - it really depends on where you're reviewing. One of our reviewers does upwards of 1000 draft reviews a month, but almost all of those are quick-fails that could easily be declined in minutes (or even seconds). On the other hand, I'm lucky if I get 3-4 reviews done in a day because I'm going from the other end and it's the old cases that need evaluating. As mentioned above, both of you have (at some point or another) declined multiple drafts in a short timespan.
I personally don't see anything actionable here (for either party) other than handing out the usual reminders about ticking all the boxes and making sure you're giving a fair review (and helpful advice), but that's advice that we all could use now and again. If I've missed something obvious I'm happy to re-evaluate the situation, though. Primefac (talk) 14:40, 10 January 2018 (UTC)
  • Primefac, thanks for your thoughts. Just to clarify, I only checked 4 or 5 of the 144 AFC reviews for copyright violations, not all 144. I found two copyright violations in the 5 I checked. I cannot speak on the other 139 reviews. Who knows? Lacypaperclip (talk) 15:12, 10 January 2018 (UTC)
Fair enough. I think even if they missed copyvios in 50% of their total reviews (which is unlikely) a note would probably be sufficient (since they're just starting out at AFC). Food for thought, I guess. It would definitely be worth checking their accepts for copyvios, but as far as the declines go it's likely any missed cv will be caught by the next reviewer. Primefac (talk) 15:21, 10 January 2018 (UTC)
"Who knows?" Indeed. In the absence of any actual knowledge we should probably AGF rather than ABF. There seems to be a consensus here that there is no issue of any kind with my edits. I appreciate you bringing your concerns up and, though the community didn't agree with them, I do value the discussion. As I mentioned previously, I noted you have a 41% miss rate in your AfDs [15] but I should clarify I don't think it's in the community's interest to conduct a WP:BOOMERANG evaluation of your own edit history and we should probably just hat this and move on. I do not believe we should drag this out further by trying to rally reinforcements here who are not even AfC reviewers [16]. I hope you agree. Chetsford (talk) 07:47, 11 January 2018 (UTC)
Correct, Primefac. As a newer AfC reviewer I intentionally pass on 75% of the articles that come up and usually only review the blatantly obvious ones; typically those that have no sources or where I glance at the references list and just see a string of YouTube videos. Frankly, the type of articles I've been reviewing don't really take more than 60 seconds, let alone 2-3 minutes. [Edit - I just reviewed this one in 13 seconds] Chetsford (talk) 07:47, 11 January 2018 (UTC)
  • Primefac has a good point re. speed. If you go through the list of submitted drafts with small filesizes it's possible to decline most of these pretty quickly, but with other drafts they will take much longer to evaluate.
Re. copyright, the reviewing instructions say that if you spot a copyright violation, you should immediately decline the submission. In practice I don't always do that; if it is a "smaller" violation (if there's not too much copied text/if the article still makes sense after removal) I will just remove the infringing text, place the {{copyvio-revdel}} template, leave the {{cclean}} notice on the talk page, warn the contributing editor and leave the submission open in the reviewing queue. But for more foundational copyright violations I think it makes more sense to also decline the article. After a big chunk of copyvio is removed, sometimes the article just doesn't make much sense anymore. And of course if all or substantially all of the text is copyvio and there's no non-infringing revision to revert to, then it's appropriate to G12. /wiae /tlk 15:15, 10 January 2018 (UTC)
  • "Playing the, oh she is attacking me game is just some kind of histrionics over a simple paragraph of concern. Re-read the paragraph I wrote, it was simply a note of concern which Chetsford has not reacted well to. Instead he has tried to turn the tables around to attack me in an effort to take the focus and scrutiny off himself." Frankly, I think I've reacted with grace and civility to all this. That said, I do slightly resent having my contributions to this discussion described as "histrionics" and "games" and "attacks". I understand, as Insertcleverphrasehere explained above, that this is part of AfC hazing I should probably just ignore, however, I wonder if it's absolutely necessary I continue to endure one editor's disembowling of me in public or - in the demonstrated absence of any other editors having concerns - if this can possibly be hatted and/or moved to a user talk page? Chetsford (talk) 07:47, 11 January 2018 (UTC)
  • Again, I continue to endure one editor's disembowling of me in public is an over-reaction to a simple post of concern. I consider that language offensive and a personal attack towards me. You blow things out of proportion, and keep trying to turn the tables onto me. It will not work. All the editors here do not agree with you. Some have concerns about the missed copyright violations by you. You may have missed reading some of the sections above. Even Primefac said, I can see Lacypaperclip's arguments and they seem to be valid concerns, so please do not fault her for coming here and asking. You need to just drop it. Everything had pretty much settled down, and then you come here and make a personal attack that I was somehow disemboweling you in public. Again, Stop it. I am not interested. Knock it off! Lacypaperclip (talk) 08:08, 11 January 2018 (UTC)
"keep trying to turn the tables onto me" Please see: "There is sometimes a belief that ... turning the discussion around to discuss the misbehavior of the original reporter is "changing the subject" and therefore not allowed. However, that just isn't the case." You raised a concern you had with my reviewing, and I promptly and politely addressed your concern by assuring you that you needn't worry since my AfD miss rate was 9% (compared to your 41%), I had a 4% miss rate on CSDs, a 1% error rate on AfCs, my average time spent reviewing AfCs was the same as yours, and you recently approved a 5x-declined AfC which is now undergoing AfD [and which Insertcleverphrasehere has said he believes is your underlying motivation for coming here] (see all preceding: [17]). If you didn't want me to respond to your concerns, why did you ping me? I guess I'm not sure what you were expecting to happen here.
"Stop it. I am not interested. Knock it off!" Sorry? When you initiate a thread about someone and ping them to it, there is a general expectation they will reply with their thoughts. Yelling at me to stop talking is an unconventional form of surrebuttal. Chetsford (talk) 10:46, 11 January 2018 (UTC)
The discussion above is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.

Sexuality in Italy listed at Redirects for discussion

An editor has asked for a discussion to address the redirect Sexuality in Italy. Please participate in the redirect discussion if you have not already done so. 70.52.11.217 (talk) 05:14, 12 January 2018 (UTC)

Introducing multi-reason declines

Hey everyone! I just added the ability to decline a draft for multiple reasons to the script. It's in beta right now, because it's a complicated feature and I want to make sure there are no bugs. You can test it out by installing User:Enterprisey/afch-dev.js just like a normal user script. (You'll also have to go into your preferences and turn off the "Yet Another AFC Helper Script" gadget.) Right now, you can only use two reasons. (I couldn't think of cases where you would want more.) It's easy for me to expand it to three or more, though, so let me know if you want that to happen. I'll leave this up for a few days (or more, depending on how many bugs we discover) and then put it into the main gadget. Happy reviewing! Enterprisey (talk!) 07:29, 13 January 2018 (UTC)

Wow thanks! Happy to be a guinea pig. I think more than two reasons might confuse people. Just trying it out - the preview is for example "bio,cv" -instead of showing how the decline is - actually how do the decline messages look like? 07:35, 13 January 2018 (UTC)
Well, I knew there was something I forgot! I'll have that fixed in about five to ten minutes. Enterprisey (talk!) 07:36, 13 January 2018 (UTC)
This sounds like a great idea! Thanks Enterprisey! Lacypaperclip (talk) 07:43, 13 January 2018 (UTC)
Fixed! Enterprisey (talk!) 07:44, 13 January 2018 (UTC)

Finding AfC submissions by topic

Following an invite on my talk page yesterday, I have signed up & been "approved". As I would like to help I tried to find submissions relevant to my areas of interest (history, geography etc rather than biography) and I found Category:Drafts about geography and places, Category:Drafts about history etc however most of these are drafts which have not been submitted to AfC. I have looked at the submissions list & category, but wondered if there is any way to find or sort them by topic?— Rod talk 18:15, 30 December 2017 (UTC)

Welcome aboard, Rod. The categories you mentioned are driven by a parameter of the template {{Draft article}}, which is not commonly used on pending AfC drafts. There is, however, a draft categorization system based on WikiProjects. If you're familiar with petscan, it can quickly tell you which pending drafts have had a particular WikiProject added to their talk page. For WikiProject England and not WikiProject Biography, for example:
Title Page ID Namespace Size (bytes) Last change
The Natural Daughter 55804095 118 18522 20171230041951
Pembroke Coast Express 55849307 118 3917 20171230044130
"The Evil Eye" 55864683 118 6219 20171230043218
Hidden Charms 55878501 118 7605 20171230042257
Toseland 55911068 118 11982 20171230042611
Popanilla 55915463 118 11661 20171230043040
River Morda 55916715 118 4649 20171230042727
Beasts 55921883 118 2147 20171230042822
Death Blooms 55924589 118 3025 20171230043033
Transformation 55934681 118 7046 20171230043215
Regenerate this table.
And for WikiProject United Kingdom and not WikiProject Biography:
Title Page ID Namespace Size (bytes) Last change
Nightmare Tenants 55276433 118 32542 20171230043139
In Limbo: Brexit Testimonies from EU citizens in the UK 55308082 118 7093 20171230042712
The Knowledge Transfer Network 55566447 118 3526 20171230042457
ECT 55660669 118 6469 20171230041525
3D Repo 55675206 118 40787 20171230040552
The Cottingley Secret 55675611 118 7854 20171230040502
Tuff Act To Follow 55676953 118 4700 20171230041233
Baby It's You 55677162 118 5281 20171230040510
CurrentBody 55684998 118 2689 20171230040630
Arkbound 55704693 118 6163 20171230040655
Digital Clarity 55784418 118 2463 20171230041116
A+E Networks UK 55810817 118 3941 20171230042502
TrainingQualificationsUK 55811693 118 9670 20171230041410
The Felix Project 55813366 118 7115 20171230041426
Your.MD 55818486 118 4485 20171230041507
Acres Band 55830130 118 4756 20171230041611
Asian Achievers Awards 55843245 118 2026 20171230042642
HMT Eileen Duncan 55865031 118 1601 20171230042115
BR Standard Class Locomotive Region Allocations 55875919 118 1340 20171230042156
The Golden Hind 55877012 118 4178 20171230042215
The National Centre for Social Research 55911571 118 1403 20171230042619
Alloga 55912571 118 2740 20171230042628
Police Now 55912697 118 22203 20171230042636
Regenerate this table.
One could run similar queries for Somerset or any other area that has a WikiProject. This may not be ideal for you if your interests don't align cleanly with one or two WikiProjects - if you're interested in history and geography worldwide, for example, or if you absolutely don't want to see anything except history and geography - but it gives you a much more focused list than the category of all pending AfC submissions.
Another thing that makes categorization less than ideal is that someone has to add the projects to the talk page in the first place. This has only been done for about 40% of pending drafts. WikiProjects can do the sorting by using AlexNewArtBot to monitor new articles for drafts that might be in their scope, and then adding their project template as appropriate. Otherwise it's up to AfC to do the sorting, manually or with importScript('User:APerson/draft-sorter.js');. --Worldbruce (talk) 19:09, 30 December 2017 (UTC)
Thanks - this is really helpful - I am interested in other things (eg architecture) and will play with Petscan to find them. I've just done a first review & will look for others of interest when I have some more time.— Rod talk 19:17, 30 December 2017 (UTC)
RodRodw, I upgraded this list of submissions so that you can filter by WikiProject - that should also be helpful. Enterprisey (talk!) 07:04, 14 January 2018 (UTC); re-sign for ping: Enterprisey (talk!) 07:05, 14 January 2018 (UTC)
Ping again: Rodw Enterprisey (talk!) 07:06, 14 January 2018 (UTC)
Thanks however https://toolserver.org/apersonbot/pending-subs gives a 404 for me.— Rod talk 08:46, 14 January 2018 (UTC)
Fixed - but not sure why. I'll investigate further. Enterprisey (talk!) 13:36, 14 January 2018 (UTC)

Reviewers - this means YOU

I'm reproducing an 11-year old message from the WMF that Athaenara kindly pointed me to a few moments ago:

Brad Patrick bradp.wmf at gmail.com Fri Sep 29 17:13:35 UTC 2006

Dear Community:

The volume of corporate vanity/vandalism which is showing up on Wikipedia is overwhelming. At the office, we are receiving dozens of phone calls *per week* about company, organization, and marketing edits which are reverted, causing the non-notable, but self-aggrandizing authors, to scream bloody murder. This is as it should be. However, I am issuing a call to arms to the community to act in a much more draconian fashion in response to corporate self-editing and vanity page creation. This is simply out of hand, and we need your help.

We are the #14 website in the world. We are a big target. If we are to remain true to our encyclopedic mission, this kind of nonsense cannot be tolerated. This means the administrators and new page patrol need to be clear when they see new usernames and page creation which are blatantly commercial - shoot on sight. There should be no question that someone who claims to have a "famous movie studio" and has exactly 2 Google hits - both their Myspace page - they get nuked.

Ban users who promulgate such garbage for a significant period of time. They need to be encouraged to avoid the temptation to recreate their article, thereby raising the level of damage and wasted time they incur.

Some of you might think regular policy and VfD is the way to go. I am here to tell you it is not enough. We are losing the battle for encyclopedic content in favor of people intent on hijacking Wikipedia for their own memes. This scourge is a serious waste of time and energy. We must put a stop to this now.

Thank you for your help.

-Brad Patrick
User:BradPatrick

(BradPatrick has the distinction of having been the interim Executive Director of the Wikimedia Foundation as well as its inaugural General Counsel). Kudpung กุดผึ้ง (talk) 11:25, 13 January 2018 (UTC)

Wise counsel from the counsel, I'd say. KJP1 (talk) 11:56, 13 January 2018 (UTC)
I don't know who BradPatrick is or whether he speaks or ever spoke for WMF. I am having troubling squaring this sentiment with WMF's position WRT WP:ACTRIAL. Deletionist-inclusionist tension is unresolved and identifying WP:PROMOTIONAL material is not an unambiguous process. ~Kvng (talk) 16:35, 15 January 2018 (UTC)

Meaningful reviews with actionable comments, on the draft_talk page

Please excuse my frustration, but I remain convinced that the style of AfC reviewing should change. It's an old example, but Draft:Paula E. Kirman discussed Wikipedia:Miscellany for deletion/Draft:Paula E. Kirman is a good illustration. A few minutes searching reveals that the subject will never be suitable for Wikipedia, but 10 reviews failed to clearly convey the message. The first (14:08, 26 December 2014) was on point, the last ("please do not resubmit" 03:40, 5 December 2017) got pretty close to being clear to the message required, but most of the other comments are decidedly unhelpful through being vague, unactionable, or raising matters that while being valid do not speak to the unsuitability of the topic. None of the reviews or comments I would call "inviting to the author to correspond", and correspondence was needed to clarify the meaning of the rejections and comments.

Firstly, the the reviews, or more so the review comments, would be more human and easier to reply to for clarification if they were on the talk page. All newcomers really need to understand that articles have talk pages, and how to use them. Draftspace talk pages would be a fine place to start.

Secondly, comments should be actionable. Having read the comment, what should the author do next? Here are some suggested actionable comments:

  • This subject is not notable. There are no independent sources supplied, nor can I find any on the web. I think it has no hope of being accepted as an article. If you agree, please blank the contents. I hope you can find another topic on which can contribute. or
  • Please find and add some independent reliable sources for the content.

Avoid subject no-actionable statements like

  • "Does not seem independently notable from Macauly"

Avoid introducing facts that will be non-decisive in acceptance of the draft and easily fixed afterwards, like

  • "This draft has external links in the article body"

Recognise that a statement such as

  • "There have been no substantive changes since the previous decline"

is clear evidence of a failure of communication, and repeating the same unintuitive templated responses fits that defiition of insanity.
--SmokeyJoe (talk) 01:48, 15 January 2018 (UTC)

Thank you for not choosing the poor responses by the three (now-)blocked editors, two of which I was fighting with over their comments for years.
As for the meat of your suggestion, from the pages I've looked over I've seen an increase in the length and value of comments over the last year or so. When new reviewers leave bad advice I inevitably find out about it (either via IRC or their talk page when the creator complains) and I've been trying to make sure everyone is being as helpful as possible. Because you're absolutely right; non-actionable comments aren't worth very much if the user can't figure out how to deal with them, and if someone is leaving poor comments they should get a (friendly) note about it. Primefac (talk) 02:19, 15 January 2018 (UTC)
"Thank you for not choosing...". Hah! I only sporadically engage, don't keep up with all of the news, and certainly don't follow your fights.
"an increase in the length and value of comments over the last year or so". I've suspected this, and it is good to hear. --SmokeyJoe (talk) 02:34, 15 January 2018 (UTC)
Regarding 10 reviews failed to convey the message, that's what having 3 declines and then it gets to MfD will (if it gets implemented) hopefully solve - either it gets sent to mainspace as notable, or deleted. However, if I see multiple declines I do try to assess to see if there is any hope of notability and state it clearly. That is sensible in saving time; this could be added to the instructions. Galobtter (pingó mió) 05:26, 15 January 2018 (UTC)
Indeed. That page should have been sent to MFD a long time before it hit ten declines. Fortunately, that's another thing we've been improving on recently. Primefac (talk) 12:29, 15 January 2018 (UTC)
@Primefac: WP:NMFD says we're not to nominate drafts for deletion on the basis of notability, so I'm confused! Curb Safe Charmer (talk) 20:26, 15 January 2018 (UTC)
You are correct, we should not be nominating based on a lack of notability, but if there can be a case made that there is no way, no how that a draft could ever be notable, it's more a question of disruptive editing (particularly if it's been resubmitted 4+ times with little to no improvement). Personally I have no issue if a draft sits around for years not being submitted continually (I know at least two drafts where the user has said something along the lines of "thanks, I'll wait until I can demonstrate GNG") but it's the act of resubmission that turns a "non-notable" draft into a "non-notable disruptive" draft. There's an MFD about Ejembi Onah that just closed recently that very clearly showed the latter was an issue. Primefac (talk) 22:17, 15 January 2018 (UTC)
  • I don't see the comments on this particular draft as especially unhelpful, and if anything they're better than the average I'm used to seeing when I casually browse through declined drafts. One problem that I'm seeing is the over-reliance on of the default boilerplate rationales, especially that long templates text that can be summarised as "not enough sources to establish notability". Often such a message is helpful, but in cases where the notability (or lack of it) is obvious from a quick web search, this is utterly useless. If the topic is notable, then the draft should be moved to mainspace with a note to the creator encouraging them to continue working on it to incorporate more of the available sources. If it's obviously not notable, then it should be made clear to the creator that they shouldn't be wasting any more of their time with it. Is there any way for some sort of WP:BEFORE to be incorporated into the AfC process? – Uanfala (talk) 12:59, 15 January 2018 (UTC)
I don't see it as worth the time to do BEFORE (at-least a reasonably proper one) on every declined draft on the first decline; I think second decline onwards would be worthwile. However common sense should be used - if it looks like more sources could be found, perhaps because the current sources regard the subject highly, then a good search should be done. Galobtter (pingó mió) 13:07, 15 January 2018 (UTC)
And I think that at least a rudimentary BEFORE-style check is the bare minimum: it takes a minute or two and it makes the difference between a meaningful review decision and a more or less arbitrary, bureaucratic decline that will drive the creator away from wikipedia for good. Editors who couldn't be bothered to make even that modicum of effort shouldn't be allowed within miles of any curation process. – Uanfala (talk) 19:02, 15 January 2018 (UTC)
Rudimentary is fine, but quite often not useful as the author himself only looked so far; I can't really tell if it really is not notable unless I do a proper before like that I do for nominating in an AfD (10+ minutes). Usually give tips on how to get look for more sources as it often is possible to find more than what you can find from googling for 1 minute Galobtter (pingó mió) 19:08, 15 January 2018 (UTC)
  • When a draft is on a non-notable topic, it is a problem. It should be left to a slow lingering death with occasionally associated tendentious resubmissions. MfD is not a workable solution. Possibilities:
    (1) the reviewer is wrong;
    (2) notability-attesting (eg independent and secondary) sources can be found; or
    (3) notability-attesting sources do not exist and the topic is hopeless.
I have been trying to find ideas.
(1) must always be acknowledged as a possibility. So, be careful with wording.
For (2), the author needs pointing to notability guidelines. The comments should be actionable. Possibly, the notability guidelines are not written to be actionable by the author of a borderline notable topic. Possibly, we need an essay on how to find sources? WP:How to find sources demonstrating notability, and when to give up?
@SmokeyJoe: When I come across borderline cases that have been submitted more then once, in my decline comments I refer the author to User:Joe_Decker/IsThisNotable. This puts the onus firmly on the author to do their own pre-assessment of sources using the same criteria that we work to. They should only resubmit when they believe the criteria are met. So far I've never re-reviewed a draft after the author has done that work and resubmitted - I think it is enough to make them realise the subject is non-notable. Curb Safe Charmer (talk) 09:47, 16 January 2018 (UTC)
Curb Safe Charmer, that sounds good. Yes, User:Joe Decker's User:Joe Decker/IsThisNotable looks like a pretty good essay just the sort of thing I had in mind. Do many use it? Should it be more prominently recommended for reviewers? I actually had more interest in hopeless drafts than borderline drafts, as it is the hopeless drafts that get thrown to MfD that seem the worst time sinks. Do you have any idea if the authors of hopeless drafts respond well to being pointed to that essay? --SmokeyJoe (talk) 10:22, 16 January 2018 (UTC)
I have found that a lot of us have our own personal userspace templates, and I think it might be a good idea to collate all of these and possibly make a set of "AFC" templates that cover common issues. Not related to this thread, though, so I'll start a new one. Thanks for the idea! Primefac (talk) 12:46, 16 January 2018 (UTC)
For (3), hopeless drafts, a lack of a clear negative response is unfair to the author. Ideas?
Create a new template that says: "This draft has been reviewed, the reviewer believes that the topic is unsuitable for inclusion for the following reasons detailed on the talk page". Link the to the talk page and state the problems. The draft should be blanked by the template, because the experienced reviewer has already decided it is hopeless. Make the author revert if the author wants to disagree.
Possibly, if two reviewers agree the draft is inherently hopeless, it should be speedy deleted. Coup de grâce. We can write a new CSD criterion. I would be pleased to contribute to this if it were agreed to be a good idea.
For hopeless drafts that are related to a commercial product, a trading company, its founder or CEO, and where all listed sources are unreliable or blatantly non-independent, I think the page should be WP:CSD#G11-ed immediately. If quality sources could exist, then cite WP:TNT in the deletion summary. A page that was started from only unsuitable sources is best deleted for a restart from scratch with acceptable starting sources. --SmokeyJoe (talk) 01:47, 16 January 2018 (UTC)

Leighton School of Nursing

NurseEducator has done a remarkable job as a first-time editor in working to advance a draft for Leighton School of Nursing to a creatable status. (See conversation here.) However, I'm still worried this may not be suitable for mainspace due to the faculties section of WP:UNIGUIDE. Also, there may be some lingering content issues with the draft. Of course, that's too bad as we have literally dozens of nursing school pages that are in a less-reputable shape than this, but that's neither here nor there.
I've taken the liberty of creating an alternate, and more succinct, version of NurseEducator's draft in my sandbox. I'm still not sure even that will pass the UNIGUIDE requirements, though. In any case, I hate to jump the queue, however, given the noteworthy effort NE has extended, I was wondering if someone might mind taking a glance at these drafts and either creating one in mainspace, or rejecting both?

Thanks - Chetsford (talk) 23:21, 18 January 2018 (UTC)

Chetsford Articles don't have to pass every guideline - they don't have to be GAs. External links in the body you can either remove or you can accept it anyhow as long as you think it is notable. You can just move your version or NurseEducator's to mainspace. Galobtter (pingó mió) 05:43, 19 January 2018 (UTC)

Introducing filtering drafts by topic (or WikiProject)

I recently gave the pending-subs tool a pretty big upgrade - now you can type in a WikiProject, and it'll filter all the drafts to only those related to the project. For each draft, the tool checks the talk page for any banners, and reads the draft's infoboxes. (For example, {{Infobox wrestling event}} implies WP:PW, and so on.) Unfortunate drawback: in order for the tool to detect a banner, the WikiProject needs to be listed at User:Enterprisey/ibx-wproj-map.js. I added a minimal subset of WikiProjects to get this ready for the meetup tomorrow where I'll be presenting this, but feel free to add more through edit requests. Enjoy! Enterprisey (talk!) 07:00, 14 January 2018 (UTC)

Wow! Looks great! Will definitely be using it, look through veryold company drafts. Galobtter (pingó mió) 07:10, 14 January 2018 (UTC)
Fabulous! I checked unsourced and found 3 easy declines quickly. I like it. Lacypaperclip (talk) 07:15, 14 January 2018 (UTC)
Fantastic! This will make it much easier to engage members of other WikiProjects, who may be interested only in reviewing drafts within their project's scope. Would you be willing to further extend the tool to allow the exclusion of certain projects? I've encountered editors who have an interest in reviewing articles related to a country, but not biographies, for example. I imagine other editors might wish to avoid companies. --Worldbruce (talk) 07:42, 14 January 2018 (UTC)
Enterprisey I suggest you have a chat with Evad37 if you haven't already, as he has just made a new wikiproject WP:RATER tool. He also had to compile a list of wikiprojects, and I think he used some existing categories or something. He would know more than I of course but might be able to easily compile a full list for you. — Insertcleverphrasehere (or here) 23:11, 14 January 2018 (UTC)
Sure, that sounds helpful! The issue here is I need something more complicated: a mapping between WikiProjects and their "canonical" shortcuts. I could easily write a script that scrapes the "what links here" page to determine the shortest shortcut, but that's definitely not the best solution. For the business WikiProject, for example: BIZ, BAE, BEF, and B&E are all the same length, but the first is obviously superior in terms of readability. Enterprisey (talk!) 21:55, 15 January 2018 (UTC)

Enterprisey I used this yesterday, and I have never had a more productive day working on AfC tasks. Thanks for working on this very useful tool. Kees08 (Talk) 17:25, 15 January 2018 (UTC)

No problem! Good to hear that people find it helpful! Enterprisey (talk!) 21:55, 15 January 2018 (UTC)
@Enterprisey: As a suggestion, since there are so many projects in the dropdown now, maybe only populate the dropdown with projects that have results? For example, spaceflight does not have any right now, so it could be dynamically removed from the dropdown to clean up the list. Kees08 (Talk) 06:44, 18 January 2018 (UTC)
This will help a lot. I would confirm certain reviewers are going to know a lot more about certain fields than others, and this will help. I also appreciate the WP:PW example Lee Vilenski (talk • contribs) 15:26, 18 January 2018 (UTC)
Done! You should see the changes the next time an update happens, which should be in around 55 minutes. Enterprisey (talk!) 06:02, 19 January 2018 (UTC)

Declined for copyright - here's something you might not know

Hey all, I just discovered a switch statement in the decline notices for copyright violations - if you see a decline notice that is {{AFC submission|d|cv|...}}, and the copyvio has been removed/revdel'd, you should change it to {{AFC submission|d|cv-cleaned|...}}, which will let other reviewers know that the cv has been dealt with. Learn something new every day! Primefac (talk) 16:05, 19 January 2018 (UTC)

And as a note, this should only be done when the cv has been removed (of course) - so if you come across a |cv| decline that hasn't been revdel'd, and you feel so motivated, you should remove the offending comment and request revdel. Primefac (talk) 16:15, 19 January 2018 (UTC)
Will the environment automatically tell you that this has happened? scope_creep (talk) 00:08, 20 January 2018 (UTC)
No. You'd have to look at the history of the page - if there is content that has been revdel'd (or some other note about the cv) then it should be switched to |cv-cleaned|. To be honest, this is a pretty rare event anyway, but I thought I'd mention it for some of the more copyright-savvy reviewers (and/or the AFC admins who might be revdel'ing after they decline). Primefac (talk) 15:50, 20 January 2018 (UTC)

Interesting AFC Stats

So, I know I'm probably not the first to do this, but I ran the whole category thru ORES (draftquality, and wp10). The results are at User:SQL/Interesting AFC Stuff. I recorded anything that ORES predicted not to be "OK", all of which it thought we'd see as spam. It also tries to predict article assessments. I was surprised to see several articles ORES thought that we would rate as FA/GA. Thought I'd share. SQLQuery me! 05:55, 21 January 2018 (UTC)

AfC decline template rewrite

Hi all, in seeing some of the frustrations expressed here along with the feedback we get from people in IRC help, I felt our AfC decline templates could use a rewrite. Given the positive feedback on the simplicity of the Wizard redo, the decline templates seemed the next logical step to improve. Users such as DGG also expressed an interest, so I created this replacement for our nn template. Most notably, I only have one link, and that's to WP:42. I feel it explains our policies the most succinctly, and seems a good jumping board for more information. Drewmutt (^ᴥ^) talk 01:44, 19 January 2018 (UTC)

  • I like the revised version. The current version opens with a very abrupt sentence and the use of an italicized significant coverage in the second sentence seems a little finger-waggy. The revised version closes with an upbeat call to action (Please continue to make improvements and resubmit your draft for review) instead of telling the person they should get lost (I'm sure not its intent, but it comes across that way). Chetsford (talk) 01:53, 19 January 2018 (UTC)
  • I changed one punctuation and one caps for grammatical and acronym sense. Otherwise I think it's less jargon-y and good. Primefac (talk) 02:54, 19 January 2018 (UTC)
  • I like the revised version. One change I would suggest is removing the initial "Thank you for your submission" text. I think the comments in the gray boxes should be specific to the chosen reason; if we're going to put in a friendly message, we should probably just drop it in the template itself. Enterprisey (talk!) 04:24, 19 January 2018 (UTC)
  • I agree with Enterprisey's approach, and I'll have some other suggestions tomorrow. I want to to improve compactness. I know that for me the probability of reading anything that looks like boilerplate goes down in proportion to the length, especially if it's a message elaborately disguising a negative response. It should be possible to state the alternatives of improving or asking for deletion in a succinct neutral manner. DGG ( talk ) 05:39, 19 January 2018 (UTC)
    @DGG: I wholly agree, and to be honest, as a notice it seems overkill to have anything more than "Your article did not meet our standards.. click here for more information". I'd prefer we not paste the same paragraph over and over again on drafts, but instead give them the notice, and direct them to a page that actually spells out what's wrong and how to fix it. The fact we're trying to tell them about our notability guidelines and what reliable sources are in template box is clunky at best, and wholly ineffective at worst. I felt it a bit much to entirely overhaul things, so this proposal was a baby step in that direction for me, but if breaking out a "why was my article declined and how to fix it" page has some traction, I'm more than happy to mock one up. Drewmutt (^ᴥ^) talk 05:52, 19 January 2018 (UTC)
    I'm supportive of this, and like the idea of making the declines more accessible to the users. I've had numerous occasions where the messages are more confusing than not to the users because they just say too much. Waggie (talk) 06:04, 19 January 2018 (UTC)
  • The decline for Verifiability in particular is unsatisfactory. It talks only about the Reliability of sources, but lack of Independence is not mentioned even though it's just as common a problem as lack of Reliability. In general the decline reasons should be better aligned with corresponding valid deletion reasons, after all only reasons that would be cause for deletion in mainspace are valid reasons for declining a draft. Another "general" issue is that all the current decline templates contain language encouraging submitters to fix the problem and resubmit, but in the case of declines that mean "this draft can never be accepted/will now be deleted" no such "fix and resubmit" language should be used. Roger (Dodger67) (talk) 06:35, 19 January 2018 (UTC)
  • I like the tonal change in the proposal (by Drewmutt) a lot. I am too jetlagged tonight to drill into details, but I strongly support making messages like this more comprehensible to new users, and it's my view that this approach (less policyspeak, more examples and guidance) will be a signficant step forward. --joe deckertalk 06:39, 19 January 2018 (UTC)
    Only problem with it is naming specific sources - we're a global project, don't privilege certain sources over all others. Rather talk of "mainstream media" than individual publishers or titles. Roger (Dodger67) (talk) 06:45, 19 January 2018 (UTC)
    I have no problem with that change in general (although I do believe examples help), but would like to see IMDB left in, explicitly mentioned as a no-no as it is. --joe deckertalk 16:37, 21 January 2018 (UTC)
  • I think more substantial changes are needed.
The *only* thing that should go on the draft is
"Submission declined on 15 January 2018 by Drewmutt (talk). For the explanation, see the talk page."; followed by the metadata "Declined by Drewmutt 3 days ago.Last edited by Primefac 3 hours ago. Reviewer: Inform author."
The text in grey should be posted to the draft talk page, followed by a personalised statement, with minimal formatting, to which the author can reply. I suggest changing the "leave a message for the reviewer." to "write a question below, or on the my talk page, or add {{help me}} to your post.
The {{Find sources}} template should be on every draft, and not be part of the submit/resubmit templates.
The "You are encouraged to make improvements by clicking on the "Edit" tab" is well behind the author's leaning curve. In writing the draft, the draft the first time they proved they can find and use the edit tab. Similarly, the "you may request deletion" part is not needed, and dramatically hurts the clarity of what's important, it serves no important purpose. No hope authors just walk away anyway.
The stating of various options for getting help is good, but it belongs on the talk page. In general, questions and answers about improving the content of a page go on the talk page.
The criteria of inclusion page, is a tad patronising. Like WP:ENC, it is "in your face". It should be reserved for people who have previously not read important messages. An in-your-face response is appropriate for resubmitters who are not listening, not for first time submitters.
"Please note that if the issues are not fixed, the draft will be rejected again" doesn't fit all cases. It implies the draft has things that can be fixed sufficiently to allow acceptance. Often, this is not true. Finding better sources, when there is no sourcing or bad sourcing, is not "fixing", but complete redrafting. If the first draft was based on Facebook and promotional material, it needs WP:TNT; adding a better source does not make the old unreliable promotional content OK. I do think there should be separate styles of responses for
almost (please fix these things then move to mainspace, themselves, yes, allow for newcomer competence);
maybe/promising/keep working (these people may need the most help) (; and
hopeless (the draft is decidedly not acceptable, maybe they can start again, point to Joe's essay).
--SmokeyJoe (talk) 07:05, 19 January 2018 (UTC)
Enthusiastic yes please to your comments about {{find sources}}, without prejudice to the others. --joe deckertalk 16:39, 21 January 2018 (UTC)
That template is in all templates except for {{AFC submission/reviewing}}. It's in the "how to improve your draft" section. Primefac (talk) 16:44, 21 January 2018 (UTC)
Yes it is, {{find sources}} is always there, and should stay there on the top of every draft, even if everything else is move to the talk page. I'd like to see lots of stuff moved to draft talk pages, but not that. --SmokeyJoe (talk) 01:31, 22 January 2018 (UTC)
  • @Drewmutt: What are you trying to convey with the phrase "should be excluded" in the next-to-last sentence of the proposed nn decline? I assume you mean not counted towards notability, but editors whose drafts are declined may think it means "should be excluded from the draft", which, except for user-generated content, would be at odds with existing policies and guidelines (WP:NEWSBLOG, WP:PSTS, and WP:ABOUTSELF). --Worldbruce (talk) 07:29, 19 January 2018 (UTC)
Although, technically you're correct, in my experience, it's rare that those types of sources are properly used, and would rather have them dump them instead of getting wordy about "well, you can use them, but you have to do so properly and in rare cases". Drewmutt (^ᴥ^) talk 22:52, 19 January 2018 (UTC)
  • As SmokeyJoe and others have said, there are two separate problems: the general template structure and wording, and the specific problems of the nn template (the way we use notability is so complex, that any attempt to explain it in a few sentences is not likely to be successful.)
I think I agree about SJ's proposal for a basis restructure , but it might be helpful to work on the current structure first, the material in red. I`ll have my suggestion ready later today/tomorrow.
There are 3 probably related immediate problems that hinder work on this: The nn template needs to subst, soit can be editing on the user talk page. It also needs to preview. (ANdideally the preview shouldbe editable from the draft page). DGG ( talk ) 10:01, 19 January 2018 (UTC)
  • DGG, when we decline a draft, the decline reason is subst. There are many times I've either declined with the wrong reason and/or gone back to edit something to fix a typo etc. Also, we can preview the decline notice (when choosing a decline reason, it shows a (preview) link to the right). Primefac (talk) 12:59, 19 January 2018 (UTC)
    I think what DGG meant was that the decline notice should be editable using the script - that is, once "nn" is selected, the reviewer should be able to edit the nn reason itself. This would basically turn every (edited) decline into a custom-reason decline. Enterprisey (talk!) 22:57, 21 January 2018 (UTC)
  • If the nn decline template is changed (and you can count me among those who think it can be improved), is there a way to measure whether the change is an improvement for the people in IRC help?
The nn decline has been used 265 times from 1 January 2018 to earlier today. Eleven of those declines (4%) led to the submitter asking a question on the reviewer's talk page (9), the AfC Help Desk (1), the Teahouse (0), or their own talk page (1). A further seven submitters (3%) may not have fully grasped the explanation of the nn decline, because they resubmitted and were declined again for nn or for one of the eight more specific non-notable reasons.
I think these measurements are a reasonable, if imperfect, proxy for how confusing the template text is to our target audience. So I would hope that any change to the wording of the nn decline template would be monitored over a similar period to ensure that the change doesn't make these percentages increase. Suggestions for better ways of measuring the effectiveness of the text are welcome. --Worldbruce (talk) 20:33, 19 January 2018 (UTC)
Methodology and selected data
  • I started by exporting all drafts in category Category:AfC submissions declined as non-notable. This misses drafts that, after being declined for reason nn, were deleted or were accepted. Based on experience, I believe those numbers to be small in the chosen time frame. Deletions of active drafts are relatively uncommon, and it usually takes more than a few weeks to remedy a nn decline and get the draft re-reviewed and accepted.
  • Using Wiki Database Scanner, I limited the results to those drafts declined for nn since 1 January 2018 (about the last 18-19 days worth). This produced a list of 265 drafts.
    • I examined the submitter's contributions to see if, since the nn decline, they had asked a question about the draft on a user talk page, at the AfC Help Desk, or at the Teahouse. This may miss questions posed by a different IP address or account than the original submitter. Twenty submissions were from IPs. This method misses questions posed through IRC help.
    • Using Wiki Database Scanner, I checked for drafts declined for nn since 1 January 2018; declined again since then for any of: nn, athlete, bio, corp, film, music, neo, prof, or web; and not already on the list of declines that generated questions.
Draft where submitter may not have understood decline Submitter Decliner(s) and whether they left custom comments Question(s)
Draft:B-Nasty discography (edit | talk | history | links | watch | logs) Passportgang (talk · contribs) 78.26 w. comment question
Draft:Genoir (edit | talk | history | links | watch | logs) Camdavis (talk · contribs) Theroadislong w. comment question
Draft:University of Maryland School of Social Work (edit | talk | history | links | watch | logs) UMBSSW741 (talk · contribs) WikiDan61 w. comment question
Draft:Code for Pakistan (edit | talk | history | links | watch | logs) Huma.hamid (talk · contribs) Dial911 w. comment question
Draft:Suzhou Nocturne (edit | talk | history | links | watch | logs) Costwk (talk · contribs) Theroadislong w. comment question
Draft:BeepBox (edit | talk | history | links | watch | logs) StinkerB06 (talk · contribs) Theroadislong question
Draft:Rima: The Story Begins (edit | talk | history | links | watch | logs) Aaron.Harris (talk · contribs) MadeYourReadThis w. comment question
Draft:IMAD: Introduction to Modern Application Development (edit | talk | history | links | watch | logs) Talking head123 (talk · contribs) Kagundu question
Draft:MyChat (edit | talk | history | links | watch | logs) Astronomich (talk · contribs) SeraphWiki w. comment, and Heliosxeros question 1, question 2
Draft:SAFETRIP (edit | talk | history | links | watch | logs) HappyGoLucky18 (talk · contribs) Dial911 (twice) w. comments question
Draft:Belmont Park (edit | talk | history | links | watch | logs) DocScribble (talk · contribs) Robert McClenon w. comment question
Draft:Extraction thimbles (edit | talk | history | links | watch | logs) S329163204 (talk · contribs) 1997kB, Theroadislong, David.moreno72, all w. comments
Draft:Jacobson Elementary School (Anna Marie Jacobson Elementary) (edit | talk | history | links | watch | logs) AlexHuang1029 (talk · contribs) Heliosxeros and Onel5969, each w. comments
Draft:Mastering Swimming (edit | talk | history | links | watch | logs) Wt.Love (talk · contribs) David.moreno72 (twice) w. comment
Draft:SmartBuilder (edit | talk | history | links | watch | logs) WitM (talk · contribs) David.moreno72 (4 times) and Theroadislong (twice), all w. comments
Draft:Team Stannis Social (edit | talk | history | links | watch | logs) Isaaaken (talk · contribs) Theroadislong (twice) and GorillaWarfare, w. comments
Draft:Tigress Cat (edit | talk | history | links | watch | logs) 69.131.170.104 (talk · contribs) WikiDan61 and Joe Decker
Draft:Tyrannoraptora (edit | talk | history | links | watch | logs) Hallothere! (talk · contribs) Theroadislong and Justlettersandnumbers, each w. comments

Thanks to the submitters and reviewers for their work. Any errors in summarizing it are mine alone.

RfC to raise NCORP standards

Please see Wikipedia_talk:Notability_(organizations_and_companies)#RfC:_Raising_NCORP_standards Jytdog (talk) 02:27, 21 January 2018 (UTC)

withdrew it - discussion is ongoing at Wikipedia_talk:Notability_(organizations_and_companies)#RfC_discussion. Jytdog (talk) 16:36, 22 January 2018 (UTC)

Does my backlog look big in this?

Hi. Not only may I as a non-account-holder casual editor not CREATE a page, on WIKIPEDIA THE ENCYCLOPEDIA ANYONE CAN EDIT, but, I cannot even EDIT THE PAGE WHERE PEOPLE REQUEST SOME PRIVILEDGED CAST TO CREATE A PAGE FOR THEM.

"There are 1533 pending submissions pending submissions in Category:Pending AfC submissions." (sic.) Nice backlog.

PLEASE JUSTIFY IN CAPS WHY IN ***** MUST WIKIPEDIA EDITORS CREATE ACCOUNTS? Entry by user:119.18.13.17. Added by scope_creep (talk) 13:40, 25 January 2018 (UTC)

Hello, IP user. This isn't the correct place for this, however, I'd like to let you know, that as a non-registered user, you can in fact create an article. See Wikipedia:Your first article. However, like all new creators, they do need to be vetted by the WP:AfC process here. After a user becomes autoconfirmed, they can, if they wish, create articles and forego the AfC process, but all articles ARE vetted, in some way. Articles are vetted by WP:NPP. I would suggest, that you always sign your posts, using ~~~~, so we know who's commented.
Is there a particular article that you are creating? Lee Vilenski (talk • contribs) 14:30, 25 January 2018 (UTC)
 Fixed the text duplication. Thanks. Primefac (talk) 14:32, 26 January 2018 (UTC)

G13 is an automatic process?

Main discussion is thataway. Primefac (talk) 21:47, 26 January 2018 (UTC)

The following discussion is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.

If a draft that has been declined at AfC isn't edited after six months, it gets tagged for speedy deletion per WP:G13 by HasteurBot and shortly afterwards it gets deleted. I've just noticed that a large number of these deletions are done by one admin at a pace of about several dozen a minute: given this speed and the fact that they don't otherwise have edits to the draft space, it seem unlikely they're doing any sort of review. In effect, the deletion of a draft after 6 month is an automatic process. Is that how it's supposed to be? I've occasionally seen editors making last minute edits to defer G13 tagging, but how effective is this practice? Shouldn't there be a process in place for systematically examining abandoned drafts and preventing the automatic deletion of any that have potential? – Uanfala (talk) 21:42, 26 January 2018 (UTC)

I'm cutting this off here and now before it turns into yet another debate. This is currently being (and has been) discussed in at least six different venues in the last few months, including an ongoing thread at WT:CSD. The text of WP:G13 says that any draft in the AFC process that has not been edited for 6+ months is eligible for deletion. There is nothing in there (currently) about requiring discretion on the part of the deleting admin, even though most of the deleting admins do exactly that. Discuss it further at the other page, not here. Primefac (talk) 21:47, 26 January 2018 (UTC)
The discussion above is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.
So, is there any systematic way of reviewing G13-tagged drafts? Should I take the above reply to mean "no"? – Uanfala (talk) 21:56, 26 January 2018 (UTC)
Sure, keep an eye on Category:G13 eligible AfC submissions and Category:Candidates for speedy deletion as abandoned drafts or AfC submissions. If something's worth keeping, put {{AfC postpone G13}}, fix it, and/or submit it for re-review. Primefac (talk) 22:02, 26 January 2018 (UTC)
I know I can do that, but should I be the only one going through the thousands of pages there? I can't do that on my own. Shouldn't there be a systematic process in place to ensure that drafts are reviewed before getting deleted? – Uanfala (talk) 22:38, 26 January 2018 (UTC)
It's a volunteer project and a few people work the lists. Here's a thousand more (as of now) you can check and save or G13. User:MusikBot/StaleDrafts/Report Legacypac (talk) 23:13, 26 January 2018 (UTC)
We all do as much or as little as we want, when we want, for the betterment of the encyclopedia. Legacypac does what I feel is a very good job of patrolling the old pages and finding the dusty gems amongst the refuse, and I'm sure there are other gnomes who do the same.
Additionally, to answer your last question - most of these drafts were reviewed, most of the them were declined, and the necessary changes were never implemented. As mentioned here and elsewhere, many of the admins who patrol pages tagged as G13 do at least give a cursory examination to see if the page is worth keeping, so there is some minor amount of "systematic" review process for them. Primefac (talk) 23:42, 26 January 2018 (UTC)

Collating userspace essays

In a thread above it was mentioned some user space essays, and I thought it might be a good idea to collate some of these (along with templates) so that we're a) giving somewhat the same advice between reviewers, b) not making redundant templates all over the place, and c) possibly creating a library of "AFC" review templates (to avoid having to spell out long username templates). Feel free to add to this list below if you have some, and maybe we can find some common threads. Primefac (talk) 12:56, 16 January 2018 (UTC)

Review templates/messages (usually subst)

Userspace essays

  • User:Primefac/RefTypes - short, subst'able essay about the various types of references and what each type is good for (primary, independent, name drops, etc). Also used as a subst-able template, which (if necessary) has a |primary= param that adds a note about how they have a lot of primary sources and could use some more independent ones.
  • User:Joe Decker/IsThisNotable - essay about notability, designed to let the reader determine the notability of their draft
I think it would be good to peer review Joe Decker's essay with the intention that it could be promoted to a Wikipedia essay with a shortcut, or an advice page within the AFC project. Curb Safe Charmer (talk) 17:51, 18 January 2018 (UTC)
I'd be glad for that sort of peer review and improvement--anything in particular with the goal of helping new editors get up to speed on GNG in a practical way. That page originated because I felt we did a terrible job of it on policy and help pages. Anything that helps improve that situation has my support. --joe deckertalk 21:51, 18 January 2018 (UTC)
On a related topic (working through a list of references and assessing their notability value), User:Sam Sailor has drawn my attention to the following: "User:Swpb made two fine templates last year, {{assess table}} and the accompanying {{source assess}}; I recall using them in Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Giles Roberts." Curb Safe Charmer (talk) 15:55, 28 January 2018 (UTC)

Drafts for already existing articles.

Someone has recently created Draft:LA1TV and submitted it for AfC review, but LA1:TV already exists in the mainspace. I just came across the draft while doing some non-free image checking, so I7m not sure what needs to be done in cases like this. Perhaps someone more familiar with how AfC works can take a look and try to sort this out. Thanks in advance. -- Marchjuly (talk) 01:23, 30 January 2018 (UTC)

I've redirected the Draft at the mainspace version. Good find. Legacypac (talk) 02:05, 30 January 2018 (UTC)
Thank you for taking a look Legacypac. It might be a good idea to let the draft's creator know why you did that so that they don't try an undo the redirect or just create a new draft. According to their contributions history, they have already edited the article; they might, however, be mistaking the draft namespace for their user sandbox. -- Marchjuly (talk) 02:20, 30 January 2018 (UTC)
Marchjuly, there is a "duplicate" decline reason, which has the added benefit of letting the submitter know that there's already a page about it. Primefac (talk) 13:51, 30 January 2018 (UTC)
"exists" is the decline reason for a duplicate of a mainspace article. "mergeto" can be used if it is not an exact duplicate. "dup" is the decline reason for a duplication of another draft. ~Kvng (talk) 17:45, 30 January 2018 (UTC)
Yes, my bad. Primefac (talk) 17:48, 30 January 2018 (UTC)
Thanks to everyone for the information. -- Marchjuly (talk) 21:19, 1 February 2018 (UTC)

Too many talks?

The latest snafu with "where to put this post" got me thinking about our talk pages. I think our splits are acceptable at the moment, but I'm also wondering if their scope(s) could be changed/modified. At current we have the following talks:

  • WT:AFC (this page), for "this project's administration"
  • WT:AFCR, for "asking about specific AFC reviews"
  • WT:AFCH, for feedback/questions about the AFCH script
  • WT:AFCP, for requesting access to the participants list

I think the formal splits are helpful, but the last talk page is mostly the one I'm debating the scope of. Currently there are the requests for AFCH access, but there are also discussions about specific users, the NPR right, general questions about communication, etc.

I definitely think that AFCH access requests should be at that talk, but where should we discuss potential removals/issues with AFCP users? I'm not particularly fussed whether they take place here (WT:AFC) or at WT:AFCP, but I would like to codify it so that users know where to post stuff. Thanks. Primefac (talk) 14:50, 10 January 2018 (UTC)

Offhand, I can see arguments going either way. Having all "reviewer reviews" at the the AFCP talk means that "participant"-related discussions are all held in the same place. On the other hand, having all discussions (outside of the scope of AFCR/AFCH) on this talk means that you don't have to wonder "where's the best place to discuss this". Primefac (talk) 14:53, 10 January 2018 (UTC)
Hah, I was going to bring up same thing. I think AFCP should be for clerical stuff since complex discussions should have the widest audience?. Interestingly AFCP has 300 watchers (maybe because people watch as they add themselves/request access), compared to 500 for this page, and only 70 for reviewer help and 90 for AFCH. I'm curious about what pages other people have watchlisted - I have all the pages watchlisted - which would help I think in knowing where discussions should take place. Galobtter (pingó mió) 08:42, 11 January 2018 (UTC)
  • Perhaps it may be sensible to move the requests for the helper script to PERM after all, as was discussed a while back when we agreed to put the participant list under full protection. AWB is not a user 'right' in the true sense either, but it's been handled successfully at PERM for years. Kudpung กุดผึ้ง (talk) 21:00, 12 January 2018 (UTC)
    ​My only concern with that would be drive-by admins who approve everyone with 500+ reviews when we get a "backlog" that gets mentioned at AN (which did happen). I'm okay with having the requests at AFCP, because we do have enough admins patrolling to keep the list updated. Primefac (talk) 16:28, 14 January 2018 (UTC)
Primefac I don't think your concerns about the admins at PERM are particularly worrysome. That would be the same issue for all the rights that are handled there. Most of the admins who work that department are fairly clued up and they don't make many mistakes, but in any case, you are generally so quick on the ball you would get there before anyone else does. Kudpung กุดผึ้ง (talk) 22:44, 14 January 2018 (UTC)
Fair enough, just something to consider. Not particularly relevant to this discussion anyway. Primefac (talk) 23:20, 14 January 2018 (UTC)
I would be okay with merging AFCR here to reduce the number of venues. I scanned the recent posts made to that page; some are just "how am I doing" posts, which would be perfectly fine on this page. Enterprisey (talk!) 02:59, 13 January 2018 (UTC)
Yes, too many talk pages. Wikipedia_talk:WikiProject_Articles_for_creation/Participants#General_discussion should be happening here. I don't see why WT:AFCR and WT:AFCH should be separate either. If you look at the conversations on the other pages, they often gravitate to general discussion and policy. When they don't, they're short an unobtrusive. If all were combined, we'd all have fewer pages to watch and no question about what to post where and no need to alert watchers of other pages to a drifting conversation. I personally think the only thing that needs to be on a separate page is the part of WT:AFCP for requesting access to the participants list. But, if others feel differently, I'm happy to continue to watchlist them all and do my best to choose the best venue for new postings. It's not a biggie. ~Kvng (talk) 23:37, 22 January 2018 (UTC)
Primefac indicates below that other talk paged will be merged here in March (2018). ~Kvng (talk) 23:01, 1 February 2018 (UTC)

Proposed AfC specific CSD

The discussion Wikipedia_talk:Criteria_for_speedy_deletion#Proposed_New_"Not_Notable/Hopeless"_CSD is here. Please join in to create something that will save us all a lot of time. Legacypac (talk) 23:59, 3 February 2018 (UTC)

The completely unofficial "I'm just making this up as I go along" February 2018 AFC Newsletter

So! It's a new month. Lots of new faces, some old ones departing, and lots of stats to crunch.

The raw numbers for January 2018
  • 8613+ submissions
  • 9327+ reviews, resulting in ~767 new articles
  • 150 reviewers with with at least 1 review (median 6, mean 43.5, max 867 reviews), with a total average of 300 reviews per day.
The good news
  • The backlog was cut by 1/3! Down from ~2400 to just over 1600.
  • We gained almost 30 reviewers, which included a dozen "inactive" reviewers that have returned. This brings us up to 234 "active" reviewers.
  • There has been a lot more feedback, dialogue, and communication between reviewers. This includes requests for second opinions/advice at WT:AFCR, constructive criticism on individual reviewer's talk pages, and a few good discussions about what we're doing and how we're doing it.
The "glass-half-____" news
  • The number of Very Old submissions dropped from almost 800 (at our max) to about 240. Yay! Unfortunately, VO still has ~5 drafts that have been waiting for over two months (9 weeks). Boo! If current reviewing trends keep up (outpacing draft creation by ~10%) this won't be an issue for long, but even at our max the oldest drafts weren't much older than they are now.
  • Of the 234 reviewers on the list, only 150 actually reviewed drafts in the last month. This is part of a growing trend; in October nearly 80% of the list had reviewed at least one page, and we've declined steadily to about 63%. On the other hand, the number of reviewers with 1+ reviews has increased steadily by ~15 per month since October; more reviewers means more reviews, so despite the low "participation" percentage there's still a net positive result (which is important).
Technical stuff
  • The decline template can now take two decline reasons. AFCH itself hasn't been updated yet (that change is still in beta) but you can manually add a |reason2= to the decline template after using AFCH.
  • On the pending subs tool, you can now sort by WikiProject. And if you're into adding WikiProjects for drafts, use the new Rater tool!
  • A shoutout to There'sNoTime for creating this sweet graph. It's quite fascinating to see the overall trends of submission and review.
  • In March 2018 the three minor talk pages (WT:AFCP, WT:AFCH, and WT:AFCR) will be phased out and all discussions will happen on this talk page. This is in order to centralize the discussions and allow for more effective communication. Requests for access to AFCH will still happen at AFCP, but discussions about specific reviewers will take place here. Any open discussions in those locations will be moved here, and all discussions from before today (1 Feb) will be archived. Some people might have noticed that the archive boxes include all of the talk pages, meaning that old discussions will still be easily searchable.

If you like this post and want to see more, let me know. If you're rather not have your watchlist clogged by silly data crunching, let me know! If there's something more/less you'd like to see in these sorts of updates, well, you get the picture.

In conclusion, lots of good things happening, but as always there's almost stuff to keep in mind. Good job, and keep it up!Primefac (talk) 18:27, 1 February 2018 (UTC)

Accepting and declining

If one wanted to, (not that I would) but could one submit an article for review and then accept the submission themselves? Ramesty (talk) 05:36, 11 February 2018 (UTC)

Anyone that is autoconfirmed 10 edits/4 days can move a page into mainspace. Legacypac (talk) 05:49, 11 February 2018 (UTC)

Dr. Anthony J. Hall-Martin

With apologies, I've made rather a cock-up here, and accepted the draft before running the copyvio check. Running the check immediately after accepting it (the wrong way round, I know), there is regrettably, a very close match to this [18]. I've let the author know of the problem, and let a note on the article Talkpage, copied to Diannaa. Is there anything else I should do? I've not got the know-how to tag it for Copyvio myself. KJP1 (talk) 16:18, 11 February 2018 (UTC)

I've sent it back to a draft and removed the blatant copyvio. — JJMC89 (T·C) 17:49, 11 February 2018 (UTC)
CSD G12. Use Twinkle, paste in the source if known. Legacypac (talk) 20:26, 11 February 2018 (UTC)
Many thanks both, and apologies for the extra work. It's rather a pity, as he definitely merits an article. KJP1 (talk) 20:39, 11 February 2018 (UTC)

Moving to mainspace over redirect

Hi All, I'm sure I'm simply being dumb, but I found a draft for Draft:Blindspot (season 1) and Draft:Blindspot (season 2). In the mainspace, these titles are redirects to the list of episodes (Well, the second series is, I think season 1 is in the wrong place.) As there is already an article for these topics, would it prudent to tell the editor to bring up a conversation about splitting the list of Blindspot episodes, or simply decline the drafts, and let them know it already exists?

I also would just like to clarify what is the procedure for articles that are only redirects (Say an article for a game, but currently it redirects to the publisher?) would I request a technical move, copy and paste and mark for deletion, or state that it already exists? Lee Vilenski (talk • contribs) 16:31, 13 February 2018 (UTC)

If it's a redirect, it doesn't "already exist". You should tag the redirect for G6:Move deletion stating the draft that needs moving (assuming it's an acceptable draft of course).
In this particular case, it looks like a copy/paste. Since I'm already clued in on this I'll take point on the moving and filling in, but in the future you should check the content vs. the existing content (in this case List of Blindspot episodes) - if it's a direct copy (or near enough) move it to the mainspace at the appropriate name, then blank the appropriate sections at the article and use {{split article}}. Primefac (talk) 16:40, 13 February 2018 (UTC)

AfC decline notice to talk page ended in wrong place.

Not sure how this is worked out yo which talk page gets the notice, but the decline notice for Draft:John Sadleir (police officer) incorrectly went to me. User:Rmfssadleir created the page, I changed the name on request, and User:Eastmain submitted the page for review. Ronhjones  (Talk) 13:35, 12 February 2018 (UTC)

@Ronhjones: The original version was tagged as yours (|u=Ronhjones), which was never changed, so you got the notification. — JJMC89 (T·C) 02:45, 13 February 2018 (UTC)
Thanks - I think I've worked it out now. Looks like the creator wrote it in the main sandbox (then lost it!). Looks like I got it back for him. I shall remember to check (and edit) the AfC header in future! Ronhjones  (Talk) 18:53, 13 February 2018 (UTC)

What speedy delete do we use...

...when there is a draft that is a duplicate of one already in mainspace? (I see where I missed my chance to speedy delete it during review). Atsme📞📧 00:59, 14 February 2018 (UTC)

If a copy of mainspace I sometimes use WP:G12 because it lacks attribution but if just a independently created draft there is no speedy. Legacypac (talk) 02:53, 14 February 2018 (UTC)
Actually, it's the same article - Grigor Hasratyan and Draft:Grigor Hasratyan Atsme📞📧 03:02, 14 February 2018 (UTC)
Creator got tired of waiting for review and just created page themselves. They have that right. I'll request a history merge which will remove the draft. Legacypac (talk) 03:08, 14 February 2018 (UTC)
unrelated thread moved to my talk page. Primefac (talk) 12:54, 15 February 2018 (UTC)


Three Strikes Rule for AfC submissions and reviews discussion has been closed

And there's no consensus for a bot-based approach. There might be consensus for an AfC guideline to MfD drafts with more than three declines. AdA&D ★ 16:57, 15 February 2018 (UTC)

We should implement this on a manual basis. On the 3rd or 4th decline send to MfD for discussion and either promotion or deletion. It is more fair to the creators and the reviewers and brings resolution. If it works well, we can automate the noms later. Legacypac (talk) 20:56, 15 February 2018 (UTC)

Checking to see if there is an existing article

I was sloppy. My apologies to all Jytdog (talk) 20:11, 16 February 2018 (UTC)

The following discussion is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.

So at Draft:Nina Teicholz (2), four AfCers reviewed the article, User:Robert McClenon, User:Lee Vilenski, User:SeraphWiki, User:St170e, and then the fifth, User:Chrissymad, gave the correct answer - there is already an article on this topic. The creator is very frustrated now and that is going to make a somewhat difficult situation (an aggressive commercial paid editor; see below for an additional note on that) more difficult.

I am very grateful for the people who regularly do this work, but would folks here please make sure you do this step? Thanks, and sorry for the nag. Jytdog (talk) 18:09, 16 February 2018 (UTC)

Thank you for letting us know about this rather odd sitaution. In this particular instance, I agree with you that it might have been worth checking to see if Nina Teicholz existed, since AFCH will not remove the (2) in its check for duplication.
In general, though, I don't think it's worth the time and effort to ask a reviewer to check the entirety of mainspace on the off chance the draft subject is in the Article space under a different name or spelling. Primefac (talk) 18:17, 16 February 2018 (UTC)
well yeah but Nina Teicholz, in this case. We recently had a case where Forest therapy was moved to mainspace from AfC but Forest bathing already existed. Would have been very hard to figure that one out. That is not what I am talking about here... Jytdog (talk) 19:49, 16 February 2018 (UTC)
That Forest therapy page was absolute crap filled with promo and OR. I would not have thought to look for it under anotzer name in mainspace. Is it not the draft creator's responsibility to consider expanding an existing article? Especially on a bio anyone searchng for sources is going to find the existing page. Legacypac (talk) 19:56, 16 February 2018 (UTC)
User:Jytdog - Before you nag us about checking for existing articles, please do your own research. I am aware that you usually do your own research quite well, but in this case it appears that you did not. The reason why I did not decline the draft on the grounds that there already was an article is very simply that there wasn't an article, only another draft. That is why the current draft has a (2) in its title, because I had to append the 2 to the title in order to move it from the sandbox into draft space. I did comment on the first version of the draft that there were multiple copies of the draft. In retrospect, the multiple copies may have been intended to game the system, just like the multiple accounts were. Please do not tell us that we should have taken note of the existing article when there wasn't yet an existing article. Perhaps we were not sufficiently aggressive in investigating and reporting the sockpuppetry, but it is hardly fair to say that we should have noted the existing article when it wasn't yet in article space. The first version of the draft was moved from draft space into article space on 4 February 2018, and earlier declines had to be on other grounds. Robert McClenon (talk) 20:05, 16 February 2018 (UTC)
Thanks for your note, User:Robert McClenon. There was a history merge here so it is unclear to me what has gone on there - but yeah looking closer it appears it was created on that date, Feb 2. I apologize for asking the impossible of everybody. Closing, embarassedly. Jytdog (talk) 20:11, 16 February 2018 (UTC)
The discussion above is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.

Disclosed and apparent conflict of interest

The reviewing instructions are silent with regard to actual (in other words, disclosed) or apparent COI or paid editing issues.

I am not sure if people at AfC should consider COI or paid editing issues; in many ways mixing content review with discussion of user behavior can lead to very messy situations, and I am generally carefully to keep them separate. If somebody's editing shows the signs of paid editing or conflict of interest, I generally don't touch the article, but instead open a discussion with the person at their talk page, asking if they have any connection with the subject. That way I come to them with "clean hands" in their eyes. (I learned that from experience)

But for instance at the discussed above, the editor disclosed on their userpage on 27 December that they work for a PR firm. And it is pretty clear that they were seeking to improve the existing Nina Teicholz page (which has been hammered by conflicted and paid editors, btw, including one who tried to add negative content to our article about one of her critics. ugly stuff).

In this case, AfC was not an appropriate route for the editor to pursue at all. A search for existing pages, and a look at the user's userpage, would have made that clear. And giving the user a script that explains what we expect of paid editors (disclosure + posting at the talk page) would have gotten the user into the appropriate "channel" for making the changes they wanted, and would have gotten this out of the AfC queue and out of the hair of the folks here...

And I do think that reviewing AfCs with any COI of the creator in mind, is very appropriate, and what should happen. This is exactly what disclosure is for.

I have several "scripts" I use in my sandbox, here.

So the concrete question is - as part of the Reviewer's instructions (am looking at the diagram in the reviewing workflow section), would it be useful to add a "COI check" step between the "quick fail" and "content review" boxes... something like the following:

  • check to see if the user discloses a COI or paid editing status
  1. if the user does disclose, make sure the appropriate tag, template:Connected contributor or template:Connected contributor (paid) is on the draft talk page, and is complete. Paid editors must disclose employer, client, and affiliation, and it is important for reviewers to understand whose interests are being promoted when they do the review. Proceed to content review
  2. If the user has not disclosed any COI or paid editing:
    1. check to see if the article had previously been deleted
    2. if so, search WP:SPI and WP:COIN to see if the page has been the subject of socking or prior COI discussions
    3. check to see if the draft is too good for a truly new user, especially if it is about a topic where COI/paid editing is common (an executive, an author, a company, or a product)
    4. if you have concerns about conflicts of interest or paid editing, before proceeding to review the content, open a discussion with the user at their talk page, asking them to disclose any connections they have with the subject. Complete that discussion, and:
      1. if there is no COI concern, proceed to content review
      2. if the user does disclose through that discussion, explain to them what we expect of conflicted/paid editors, especially with regard to content in mainspace. Make sure the appropriate tag, template:Connected contributor or template:Connected contributor (paid) is on the draft talk page, and is complete. Paid editors must disclose employer, client, and affiliation, and it is important for reviewers to understand whose interests are being promoted when they do the review. Proceed to content review.

The benefit here is that the user can be educated and a) the discussion about COI happens before any review happens, and so the issues are not mixed up together; and b) the review is done with any COI in mind, which is the purpose of the disclosure.

Thoughts? Jytdog (talk) 18:43, 16 February 2018 (UTC)

User:Jytdog - First, apology accepted. You and I are both on the same "side" against paid editing, and it is unfortunate that we have to have sides, but sometimes we have to draw ethical distinctions. Second, I agree, at least if I understand. A reviewer should perform at least a minimal check for conflict of interest. Of course, in the case of the typical one-paragraph social media profile, there is no real distinction between a conflict of interest check and a content check, because the first says autobiography and the second says CRUD at the same time. But you are talking about otherwise plausible drafts. I agree that at least a minimal check for conflict of interest should precede a real review of content. Robert McClenon (talk) 20:29, 16 February 2018 (UTC)
Comments by other reviewers? Robert McClenon (talk) 20:29, 16 February 2018 (UTC)
I don't work in the COIN area at all but I assume any business page, musical bio, and the like is created by a COI editor unless there is no obvious benefit to the subject in having a page. I know enough about SEO to spot SEO efforts too. Getting a Wikipedia link to your youtube video or website is really helpful, even from userspace. Legacypac (talk) 22:01, 16 February 2018 (UTC)

Can someone help out Antonios Liapis

There seems to be a premature move to mainspace and possible autobiography/COI-type issue with Antonios Liapis. Could someone familiar with the AfC process step in and help out? --Xover (talk) 11:02, 2 February 2018 (UTC)

I've sent it to AfD [19]. Good catch User:Xover. Be sure to comment there. Legacypac (talk) 12:40, 2 February 2018 (UTC)
Sigh. I came here asking for help hoping someone could provide hand-holding for a newbie acting in good faith. Instead the article is nominated for deletion; their attempt to move it back to userspace for improvement was reverted because it's currently at AfD; and, as the cherry on top, they have been blocked for a purely technical violation of the username policy (named after the university department), so they can't even participate in the AfD. Don't bite the newbies, indeed. --Xover (talk) 17:06, 2 February 2018 (UTC)
Oh, just to be clear: I'm being grumpy about Wikipedia's collective handling of this issue—as an exemplar of how we tend to do it in most cases—and not any kind of accusation or criticism of any of the individual editors involved. I see that coming in a reply under Legacypac's post here it could easily be read as addressed to them, and so felt it prudent to clarify. Apologies for any misunderstandings: mea culpa. --Xover (talk) 17:29, 2 February 2018 (UTC)
It's ok. I prefer to see the notability of a page determined sooner than later to avoid wasted effort by all involved. I concur with your assessment it is likely an autobio, which should be discouraged. Legacypac (talk) 23:55, 3 February 2018 (UTC)
WP:BITE apparently doesn't apply to all newcomers. ~Kvng (talk) 15:41, 5 February 2018 (UTC)
If it doesn't apply to all newcomers, that may be a sign of reason, which would be good. As it is, Do not bite has become such a dogma that it does more harm than good. A few newcomers need to be bitten. Robert McClenon (talk) 03:15, 17 February 2018 (UTC)
At least at AfC nearly all drafts get comments amd advice, in mainspace new pages get speedy deleted. Legacypac (talk) 05:58, 7 February 2018 (UTC)

Twin G11's

Well, I encountered two nearly identical drafts, one in draft space and one in a sandbox, which appeared to have been written on Madison Avenue. Tag two for the price of one. Robert McClenon (talk) 00:10, 18 February 2018 (UTC)

Proposal to overhaul the default tutorial

I've put up a proposal at the Village Pump to replace the old WP:I and WP:T with the superior Help:Intro. Any opinions welcomed there. T.Shafee(Evo&Evo)talk 02:56, 18 February 2018 (UTC)

Draft:Lattice and bridged-T equalizers

I have been trying to cross-check the contents of this draft that has been sitting there since last many days now. However, someone with more technical knowledge of the subject would be able to better understand it and thus, approve it. Any techie in the house? Dial911 (talk) 07:52, 18 February 2018 (UTC)

Not that I have a great deal of knowledge of the subject, but it seems to be an alright article. If it passes WP:COPYVIO checks, then it should be fine. Once in the mainspace, it will be looked at by more technical viewers, surely? Lee Vilenski (talk • contribs) 11:02, 19 February 2018 (UTC)
I am concerned that this may be a candidate for a merge. I have posted to Talk:Zobel_network#Draft:Lattice_and_bridged-T_equalizers for feedback. Of course, if everything else looks good, it should be OK to accept this and any merge can be done once the article is in mainspace. ~Kvng (talk) 18:16, 19 February 2018 (UTC)
No harm in sending to mainspace. It will be tagged for the correct wikiprojects and dealt with. Legacypac (talk) 18:45, 19 February 2018 (UTC)
An administrator has asked Wikiproject Electronics for help. Dial911 (talk) 20:48, 19 February 2018 (UTC)

Draft created by a sock & reproduction of material deleted at AfD

See Draft talk:Ajithkumar Nair. This seems to slip between the cracks of CSD criteria but the draft is not going to go anywhere because the guy is not notable. What to do? - Sitush (talk) 18:16, 20 February 2018 (UTC)

The "Early life" section is word-for-word copied from the deleted article, but everything else is new. So you're right, it doesn't meet either G4 or G5. If it meets the concerns expressed in the AFD and (in general) WP:42, then it's acceptable. Primefac (talk) 18:21, 20 February 2018 (UTC)
Er, I think if you check the history of the deleted article you will find that it all comes from the thing prior to it being pruned for fake refs, irrelevancies etc. - Sitush (talk) 18:22, 20 February 2018 (UTC)
Oh, well, in that case.... Primefac (talk) 18:30, 20 February 2018 (UTC)
In that case, what? I'm confused. Can we use CSD in draft space for anything other than stale drafts? Can this be CSD'd as a recreation of the AfD'd article or is someone going to decline on the grounds that it could be the basis of another attempt to assert notability etc Another attempt won't succeed - it is promo of a minor civil servant, so unless he does something dramatically different in his life, he'll never meet the bar - Sitush (talk) 18:48, 20 February 2018 (UTC)
Ah, sorry, we conflicted. The thing has gone now, thanks. - Sitush (talk) 18:49, 20 February 2018 (UTC)
All the Gx WP:CSD can be applied to drafts or any other page Legacypac (talk) 20:37, 20 February 2018 (UTC)

When to Go to MFD? Questions

I have a few questions related to some of the above discussion, about whether there is any agreement as to when to take a draft to MFD. I see that there seems to be rough agreement that three declines are sometimes enough to take a draft to MFD as not likely to make it to article space. Is that a rough consensus?

Second, sometimes it is obvious on the first submission that a draft will never be an article. My assumption is that these completely clueless social media directory entries and even more clueless nonsense should just be declined, and not MFD'd. Of course, if the draft is a candidate for G3, G10, or G11, tag it, but those are speedy deletions. Otherwise, if the author doesn't try again, the crud will come up for G13 in six months. Is that the opinion of others?

Third, should the reviewer use judgment on a second submission of something completely clueless (where it is obvious that the author just doesn't understand)?

Robert McClenon (talk) 03:25, 17 February 2018 (UTC)

For some months now I've been CSDing AfC declines in selected categories [20] I use G11 spam a lot and I work to clear the Test declines with WP:G2 test or just blanking sandboxes. Hoaxes and Attack are other areas to CSD. No more work than nominating G13 later but this way they are not REFUNDable and the garbage is gone sooner. As a result I've noticed a marked increase in the quality of pages that make it to User:MusikBot/StaleDrafts/Report as G13able.

I like the 3 strikes idea. After 3 or 4 declines send it to MfD for a firm decision. I'd also prefer that we use CSD more often instead of declining to cut down on resubmissions and the need for a G13 reviewer to look at it later. Legacypac (talk) 03:46, 17 February 2018 (UTC)

  • I like the idea too, but with independent reviewers being sufficient to delete a draft, without going through MfD. However, there is an earlier problem to deal with, which is the overly soft wording of decline templates for things that on the face are completely hopeless. The author should be advised unequivocally that their topic does not look even close to notable before it becomes a question of deletion of the confused resubmitter’s work. —SmokeyJoe (talk) 05:42, 17 February 2018 (UTC)
Next question: If I decline something for the first time that is completely hopeless, should I say so? My thinking is that if a submission is completely hopeless, as most submissions are, there is no real need to waste time telling the editor not to resubmit, because, on the first submission of something really clueless, telling him not to resubmit might be saying not to put beans in your ears. Robert McClenon (talk) 06:50, 17 February 2018 (UTC)
Yes, but with more carefully chosen words. I think, always leave open the possibility that the reviewer is wrong. “I think this topic is wholely unsuitable for inclusion”. “If you want to pursue this further, I recommend that you work through User:Joe_Decker/IsThisNotable”. Remove the template that allows them to resubmit. And as always, these words belong on the talk page. And the author should be {{welcome}}d. —SmokeyJoe (talk) 08:32, 17 February 2018 (UTC)
Well the notability decline templates say something about "not yet shown to meet notability' which is really misleading in many cases. "Notable" is almost the wrong word. We should be saying "nothing about this draft suggests a "credible claim of significance necessary for an acceptable wikipedia article. It's pretty safe to assume new editors don't put in mundane stuff and leave out how the subject won a major prize or played for the NFL. Save the "notability" declines for borderline cases where more refs could get them over the line. Legacypac (talk) 07:11, 17 February 2018 (UTC)
You say to remove the template that allows them to resubmit. How? Are you saying that I should come up with a manual method of declining the crud, or that the templates should be modified to leave out the resubmit option, or what? Are you saying that we should make the work of the reviewer harder (which of course will simply lead to a longer backlog), or what? Please explain. Robert McClenon (talk) 19:02, 17 February 2018 (UTC)
It shouldn’t be hard work. Regrettably, it seems harder than it should be. Reviewing is hard, but acting on your judgement at the end of the review should not be. I am not a fan of all the templatings and button pushing, I think the current state of workings of AFC is regrettable. I think it needs someone technically more competent to sort it out. The lack of easy forceful rejection of a draft is the biggest problem I see. —SmokeyJoe (talk) 22:56, 17 February 2018 (UTC)
Maybe I don't understand, or maybe I do. The answer is coming across as a typical "Dump on the reviewers", although it may be meant to be dumping on the tools, which is fine with me. As a reviewer, and in most functions of Wikipedia, we are normally advised to use the tools available, and normally the tools really do help. For instance, it is easy to tag crud for CSD, and it is easy to submit a repeatedly rejected draft to MFD. But are you saying that, as a reviewer, I should go through a lot of manual steps to reject crud, or are you saying that there should be wordings of the decline that are appropriate to crud and do not encourage fixing and resubmitting? Robert McClenon (talk) 00:04, 18 February 2018 (UTC)
It is never my intention to dump on people. Dump on AFC, it works poorly. Dump on typical reviewer reject comments, sure, they can be as crap as the crap they respond to. I later discover that the reason the comments are so bad is that auto-templating-wikiprogramming whatever constrains them, so yeah, dump on the tools. Go back to dumping on the AFC system because in involves no process review. Individuals have to make a song and dance about a year worth of bad reviewing by a bad reviewer.
“should be wordings of the decline that are appropriate to crud and do not encourage fixing and resubmitting?”. Yes, that’s exactly what I meant. —SmokeyJoe (talk) 00:56, 18 February 2018 (UTC)
I still have some questions. If you think that I am a little defensive about AFC and its reviewers, I am, because there are editors who like to dump on the reviewers, saying things like that we aren't sufficiently welcoming, because most new editors primarily want to improve the encyclopedia. (I understand that it is dogma to say that, but it isn't my observation. My observation is that a few new editors want to improve the encyclopedia, but a majority are either clueless or self-serving or both.) What do you mean by saying that the system involves no process review? What do you mean about bad reviewing and bad reviewers? What do you mean about dumping on typical reject comments? Are you saying that the reviewers should be more welcoming and go to greater lengths to help the editors, or are you saying that the messages should be changed, or both? I don't really understand what you are saying should be changed. Robert McClenon (talk) 03:05, 18 February 2018 (UTC)
It is my observation that most editors are improving the encyclopedia, not just attempting to improve the encyclopedia. It is also my observation that non-editors (complete newcomers) who come to Wikipedia to write a new article and do so through AfC are mostly in a different set to the previously mentioned editors, in that they care about their particular chosen topic (suitable or unsuitable) and have little though for anything else. I think you and I are observing the same thing?
User:SmokeyJoe - Maybe. Most actual current editors are improving the encyclopedia. That wasn't the question, but we do a relatively good job of dealing with or weeding out editors who do not improve the encyclopedia (trolls, flamers, POV-pushers). The statement that I took issue with was that most new editors are here to improve the encyclopedia, and from context the administrator who said that meant first-time editors who submit to AFC. They may have said that because it is party line dogma. In my experience, first-time editors who come in to AFC fall into three main classes. The first is those who have a conflict of interest. The second is those who are completely clueless (and submit complete crud). Sometimes the first and second classes overlap. The third and smallest class is those who are here to help the encyclopedia, and most of them do help. I think that many of the new editors who are able to contribute constructively start off with useful maintenance rather than by doing one new article off the bat, and starting off with maintenance is a better approach anyway. We do have a few editors who honestly want to contribute to the encyclopedia and honestly think that writing one new article is the best contribution they can make. I wasn't talking about actual current editors. I was talking about first-time AFC contributors. I was also talking about first-time new page creators before ACTRIAL. Robert McClenon (talk) 02:38, 19 February 2018 (UTC)
"The system involves no process review"? I an talking about long term active project management in simple terms. It is related to the buzz term "continuous improvement", although that is more of a fine refinement. It's is usually expressed in terms of operating in a cycle: (1) Document your assumptions and (2) document your processes (3) carry out the process; (4) review and modify your assumptions; return to (1). AfC, I believe, began with few documented assumptions, and some of the undocumented assumptions I believe were way out. One poor working assumption is that newcomers recruited to AfC are a demographic similar to the new editors of the growth years, 2004-2007. I think instead, AfC is catering for, in practice, far more COI, promoting newcomers. The process of AfC works well for well-intentioned newcomers, and struggles with (struggles under) others. The architects of AfC don't seem to be around. They would be the natural reviewers. The review process would want to have a record of feedback. AfC has pretty good live support. Records? I am not sure about records. On initial browsing I thought there were no records of any kind, but with digging and asking and time I have discovered there are records. Unfortunately, off the top of my head, I can't remember where they are. Anyway, that's what I mean by no review process. DRV and MRV are great review processes for deletions and renames. AN and ANI serve well enough has admin review. I saying all of this, I need to say that it is far easier to comment on problems than to propose workable solutions.
User:SmokeyJoe - I still don't understand what you are saying should be done differently. I agree that it is easier to comment on problems that to propose workable solutions. I also agree that the working assumption is wrong. I agree that there seems to be a party line assumption that there are a lot of enthusiastic new editors ready to contribute, and therefore the fact that they aren't showing up is taken as proof that the AFC reviewers are driving them away or something. Robert McClenon (talk) 02:50, 19 February 2018 (UTC)
"What do you mean about dumping on typical reject comments?". That is a comment on my earliest comments on unhelpful reviewer comments on hopeless drafts that were tendentiously resubmitted until finally sent to MfD where I first saw them. I guess my comments were not well worded or well directed and may be well criticised as appearing to merely dump on the reviewers making the comments. I had in mind comments by reviewers such as SwisterTwister which I considered barely coherent.
I am saying that some things need to be changed. Some ongoing experimenting is a good thing. One thing we seem to be agreeing on is a better response to hopeless drafts, a response that is not easily read as suggesting that addition of more references and more inline formatting may convert their hopeless draft into an accepted draft. In these discussiond, I have discovered that the responses are over-templated in template coding that few know how to modify. Few knowing how to modify the templates is itself a problem that should be fixed. Fixed by who? The template coders seem to no longer be here.
User:SmokeyJoe - I see a template coder comment below. I don't think that the templates need to be changed, so much as that we need to add a few more choices that are less encouraging. Robert McClenon (talk) 02:50, 19 February 2018 (UTC)
Where are these templates? --SmokeyJoe (talk) 02:19, 20 February 2018 (UTC)
One clumsy method I can suggest is that on reviewing a submitted drafts as hopeless, blank it, and replace it with the text "The draft was reviewed and was judged as not suitable for inclusion. It's contents can be found in the page history. Please read WP:5P. --~~~~". Do it enough times, and maybe a template-savvy gnome will provide a more elegant solution. --SmokeyJoe (talk) 10:19, 18 February 2018 (UTC)

The one thing I'll say is that I am happy to code up changes to the decline notices (or even add new ones!) but with the exception of the change to the |nn| decline we did last month no one has actually proposed anything. We've just been arguing about the fact that it needs to be changed (and from my perspective, everyone is in agreement with that yet we still keep arguing). Make some proposals, get some votes, and I'll do what's necessary. As with most of the templates I maintain, I'm not going to make major updates every other day while the final language is being debated. Primefac (talk) 15:29, 18 February 2018 (UTC)

User:Primefac - Thank you. I don't think that the templates need to be changed, with one exception. I think that we need a few more choices. I will comment below. Robert McClenon (talk) 02:50, 19 February 2018 (UTC)

Template Thoughts

First, I have already said that the "blank" comment is weird and should be changed. As written, it seems to be meant to be the response to a submission with a meaningful title and no content. That isn't something that I see, but I do often see a blank submission in a sandbox. In these cases, it isn't a requested article. It is either an empty test edit or a case where the editor is trying to do something and didn't succeed. Robert McClenon (talk) 02:58, 19 February 2018 (UTC)

Second, we need a template reply for an entry that reads like a social media profile or a directory entry. We need something to say that Wikipedia is not a social medium or a directory and that entries about non-notable people are not suitable for inclusion.

Third, I would like to see a template that just says, "This submission is not suitable for inclusion in Wikipedia" that should be accompanied by one or two sentences by the reviewer. This is not really that different from the second point. We do have the "NOT" choice, but it really is more appropriate for things that fall into a specific dustbin rather than the generic dustbin.

More thoughts on template additions will follow. Robert McClenon (talk) 02:58, 19 February 2018 (UTC)

@User:SmokeyJoe's idea above - Blank and replace with a "hopeless" message would work great. We already do that for attack and copyvio. Put a clock on the message so the whole page comes up for deletion in a category in a week or two. No need to wait 6 months. Can we make the message sent to the user talkpage say something more clear than "there is a new comment"?Legacypac (talk) 03:02, 19 February 2018 (UTC)
If it's a formal decline notice, they'll receive it on their talk page. Primefac (talk) 03:03, 19 February 2018 (UTC)
Sorry I make a lot more comments on drafts than declines. Legacypac (talk) 03:38, 19 February 2018 (UTC)

Blanking (No)

I dislike the idea of blanking of drafts simply because they are crud. I think that submissions that are crud should be declined, with wording that does not mention resubmission, but they do not need to be blanked. We blank attack pages and copyvio because they have no right to exist. Crud has a right to exist in draft space or user space, just not to be accepted into article space. We delete attack pages as a courtesy to the person being attacked. We delete copyvio because it is illegal (even if no one else besides Wikipedia cares about the law). We don't delete word salad in draft space (although we do delete word salad in article space). Why should we delete stupid autobiographies in draft space? Just decline them and discourage their resubmission. That is enough. Robert McClenon (talk) 04:04, 20 February 2018 (UTC)

Just let the crud sit for six months with the indication that it is crud, and in six months it can go G13 bye-bye. It isn't necessary to blank it unless it is illegal or hurtful. Copyvio is illegal. Attack pages are hurtful. Social media profiles are just not encyclopedic. Robert McClenon (talk) 11:49, 20 February 2018 (UTC)
Are AFCH users regularly blanking drafts? This shouldn't be happening, and I'm not entirely sure why the suggestion is being made that we are (unless I'm misreading). Primefac (talk) 12:25, 20 February 2018 (UTC)
User:Primefac - No. No. The suggestion is that we should be blanking them. I am replying to a suggestion that drafts that will clearly never be articles should be blanked by the decline template, and replaced with language stating that they are not appropriate for Wikipedia. The decline template does blank drafts that have copyvio, and attack pages are blanked. I was disagreeing with a proposed practice, not a current practice. I think that drafts that are completely unsuitable, in particular social media profiles of non-notable people, should be declined with wording to that effect that does not encourage resubmission, but I don't think that they should be blanked. We don't blank drafts that are spam. We decline them as reading like an advertisement, and sometimes tag them for G11, but we don't blank them. We don't blank drafts that are complete fabrications, unless they are fabrications that tell lies about living people. Otherwise we decline them as hoaxes and can tag them for G3, but we don't blank them. I was disagreeing with a suggestion. I hope that this clarifies. Robert McClenon (talk) 19:14, 20 February 2018 (UTC)
If you don’t find the content offensive to Wikipedia, I support you not blanking. If another editor finds abandoned content mildly offensive, I urge them to consider blanking rather than take it to MfD. For content that does not fail anything at WP:NOT, at MfD I expect an articulated reason for deletion including why blanking is not good enough. I support competent editors acting on their judgement. —SmokeyJoe (talk) 01:33, 22 February 2018 (UTC)

Automatically tag for deletion

I've reviewed several thousand pages tagged as blank submissions and found almost zero ever get anything useful added after the decline. Tagging them later for G13 is a waste of time and provides a refund opportunity for no purpose. How about we build in the {{Db-g2}} tag right into the decline and save the step of manually tagging later. Also, I've found that hidden text in drafts is too rare to include in the decline notice. A quick check by the reviewer of even the history will show there is hidden text.



Currently it says: empty or blank "We're sorry, but we cannot accept blank submissions. Please consider submitting to Wikipedia:Requested articles instead. If in fact you did include text within the article, but it isn't showing, please make sure that any extra text above your entry is removed, as it may be causing it to hide and not be shown to the reviewer."

I propose it says: empty or blank "Your submission to Article for Review was blank. You may want to use Wikipedia:Requested articles instead or restart the draft with actual content. The blank page will be deleted shortly" and include the G2 tag

Similarly pages tagged as "test" pages very rarely get built out and should just be deleted

Current message: "This submission seems to be a test edit and not an article worthy of an encyclopedia. Please use the sandbox for any editing tests, but do not submit for review until you have an article that you want reviewed for inclusion in Wikipedia. Thank you."

Proposed wording: "Your submission seems to be a test edit. A sandbox is provided for test edits. Please only submit pages that you want reviewed for inclusion in Wikipedia. The submitted page will be deleted shortly. Thank-you" and include G2 tag.

"van" or vandalism pages could be speedy tagged for deletion in the decline as G3. The message is fine as is. Legacypac (talk) 04:22, 20 February 2018 (UTC)

User:Legacypac - I think that the wording of blank is just wrong, because it implies that the submitter was requesting that an article be written about the topic, and I have never seen a blank submission with a valid title.
I disagree, but not strongly, with automatically tagging drafts for G1, G2, or G3. I would prefer that the reviewers tag them. It would be nice if the template asks whether to tag. Once in a while the reviewer may think that there is a possibility that the author may get a clue, but not every often. So I disagree with automatic tagging, although I like the concept of optional automatic tagging. Robert McClenon (talk) 19:24, 20 February 2018 (UTC)
As I noted, I've cleared thousands of declined blank pages. The decline includes the title so in the off chance they want to restart they can just click the title to restart. I concur that the assumption they want to request a page might be wrong. Very few accounts that submit blank pages ever edit again. Legacypac (talk) 20:35, 20 February 2018 (UTC)

The Templates

Template:AFC_submission/comments Legacypac (talk) 02:37, 20 February 2018 (UTC)

"never going to be suitable"

This is of course a subjective opinion. I've personally rescued a few AFC declines from MFD that were tagged with this. Why the obsession with wanting to delete as much as possible and discourage new users by not even allowing their pages to get a chance at a vote?

G1, G2, and AFC

There was recent discussion about completely stupid submissions to AFC, in which User:Legacypac mentioned that after submitting patent nonsense or a test, the editor never comes back within six months to do anything reasonable. I tagged two completely stupid submissions for G1 and G2, that is, for multiple reasons. These were declined on the technically correct grounds that G1 and G2 do not apply in user space or draft space. I hadn't tagged them as G3 because it isn't clear to me what, in user space, is just vandalism short of hoaxes and attack pages. So these two stupid submissions are still there and will come up for G13 in six months. So, first, purely stupid tests don't get deleted. So, second, should I nominate them for MFD? Robert McClenon (talk) 17:54, 21 February 2018 (UTC)

If they're in the user space, just remove the AFC tags. Otherwise, there really isn't much harm in having a draft sitting around blank for six months. Primefac (talk) 18:01, 21 February 2018 (UTC)
User:Primefac - I still don't understand about "sitting around blank". It appears again that I am being told that I should blank cruddy drafts. I disagree. Attack pages and copyvio are blanked because, for different reasons, they have no right to exist. Am I really being told again that I should blank cruddy drafts just for being cruddy? Robert McClenon (talk) 01:26, 22 February 2018 (UTC)
Sorry, was thinking about A3 - no content. My point was that there's no need to delete a cruddy draft immediately, because they'll eventually be deleted. Not being archived, they'll probably never be seen by more than a half-dozen people. Primefac (talk) 02:02, 22 February 2018 (UTC)

Per WP:CSD G1 and G2 DO apply to Draft space and G2 applies to anything submitted to AfC (and maybe so should G1) The average quality of pages coming up for G13 has really improved since I started clearing out all the tests, blanks, vandalism and attack pages from the AfC declines. Better quality pages to review should encourage users to look for gems in the pile instead of relying on the bot to nominate pages. Legacypac (talk) 19:17, 21 February 2018 (UTC)

CSD Discussion

This deals directly with AfC Wikipedia_talk:Criteria_for_speedy_deletion#G2_applying_to_AFC Comments welcome. Legacypac (talk) 10:27, 22 February 2018 (UTC)

Created template "42" to save time

I find in some cases it helps to really... gently pat someone on the head with the GNG, so a number of times in the past I've just copy-pasted the big words from WP:42 to summarize the point. I've been meaning forever to just templateify it so I don't have to copy, paste, so here's what you get now if you type {{42}} on a page:


Hope this might save others time as well, and get the point GNG across in large and highlighted letters. MatthewVanitas (talk) 02:27, 22 February 2018 (UTC)

I used it already. Good idea.Legacypac (talk) 10:27, 22 February 2018 (UTC)
Very nice, very happy with that template. Lee Vilenski (talk • contribs) 10:39, 22 February 2018 (UTC)

Dial911

I noticed that the Datari Turner page has been created again. This page was caught up in the Mister Wiki arbcom case and the founder of Mister Wiki has continued working on the articles. Part of the Arbcom case involved abuse of the AfC system.

User:Dial911 was the person who passed the article into mainspace.

Since very early in this account's history, they have been trying every month to get AfC and/or NPP privileges:

Just wanted to raise this. Jytdog (talk) 17:49, 23 February 2018 (UTC)

Jytdog, if you haven't noticed the AFD, they've already received their bollocking for it. I have a feeling they'll be more cautious in the future. Primefac (talk) 18:03, 23 February 2018 (UTC) (talk page stalker)
I did see that yes - it is in this block of text at the AfD. I wanted to raise this more centrally. I am not sure that Dial911 is experienced enough yet to be doing AfC. I find the history of the account somewhat troubling as well. I want to assume good faith but the history is what it is. Jytdog (talk) 18:16, 23 February 2018 (UTC)
Jytdog, my sincerest apologies, for some reason I thought you had placed this on Dial's talk page as a note. You are more than welcome to raise your concerns here. I've stricken my previous statement. Primefac (talk) 18:32, 23 February 2018 (UTC)
no problem, thanks. I should have linked to the AfD and didn't - now it is here. Jytdog (talk) 18:39, 23 February 2018 (UTC)
Jytdog, I don’t know how would I prove that I have nothing to do with Datari Turner. I just reviewed it as I would have done with any draft. Me requesting for AfC and NPP rights was purely exclusive from the event of approving this draft. Dial911 (talk) 19:13, 23 February 2018 (UTC)
Thanks for your note. I did not say that you have a connection with Turner. You did show very bad judgement, which is something that is not unexpected for someone who is inexperienced. I also do not understand why you have been so eager to get NPP and AfC reviewer rights, after making a series of very desultory edits. Your behavior is what I would expect of someone who does not have good intentions but is seeking to subvert WP's independent review processes. I am not saying that you do have bad intentions but the behavior does look this way. Jytdog (talk) 19:17, 23 February 2018 (UTC)
I know I made a bad decision and I will be cautious in the future. If you have any recommendations for me, I will be more than happy to consider. Thanks! Dial911 (talk) 19:28, 23 February 2018 (UTC)

Template:!Cite etc.

Do people here use {{!Cite}}, {{!Promo}}, {{!IN}} etc.? Judging from their documentation, they seem specifically designed for use at AfC. They have been nominated for deletion, see Wikipedia:Templates for discussion/Log/2018 February 19#Template:!Promo. – Uanfala (talk) 00:03, 24 February 2018 (UTC)

FamousBirthdays.com

I'm trying to respond to a request for feedback, following a Decline/Speedy Deletion. I'm sure I read somewhere of a specific Reliable Sources discussion of FamousBirthdays, the upshot of which was that it wasn't acceptable as it's user-driven, although moderated, I think. Can anyone point me in the direction of the discussion, so that I can cite it in response. Thanks and regards. KJP1 (talk) 18:12, 25 February 2018 (UTC)

I've seen it mentioned as not being a reliable source at a number of AfDs. I did some quick digging and this discussion from a several years ago popped up: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Reliable_sources/Noticeboard/Archive_153#Is_famousbirthdays.com_a_reliable_source_for_personal_information ZettaComposer (talk) 18:30, 26 February 2018 (UTC)
ZettaComposer - Many thanks indeed. I knew I'd seen it discussed somewhere. When one looks at it, it reeks "Fanzine", but, understandably, the disappointed contributor wants to know why it's not RS. KJP1 (talk) 18:47, 26 February 2018 (UTC)

Articles with TBD

We have three drafts that are full of TBDs:

What do we want to do with them? We can accept and leave them as stubs, or we can leave them as redlinks.

I think we should just accept them, because if we do not, someone will eventually make an article, possibly without all the useful templates in them, and we will have to go in and merge all of them. I am not sure if we want to define any sort of timeline for these, as it is an annual thing that occurs for a lot of sports teams, leagues, etc. Thoughts on it? Kees08 (Talk) 23:29, 26 February 2018 (UTC)

This is an annual problem, where people seem hell-bent on creating articles before any reliably-sourced information is available. If accepted as blank articles, they simply become magnets for unsourced additions. Take a look at 2017 Mid-American Conference football season, which was accepted in that condition and still is largely unsourced and still contains blank sections. As for the "useful templates", these draft creators are just copying older articles and changing the dates. Nothing is lost by keeping this in draft space until there is something substantive to be said. One last thing -- the two "sources" in the draft for the Mid-American conference are dead links, another problem that seems to be common with these too-early submissions. NewYorkActuary (talk) 01:35, 27 February 2018 (UTC)
Yup, if there's no suitable content they can be declined as either NOT or blank (depending on how much actually is in the draft). An additional note pointing specifically to CRYSTAL would also be helpful. Primefac (talk) 13:12, 27 February 2018 (UTC)
I'd be worried these articles are only here, due to user's wanting to be the person that created the article, rather than adding anything helpful. WP:TOOSOON articles need to be treated as such, even for ironclad notable subjects. Lee Vilenski (talk • contribs) 13:22, 27 February 2018 (UTC)
Sometimes these are created in mainspace and moved to draft until they're notable. I think the best we can do is decline as not yet notable, then hope that when it is actually time to create them, somebody will notice the "there is a draft for this article" message. – Joe (talk) 13:20, 27 February 2018 (UTC)

I G13 as they come up. If the creator needs them they can Refund. Legacypac (talk) 04:24, 1 March 2018 (UTC)

Long es

I know most of you won't be able to see this, but with the new 1000 character edit summaries AFCH has taken to leaving some bloody long messages. Enterprisey, how easy would it be to truncate AFCH edit summaries to 250 chars? Primefac (talk) 01:59, 2 March 2018 (UTC)

Halfway point check for L293D

L293D was given access to AFCH one month ago on a two-month probation. In the spirit of collaboration (and to not throw them under the bus for doing things they didn't realize were incorrect), I would invite constructive criticism on their AFC activities. The primary purpose of this thread is to politely let them know about areas they can improve, not to lambaste them for their mistakes. This feedback will then be taken into consideration at the end of their probationary period. If you see nothing wrong, that is a perfectly acceptable response. Thank you. Primefac (talk) 01:49, 4 March 2018 (UTC)

Aw... I was looking forward to sharpening my pitchfork. :P I'll take a random sampling look in a few hours. Hasteur (talk) 01:59, 4 March 2018 (UTC)
Couple of quick things: you can't A7 drafts, and "not having a birth date" isn't a valid reason for a decline (example which actually did have a birth date anyway). This wasn't a hoax or joke and foreign-language sources are allowed for this draft. jcc (tea and biscuits) 02:08, 4 March 2018 (UTC)
Just curious - what do you do to those two not-A7 drafts, that seem pretty clearly never going to reach article? Wikipedia:Miscellany for deletion? --GRuban (talk) 03:45, 4 March 2018 (UTC)
You have a few items in the toolchest: First is you could let it age out 6 months and let CSD:G13 grab it (very likely because they're "youtube stars") because they're probably mayfly editors (live in the sun one day then never return). Second is redirecting to some mainspace page that is a reasonable redirect target (to focus energy there and to get a potential WP:SPINOUT) Finally, if the page gets continously re-submitted, you can decline it and then file a MFD on the grounds of repeated resubmission without improvement or likelyhood of improving enough to be accepted. This last one is the nuclear weapon as deletion removes visibiliy of the entire history and a MFD success is a lot harder to get back than the other options. Hasteur (talk) 03:51, 4 March 2018 (UTC)
WP:G11 is a good tool for promo which most declines are. Legacypac (talk) 05:09, 4 March 2018 (UTC)
Also don't reach for G11 too quickly. We want to give them an opportunity to reform and address the promotional nature. Hasteur (talk) 05:17, 4 March 2018 (UTC)
Yes it depends on the situation. Some pages are not going to ever be mainspaced like a local business promo page. Legacypac (talk) 05:33, 4 March 2018 (UTC)

AFCH acting up?

Twice in a row now I've picked my reasons from the scrolling box, though when I chose "Exists" it didn't give me the usual place to place the title of the existing article, and two times in a row I get two weird broken letters in the box instead. Please see Draft:Walter_Lenck and Draft:TVASTERA for what's happening. Thanks! MatthewVanitas (talk) 09:02, 3 March 2018 (UTC)

Just coming to report exactly the same issue. Little letters, "a" etc., appearing in the templates where the decision should be. Is it related to the "second reason" change? KJP1 (talk) 10:30, 3 March 2018 (UTC)
I've got the same issue too when I reject a submission. KGirl (Wanna chat?) 13:01, 3 March 2018 (UTC)
@Enterprisey: jcc (tea and biscuits) 14:15, 3 March 2018 (UTC)
same Chetsford (talk) 17:34, 3 March 2018 (UTC)
Recent edit seems to be decided to parse a two-letter decline (e.g. |nn|) as two separate reasons (e.g. |n|n|). I've rolled back the change until I or Enterprisey can figure out what caused the issue. Primefac (talk) 19:05, 3 March 2018 (UTC)
That's very weird. I'm heading into a busy stretch IRL (again :/) so I might get to this sometime during the week, but it's more likely I'll fix this next weekend. Feel free to ping me/email me/etc if this isn't fixed by, say, next Saturday. Sorry about this. Enterprisey (talk!) 09:11, 4 March 2018 (UTC)

Nobin Paul

@Primefac, @Legacypac, this article created by User:Priyankalalan seems to have magically moved out of Afc, even though Draft:Nobin Paul is still there. scope_creep (talk) 14:55, 8 March 2018 (UTC)

Meh... only trivial edits from other editors after submission, so while it's not an ideal copy/paste pagemove it's not exactly prohibited. I think if the PROD survives I'll histmerge it back into the draft for further work. Primefac (talk) 15:03, 8 March 2018 (UTC)

Regarding notifications left by the helper script

Two things:

I’ve seen two recent examples where the editor who got a notification did nothing other than place the {{submit}} template, leaving the persons who actually authored the page uninformed. In one case I did it for a user who was asking abut getting a draft reviewed at the teahouse and in another case it was a user I had actually just blocked, the adding of the template being practically the only positive edit they ever made. Is there a way the tool can detect this and prompt the reviewer to maybe send it to someone who actually did the work?
I also do a lot of work at WP:UAA and quite often we get reports there from users who have just had a spammy AFC submission declined, and who named their accounts after the subject they were writing about, usually violating WP:ORGNAME. I find it a bit weird/tone deaf that we drop invites to the Teahouse on users who are very clearly violating the username policy and will be blocked in short order. Any way the tool could also prompt the user to verify they wish to leave the invite if the username closely matches the name of the submitted dratf?

Thanks for your consideration. Beeblebrox (talk) 22:12, 8 March 2018 (UTC)

  • the teahouse invite is optional and controlled by a checkbox. The feedback page target can be controlled but does not always go where one thinks it should. It seems to be a minor issue no one is willing to fix. Legacypac (talk) 22:58, 8 March 2018 (UTC)
  • When someone other than the draft author adds {{subst:submit}}, they should use {{subst:submit|author}}. This sets |u=author instead of |u=submitter in {{AFC submission}}. |u= defines the user who will get notices. — JJMC89 (T·C) 04:58, 9 March 2018 (UTC)
  • I've discussed the first issue multiple times with a certain editor; unless the reviewer is willing to check the page history, see who created the page, check that against who submitted the page, and update as necessary, it will just send it to the submitter. I personally don't think it's worth going to that much effort. Even if we were to automate it, it's possible that the creator abandoned it and a second editor improved and submitted the page. Should the creator be notified if the second editor did all the work? I would hazard a guess that drive-by submitting is relatively rare.
As for the teahouse thing - I personally never send a teahouse invite, usually for the reasons mentioned. Primefac (talk) 14:05, 9 March 2018 (UTC)

Proposal to create stubs about spiders

Please see Wikipedia:Village pump (proposals)#A Bot for Creating Arthropod Stubs, Trial. Some of the respondents, who seem to be involved in New Page Patrolling, have recommended that thousands of stubs about arthropods be created in the Draft: namespace rather than the mainspace. As that recommendation would affect your work more than most, I thought you might be interested. WhatamIdoing (talk) 04:44, 2 March 2018 (UTC)

Not necessarily as the pages would be reviewed by volunteers on the bug project, not AfC volunteers. However, more thoughts are welcome as the editors here deal with new pages all the time. Legacypac (talk) 05:08, 2 March 2018 (UTC)
@WhatamIdoing: @Legacypac: Can we beg and plead that they not AFC them, but rather keep them in each editor's namespace and use some internal category so the bug-project reviewers can find them? I really would not enjoy having them in AFC! MatthewVanitas (talk) 02:50, 10 March 2018 (UTC)
We're talking about a bot creating 15,000 stubs (over time). Nobody should have to move that many pages. Even if you spent a mere ten seconds loading each page, glancing at it, and moving it, we're talking about dozens of hours of work.
The OP posted 20 sample articles, and nobody's found any significant problems. Not one. There's really no need for manual review (nor any likelihood of a manual review doing any good, because humans get tired and bored and would likely miss any rare errors). WhatamIdoing (talk) 04:14, 10 March 2018 (UTC)

School security

Moved from Special:PermaLink/828214769#School_security. Primefac (talk) 13:56, 1 March 2018 (UTC)

Malcolmxl5 - The above seems rather odd and I'd appreciate a second opinion. I came across it in the Afc lists, and was rather surprised to see it had been moved to the mainspace. To me, it's very much an essay rather than an article. For a start, what region is it covering? If global, the sources are too limited. And if so, what is the purpose of the, rather random, mentions of New Zealand and Poland? The tone seems strange; "As we see a rise in gang and drug activity among other safety threats in our schools". To be frank, it doesn't seem anything like a comprehensive overview of the secondary sources on this, admittedly huge, subject. And the move to mainspace seems a little unconventional. I've pinged the editor involved. KJP1 (talk) 22:01, 6 February 2018 (UTC)

Hi KJP1, it’s not an article that I would attempt to write, that’s for sure! The move was a technical move - I completed a move on behalf of User:MatthewVanitas who was unable to move it himself as it required a page to be deleted. Matthew is an experienced Wikipedian who is active in the AfC lists and I assumed that he had reviewed and was publishing the draft article (that said, I would prefer a clearer reason such ‘Publishing accepted Articles for creation submission’ rather than the one that was given). --Malcolmxl5 (talk) 11:35, 12 February 2018 (UTC)
Malcolmxl5 - Many thanks for getting back, and sorry for the delay in replying. You're quite right: I've seen Matthew many times at Afc and his contributions are first-rate. So, I shall go and ask him. Thanks again. KJP1 (talk) 06:05, 1 March 2018 (UTC)
@KJP1:, I think this was one where I approved it because the concept meets Notability, and with the huge delay in approvals right now (not pointing fingers, we're all trying) I thought it better to approve an inarguably Notable topic and let it get improved in mainspace, since it's not great but doesn't flat-out violate BLP or anything, and is properly footnoted (though too many Primaries). I would not rush through a BLP, or an article of iffy Notability, but when there's a no-question Notable I have a hard time consigning it to a possible month+ wait over, say, phrasing or global perspective or whatnot. I realize some folks may oppose this on principle, but I think it's a pragmatic reaction to the backlog. MatthewVanitas (talk) 02:48, 10 March 2018 (UTC)
MatthewVanitas - Really appreciate the note and absolutely understand the logic. And yes, the backlog continues to be concerning. You may have seen a discussion a few of us have been having over at Mfd about whether a change to the wording of one or two of the Decline templates may be part of the answer. Any thoughts of your own would be very much appreciated. Thanks again and best regards. KJP1 (talk) 07:21, 10 March 2018 (UTC)

Another AFC template: "Template:AFCassure" for encouraging and reassuring novices at the end of your comments

Since I use this phrase *constantly* I made a template for it to save time.

Please make these changes, then click Resubmit for next review. Do not be discouraged, AFC is an iterative process, and Declines are normal. Keep up the improvements!

Hope this may be useful to some folks, feel free to tweak it. And I didn't know what categories to apply; thoughts? And note that I would use this template only for Promising articles, not for articles that I'm pretty sure should never publish. MatthewVanitas (talk) 01:43, 10 March 2018 (UTC)

Those are nice sentiments that will help many new users. But where exactly do you use it? In the comment section of the submission? On the editor's Talk page? NewYorkActuary (talk) 01:48, 10 March 2018 (UTC)
I use it at the end of a Custom comment on the Decline, or in the comment box when choosing another Decline rationale. See for example Draft:Tomoko Akane. It only saves seconds, but I like saving those seconds, same reason I made the template {{42}} posted earlier on this page. MatthewVanitas (talk) 02:24, 10 March 2018 (UTC)
How about template AFCNO that says something like "this topic is not at all suitable for Wikipedia. Do not resubmit this" We could then batch nominate anything with the template for deletion every week. Legacypac (talk) 02:41, 10 March 2018 (UTC)
@Legacypac: ooh, I *like* it! Go on with your bad self! (But would not "AFCno" be easier? Or do caps not matter?) MatthewVanitas (talk) 02:43, 10 March 2018 (UTC)
afcno would be easier to type. I have to hit shift for every cap letter. Legacypac (talk) 02:47, 10 March 2018 (UTC)
Per your comments, I have moved it to "afcassure", with a Redirect that I think still lets the capitalized version work. MatthewVanitas (talk) 05:43, 10 March 2018 (UTC)
  • maybe step it up with afccrap "your submission is crap. I'll never get back the 10 seconds it took to figure that out. Don't edit Wikipedia again!" Anyone want to use that template some days? Legacypac (talk) 05:57, 10 March 2018 (UTC)
  • @Legacypac: I have been sorely tempted at points to link submitters to Wikipedia:No one cares about your garage band, but that's probably counted as bitey. I love the concept of the article, though the execution is a bit dad-jokey. I might look and see if the originator is open to punching it up a bit, or is no longer around, and maybe I can either make it punchier, or perhaps preferably find someone younger/hipper/funnier than me to make it more current. MatthewVanitas (talk) 22:42, 10 March 2018 (UTC)
For what it's worth, MatthewVanitas, WP:GARAGE is a WP essay not a userspace essay, so you're welcome to edit it (though I understand the desire to "clear" it with the creator). Primefac (talk) 23:24, 10 March 2018 (UTC)

I'm tempted, but I checked and it averages just 69 views/day, and I should probably be focusing my effort on my upcoming GA nom of Shivaji with gets 11,000 views/day. It's a fun essay, I can live with it being a little cheesy. MatthewVanitas (talk) 01:19, 11 March 2018 (UTC)

Deborah Mendez

Hello, folks. An odd situation has occurred with the above-captioned article. It was created earlier today as a draft, apparently at a New York editing "meet up". There were substantive contributions made to the draft by two new editors, at which point a third new editor submitted it for review here. But about a half hour later, an experienced editor (apparently one of the organizers of the meet-up) moved the draft into Main space. That editor is not an AfC reviewer.

I happened across the article and found that it is almost a complete copy-and-paste of the subject's profile on her employer's web page. I've nominated it for speedy-deletion.

The reason I'm posting here is that the article is showing up in the AfC statistics as one that was accepted by us. Somehow, this doesn't seem right, especially because there's a reasonably good chance it is going to be deleted soon. Is there anything that can be done about having this show up in the statistics as one of "our" acceptances? NewYorkActuary (talk) 00:37, 9 March 2018 (UTC)

Which "stats" page did you see this on? I don't see it at the template page, nor was it added to Wikipedia:Articles for creation/recent. Primefac (talk) 14:10, 9 March 2018 (UTC) (please do not ping on reply)
ping. Primefac (talk) 14:10, 9 March 2018 (UTC)
Thanks for responding. It appeared for a while on Template:AFC statistics (see, for example, this version). As for Wikipedia:Articles for creation/recent, my understanding is that additions to that list are done by the AFC Helper script, which wasn't used by the person who "accepted" the draft. In any event, my concern is not that the article briefly appeared on the template list. Instead, it's whether it is going to appear as an accepted-but-soon-deleted-for-copyright-violations article whenever someone analyzes our collective performance. NewYorkActuary (talk) 14:44, 9 March 2018 (UTC)
Ah, missed it. There are a few different users who track the stats of a page, and as far as I know none of them use {{AFC statistics}}, but personally I check WP:AFCAA and WP:AFC/Recent, as well as a search through reviewer's edits. Also, AA doesn't keep track of CSDs, so unless someone else is actively tracking the stats page I don't think that an out-of-process draft "acceptance" is going to affect the overall numbers. Primefac (talk) 14:51, 9 March 2018 (UTC)
I'm not sure that 'out of process' is the correct term to use. Historically, AfC is a WikiPrroject rather than an official (if albeit a necessary) process, and hence anyone with the technical ability without being on the list of 'us' AfC reviewers can move a draft to mainspace and/or delete it or flag it for deletion, whether or not they avail of the helperscript. At least that's how I have understood AfC all these years. What may need to be investigated here is the correct collection of data for the stats, but is that even a critical issue? Kudpung กุดผึ้ง (talk) 02:43, 11 March 2018 (UTC)
I meant out-of-process in the literal meaning that a non-AFCH move is not in the process of AFC itself. I'm not sure how often this sort of thing happens, but I don't think it's critical. If people are actively moving acceptable drafts that reduces the backlog, so as long as NPR catches the bad ones I don't particularly care. Primefac (talk) 13:29, 11 March 2018 (UTC)

A new wish: no drafts in sandboxes

I think there is no history of discussion on this. Drafts, particularly afc tagged drafts, but including all drafts, get a bit complicated when they are in a page titled “sandbox”. Sandboxes are meant to be for testing, and other people sandboxes should usually be left alone. I think it might be great if the AFC templates auto-detected that they were on a page titled “sandbox” and displayed a message urging the page be renamed to something describing the topic. —SmokeyJoe (talk) 22:39, 26 February 2018 (UTC)

Well, we have Category:Pending AfC submissions in userspace, and it's emptied fairly regularly. Primefac (talk) 13:09, 27 February 2018 (UTC)
Yes, but Category:AfC drafts in userspace contains 63 pages, and Category:Declined AfC submissions in userspace 3,777 pages, and many of this are titled "Sandbox". I have come across Legacypac (talk · contribs) recently seeking to clear out these old sandboxes, and I have some concern. Mostly they are NOTWEBHOST violating promotion or other old junk that should be cleared, as Legacypac wants to do. G13 will eventually collect them, but we generally give a lot of leeway to usersandboxes, especially with respect to testing.
New users are continuing to write AfC drafts in their sandboxes. I thought this was technically discouraged, that by default a prompted title was written to DraftSpace by the template coding.
I'm wondering whether we could do something more to discourage new topic drafting in sandboxes. I think that if easy, it is very desirable, because draft titles are very important for defining the topic of the content.
I also just today discovered today, User:Primefac, that you claim to be a regenerated User:Coffee? I had not recognized the long respected colleague.
Another side-thought, after looking at these recently declined AfC sandboxes, does anyone else suspect that the vast majority are sockpuppet undisclosed paid editors? --SmokeyJoe (talk) 03:54, 1 March 2018 (UTC)
I would argue that "not-junk" sandbox drafts do get moved to the Draft space. I don't know where the conversation was held (it was at least a year or two ago) but this discussion has been held before, and we determined that it was pointless to move garbage to the draft space. There's no rush to delete these pages, and G13 will eventually claim them all, and so there's no reason that we must move these non-pages out of the userspace. And I claim nothing, unless there are a dozen people all claiming to be Coffee Primefac (talk) 13:45, 1 March 2018 (UTC)
That's kinda touching, didn't know that was even a thing. I love y'all. — Coffee // have a ☕️ // beans // 21:21, 1 March 2018 (UTC)

Most "drafts" in Sandboxes are junk and dups of mainspace etc. I find all kinds of problematic pages and every so often something useful. I generally blank sandboxes as sandboxes are never really deleted out of existance and it does not require an Admin action. Most are by editors that never made another edit past the first day. Any help clearing junk is welcome in Category:Stale_userspace_drafts and Category:Declined_AfC_submissions Legacypac (talk) 04:32, 1 March 2018 (UTC)

@Legacypac: I have gone through 30 or so stale userspace drafts, following the procedure listed on the category page. I am still finding my feet doing this, and have run into some resistence here and here where editors have taken umbrage to the unilateral draftification of a userspace draft per "if the topic looks notable and is not covered in mainspace, but you are not comfortable readying it for mainspace, consider moving it to a suitable title in Draft space to expose it to more editors and encourage improvement." Guidance welcome before I do more! Curb Safe Charmer (talk) 13:54, 11 March 2018 (UTC)
@User:Curb Safe Charmer I try to steer clear of active user's userspace, unless it's an AfC submission. Sometimes I drop an AfCH comment asking if this page can be moved to mainspace or whatever. Usually the user has simply forgotten the page. The two big benefits of looking in userspace are a) surface good stuff b) delete highly problematic stuff. So we don't have to check pages over and over while looking for a and b, delete (redirect, blank or delete) useless stuff. Legacypac (talk) 19:24, 11 March 2018 (UTC)
@Legacypac: I think then, that that procedure, and particularly #8, should be tweaked to shift the focus from the nature of the draft to the status of the author. Perhaps it should say that if the draft is stale but the author is active, the emphasis should be on engaging the author before blanking/taggging/moving anything. Do you agree? Also, it sounds also like there's a need for a script to filter that category, to return only articles 'belonging' to authors who haven't edited at all for a specified amount of time. The script could also (presumably) easily identify drafts where the draft has no content other than the default new article template, so those could be tagged as G6. Curb Safe Charmer (talk) 19:42, 11 March 2018 (UTC)
Good ideas. It looks like you started at A and Z and on a user with a bunch of drafts. A and Z have already been heavily worked (cause everyone does what you did) so many of the remaining pages are active users. If you work other letters you'll find the active users are very rare. Nearly all users are one hit wonders. If we could figure out a way to ID the default new article template we could sweep away a whole lot of clutter quickly and focus on the pages that need attention. Legacypac (talk) 20:08, 11 March 2018 (UTC)
@Curb Safe Charmer: #8 was badly worded, indeed. Also, category pages are not an appropriate location for posting policy, guidelines, or essays. I have now fixed these issues, and for clarity I have linked to the fixes in the discussion that you started on my talk page. Zazpot (talk) 00:21, 12 March 2018 (UTC)

Good news

Just wanted to share that we have addressed every last AFC submission that was originally submitted in the year 2010 (as determined by HasteurBot) either through promotion to mainspace, redirection to a mainspace target, or deletion. Hasteur (talk) 01:57, 4 March 2018 (UTC)

Er ... does that mean we have AFC submissions that date to 2011? Wow. Is there a way to see all AFC submissions over 1 year old? --GRuban (talk) 04:15, 4 March 2018 (UTC)
@GRuban: Category:AfC submissions by date/2011 (replace the year as you wish). Also each time the {{AFC submission}} template gets invoked it transcludes a Year/Month/Day category hierarchy onto the page so you can trace down specific dates. Also when a AFC submission gets promoted to mainspace, we keep the AFC submission data on the Talk page pair of the article (ex: Talk:2010 Copenhagen terror plot). Hasteur (talk) 04:20, 4 March 2018 (UTC)
I probably wasn't clear, or maybe just don't understand - when I go there, I don't see pages, just more categories, and when I trace those categories down, I eventually get to articles in main space. I was asking, is there a way to get to all the AFC submissions from 2011 that haven't been reviewed yet? You know, to ... review them? --GRuban (talk) 04:25, 4 March 2018 (UTC)
@GRuban: Ah, I see. What I gave was every AFC submission, ever. Not unreviewed submissions. Everything that is unreviewed is in the Category:AfC pending submissions by age category tree. Start at the "Very Old" subcategory, then 4 weeks ago, then 3 weeks ago, then count down the days ago. Hasteur (talk) 04:30, 4 March 2018 (UTC)
Some very old declines are still around due to bot or human edits or most likely older mainspace pages sent to draft. I'm only a little surprised we had pages back to 2010. Legacypac (talk) 05:06, 4 March 2018 (UTC)
And sometimes WP:REFUND brings back old stuff. It is not actually a problem that it happens though. Similar happens with new page patrol when old redirects are converted to articles. Or old prods with maintenance tags are restored. Graeme Bartlett (talk) 23:29, 12 March 2018 (UTC)

Proposed edit

I propose that at Wikipedia:WikiProject Articles for creation/Participants, in the "Criteria" box at the top, a link be added to Wikipedia:WikiProject Articles for creation/Reviewing instructions in the text. Jjjjjjdddddd (talk) 19:37, 12 March 2018 (UTC)

It is already on the tab at the top, but it would be a good idea to link "reviewing instructions" text too. Graeme Bartlett (talk) 23:22, 12 March 2018 (UTC)
Good idea,  Done. Primefac (talk) 00:39, 13 March 2018 (UTC)

Project Goals

Contested phrase: "#Remove unsuitable and abandoned submissions via WP:CSD, WP:MfD and redirection of pages."

Clearly this project manages drafts that are put into it. That management includes deletion where appropriate. An editor has reverted me [22] without discussing or providing any evidence management of drafts is not part of the project. I don't believe that telling users who submit that we will delete their inappropriate or abandoned efforts should be controversial. The reverts were WP:POINTy, pointless and rude. They also failed to take it to talk as I requested [23] but reverted again maybe trying to spart an edit war? Legacypac (talk) 22:13, 10 March 2018 (UTC)

You made a bold move (B), were reverted (R), and thus it is your responsibility to bring it to the talk page and discuss (D). But now we're here, and we're discussing it, so no harm no foul. Primefac (talk) 23:29, 10 March 2018 (UTC)
  • I don't think the the line is quite worthy of a top level wikiproject goal. It belongs maybe as a sub point to a point that includes wikiproject maintenance. If included at any level, MfD does not belong as the second option. MfD should be the last option, for when there is a clear problem requiring a decision. The first word "remove" is unclear, and probably biased. Is there nothing between "do nothing" and "remove"? What if the submission is in a user's userspace? Contributing users have broad leeway to keep stuff in their userspace. Does it mean "remove the AfC template"? What's wrong with simply archiving?
A much more worthy project goal to include at the top level is "Review and refine wikiproject processes". --SmokeyJoe (talk) 04:31, 12 March 2018 (UTC)
Yes the contested phrase is not the goal of the project. Instead it is just something done to make our work easier—a secondary maintenance task. Graeme Bartlett (talk) 23:20, 12 March 2018 (UTC)
Agree with the above — not in the spirit of the project, and not a goal of the project. A side effect of good editors, perhaps even necessarily so, but not the goal. I suppose that'd be WikiProject:Draft sorting. ~ Amory (u • t • c) 01:38, 13 March 2018 (UTC)

AFCH no longer blanks page for Vandalism/Attack?

In the last few days, I've had several Declines for vandalism/attack, but unlike in the past, the page does not blank, so I manually go and delete the text to minimize time blatantly offensive/targeted material is visible at all.

Is that an error in the program, or a programmer decision? MatthewVanitas (talk) 06:56, 4 March 2018 (UTC)

Copyvios are also not blanked. When and why was the script changed? Roger (Dodger67) (talk) 14:44, 11 March 2018 (UTC)
I requested that copyvios not be blanked in order to make it easier for the patrolling admin to do a check on the text. I don't know why attack blanks were removed. Might want to ask Enterprisey why they removed all blanking options. Primefac (talk) 14:48, 11 March 2018 (UTC)
Yes as an admin trying to delete copyvios, it makes it much harder to confirm if the problem text is invisible. Anyway vandalism and attack certainly deserve to be speedy deleted quickly. But blanking them also makes it harder for the admin, who then has to check the history to confirm. I suppose we need some admin-only style added so that normal readers do not see it. There are already some hidden styles, that only show in preview mode, or CS1 errors in references for example. But then we would need admins to change .css file to make it visible. Graeme Bartlett (talk) 23:26, 12 March 2018 (UTC)
I'm firmly in the blank camp — an extra click/page load for a sysop is worth it in my book if it hides material — but if you wanted to achieve this, Graeme or anyone else, I think all you'd have to do is wrap the content in <span class="sysop-show">. ~ Amory (u • t • c) 01:34, 13 March 2018 (UTC)
I'll sandbox putting the span class into the decline rationale. Primefac (talk) 01:41, 13 March 2018 (UTC)
Blanking has the added benefit of causing wiki mirrors to replace the text with the blanking message. I imagine its a pain for admins though. Legacypac (talk) 02:13, 13 March 2018 (UTC)
I have noted this for a long time. Blanking, removing text and replacing with a message, and redirecting, causes the mirrors and search engine caches to update, while deletion locks in the last version forever. --SmokeyJoe (talk) 23:58, 13 March 2018 (UTC)
Not sure hiding hiding via css would help with that. ~ Amory (u • t • c) 00:56, 14 March 2018 (UTC)

ACTRIAL Post-trial Research Report posted

Report is published here. Would love to hear what y'all think on the report talk page. Kaldari (talk) 19:50, 14 March 2018 (UTC)

Post ACTRIAL - next steps

The conclusion to the report comissioned by the WMF strongly reiterates our long-time on going requirements for the NPP and AfC processes to be improved. Within minutes of the trial being switched off, the New Pages Feed was swamped with inappropriate creations and users are being blocked already. The conclusions also make some recommendations for AfC.

This is now the moment to continue to collaborate with the WMF to bring the AfC system up to date by making a firm commitment to addressing these issues. One place to discuss these projects initially is at The future of NPP and AfC - next steps where those interested in helping actively can also elect to join the task force. Kudpung กุดผึ้ง (talk) 19:24, 15 March 2018 (UTC)

Articles on surnames

Do we have any guidance on whether articles on surnames are appropriate for Wikipedia? There's a small rash of drafts on Nepalese surnames in Afc at the moment. They're not acceptable, as they're mainly not sourced, but I wondered whether they were acceptable in principle? KJP1 (talk) 17:56, 15 March 2018 (UTC)

It's one of "those days" where I can think of a half-dozen Indian surnames that have their own article, but I couldn't actually point you to a single on of them. There's also stuff like History of Routledge surname 15th to 18th centuries. So yes, in principal if an article about a surname is well-sourced then it could theoretically be included on Wikipedia. Primefac (talk) 18:08, 15 March 2018 (UTC)
I could also be thinking of castes such as Reddy, which probably should have articles, but with no specific "thou shalt not" regarding surnames, I'd say they'd be acceptable given good sourcing. Primefac (talk) 18:10, 15 March 2018 (UTC)
No need to rely on Primefac's failing memory. (Just kidding!) You can take an amble through Category:Surnames to find thousands of them. NewYorkActuary (talk) 18:22, 15 March 2018 (UTC)
Har har :-p Problem is most of those are "list of people with surname X" rather than "this is an article about a surname". However, if you're bored you probably will find a few of the latter in there. Primefac (talk) 18:26, 15 March 2018 (UTC)
Many thanks - but I'm not that bored! KJP1 (talk) 18:50, 15 March 2018 (UTC)
A possible starting point is Wikipedia:WikiProject Anthroponymy. It points to Wikipedia:Deletion policy/names and surnames. It's from 2005, but the basic arguments may still hold. --Worldbruce (talk) 19:27, 15 March 2018 (UTC)

RfC on permanent implementation of ACTRIAL

There is currently a request for comment at Wikipedia:Autoconfirmed article creation trial/Request for comment on permanent implementation about whether or not autoconfirmed status should be required to create an article in the main space. This is a follow up to the recently ended autoconfirmed article creation trial (ACTRIAL). All are invited to participate. TonyBallioni (talk) 13:40, 19 March 2018 (UTC)

Sandbox Question, etc.

I just had a discussion with User:Victuallers on my talk page that I may continue here. They have been working with students, and have been telling the students to work in their sandboxes, and the students are surprised when the sandbox is moved into draft space. I explained that the move into draft space and is commonly (but not always) done by a reviewer when a sandbox is Submitted using the big blue button. So maybe there has been a disconnect or misunderstanding as to when and whether to use the blue Submit button. Submit for what? We AFC reviewers take it to mean Submit for review by an AFC reviewer. Maybe there are other ideas as to what it means, in which case maybe other uses need a different method of requesting whatever review (e.g., by a professor) they want.

I do have a question. Does the user sandbox always automatically have an AFC Submit button? If not, when is the ability to Submit a sandbox enabled?

I assume that the other editors reading this page know that we need to be aware that user sandboxes have multiple uses, including but not limited to drafts, and that draft space has one use, which is for drafts. (Some of us know that drafts can also be developed in user space as named user subpages.) Robert McClenon (talk) 18:33, 16 March 2018 (UTC)

{{User sandbox}} does indeed always have a blue "Submit your draft for review" button. The preceding text is Writing an article and ready to request its creation?, which could possibly be tweaked to make it clearer that it's being submitted for review at AFC. Primefac (talk) 18:43, 16 March 2018 (UTC)
AfC is jargin only some experienced editors know. Maybe say "Writing an article and ready to request an experienced editor review and create it?" That might communicate not to submit crap or blank pages better. Legacypac (talk) 20:07, 16 March 2018 (UTC)
I didn't propose any language, just thinking that it could be more clear. Primefac (talk) 17:59, 17 March 2018 (UTC)
  • Sandboxes are slightly complicated, but not very complicated. I think serious drafts found in a long inactive user’s sandbox should be moved to DraftSpace but only with careful consideration by the mover, including a careful choice for the new title.
Nonsense, or NOTWEBHOST violation, in a user sandbox should be deleted per WP:CSD#U5 if it applies (no useful contributions).
For unsuitability sourced promotion, use WP:CSD#G11.
If not a promising draft, and not speediable, either remove the AfC tag or blank the whole page.
Reserve MfD for special cases worthy of discussion, include where the is a dispute with the author. —SmokeyJoe (talk) 22:47, 16 March 2018 (UTC)
Impressed that this has beenb taken up. The issue here is that newbies were surprised to find that they un change of a draft when they were preparing text.Victuallers (talk) 10:19, 18 March 2018 (UTC)
I admit that this could be confusing for new editors. I just tried something with this alt account of mine to see what happens. Kudpung (user talk:Kudpung), editing as Kudpung3 (talk) 10:38, 18 March 2018 (UTC)

I've proposed a change to User Sandbox template wording here [24] which I hope addresses the concern expressed and my concern that people don't know what the submit button does, resulting in hundreds of blank and test submissions a year. Legacypac (talk) 15:58, 18 March 2018 (UTC)

Every good contributor to a project is entitled to have a few terrible ideas. User:SmokeyJoe's idea that stupid drafts that are not speediable should be blanked is a terrible idea. In general, we blank a few things that are pending deletion, redaction, or suppression. We should either nominate the stupid drafts for deletion, or leave them alone and let them die of old age. I am puzzled by the idea of removing the AFC tag from stupid pages, because, depending on where they are, that turns off the clock. Turning off the clock is okay for regular user sandboxes, which are, after all, sandboxes. (However, if you repeatedly throw sand out of them and throw modeling clay into them, you will treated like a child who throws their toys out of the pram.) Robert McClenon (talk) 20:58, 19 March 2018 (UTC)
“depending on where they are”? They are the user’s main sandbox. The user is inactive. It is not a real draft. Blank it if not suitable to leave live, remove the AFC taggery if innocuous but not a draft. Stop moving sandbox tests to draftspace. Ideally, an afc tag in the sandbox will not put the page into the afc processing queue. Instead, it should prompt the user about selecting an appropriate title. No new user will genuinely be re-drafting the sandbox article. —SmokeyJoe (talk) 21:31, 19 March 2018 (UTC)

The time has come, the Walrus said, to finally hash out what we want the decline comments to say

I have created a sub-page here to discuss changes to the decline notices currently being used by our project. Please voice your opinions and thoughts there. Primefac (talk) 19:00, 19 March 2018 (UTC)

To keep reviewers more focused on the subject and less on the style of submission, I am proposing that the following decline reasons be removed: adv, essay, ilc, npov, v. Please visit these sections and register your outrage. ~Kvng (talk) 19:41, 20 March 2018 (UTC)

What's prohibited?

I'm afraid that I may be a bit behind the curve on this at the moment and may need to get up to speed. I certainly understand that using AFC is now the best-practice means of creating new articles, but:

  1. Is creation directly in mainspace (or in a sandbox and moved directly to mainspace) without, in either case, going through AFC prohibited by guideline, policy, or generally accepted practice?
  2. If an article has been submitted to AFC, regardless of whether or how it has been reviewed, is it a violation of a guideline, policy, or generally accepted practice to move that article into mainspace without the consent of an AFC reviewer?

By "prohibited" and "violation" I mean something that an editor will likely be blocked or banned for and/or something that will cause the action to be reverted? Regards, TransporterMan (TALK) 16:52, 20 March 2018 (UTC) PS: I'm not talking about creations by editors who have some restriction such as not being autoconfirmed. — TransporterMan (TALK) 16:53, 20 March 2018 (UTC)

In two words, "no" and "no".
We encourage new editors to use AFC because it stems the flow of really bad COI/paid editing, but there is nothing prohibiting editors from doing so. If a draft is moved to the article space and it is not of sufficient quality, it is more likely to be moved right back to the draft space (which might be seen as a good thing because it would be spared an AFD), but there are plenty of drafts that are perfectly acceptable and thus are kept as articles. Primefac (talk) 16:55, 20 March 2018 (UTC)
Thank you. That's what I thought, but I wasn't sure, so I very much appreciate the clarification. Best regards, TransporterMan (TALK) 18:03, 20 March 2018 (UTC)

IP's can't create directly in mainspace so they have to use AfC? Do COI editors have to se AfC? Legacypac (talk) 17:31, 20 March 2018 (UTC)

"Yes" and "no" respectively. The former is a technical restriction and the latter is only a suggestion (i.e. they shouldn't create articles directly but they are not prohibited from it). Primefac (talk) 17:41, 20 March 2018 (UTC)
  • I wish to discourage anyone from using AfC. Newcomers are better advised to edit and improve existing mainspace content. Newcomers with burning new topic ideas are better advised to add mentions of the new topic to existing articles. New topics are more often better started as a new section within the larger topic. If not, create red links. If these stick, if existing topic-interested editors don’t revert these additions, create the redlinked article. A newcomer doing this will immediately be in view of topic-interested editors and will much more likely become engaged with these editors. —SmokeyJoe (talk) 20:39, 20 March 2018 (UTC)

Highly backlogged?

I don't have stats but my impression is many pages are reviewed within a few days. It's the hard reviews that take longer. At the rate of inflow of 200-250 a day and a backlog of 2200 pages we are only 10 days behind. Can we change the messages to say just backlogged? Legacypac (talk) 22:16, 19 March 2018 (UTC)

I've been concentrating on CAT:VERYOLD for the month or so I've been reviewing, and it's been steadily growing. --GRuban (talk) 22:24, 19 March 2018 (UTC)
I've mentioned this a couple of times in various locations, but I'll state it here again for the record; I have yet to find a satisfactory way to assess the "backlog". We used to go purely by the number of pending submissions (which is currently 2275), but it tells us nothing about how old they are (they could be all within a week of submission). A few months ago I changed everything to relate to how old everything was, but I still got into issues with the "very old" category (which currently catches anything over one month old); the wording at {{AFC status}} was taken from when we did go off hard numbers, and to be completely honest I think I need to re-evaluate the language anyway.
As has been mentioned in a number of places recently, we don't actually have any drafts that are older than two months old. Does this mean we're backlogged? Yes. Are we "severely backlogged"? I don't know. Maybe we need to discuss the language used in these templates. Do we even need to clarify how much of a backlog we have? Should we just give an "estimated time" like we do at the drafts themselves? {{AFC submission}} gives a rough timeframe for how long drafts are taking to be reviewed (as well as saying that we're backlogged, but that can easily be removed). Personally I'd like that idea better, because we will always have a "backlog" but it's more relevant to know how long things have been sitting around. Primefac (talk) 12:25, 20 March 2018 (UTC)
As for stats, I do have some. With the exception of February, we've been getting fairly close to reviewing the same number of drafts as were submitted per day. Yes, the majority do come out of the "0 day" page, but the rest come out of the very old pages. If you look at our pending submissions, 0 day is almost always 100+ but then everything until about "3 week" (when we start combining multiple days) is around 50 drafts. Basically, if your draft isn't reviewed in the first 48 hours, it's likely it will sit unreviewed until a month or two later (barring those who review random submissions). Primefac (talk) 12:31, 20 March 2018 (UTC)
I feel like we are creating a perception that AfC can't keep up yet most submissions get reviewed in the first several days. This is being ised against AfF by outreach people. Topics that are edge cases or require a specialized skill set get passed over by most reviewers. For me its FOOTy. I can't understand their inclusion criteria but I'll review PROFs all day long. I've sent a lot of userspace pages in so have gained a unique perspective as a submitter. Most pages I've submitted are reviewed within a day or so but then like today one will pop up accepted that I barely remember handling. I think we should cut out the backlogged wording amd just say "the time for review will depend on the topic and condition of the page." Legacypac (talk) 17:29, 20 March 2018 (UTC)
I think the most important thing is to give AfC authors an indication of how long they will need to wait for review. We can do this fairly accurately by extrapolating from what is the oldest draft in the queue at the time of submission. Their expectations will be exceeded in the likely event that we get to it before then. As far as describing the backlog, maybe we should drop the labels and color codes and just report the number in the queue and maybe the oldest in the queue too. ~Kvng (talk) 18:09, 20 March 2018 (UTC)
I agree that the "Highly backlogged" tag does create a regrettable and inaccurate impression and apologies if I've contributed to that over at AfF. I think something that gave authors a reasonable expectation of when their draft might be reviewed would be much more helpful. KJP1 (talk) 18:44, 20 March 2018 (UTC)
I just finished updating that little issue. Primefac (talk) 19:03, 20 March 2018 (UTC)
Many thanks. More accurate and more helpful. KJP1 (talk) 19:23, 20 March 2018 (UTC)
And thanks again for the split of the Very Old category into weeks. Much more manageable to address. KJP1 (talk) 19:45, 20 March 2018 (UTC)
FWIW - here's a daily stats graph. SQLQuery me! 21:42, 20 March 2018 (UTC)

Updated templates

I have updated both {{AFC status}} and {{AFC submission}} so that they more accurately reflect the current status of the backlog. In order to do this I expanded the "time" categories, which now go out to 8 weeks before kicking over to "very old". Primefac (talk) 19:07, 20 March 2018 (UTC)

Nice. Now I'm going to attack the very oldest. Legacypac (talk) 20:22, 20 March 2018 (UTC)

Thank you very much! That makes it so much more manageable. --GRuban (talk) 21:05, 20 March 2018 (UTC)

Korean sources at Draft:Zhong Chen Le

New sources on this draft need to be evaluated for reliability and coverage. This would seem to require a Korean-speaking reviewer. Any suggestions? ~Kvng (talk) 18:00, 20 March 2018 (UTC)

Apologies for tagging on to your query but it illustrates a wider question that I'd be interested to raise. There's been some discussion on "hard" AFCs not getting reviewed quickly. One of the problems I've encountered is where the sourcing is entirely, or almost entirely, in languages other than English. I've come across plenty of examples where, although the text is obviously in English (otherwise it would be rejected), the sourcing is entirely in Chinese or Russian, or some other language although these seem the most common. That makes it nigh-on impossible to review if you are a feeble monoglot like myself. Is there any guidance on possible approaches when faced with this issue? KJP1 (talk) 22:50, 20 March 2018 (UTC)
This has come up frequently on this talk page. I have reviewed the archives and haven't found any satisfying suggestions. I usually leave a comment for the author apologising for and explaining delay and requesting English sources to speed things up. I haven't tracked what happens next but obviously they eventually get reviewed by somebody somehow. ~Kvng (talk) 23:18, 20 March 2018 (UTC)
This advice is only meant as advice and not "law", but when I encounter a draft with non-English sources I use Google Translate on the page. Obviously it's not a perfect translation but it allows me at the very least to see whether this is a "one sentence mention" or a piece actually about the person. If it discusses the subject in any sort of detail then it meets the "significant coverage" angle (unless it's purely promotional, but I wouldn't expect a reviewer to know which sites fit that bill). Primefac (talk) 12:04, 21 March 2018 (UTC)

Ballynahinch Castle

Article was created a few times as advertising in draft form at Draft:Ballynahinch Castle, and was later PRODed [25] under a different title draft. The article has been moved by the creator User:Ctz o into mainspace now that they are autoconfirmed. Should this article simply be put up for AfD (As it doesn't seem notable to me), or otherwise? Lee Vilenski (talk • contribs) 16:25, 21 March 2018 (UTC)

Eh, the work done to the draft is probably enough to salvage the article. Ritchie333 might want to know about the new article though to keep the attribution straight. Primefac (talk) 16:33, 21 March 2018 (UTC)
There's a copy of the draft in Draft:Ballynahinch Castle Hotel. I spotted it, got rid of the copyvio and trimmed it to a stub. The castle is possibly notable, the hotel itself is probably not. Ritchie333 (talk) (cont) 16:37, 21 March 2018 (UTC)
Useful & non promotional architectural stuff on this castle at the National Inventory of Architectural Heritage (from Department of Culture, Heritage and the Gaeltacht).— Rod talk 17:48, 21 March 2018 (UTC)

NCORP has been rewritten

This is just an update to all new page reviewers that WP:NCORP has been substantially rewritten to strengthen the sourcing requirements for corporations and organizations (with the exception of non-profit educational institutions, religions or sects, and sports teams). It is probably worth a read for all AfC project members. TonyBallioni (talk) 19:25, 23 March 2018 (UTC)

My experience with copyvio patrol

Whenever I come back to AfC after a break, for some reason, I sometimes initially forget the copyvio checks. Apparently other people forget to do this too. Also copyvio is a quick fail so why not clear these from the backlog quickly. As penance for my failures to catch some blatant copyvios in drafts I accepted, I did a round of patrolling pending submissions for copyvios. I used Earwig's Copyvio Detector and lots of browser tabs. If someone wants to try to automate this, here's what you're up against: ~Kvng (talk) 14:58, 23 March 2018 (UTC)

  • I manually examined anything that Earwig's tool marked as have 10% or greater chance of violation. Often you get such hits from multiple sources; You need to check them all. In my experience below 10% are never violations. 10-50% are not necessarily violations because they may refer to quotes and titles. These things need to be looked at manually because there are frequent false positives and false negatives reported.
  • Once you find a copyvio there's a lot of work to do to clean it up. The full banana involves potentially requesting speedy deletion or, more likely, editing the article to flag and hide or remove the infringing material from the current revision as well as tweaking the edit history to make the infringement inaccessible there too. You can do half banana by using a template to hide the material in the current revision and alerting the CV squad. There are apparently Wikipedians ready to help clean all this up. The breadcrumb trail of instructions for doing all this begins with a clickable link for reviewers in the AfC copyvio decline description. There's a lot to it but it is not hard to follow if you put your mind to it.
  • If you do not find a copyvio, you can accept the article if it meets the other acceptance criteria. If you're just patrolling for copyvios, you can leave an AfC reviewer comment to that effect and maybe save a future reviewer the need to do the copyvio check. Or maybe not. Conceivably, an author (or anyone) can add infringing material while it is in the review queue between copvio patrol and final acceptance. Clearly this is an unlikely scenario but it is possible and some people do worry about these things. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Kvng (talk • contribs) 14:58, 23 March 2018 (UTC)
  • Don't we have a bot that automatically detects copyvios? Jjjjjjdddddd (talk) 06:27, 26 March 2018 (UTC)

Why send User questions and comments to Reviewer's talk instead of Draft talk

Why is this built into the system, encouraging users to come to our talk pages to ask questions about the review or plead for acceptance etc. Some of the comments are really useless amd deserve to be deleted with the Draft. I often transfer the less useless ones to the Draft talk so the next reviewer can benefit from the discussion. We are already watching drafts we decline so we should be directing new users to the draft talk. Legacypac (talk) 06:23, 26 March 2018 (UTC)

We should fix this right away. It will facilitate dialog with the submitters and gove the next reviewer all the info instead of spreading discussion to various reviewer talk pages. Legacypac (talk) 06:27, 27 March 2018 (UTC)

Some stats on the AfC process compared to NPP and notabilty and some ideas to float for AfC reform.

The expected review result of 100 random drafts if they were put through AfC vs NPP with an assessment of the notability of those topics. Presented as a stacked bar chart

There has been a lot of criticism directed at AfC of late, and I decided on a little research project to collect some data. Legacypac and I gathered up a random selection of AfC drafts and reviewed 100 of them, we recorded the expected result of the AfC review process (outlined HERE), the expected result of the NPP review process if that draft had been in the main space (per the process outlined HERE), as well as assessing the notability of the draft's topic by examining the sources in the article as well as performing searches (per WP:BEFORE). While another pair of reviewers might have reviewed these submissions slightly differently, we don't feel that the result would be so different that we cannot draw conclusions from the data. The results are summarised in the chart above.

Results:
  • The AfC process is considerably more strict than NPP when it comes to accepting submissions. In particular, the AfC review process regularly declines drafts on topics that are clearly notable (17 out of 100 drafts were declined despite being clearly notable). The proportion of notable topics that are currently being declined at AfC indicates that AfC is perhaps demanding too much of new editors.
  • In the case of topics of 'borderline' notability, it seems that both processes are likely to proceed with caution, with the result that AfC will most often decline borderline topics, while NPP will often accept some borderline topics. This result is to be expected, and perhaps, desired.

Ideas for improvement of the AfC process

I'd just like to float some ideas that I've had with regards to potential improvements to the AfC process.

  1. Require that reviewers do a search for notability before declining based on notability (WP:BEFORE for AfC).
    The current system declines many clearly notable topics. With this change, reviewers would perform a search, and if good reference material is found, the reviewer could simply accept the article and add a tag ({{sources exist}}) indicating that they had performed a search and found the subject to be notable (to prevent others from having to search again and discouraging other editors nominating the article for deletion in ignorance). Alternatively, the AfC reviewer could simply drop a couple references from their search into the article.
  2. Overturn WP:NMFD. At least with regards to multiple-declined drafts where the submitter has been told several times that the subject is not yet notable (not with regard to userspace content or unsubmitted drafts).
    This would allow us to deal with repeated submissions on non-notable topics that tend to clog up the AfC process, and this suggestion enables the next one:
  3. Discussion at MfD for repeatedly resubmitted drafts:
    On the third decline with unaddressed issues AfC reviewers are recommended to list the draft MfD for discussion, if notable it should be moved to main space, if not-notable it should be deleted. If the topic looks promising for future notability (i.e. a film in pre-production) it could be userified with a prohibition on submitting without new high-quality sources.
  4. Reviewers should not decline the same submission more than once (prohibition does not apply to commenting on or accepting a draft previously declined).
    Repeated declines from the same reviewer decrease collaboration in the AfC workspace, a frequent criticism of AfC. This change would fix an issue that currently exists where one user watchlists a draft, and will see when it is submitted again before other reviewers get a chance to have a look at it. Having a different set of eyes review a submission each time ensures that the maximum amount of collaboration possible occurs. While it may seem a bit like asking the other parent, that is intentional, and most reviewers should be reviewing to roughly the same standard anyway (if they are not, then it is a problem that this change will help identify).

I am keen to know what you guys think with regards to the data displayed above, and also how feasible/workable you think the ideas above might be. If any ideas get a predominantly positive reception we could propose one or more of these ideas as a formal change to the AfC process. I am also keen to hear any other ideas that you guys might have come up with for improvements to AfC. Cheers, — Insertcleverphrasehere (or here) 05:27, 21 March 2018 (UTC)

  • That was an excellent study. Thank you cleverPhrase and Legacypac.
Ideas:
RE #1. Support, and support implication that notable topics should be mainspaced even in poor condition.
RE #2. Suggest alternative, WP:Drafts for discussion. Warn that deletion for non-notability necessarily raises the bar, raises the difficulty of reviewing and making a decision. Urge that failure results in a blunt rejection, but not deletion, at least not immediate deletion. The author may need to review what was rejected.
RE #3. Oppose. Repeated resubmission is a result of a combination of failure of AfC decline notices to adequately convey the intended message, and behavioural issue. The first should be remedied by better AfC responses, the second as a behavioural matter, warnings, blocking.
RE #4 Suggest that all reviewer comments go on the talk page. On that talk page, each review comments in their own thread, and adds comments to their earlier thread if commenting a second time. However, it would be far preferable if post submission comments were to become more normal human-like conversation on the talk page, resembling the talk culture in other namespaces.
I think the data is great to have. I feel the data rings true. Something has to be tried.
RE Wikipedia:WikiProject Articles for creation/Decline comments workshop. It is hard to say this there, I think there are too many templated options. As per my notes at User:SmokeyJoe/AfC_wishlist#AfC_acceptance_/_rejection_process_improvement, I think five templates is the right number, and that the detail of the comments should go in threaded discussion on the talk page. --SmokeyJoe (talk) 05:56, 21 March 2018 (UTC)
  • Thank-you to User:Insertcleverphrasehere for setting this up. The 250 drafts choosen were truly random (every 10th waiting) and the 100 processed were also random. The percentages can be fairly applied to pages waiting, but not all submissions because most 0-1 days easy accepts and rejects get processed quickly so escaped our sample. I agree with the conclusions presented.
We can eliminate the backlog by making some key changes:
  1. More quickly accept the imperfect but notable and verifiable. This will reduce the submit-reject cycle. We are dealing with new users that don't know how to fight for their notable topic and may not be up to the task of building out a perfect page. They often quit after just one or two submissions which is a waste of both creator and reviewer time.
  2. look at the page like a NPR amd Seek immediate deletion of unacceptable pages. If it can be CSD'd (G11, G12, G2 amd G3 mostly) CSD it. If the CSD is declined or not CSDable but needs deleting, take to MfD. It is a little extra effort but this will cut down on resubmissions and save another editor later figuring out why to delete it.
In theory in the hands of a good reviewer nearly every submission could be promoted as notable or deletion sought on the first AfC pass. Let the creator work on the borderline cases for a second submission perhaps. No page should get to 4 to 11 declines like the ones on this list. User:JJMC89_bot/report/AfC_decline_counts as that is just a big waste of reviewer time. Legacypac (talk) 07:02, 21 March 2018 (UTC)
  • Don't at all agree that we should be lowering the quality of articles accepted to mainspace. Do we see a sufficient level of improvement of articles already here, no years-old cleanup tags, everything kept updated, etc? We do not. There should be some expectations laid on new article creators, pointing to help and guidance and so on. A "decline" is nothing like a deletion: it's like a publisher returning a MS saying "thank you, we'll accept this, but it first needs a bit more work on your part". A bit of BURDEN should be applied here: The burden to demonstrate verifiability lies with the editor who adds ... material, and is satisfied by providing a citation to a reliable source that directly supports the contribution. That's on a policy page, and why wouldn't it apply to a new article as much as to a change to an existing one?: Noyster (talk), 09:15, 21 March 2018 (UTC)
  • On a similar point to Insertcleverphrasehere's initial post, the AfC reviewing instructions don't say explicitly that reviewers must do a WP:BEFORE search when reviewing an article. (There is the "would probably survive a listing at AfD" language, but the connection there is not explicit.) As a project, perhaps we should iron out exactly how much work reviewers should be doing to assess the potential notability of a draft. Maybe it is adherence to WP:BEFORE, maybe it is a lesser standard or something else entirely, but at any rate we should have a larger discussion around this. /wiae /tlk 09:50, 21 March 2018 (UTC)
I want to add a second point that slipped my mind when I posted earlier. There is additional tension between the notion of reviewers following WP:BEFORE and the current notability decline reasons. Take the "bio" decline reason for example: "This submission's references do not adequately show the subject's notability". The way this reads, a reviewer can logically decline an article on a notable person if the current state of the article's references don't demonstrate the notability. (Indeed, this is basically what Noyster alludes to above.) So if we want to codify adherence to WP:BEFORE or some other "is this topic objectively notable" process in the reviewing instructions, the notability decline reasons should probably be reworded. I guess I'll put a plug in here for Wikipedia:WikiProject Articles for creation/Decline comments workshop, as the outcome of this discussion could affect what goes on at that subpage. Thanks, /wiae /tlk 12:44, 21 March 2018 (UTC)
  • You could start by tagging first and second person spam submissions for deletion. I occasionally come across pure spam AFC submissions that were reviewed but not tagged. It boggles the mind. MER-C 10:48, 21 March 2018 (UTC)
  • I must agree with Noyster, we should not be lowering the quality of submissions by accepting everything that's notable no matter what mess it's left in by the author OR the reviewer - there's nothing wrong in a reviewer providing feedback saying 'this topic is notable, but your draft needs a little more work before it can be accepted'. I'd also wonder if Legacypac and Insertcleverphrasehere are looking at this correctly - instead of looking at notable content being declined, a more useful metric (particularly from the much talked about and fatally flawed editor retention point of view) is whether a more rigorous AFC process makes articles less likely to be nominated for and/or actually deleted. Nick (talk) 12:15, 21 March 2018 (UTC)
    Approximately 10% of articles that were accepted at AFC get nominated for deletion, with about 5-7% eventually being deleted. Insertcleverphrasehere, do you have the numbers for articles created directly in mainspace? Primefac (talk) 12:36, 21 March 2018 (UTC)
data pre ACTRIAL showed about 20% of AutoConfirmed user creations are deleted. A few more get redirected, which would include some merges. Legacypac (talk) 15:52, 21 March 2018 (UTC)
  • Point #4 has always been a personal philosophy of mine, and one that I've encouraged others to hold to, but it might be worth codifying (for exactly the reasons you've given). Primefac (talk) 12:42, 21 March 2018 (UTC)
  • I'm struggling to see the value of this study. The links that appear in the brief description of the "expected" AfC and NPP results are merely links to the project pages that contain the instructions. How were these instructions translated into numerical percentages? And these "expected" percentages are then compared to the authors' own opinions as to what the "correct" results should be. In all, I'm struggling to see how this study does anything more than produce a pretty graph that illustrates the authors' opinions.

    But the more basic issue is the false dichotomy of "accept/decline". AfC is an interactive process and I wholeheartedly agree with Nick's statement above -- there truly is nothing wrong with declining a submission but then immediately opening a discussion with the new editor on the Draft's Talk page. In my experience, new editors who are writing non-promotional articles actually do want to learn how to produce a better piece of work and are quite happy to receive specific advice on how to do it. Also in my experience, these editors don't take more than two or three days to implement the improvements. A two- or three-day delay is a small price to pay in return for a new editor who will now go out into the wider Wiki-world and not repeat the same basic errors that appeared in the draft. And all it takes to get this trade-off is a group of AfC volunteers who are willing to talk to the new editors in a constructive fashion. NewYorkActuary (talk) 13:55, 21 March 2018 (UTC)

​To clarify; we followed the linked reviewing instructions for both projects to the best of our personal judgement on 100 random drafts from the AfC backlog, thus indicating the percentages for each result (the data page is linked to the word 'data' in the first sentence). A quick look at the list of abandoned drafts indicates that unfortunately many editors don't resubmit after being declined. This then eventually results in G13 deletions of their article on a notable topic, which doesn't seem acceptable to me. I get where you are coming from, and if every reviewer collaborated the way you describe with new editors, AfC would be a better place, but it would be nice to implement a system that ensures that notable submissions are not lost (unless they would be CSD/BLPRODable in the main space). Perhaps if the reviewer was required to do a notability search, and inform the author of the result (i.e. "your submission seems notable, but it needs a couple more references, try searching on google news, I fear this might get deleted if moved to main space". If you combined this with a change to the resubmit box so that it contained a message like; "AfC is an entirely optional process, you are free to move this page to the main article space yourself." Some food for thought anyway. I'm enjoying reading the comments here, some interesting perspectives and ideas. — Insertcleverphrasehere (or here) 19:08, 21 March 2018 (UTC)
  • Question - Can someone summarize for me where this eagerness to delete drafts comes from? I'm pretty sure the total effort put into the MfD discussion is greater than the AfC reviewer pool having to do multiple declines on the draft before the author gets the message and the draft drifts off without drama through G13. ~Kvng (talk) 14:39, 21 March 2018 (UTC)
  • Oppose 1 - We don't need to make reviewing more difficult or time consuming. Authors should not be deprived of the learning experience of finding, evaluating and adding references. Most of the previously-declined drafts I review have been improved in some meaningful way. Notability searches can be done in G13 salvage review by those WP:VOLUNTEERs interested in doing so. ~Kvng (talk) 14:45, 21 March 2018 (UTC)
  • Non-viable, tendentiously resubmitted drafts should be deleted via MFD. I also support the suggestion by User:SmokeyJoe to remove the resubmit button for hopeless drafts (though I argue that they should be deleted promptly). MER-C 15:33, 21 March 2018 (UTC)
  • I have an issue regarding adding sourcing to drafts. Authors of these drafts could simply come up with a notable subject, and write a line or two with a source; and as reviewers we wouldn't be able to deny it, and would have to work on the article ourselves. Surely notable topics that haven't been written well/sourced well should be left in draft. There are plenty of "Requested articles" in WikiProjects, which are usually notable topics that haven't been written yet. But an article shouldn't be written purely to strike that entry off the list. I feel as though our goal should never be to encourage poor articles, but to help new users write better articles. Lee Vilenski (talk • contribs) 16:13, 21 March 2018 (UTC)
​Even a one line stub on a clearly notable topic submitted to mainspace can actually be an acceptable submission that shouldn't be deleted, people create these all the time, and while NPP often adds tags to them informing the author that they need additional references etc, often nothing is done about it. The same is true in draft space, editors often don't resubmit, resulting in the loss of a notable topic start. I don't see much reason why a new user would be any more inclined to fix the issue in draft space vs article space, given that they are informed of the issue even if they just go the NPP route, but at AfC their submission is held hostage, even if they can't figure out how to add references. I've seen lots of notable topics declined by reviewers despite good references just because the author had only used bare urls and not included them as incline citations (we don't even require inline citations in main space). — Insertcleverphrasehere (or here) 19:08, 21 March 2018 (UTC)
If the one line stub is un-sourced, then it's not an appropriate submission, no matter how notable it might be (to actually assess notability in the absence of any sources, you would be forcing the reviewer to find and assess sources, some or all of which may well differ from those the author used to write the content - far from ideal, maybe even far from possible if it's a historical work for which dead tree media is being used). The last thing we want to be doing is removing the fair, reasonable and friendly approach AFC provides for sourcing, and in particular, sourcing of BLPs, and instead letting new users out into the article space where they're going to be finding more deletion notices (CSD, BLPPROD and AfD) and they're going to be getting warnings and sanctions under the BLP policy. Just remember for a moment that there are ArbCom Discretionary Sanctions available for those violating the BLP policy - do you want new users being hit with DS notifications and then sanctions because they can't work out how to add a reference, or do you want them confined to Draft space in the company of helpers and reviewers who can point them in the right direction and help them reference their new content ? Nick (talk) 11:24, 22 March 2018 (UTC)
​}Per WP:NEXIST and WP:BEFORE, that isn't quite right. A a notable topic with a one line unsourced stub that establishes context, and also contains a credible claim of notability and is not a BLP (Avoiding CSD on A1, A7, and A9, and also avoiding BLPROD) should actually survive deletion and should not even be nominated in the first place. Per WP:BEFORE, reviewers are required to search for sources, and if they are found, are not supposed to delete the article. My preferred solution in these cases is to quickly copy a couple of references to the end of the first line (using the proveit auto reference gadget can do this quickly), or else tag it with the ({{sources exist}}) tag. — Insertcleverphrasehere (or here) 20:40, 22 March 2018 (UTC)
The problem with relying on guidelines like WP:NEXIST and WP:BEFORE is that you're relying entirely on the reviewer being able to find sources, to assess those sources, and to make a determination on the notability based on what they find. That sometimes works when sources are digital and online, it's useless when you're looking at an article or draft written around print source material and difficult when digital sources are behind a paywall. WP:NEXIST and WP:BEFORE provide little or no meaningful protection for many of the articles we see submitted through AFC, and even if an article isn't ultimately deleted, the process of dealing with CSD, PROD or AFD notices on your new article is a significant deterrence to continued contributing to Wikipedia. Nick (talk) 23:31, 22 March 2018 (UTC)

Examples

There is a long held idea starting with Jimbo Wales himself that one editor puts in an idea and another adds a little and over time an article builds. Joseph_Bishop is a page I accepted based on meeting WP:PROF amd tagged with "Sources exist". Well overnight the page has been greatly sxpanded from the nice friendly page I accepted. Legacypac (talk) 16:22, 21 March 2018 (UTC)

Nice example. New editors actually learn from the edits that others make to the pages they create as well, as most of them will follow along to see what happens to the article they created. This collaboration and 'teaching by demonstration' is generally lost with the current AfC process. — Insertcleverphrasehere (or here) 19:11, 21 March 2018 (UTC)
And we're all just gonna ignore the fact that it's a massively huge copyvio, I guess. CHRISSYMAD ❯❯❯¯\_(ツ)_/¯ 13:57, 22 March 2018 (UTC)
oh, you're no fun anymore..... Ritchie333 (talk) (cont) 14:07, 22 March 2018 (UTC)
If my work with copyvios makes me 'not fun' anymore, I'm okay with it. This was when it was accepted. CHRISSYMAD ❯❯❯¯\_(ツ)_/¯ 14:11, 22 March 2018 (UTC)
Yes, I know - I dealt with it and threw in some Pythonesque humour for a bit of a laugh - we're not allowed to link to the actual video on YouTube because it's a .... well .... Ritchie333 (talk) (cont) 14:24, 22 March 2018 (UTC)
Oh well, new users will be new users. — Insertcleverphrasehere (or here) 14:26, 22 March 2018 (UTC)
New users will be new users isn't an excuse or acceptable reason for an established AFC reviewer accepting at least (so far, in the last 24 hours alone) 5 copyvio drafts and moving them into mainspace without even acknowledging the CV. CHRISSYMAD ❯❯❯¯\_(ツ)_/¯ 14:34, 22 March 2018 (UTC)
On the specific draft a good portion of it was university positions and dates which is not really copyrightable. If Bishop was President of X School from 1964-1967 and the Dean of Y school from 1967-1969 there are only so many ways to write that. I also note all the additions by mainspace editors were removed as copyvio which seems highly unlikely they were copyvioing in a few words at a time.
I look for CV by searching key phrases and I often find it. I've never been able to get earwigs tool to load properly though. Maybe ChrissyMad's diligence should be put to good use by her checking more submissions for cv. I really appreciate the reviewer who marks drafts as CV checked. Legacypac (talk) 16:05, 22 March 2018 (UTC)
Yes. Let’s be more careful with copyvio please. It’s no secret that I’m a fan of Legacypac’s approach to AfC and draft space, but moving CV to mainspace shouldn’t happen. TonyBallioni (talk) 14:46, 22 March 2018 (UTC)
New users will be new users is an excellent example of why keeping AFC a little more on the strict side is important - it gives reviewers the ability to check for copyright issues. That is of course aided when there's sources against which one can check not just for a copy and paste copyright violation but also for less apparent issues such as close paraphrasing or image copyright problems. Nick (talk) 15:02, 22 March 2018 (UTC)

Everybody looking at NPP and AfC needs to arm themselves with importScript("User:The Earwig/copyvios.js"); in Special:MyPage/common.js - every time you see a big article with flowery language outside of Wikipedia's style, hit the button and check for copyvios. Ritchie333 (talk) (cont) 15:11, 22 March 2018 (UTC)

For the initiated (Me), I currently run Earwigs Copyvio as a bookmark and run it as a separate page. How does the script work differently? My knowledge of coding is very poor, sadly. Lee Vilenski (talk • contribs) 15:47, 22 March 2018 (UTC)
It's basically a shell around the web version - it takes the current page and auto-fills the relevant parameters across. Ritchie333 (talk) (cont) 15:53, 22 March 2018 (UTC)
Yes, it is by far one of the most useful scripts on this project. TonyBallioni (talk) 15:38, 22 March 2018 (UTC)
For once, we agree on something Ritchie333 ;) I'm actually a bit surprised it's not automatically built into the AFCH script (or maybe it is and we don't advertise it well enough?) In any case, my normal routine with reviewing drafts is to open the CV check in an ew window (via the tool) and look at the draft while it's running. I do it for every draft (the obvious exception being nonsense) even if I'm declining. CHRISSYMAD ❯❯❯¯\_(ツ)_/¯ 15:43, 22 March 2018 (UTC)
We should catch copyvio wereever we can but it is potentially more quickly spotted in no index mainspace than no index draft space because more eyes on the page. Legacypac (talk) 16:05, 22 March 2018 (UTC)
How do you figure there would be more eyes on an unwatched page in mainspace, than an unwatched page in draft space? SQLQuery me! 16:36, 22 March 2018 (UTC)
A page in NPR gets quite a few eyes and checks and editors that categorize and verify etc. Not so much as an AfC Draft. The page could been placed directly in mainspace vs moved into mainspace and it will get the same reviews. We all know there are plenty of copyvios on the site, and we wack them as we find them or even better, rewrite the material to solve the problem. Legacypac (talk) 19:22, 22 March 2018 (UTC)
Legacypac If it's so easy to rewrite, why don't you do it in the first place instead of moving it to mainspace where it will be indexed and cause legal trouble? Can you please, going forward, just commit to actually making a good faith effort to check for copyvios before moving anything to mainspace? CHRISSYMAD ❯❯❯¯\_(ツ)_/¯ 19:27, 22 March 2018 (UTC)
Ritchie333, What does the copyvios script do? I installed it but nothing new comes up. Dial911 (talk) 17:46, 22 March 2018 (UTC)
You need to be browsing the article first (ie: not editing, viewing history or anything else) before you'll see an option. For example, if I browse to Ballynahinch Castle, and click on the link "copyvio check", I get this. Ritchie333 (talk) (cont) 17:49, 22 March 2018 (UTC)
I think I have done something wrong. I can’t see ‘copyvio check’ button. Will check my script page once again. Dial911 (talk) 18:02, 22 March 2018 (UTC)
Hmm, might be worth raising it on the Technical village pump. Ritchie333 (talk) (cont) 19:31, 22 March 2018 (UTC)
It's not just you - I have the same problem. SQLQuery me! 19:44, 22 March 2018 (UTC)
Is it possible it doesn't work because I run in MonoBook and you're running in another skin? Although that's the whole point of common.js - it's common to all skins. Ritchie333 (talk) (cont) 19:48, 22 March 2018 (UTC)
Hah! Changing to monobook and back got it. Weird, but works. Thanks! SQLQuery me! 19:51, 22 March 2018 (UTC)
I use Vector (default) so I tried changing to Monobook but that stacks nav links on top of each other. Still no link to earwigs tool. Is it supposed to be on the left bar or top bar? Legacypac (talk) 20:08, 22 March 2018 (UTC)

(←) :Left bar, under tools. SQLQuery me! 20:21, 22 March 2018 (UTC)

It works now and saves time too. Dial911 (talk) 02:50, 23 March 2018 (UTC)

Copyvio checks to reduce the backlog

Since copyvio is a delete reason, maybe the editors that can make the script work and are good at copyvio should go through the waiting pages and check them - deleting or marking the pages as copyvio checked. Then we can review the checked pages for notability. Legacypac (talk) 19:54, 22 March 2018 (UTC)

Legacypac My question was specifically to you regarding copyvios. Can you please answer? And having a separate group doing just cv checks really, really isn't going to be helpful when reviewers should be more than capable of doing a cursory check. All this does is duplicate efforts. Additionally, the issue with this is that there can be several interim edits, so if we're marking it as 'checked' before moving into mainspace, it's not guaranteed to be the last revision. CHRISSYMAD ❯❯❯¯\_(ツ)_/¯ 19:58, 22 March 2018 (UTC)
This section is about how we could quickly make a dent in the backlog by checking pages in waves. I get you have it in for me after I tagged one of your Draftspace creations G13 and you raised hell on my takpage. I do check copyvios but evidently need to increase the checks. If a paragraph is built in multiple edits with multiple cites it should not be copyvio but anything is possible. I'm trying to get the script to work so I don't have to do checks with Google. Legacypac (talk) 20:05, 22 March 2018 (UTC)
I do not have it in for you - I only came across your accepted articles today by chance and once I noticed three copyvios, I continued checking. If you're refusing to do the bare minimum of reviewing (ie. looking at sources, which would have shown you that several of the articles I pointed out were copyvios) why are you even reviewing at all? We're not talking about content from "multiple sources" we're talking about outright copyright violations that you moved into mainspace. Legacy, google or script, it doesn't matter. You moved 9 violations into mainspace, 3 of the most egregious ones, particularly this one: Kuwait Gulf Oil Company were copied and pasted from the first three sources, which again, had you bothered to look, you would have known. This doesn't require a tool, it requires a simple review.CHRISSYMAD ❯❯❯¯\_(ツ)_/¯ 20:11, 22 March 2018 (UTC)
And to put this into a bit more perspective, I'm not trying to be harsh on you for one mistake but you've created several messes in just the last week of accepts and you've outright refused to even commit to collaborating and fixing it:

CHRISSYMAD ❯❯❯¯\_(ツ)_/¯ 20:17, 22 March 2018 (UTC)

You caused enough trouble on my talkpage with your blatant misrepresentation of my tagging without proper details so your incorrect accusations could be easily checked out. Please check every page and fix them, then get to work on the unreviewed AfC pages. A copyvio in no index Draft is just as bad as a copyvio in no index mainspace, in fact in mainspace the copy vio is more likely caught to edited out of existence as the page is reworked. I'll be figuring out a better system for copyvio now and will be atracking the backlog with it hecause evidently parts of many of the most acceptable pages are copied from elsewhere. Makes one want to shut down AfC because the submissions are either non-notable, promo or copyvio - all of which should be deleted. Legacypac (talk) 20:20, 22 March 2018 (UTC)

  • Whoa there, calm down everyone. Everybody makes mistakes, and Legacypac has been doing a lot of good reviewing recently. If Legacypac needs to be a bit more vigilant for copyvios, fine, but lets not start a witch hunt here. This kind of attitude toward reviewing mistakes is why so few people are willing to be reviewers. — Insertcleverphrasehere (or here) 20:21, 22 March 2018 (UTC)
Insertcleverphrasehere I made a good faith effort to notify them of this and they continued on in spite of it. So it's not a witch hunt, I am literally asking if going forward they will review with a little more caution. One or two mistakes re:copyvio is acceptable but moving 9+ drafts into mainspace that are copyvios in a week is excessive. I'm not asking them to stop reviewing, I'm asking them to actually review a little more thoroughly. CHRISSYMAD ❯❯❯¯\_(ツ)_/¯ 20:24, 22 March 2018 (UTC)
There was no notification or discussion so don't misrepresent things. I NEVER refused or continued anything. I immediately jumped on the tagged examples and reworked the text into copyvio compliance. Legacypac (talk) 20:59, 22 March 2018 (UTC)
Legacypac, I've been working with Chrissymad for over a year now at AFC and other than the admins at Copypatrol she is one of the top spotters of copyright violations and I trust her judgement almost implicitly (though like with all copyvio issues I still double-check). She is also exactly correct - we should not be accepting drafts that have copyrights in them. Now, there is absolutely no issue with rewriting the text so that it is compliant and then accepting the page, but we must perform a revdel on the old versions.
What's done is done, and whether you were "properly notified" six hours ago or not is rather moot, because now you definitely know about the concerns regarding your reviewing. I trust that you will be more cautious about copyright violations in the future (through whatever means necessary). I genuinely am glad that your tban has been lifted and that you can help us cut down on the backlog, but just because you are a useful and productive editor does not mean that I will hesitate to kick you off the project if you ignore the basic tenants of Wikipedia's copyright rules. Primefac (talk) 22:13, 22 March 2018 (UTC)
And to further address the point made about about having someone do a "copyvio check" on all drafts - that is a bad idea because the next edit after "no copyvios found" could be a +1,150 copyright violation and will lull the next reviewer into a false sense of security. It's perfectly fine to check a draft for copyvios even if you're not going to review it, but it should not be marked as such. The only times that should be happening is when a |cv| decline gets checked by an admin and turned into a |cv-cleaned|. Primefac (talk) 22:16, 22 March 2018 (UTC)
Oh, I'll be checking pages much more carefully. It's nice you trust her but after all the trouble she caused on my talk I don't take anything she says at face value anymore about my editing.
Yes we should make notes about copyvio checks. I always look at the sequence of edits, so if Reviewer X adds a note that it is copyvio checked or Reviewer Y says its been copyvio cleaned amd there are no more significant additions we should be able to rely on that check. A copy vio could be introduced 5 minutes after a page is mainspaced too - it's really hard to find them all especially when several sections check out ok but one section was copied. Let's remember there is no deadline and we can't all specialize in the same type of work. Legacypac (talk) 23:29, 22 March 2018 (UTC)
I know, and I don't expect every reviewer to catch every copyvio 100% of the time (hell, I've missed cv before and it's one of my specialities). Mistakes will happen, and there's nothing wrong with that. We can only do our best, which is why we have other editors and NPP to catch us.
And yes, you're right, if we check the history and see no edits since the "all clear" then it's still good, but it's the reviewers who don't go that extra mile who will think it's okay even if it's not. I would just rather not have us missing the obvious because of a small oversight. Primefac (talk) 23:42, 22 March 2018 (UTC)

Automated copyvio checks on new pages?

  • I've considered whether some kind of automated tool could be developed to warn users that their submission might be a copyvio (Automatically run the copyvio tool on all new page submissions by editors without extended-confirmed and then warn them if a result is >50% likelihood). They would be free to ignore the warning and submit anyway, but this could perhaps flag the page to NPP/AfC with a warning to check for copyvios. I think a lot of new users don't know that they shouldn't copy, so this would likely cut out most of the copyvios that we have to deal with on a regular basis. What do you guys think? — Insertcleverphrasehere (or here) 23:50, 22 March 2018 (UTC)
I asked at VPT a while back whether it was possible and the general consensus was that it would take a bit of work, but generally was feasible. — Insertcleverphrasehere (or here) 23:55, 22 March 2018 (UTC)
For years I reviewed submissions to a writing site. They had a tool that randomly selected phrases of 10-15 words and googled them within quotes. If we got exact matches we investigated. Otherwise we considered the page copyvio free. I'm not a bot builder but it sure seems like a bot running in draft space could flag copyvios. Is there not a bot doing this in mainspace now? Legacypac (talk) 23:59, 22 March 2018 (UTC)
Nothing new really. We used to have one tagging all new articles. A very good one made by Coren. Every new article was automatically checked and tagged as required. This saved the patrollers a lot of work. This idea is good and is technically viable. Again, it's something I feel the WMF should spnsor as part of their responsibility for copyright laws, and should not wait for any gadget wish lists. It's probably neverthless in our interest to include a more distinct copyright information on the page creation template. Kudpung กุดผึ้ง (talk) 02:08, 23 March 2018 (UTC)
Worth mentioning CopyPatrol here; you can log in through OAuth and patrol only drafts for copyright violations if you'd like—there's a checkbox next the top with the option. It's not a substitute for on-the-draft tagging, but it is something. /wiae /tlk 02:19, 23 March 2018 (UTC)
Wow thanks User:Wiae great tool. When you tag a page for deletion on wiki, do you tag the page fixed/reviewed in the tool? Legacypac (talk) 02:44, 23 March 2018 (UTC)
It's not really a tool per se, Wiae, because it depends on manual intervention. In my patrolling experience, where I run every suspicious new article through Earwig's Copyvio Detector (a link is prominently displayed in the side bar), I get to them before the Copy Patrol people. Now if earwig could be made to function in the same way as the nowdefunct Coren did, that would be excellent. Kudpung กุดผึ้ง (talk) 02:52, 23 March 2018 (UTC)
Legacypac, once you've cleaned an article of copyright violations, or tagged it for deletion, then you can mark it as reviewed. I'm not active too much nowadays but there are a few users who regularly check the queue. I'm sure they'd be happy to have more volunteers help out! Kudpung, you are correct. It is a good way to catch copyright violations, but as you mention it does take some time to catch them (and so it is not a replacement for the Earwig tool, which everyone should run), and it is not an ideal solution. A guy can dream though... /wiae /tlk 14:03, 23 March 2018 (UTC)

We should run a test with this list: User:Insertcleverphrasehere/AFC_stats of randomly selected pendimg AfC pages (even accepted ones). Add a copy vio column Y/N and go at it. That would give us a rough idea of how likely it is to find copyvio in the review pending. Pick ones that are not marked and used for the other stats. Legacypac (talk) 02:25, 23 March 2018 (UTC)

This discussion sparked me to run AFC over the copyvio tool. I'm only about 1/2 way done, but early results are here: User:SQL/PossibleCopyvioDrafts SQLQuery me! 02:49, 23 March 2018 (UTC)
There's also User:SQL/Interesting AFC Stuff - which I'm updating again right now, where AFC's pages were run over ORES. SQLQuery me! 02:52, 23 March 2018 (UTC)
Now updated. SQLQuery me! 03:06, 23 March 2018 (UTC)
​Thanks for that. How difficult is it to update? We should get a bot to upkeep a category like this (sorted by worst score though). I just went through some of the worst spam submissions and CSDed a bunch of companies, so it is pretty useful. — Insertcleverphrasehere (or here) 07:13, 26 March 2018 (UTC)
@Insertcleverphrasehere: I've got it working with SQLBot, and moved to a sortable table:User:SQL/AFC-Ores. I hadn't integrated the copyvio part in the table yet - but here's a preview. It should take 5 to 8 hours to run over all the drafts in the category. I'm thinking about running it daily. Also, what would we think about tagging the drafts instead of (or in addition to) the table? SQLQuery me! 22:59, 26 March 2018 (UTC)
​This is awesome. I think that the table is a great idea and tagging the drafts also has some potential, especially for copyvio, but I'm not sure what this would look like. Possibly a tag that only appears to extendedconfirmed users could be useful (all patrollers should be extendedconfirmed) using the method outlined HERE. Could you suggest what kind of tag we might add (examples if possible)? — Insertcleverphrasehere (or here) 23:09, 26 March 2018 (UTC)
User:SQL/AFC-Ores/Template for instance (really, really rough idea). Could also possibly add maintenence categories like Category:ORES wp10-predicted FA drafts or Category:Possible spam drafts (ORES) etc via the same template. E.g.: SQLQuery me! 23:21, 26 March 2018 (UTC)
(←) Or - with different parameters: SQLQuery me! 23:31, 26 March 2018 (UTC)
​I like this idea, though I would like to see some discussion and consensus on a threshold level to choose. I think that spam is pretty obvious to anyone who looks at it, so we probably don't need a tag for that (though a listing in a table is very useful for identifying and deleting the worst examples). A Copyvio tag similar to the one you have shown above would be perfect, though again I would suggest that we wrap it in <span class="extendedconfirmed-show">...</span> so that the author wont see it, but the reviewer will. — Insertcleverphrasehere (or here) 23:36, 26 March 2018 (UTC)
So, today I added whitelisting at User:SQL/AFC-Ores/Whitelist - adding a page to this whitelist will cause the bot to skip it entirely. SQLQuery me! 02:49, 29 March 2018 (UTC)
Tag every Draft page with a score. Than we know that below x% the page is not copyvio. Above Y percent is likely a CSD candidate. Does it hurt to show this info to the creator? I went through ans tagged some pages off the report provided and one of the creators asked me about it. This will really speed up processing because some pages we can just focus on notabilityamd others we can quickly CSD. Legacypac (talk) 23:58, 26 March 2018 (UTC)
I think it likely that we will get a ton of questions by the creators aimed at these tags and disputing them, before a human has even looked at the page. We don't want this as it is BITEY and also the tag will often be wrong (many high confidence 'spam' articles that I have read have been perfectly fine for example, and also take this 94% copyvio as an example). Wrapping it so that only reviewers see it avoids the BITEyness of automated tags almost entirely while retaining their usefulness. I don't mind Legacypac's suggestion that every article should be tagged with all criteria, so long as the tag is automatically stripped off as part of the 'accept' function of the AFCH tool (to reduce extra work). — Insertcleverphrasehere (or here) 00:16, 27 March 2018 (UTC)

Ideas again

Discussion seems to have taken some sharp turns. Does someone want to summarize where we are on discussion of proposed improvement ideas and any new ones introduced. I can do it if no one else is able. But, since I have some strong opinions about some of these proposals, I may not be the most objective summarizer available. ~Kvng (talk) 15:09, 23 March 2018 (UTC)

I never intended any of theseveral to be 'proposals', just to stimulate conversation about ideas on how to reform AfC. — Insertcleverphrasehere (or here) 03:55, 24 March 2018 (UTC)
Fair enough but the conversation does not appear to have produced any reform proposals which I think is the end goal here. I think it will be difficult to get consensus on reform because we have one group of reviewers who believe AfC exists as a quality control mechanism and another group who believe we should be focused on primary acceptance criteria and let quality improvements happen through collaboration in mainspace. There is little intersection between these groups and both are large enough to throw a wrench into any consensus they don't like. ~Kvng (talk) 15:31, 24 March 2018 (UTC)
  • ​To sum up, I've gotten some feedback on the points I raised at least.
1.) Polarised response, largely what you said above applies: "we have one group of reviewers who believe AfC exists as a quality control mechanism and another group who believe we should be focused on primary acceptance criteria". Well ok then, we might not get consensus on this. In which case it should be made abundantly clear to new users once they pass the auto-confirmed threshold that they can move the page to mainspace themselves. AfC should not be article purgatory, yet currently it is to any new user, good faith or not, that is unable to figure out how to add references, etc. I'm going to ask a question at VPT regarding whether it is possible to have part of a template only display to users with certain editing privileges.
2. and 3.) Your comment about the amount of effort likely to be expended at MfD made me re-think this a bit. While in some cases the amount of disruption may justify a trip to MfD, I think you might be right on this count and I don't think I'll be pursuing this particular avenue in the future. Highly disruptive ones already end up at MfD so I don't think that these will alleviate much effort.
4.) Not much response to my 4th suggestion (no repeat declines from the same reviewer), but what there was seemed very positive, so this seems like a promising proposal so far at least. — Insertcleverphrasehere (or here) 05:53, 26 March 2018 (UTC)

I get the idea amd see the merits but allowing a reviewer already familiar with the page to decline again is a time saver. Right now the system puts the declined page on your watchlist and channels user enquiries to the declining reviewer's talk (which I hate - comments on my talk are almost useless - they belong on the draft talkpage). So really we are encouraging the forst reviewer to come back again. Legacypac (talk) 06:14, 26 March 2018 (UTC)

I like the idea of letting authors know that purgatory is unlocked once they reach autoconfirmed status. Do we want to give them a get-out-of-jail button?
I think that authors should be able to contact the reviewer. When I've been contacted the question usually is some form of, "Why was my draft rejected?" and I usually can be of some assistance but I make it clear that it will be another reviewer looking it over if they resubmit. ~Kvng (talk) 13:37, 26 March 2018 (UTC)
Users are free to contact a reviewer but posting on the talk page is far superior to posting on our talk. I movedtwo such posts just this AM. I don't like the idea of telling them they can move their spam/vanity bio/nonsense out of AfC. Enough users find that out on their own and we end up cleaning up their mess. Legacypac (talk) 17:54, 26 March 2018 (UTC)
The "spam/vanity bio/nonsense" authors are the ones most motivated to get their submissions published and so are the ones most likely to find their own way out of AfC purgatory. The submissions we need to be concerned about are from NPOV authors that just want to improve the encyclopedia. Theirs is altruistic motivation and so likely more fragile and so I beleive those authors are more likely to just give up both on their submission and on future contributions to Wikipedia on initial rejection for misformatted footnotes, etc. ~Kvng (talk) 19:35, 26 March 2018 (UTC)
  • It looks like it is pretty easy for us to add a get out of jail button that only autoconfirmed users will see:
Wikipedia:Village_pump_(technical)#Display_a_message_in_a_template_only_to_user_with_a_certain_user-group?
It should come with a warning that improper submissions may be deleted, but I think this is something that will result in a lot of good faith editors getting less frustrated with the AfC process. Yes Legacypac we will end up with more spammers skipping out of AfC and into the NPP queue; this is probably a good thing as NPP is far more equipped to handle these sorts of promotional submissions than AfC is (deletion on lack of notability grounds is available to NPP) and NPP can also handle them permanently with one review, where at AfC they often clog the works by being resubmitted over and over. This may have the potential to address many of AfC's problems by simply making it more clear to the authors what is already the case: AfC is entirely optional once you reach autoconfirmed. — Insertcleverphrasehere (or here) 21:15, 26 March 2018 (UTC)
Humm, there are merits to allowing people to move their pages to mainspace where we have more tools for deletion and many more editors will see the pages. Supports my "sink or swim" positions. Legacypac (talk) 21:27, 26 March 2018 (UTC)

AfC Comments - Put them on Talk and Leave them there

Also, why do AfC comments need to go on the Draft page? Why not on the talk page where we can dialog with the creator of the page. It's good training for the new users to use talk anyway, and often many of our comments would be useful to NPR. We could mark issues raised as resolved or not resolved or just make a comment before accepting the page saying "Issues raised have been addressed except for xyz that needs more work" I've taken to putting reasons I accepted the page on talk to head off AfDs etc and explain my thinking. Legacypac (talk) 06:23, 26 March 2018 (UTC)

I figure it's like a maintenance tag, but you have a point. Jjjjjjdddddd (talk) 06:28, 26 March 2018 (UTC)
It’s an artefact from when drafts were subpages of WT:AfC and didn’t have talk pages. It is the most glaring inconsistency between AFC and the rest of Wikipedia culture, the use of talk pages. Mainspace discovered the need for talk pages in 2001, comments on the document-proper is not a good way to work. Talk pages work everywhere else, and draft header template comments do not work if work means leading to conversations and solving of problems. I think only a minimal template should go on the draft page, and all comments on the talk page, exactly as with templates and comments in mainspace. —SmokeyJoe (talk) 06:40, 26 March 2018 (UTC)
This is something I've often wondered about. It should be logical for the actual commenting to be done on the talk page. Can this be introduceed without a great kerfuffle? Kudpung กุดผึ้ง (talk) 05:15, 27 March 2018 (UTC)
I presume it is just a bit of coding becuase when we accept info goes on talk automatically. I don't think comments should be stripped either, it's good history for other editors checking the page later. As SmokeyJoe points out it was required to strip comments when the page was a subpage of Articles for Creation. The change would greatly improve dialog between submitters and reviewers. Who can change the tool? We can start right now by typing our unique comments onto talk instead of using the Comment function. Legacypac (talk) 06:23, 27 March 2018 (UTC)
Without digging into the code history, I'd imagine it's a hold over from when drafts were in the Wikipedia talk namespace, before Draft existed; at least, that's how it worked backed then. No talkpage for the talkpage. ~ Amory (u • t • c) 10:53, 27 March 2018 (UTC)
same reason we've been directing questions to the reviewer's talkpage. Legacypac (talk) 23:38, 27 March 2018 (UTC)
Can this be acted on immediately? (Or at least before ACTRIAL is reactivated?) The existing comment system doesn't encourage detailed useful critique, nor permit eg interwiki links or urls, so you can't ask an author whether the article is intended as a translation of x or suggest sources except by adding them. And teaching newbies to handle article talk pages would be a bonus. Espresso Addict (talk) 00:32, 30 March 2018 (UTC)

Draft:Barbara Bosworth

This draft declined for promo a few times but it reads ok now. Pretty long, lots of sources, she has a few books etc. What do other reviewers think of it now? Legacypac (talk) 06:11, 1 April 2018 (UTC)

It's still pretty promotional in tone in places, imo -- it reads a bit like a patchwork between a promotional piece and a more-neutral entry, presumably more than one author at work?-- and far too long. It's a bit out of my area but I believe the subject is probably notable; see [26] which makes her achievements clearer. The CV link {ref 1) has been taken down so the Chair is unsourced [eta: now fixed] also ref 9 to the Smithsonian. Ref 10 checks out, but needs to be attributed to Andy Grundberg in Grand Street. A lot of the refs, though not all, are to what she says about her work, in interviews (published in reputable places), and I think this material needs substantial pruning. Espresso Addict (talk) 08:52, 1 April 2018 (UTC)
The 17 April 2017 deleted version by Bosworthentry is pretty similar to the first draft version submitted, also by Bosworthentry. However there's an AfD keep Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Barbara Bosworth on a version that was later deleted for being created by a blocked user, which is completely different (much shorter, encyclopedic tone); I very much doubt they're the same person. Espresso Addict (talk) 09:21, 1 April 2018 (UTC)
If notable - and I think she is - the tone can be fixed in mainspace. As an Admin you can unprotect the title. Legacypac (talk) 09:29, 1 April 2018 (UTC)
I agree with Legacypac. She's clearly notable enough for an article. Articles do not have to leave AfC as perfect, only as good enough. It contains no problems that cannot be improved in article space. I also note that some of the so-called promotionalism found in drafts is often a product of new editors trying to emphasise the subject's notability, precisely because of their fear of AfC reviewers, many of whom are not well versed in notability criteria or specialist subjects. Voceditenore (talk) 10:16, 1 April 2018 (UTC)
We need to accept articles that are not likely to be deleted. Why would this article conceivably be deleted? WP:TNT is the only reason I can think of and that's not a valid reason and so rarely prevails at AfD. ~Kvng (talk) 14:28, 1 April 2018 (UTC)
Even if TNT were a valid reason for deletion in general, this draft doesn't remotely fit the description "pages that are beyond fixing". At most it could use some pruning, but in my view even that is not absolutely necessary. If ACTRIAL becomes permanent (and I sincerely hope it does), AfC is going to have to get up to speed to stop of these kinds inappropriate rejections. Voceditenore (talk) 16:19, 1 April 2018 (UTC)
@Seraphimblade: twice speedy deleted from mainspace a draft substantially identical to the basis for this page, and then salted the title. Pinging him for an opinion here.
As a tangentially related aside, if an admin or someone else with the autopatrolled privilege accepts an AfC draft, does that enter NPP marked as patrolled? Espresso Addict (talk) 19:34, 1 April 2018 (UTC)
No we've discussed implementing that as an AFD-NPP reform. However as an NPPer I can and maybe should patrol the page as well. Legacypac (talk) 22:24, 1 April 2018 (UTC)

On the original topic, for the record Seraphimblade strongly objects to the article in its current state. I'll ping the women's project, see if they can tidy it up. Espresso Addict (talk) 21:42, 2 April 2018 (UTC)

Notifying new editors of topic-specific notability criteria

I was just looking at Draft:Hard Rain SoloistEnsemble, which was recently - and reasonably - rejected on notability grounds. As the name implies, the article is about a musical ensemble, and yet none of the review messages on that page nor on its creator's talk page, mentions Wikipedia:Notability (music)#Criteria for musicians and ensembles.

It strikes me that I have rarely if ever seen an AfC reviewer mention such topic-specific notability criteria when rejecting a draft. May I suggest that doing so should become part of common and best practice? Such pages give the author a clear and set of guidelines. Andy Mabbett (Pigsonthewing); Talk to Andy; Andy's edits 22:14, 31 March 2018 (UTC)

I obviously cannot speak for every reviewer, but pages like that in my experience are the exception rather than the rule. If I'm reviewing a draft against an SNG I mention that in my decline, and most of the other reviews I have seen do the same. However, you're right in that if the SNGs aren't being mentioned they probably should if the reviewer is using them. Of course, if something fails GNG or V outright then there's not much point in looking further. Primefac (talk)
As I mentioned above, I think some articles on academics are being declined even though they stand every chance of meeting WP:PROF, so I think reminding reviewers of the existence of such guidelines would be useful, too... Espresso Addict (talk) 23:42, 31 March 2018 (UTC)
I know some PROF passing pages are being declined because I've accepted them after the decline. Legacypac (talk) 00:57, 1 April 2018 (UTC)
WP:PROF is difficult because, at least as I understand it, in practice it trumps GNG, in the sense that the fact that the citation record is adequate to pass PROF1 is used to infer that sources exist even if they have not been demonstrated. The other problem is COI, of course, because the first page every aca-editor creates is about themselves/their PhD supervisor/head of department... but at least some of these people are likely to be future productive editors who know things, can write referenced text and have access to offline sources. Espresso Addict (talk) 02:27, 1 April 2018 (UTC)
@Espresso Addict: What's the best venue for doing such reminding? Andy Mabbett (Pigsonthewing); Talk to Andy; Andy's edits 22:36, 2 April 2018 (UTC)
Perhaps all reviewers should be auto-signed to the newsletter, and that could be resurrected so that discussions like this one could be conveyed to the workforce. The NPP newsletter looks like a success story. Espresso Addict (talk) 22:47, 2 April 2018 (UTC)
On the contrary. Whatever the guideline (if any!) consulted by the reviewer, and whatever the reason for rejection, the topic-specific notability guideline contains information that will aid the new editor. Andy Mabbett (Pigsonthewing); Talk to Andy; Andy's edits 22:39, 2 April 2018 (UTC)
We do have a specific music decline reason that I assume the generated decline text has a WP:NMUSIC link of some sort in it. Giving a more specific notability decline reason is helpful but not, IMO, essential as almost all topic-specific notability criteria are superseded by WP:GNG; For all but WP:NCORP, if WP:GNG is met, the more specific notability criteria is met. ~Kvng (talk) 14:34, 1 April 2018 (UTC)
Consider a new contributor, who knows nothing of such TLAs. They want to know "What must I do to get this article published?", "What is meant by "significant coverage" or "Am I wasting my time if I continue with this?". Topic specific guidelines answer these questions much more clearly than GNG. Besides which, if your point holds why do such guidelines exist? Andy Mabbett (Pigsonthewing); Talk to Andy; Andy's edits 22:36, 2 April 2018 (UTC)
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