User:ONUnicorn/NPPS/HistoryTheorist

Hello @HistoryTheorist:, and thank you for your interest in NPP school. I have set up this page for us to use for the training. I suggest you add this page to your watchlist.

I know the next week or so is the holiday season, and you said you want to start after the new year, so don't feel pressured to get started right away. That said, I'd like to begin to get a baseline read on your expectations for NPP school and what your starting skills and knowledge are like, so below are a few starting questions for you to respond to at your leisure.

I've put my questions in bold. Please put your answers in regular text to make it easy to distinguish question from answer. ~ ONUnicorn^{(Talk|Contribs)}problem solving 06:33, 24 December 2023 (UTC)

 Done I might end up editing some of my responses later but @ONUnicorn:, here they are. When I said I wanted to start in the new year, I meant that I'll be on vacation (see my user/talk page) from Dec 27 to 31 and probably not on Wikipedia. I might be semi active Dec 25 but less than usual. If you are not busy during the holiday season, I can do some NPP activities in the interim but really get started in the new year. ❤HistoryTheorist❤ 21:22, 24 December 2023 (UTC)

1. Getting to know you

• Q. You've been active on Wikipedia for about 6 months now, and I see you've tried your hand at a few different things. What has been the most interesting or rewarding thing you've done here so far?
  • A. The most interesting and rewarding thing I've done is create 2 articles (Nelson Santana and Uwe Holmer) with little help. It's fun doing your own research on a topic so obscure that there's no article on the English Wikipedia but notable enough to merit its own page. I also doubled the length of Stuart Epperson, and although I don't agree with a lot of his politics, it was pretty fun improving the article about him.
    • Y Thanks. Researching, learning about new topics, and writing about them is very rewarding, one of my favorite things to do here, and New Page Patrol can work well for people with that kind of drive. I enjoyed reading Nelson Santana and Uwe Holmer. As we progress you will see that New Page Patrol has a tension between being quick and being thorough. Both are needed. I tend to err on the side of being through, and if I find a horrible article but I am able to research and rewrite it so it's acceptable, I'd rather do that than delete it. Hammerton Killick, Children's Village, and Komboni are some examples of articles I found on New Page Patrol and fixed up. You will find that is not true of all reviewers - and there is nothing wrong with that. Keep in mind that there are several different styles of patrolling, and to some extent you'll need to find what works for you. If finding the hidden gems that need work motivates you, then by all means, use that motivation.
• Q. I see you've tried a few editing tools like AntiVandal, RedWarn, Twinkle, and HotCat. What do you like and what do you dislike about these tools?
  • A. With AntiVandal, I like that the diffs of edits are front and center, and I do not have to click on diff to see the edits. I also like that I can quickly revert and warn users about vandalism, but the downside of this is that AV sometimes goes too fast and I may hastily revert a good faith edit. I haven't completely mastered the system and eventually gave up after I made some mistakes. RedWarn and Twinkle are basically the same tool to me, except that RW has a more modern interface and has more options to warn users about vandalism which I really like. However, for welcoming users, I can't resist but use Twinkle. HotCat is a really handy tool because I don't have to go digging for categories; I can enter a keyword and the relevant categories come to me.
    • YI'm glad that you have seen that sometimes tools can be helpful, and sometimes they can lead to going too fast. For a long time I was hesitant to use tools, and only installed Twinkle after I became an admin and I still don't use its full range of functions. Once you have the New Page Reviewer userright you will have a toolbar that appears on the side when looking at a new page. It can be really helpful, but can also (as I've found with a lot of tools) lead to an over-reliance on canned, templated messages for communication. Sometimes the templated messages are fine, but often it's better to leave messages for page creators in your own words. It's also good to know how to do things like create an AFD manually, even if you use the tool 90% of the time. (And really, once you've done an AFD manually 2-3 times, for Heaven's sake, use the tool after that! It's much easier and less prone to missing a step.)
• Q. Why are you interested in New Page Patrolling? What are you hoping to get out of our time together?
  • A. I'm interested in New Page Patrolling because I want to try something different and I see that there's a huge backlog and a huge backlog drive but I don't feel confident enough to attempt to do NPP work on my own. I also hope that by reviewing other people's work, I become a better article creator myself. What I hope to get out of NPP school is a better grasp on content policies and more confidence assessing and hopefully assisting others create articles. I already have an idea on how to do both, but I want to get more practice and learn from a more experienced user.
    • YGreat! Hopefully this will be a good experiance for you.
• Q. You've done some counter-vandalism work. Please describe your process. How do you determine if an edit is vandalism, good faith but inappropriate, or acceptable? How do you respond to the editor who made the edit? How does your response differ for each of the three types of edit?
  • A. Edits that are vandalism include profanity (unless it has some relevance to the source), blanking and getting rid of sources, nonsense, explicit images, and removing information from well-established sources. Good faith but inappropriate edits are edits that add information that might be true but do not provide a source. Another type of edit that I would put under this category are POV edits that are attempts to add the "truth" but are unacceptable because they violate NPOV guidelines, and similarly, COI edits that add unsourced information that violate NPOV. Acceptable edits are constructive edits that change grammar, update pages, and include refs, even if they are bare urls. If I see an edit that I believe is pure and simple vandalism, I will instantly revert it and send a warning. Continual vandalism will be sent to AIV or RfPP. I would probably do the same thing for extremely POV edits that might have a grain of good faith but are probably vandalism. The way I would tell apart vandalism from good faith but POV edits are how the user responds. If the user ignores the warnings and reinstates the edit without giving a reliable source or if they are really not civil, I'll consider the edit vandalism. However, if the user asks for a reason, is civil, and explains why they made the edit, I will consider their edit to be a good faith edit that didn't completely meet Wikipedia standards. I will usually try to be more gentle with users who are trying to improve Wikipedia and give them specific advice to improve their edits so that they meet WP standards.
    • YFor the most part, this is a good answer. I will note that you included various types of content removal ("blanking and getting rid of sources" and "removing information from well-established sources" as vandalism. While content removal is often vandalism, it can also be good faith but inappropriate, and sometimes it is acceptable. For example, imagine the article is a biography of a living person, and a new account is continually removing the sourced date of birth. There are times that conduct is entirely appropriate, and times it is a sign of a good-faith editor with a conflict of interest. Unless it's really obvious, try to assume good faith and talk to the person.

• Q. When you revert and warn someone as part of anti-vandalism work, do you keep an eye on their talk page and contributions to see if they respond to your warning? If not, why?
  • A. If there's a user that I think has made especially promising edits (I also use recent changes to welcome new users as well) or has made especially bad vandalism, I may check my watch list to see what has become of them. I don't regularly check my watchlist, but it's becoming more and more of a habit.
    • YWhen I'm doing New Page Patrol, or leaving newer users messages for any reason, I typically try to go back and check their talk page the next day to see if they've responded. I don't normally keep the page on my watchlist as that can become overcrowded. Newer users tend to struggle with talk pages, especially if they primarily edit on mobile. It's important to be aware of the mobile communication bugs, although a lot of them have been fixed in the last year or so. Newer users don't normally know how to ping people, so checking back is important.

• Q. If you haven't already, please read the behavioral guidelines Don't bite the newbies and Assume Good Faith. In your own words, explain what these mean to you. Please focus on the context of counter vandalism and new page work, but feel free to include a broader view of those policies.
  • A. What these policies to me is that all users are human beings (hopefully not bots) and most are looking to improve the encyclopedia, even if their edits are not perfect. Therefore, I should be patient and lend a helping hand when they ask for help. I should also be quick to forgive and be humble, as I am not a perfect editor (I hope to become better with every edit though), and the new editor might be right where I am wrong. Together, we can help Wikipedia become a better place. With regards to NPP, this can include gently providing specific suggestions to improve a draft that is almost up to WP standards but not quite. It can also mean going in and improving the draft myself, although I would want the creator of the draft to make improvements themself and intervention would be a last resort. If a draft has no potential of ever becoming an article, giving specific reasons why without trying to be too discouraging (a difficult balance) is a good way of being gentle to the newcomers. However, I don't think that AGF means tolerating vandalism and incivility. If an editor isn't looking to improve Wikipedia and is hurling libel and insults, they should be shown the door.
    • YGreat answer! Keeping in mind that everyone you're dealing with is a person (even bots are operated by people) and treating them with kindness and human dignity can go a long way to smoothing things over. The one thing I will point out is that with NPP, we are not dealing with drafts. We are dealing with articles that were either created directly in article space, or have been moved there from draft space. We often send things back to draft space, but when we come accross them, they are in mainspace.

That's all for now. Once you've answered these questions we'll move on to the next lesson. ~ ONUnicorn^{(Talk|Contribs)}problem solving 06:33, 24 December 2023 (UTC)