Wikipedia talk:New pages patrol/Reviewers/Archive 46

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Help?

I am guessing I'm in the wrong place but am hoping the good graces of Wikipedia will take mercy and tell me where I need to be to ask my question. I recently posted my second article of creation. I was told that I did not need to have it approved through the draft process and could just move it to article status myself. So I did. Very quickly someone came along and gave it B status. Then I went to google it and couldn't find it only to learn that new pages have to be reviewed or wait 90 days. I didn't know that! Now I can't find it anywhere on the new pages to be reviewed list either! My creation Christianization of the Roman Empire as caused by attractive appeal is lost in an alternate universe somewhere! Is there anything I can do to bring it home? I would like to volunteer to help with this whole review process thingy, but it looks a little overwhelming for a relative newby. There's so much I don't know. Wikipedia is a morass. :-) Jenhawk777 (talk) 21:32, 8 November 2021 (UTC)

Hi there @Jenhawk777. Your article is not lost. For an article to appear in Google, it needs to be checked by a member of New Page Patrol, have been more than 90 days since it was created, or created by a veteran editor who has a special right called "autopatroll". So for now your article is in this holding pattern. Right now the New Page feed has about 8700 articles in it. Articles are reviewed in no specific order by the volunteers. So it could get indexed as I'm typing this response or it might have to wait the 90 days to be indexed. The length of the article is about commendable - it looks comprehensive - but is also likely a deterrent to a fast review. One quick suggestion in passing: it looks like there is a paragraph that is closely paraphrased from Frontline. I would recommend rewriting that, any other place that may be similarly written. Best, Barkeep49 (talk) 22:00, 8 November 2021 (UTC)

Barkeep49 Bless you! Thank you for responding so quickly and kindly. I will wait to see what happens. "Frontline" is actually directly quoted in a couple of places, yet on the detector it always shows up as a violation. I don't know why some quotes show up as copies while others don't, but it is appropriately quoted and referenced in the article itself - no violations - promise!!! So I guess I just wait, and that's okay, I just didn't know what was going on. I have learned something new again! Thank you! I am looking at volunteering to help out here - I'm just not sure I would know what to do. Jenhawk777 (talk) 22:56, 8 November 2021 (UTC)

Barkeep49 Thank you for your help. I continue to impose on your patience. If you look here at Earwig, [1] you can easily see that the Frontline excerpts are quotes that are appropriately set off, referenced and fully sourced. It says copyvio but it isn't. Earwig sometimes does that with quotes.

I went and put in my username to see the article's status and noted that someone marked the possibility of copyvio violations on it. On my draft, before finishing the article, Dianna deleted some material because I am too inexperienced in too many ways and didn't know that the copyvio rules didn't just apply to published articles - or rather, that everything on WP is in the public domain and is therefore considered published and is subject to those same rules. Those were fixed as soon as I was told. I note that Dianna did not say they had been fixed, should I go ask her to do so? Now I know better and write offsite, and import it in, only after carefully checking everything. There are no copyright violations in this article, I swear. Jenhawk777 (talk) 04:55, 9 November 2021 (UTC)

@Jenhawk777 as I said I only did a quick check here and so it is entirely possible that you've followed all our guidelines over COPYVIO. Thanks for your attention to the matter. Best, Barkeep49 (talk) 16:11, 9 November 2021 (UTC)

NPP message

Hi New pages patrol/Reviewers,

Invitation

For those who may have missed it in our last newsletter, here's a quick reminder to see the letter we have drafted, and if you support it, do please go ahead and sign it. If you already signed, thanks. Also, if you haven't noticed, the backlog has been trending up lately; all reviews are greatly appreciated.

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

MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 23:11, 20 August 2022 (UTC)

well done--Ozzie10aaaa (talk) 00:56, 21 August 2022 (UTC)

This week's PageTriage patches

Deployed earlier today:

• Special:NewPagesFeed can now filter "Were created by autopatrolled users". Also, the green check mark now denotes manual reviews, and the purple check mark (new) denotes autopatrolled reviews.
• The AFD bug may finally be fixed. Attempt #2 is live. If you tag an article as AFD and the AFD does not get created, please let me know right away. I am not 100% sure my patch worked.

–Novem Linguae (talk) 06:57, 19 August 2022 (UTC)

@Novem Linguae: I hate to break bad news... but... I had yet another malformed AfD: [2]. Had to clean up the mess and use Twinkle. ^Complex/_Rational 19:26, 27 August 2022 (UTC)

@ComplexRational. Thanks for reporting. Does it happen consistently for you or intermittently? Any idea how to consistently reproduce the bug? –Novem Linguae (talk) 14:40, 28 August 2022 (UTC)

@Novem Linguae: It happened both times I tried to AfD using page curation recently; I haven't yet had a perfectly formed AfD. I can't say how to consistently reproduce it, because most likely I'll be moderately active at NPP at best and can't produce a large enough sample size, but there are no other influencing factors I'm aware of. ^Complex/_Rational 15:07, 28 August 2022 (UTC)

Visual distinction for unreviewing a page

I'm still very new to actually reviewing pages even though I've been going through NPP school for awhile and so far I've mostly been focusing on redirects. But I've noticed that the process for unreviewing a page is not ideal. Maybe it's just because I'm new or because the green just doesn't stand out as much as it should on my screen, but I've happened to accidentally unreview a page (both redirects) twice. Obviously my mistakes are my mistakes, but I was wondering if maybe someone has pointed out that a more distinct visual difference might be useful? Like an x instead of a checkmark either way for unreviewing. Or a way to set a preference to get a prompt saying "are you certain you want to unreview this page?" Also my understanding (which may be flawed) is that things really shouldn't rely on colour for accessibility reasons. By the way, if anyone sees any issues with the limited reviews I've done so far, please let me know. I'd rather be set on the right path now than find out I've been messing things up for who knows how long later on. Clovermoss (talk) 03:46, 11 August 2022 (UTC)

You do have a point that using color only is an accessibility concern. The button is a plain checkmark if the article is unreviewed, and switches to a green checkmark when reviewed. On the other hand, we are not relying only on color here - when you click on the button, you get the dialog pop-up box that clearly says continuing will mark article as reviewed/unreviewed. I don't follow your suggestion for an "are you certain" prompt - it already is a two-step process. MB 16:23, 16 August 2022 (UTC)

I don't recall getting the dialog pop-up box you described? If there's that, I agree that's good enough. There doesn't need to be a two-step process for it. Clovermoss (talk) 18:02, 16 August 2022 (UTC)

Well, you click the (filled green) checkmark first, which brings up a sub-dialog box, which you can click as "Mark as unreviewed". I don't think you can unreview an article in a single click—needs at least two. Unless you have some weird config? Ovinus (talk) 18:15, 16 August 2022 (UTC)

If you aren't paying close attention to the color of the checkmark, the next dialog box doesn't differ that much between the review and unreview versions. The "action button" says "Mark as reviewed" or "Mark as unreviewed". We could change the latter to "Unreview this page", and possibly move it to the right side to further differentiate. Novem Linguae, what do you think? MB 01:00, 17 August 2022 (UTC)

If we all agree that this is a problem that needs solving, I think a good solution might be changing the check box colors from gray and green, to red and green. And changing the unreview/review button color from green and green, to red and green. However I am neutral on this being a big problem (the gray and green system doesn't confuse me). I'll keep an eye on this to see if a consensus develops. Hope that helps. –Novem Linguae (talk) 01:12, 17 August 2022 (UTC)

@Novem Linguae: Red and green might not be ideal given that some people have red-green colour blindness and thus can't really distinguish between the two. Maybe red and blue? Clovermoss (talk) 00:45, 21 August 2022 (UTC)

Total color blindness also exists, so having an "x" for an unreviewed article and a check for a reviewed article would seem to build in additional accessibility. I am not familiar with the process and how it appears, but multiple layers of features to help prevent error seems helpful generally, if it is not particularly difficult to implement. Beccaynr (talk) 01:02, 29 August 2022 (UTC)

Get ready, it's coming

WP is becoming Botipedia. See Wikipedia:Bots/Noticeboard#Dams article. Atsme 💬 📧 11:11, 30 August 2022 (UTC)

• Ach scheiße.... ~Styyx^Talk? 19:33, 30 August 2022 (UTC)

• Exactly! Atsme 💬 📧 22:28, 30 August 2022 (UTC)

  Well, it does look like they're recommending a list article instead. Otherwise, we'll be flooded with new stubs. — rsjaffe 🗣️ 23:39, 30 August 2022 (UTC)

Discussion at Wikipedia talk:Arbitration Committee/Requests for comment/Article creation at scale

 You are invited to join the discussion at Wikipedia talk:Arbitration Committee/Requests for comment/Article creation at scale. –Novem Linguae (talk) 03:18, 1 September 2022 (UTC)

There are several proposals in this workshop that would affect notability and the NPP workflow. For example, "Proposed solution 1.1 (to issue 1: Mass creations)" is "Require new articles to be supported by at least one citation to a reliable source that is not a database." The relationship between GNG and SNG is also discussed. This talk page/workshop may also be a good opportunity to inject some of your own proposals. –Novem Linguae (talk) 03:18, 1 September 2022 (UTC)

"Set filters" button off or nearly off the screen

Discussion moved to Wikipedia:Page_Curation/Suggested_improvements#Club_all_"were_created_by"_options_into_one_drop_down

Help please

Hi all. Brand new reviewer here, freshly trained by the wonderful @Atsme. Here’s hoping she or anyone else can answer this. When I am in the new page feed, I can see in red a page was previously deleted. Where do I see the new page? I am kinda feeling a little stuck. This page is not suitable for Wikipedia at present. Can I really draftify it without a discussion? I also want to know how I can compare it against the previous article, and also want to know how it was deleted? I know I can only CSD an article that was deleted after consensus to delete was reached, AND it needs to be substantially similar. Can’t figure out how to actually check those two criteria though?

One page I just CSDd did actually have the AFD discussion in the talk page. I checked that and there was consensus to delete. Given the new article was a one sentence stub I CSD tagged it. Also, beginners opinion here, but I’m unsurprised at the backlog. Looking at it, very few articles stand out as ones I can quickly review. Is there a reason we allow editors with so few contributions to be autoconfirmed and create articles? I feel like articles for creation works better? I feel sort of stuck at NPP - I either have to mark the article as OK, or it gets tagged or deleted. Whereas AFC I feel like the junk can quickly be declined, then the writer has a chance to resubmit? Any tips for a newbie? I also can’t figure a way to sort out the new pages feed into categories like one can at AFC? Thanks so much everyone and happy to be part of the team! MaxnaCarta (talk) 10:21, 5 September 2022 (UTC)

Hi, MaxnaCarta - happy to see you found your way over here, and I realize your first day out as a full-fledged reviewer can be a little intimidating. For these first few weeks, you can contact me directly on my UTP or via email. You can also go back to your tutorial and review prior discussions. I can understand why that BLP is confusing as it was included with the following Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Jim McMahon (politician) and then restored later. This is one of the situations we deal with fairly often, and decide which is the best option. First - I removed the copyvio. If you did WP:BEFORE and found no sources to establish N, you can try A7 noting that it was previously deleted & provide the url so the acting admin will know. Atsme 💬 📧 10:56, 5 September 2022 (UTC)

@MaxnaCarta: Sometimes, more likely if it's an article that existed a long time before being deleted, you can find both the AfD and (if you're lucky) an old version of the deleted article using the Wayback Machine. In that case, you can easily check whether CSD G4 applies, and apply the tag if it does. ^Complex/_Rational 15:24, 5 September 2022 (UTC)

One script you might find useful is User:Bradv/Scripts/Superlinks. It gives you a bunch of helpful links on pages, including a "log" button that brings up the page's deletion log, which tells you when/why the page was deleted. Clicking "log" on Barbara Dawson, for instance, shows you the 2008 AfD that Atsme mentioned above. It's not perfect, but it usually does a pretty good job. Cheers, Extraordinary Writ (talk) 00:41, 6 September 2022 (UTC)

Dab page at NPP

I am doing what I can to help. I appreciate all of you and the work you do. i know the last thing you want is to read a long story. But I thought if anything, this may be something more editors can learn from.

During NPP I found Ohana (surname) dab page - it was just a list, and I checked to see if there was a page. I found Ohana (disambiguation) page - and there was ample room in the d page to move the surnames and redirect. The page creator began reverting the redirect, and the merge. The page creator erased every message I put on their talk page. I decided to send the redirected page to AfD so they would stop reverting the redirect.

The page creator started an RFC on the dab/surname topic. At the RFC an admin (BD2412) told them they should if possible include references providing information about surname origins and usage.. The dab creator then added a reference. Next BD2412 came to the AfD to tell me I should be trouted and blocked because there can't be references in a dab page. So I then erased the reference from the dab pages and came back to announce it in the AfD. I then went to BD2412's talk page, to ask about the comments in AfD. They did not answer, but instead came to the AfD to threaten taking me to ANI for erasing references. Me I am following what they said, there can't be references in a dab page... I commented that they should have discussed with me on their talk page. Next they went to their talk page and said I was trolling and they mentioned blocking me.

What started all of this? I saw two short list/landing pages named Ohana and thought they should be combined. I really thought I was improving the project. I plan to take a break after this experience but I bring this here. Have a great weekend everyone! Bruxton (talk) 00:35, 2 September 2022 (UTC)

I have no opinion on whether there should be two pages or one, but the threats of ban etc. seem way over the top. (t · c) buidhe 01:35, 2 September 2022 (UTC)

Thanks @Buidhe: I was pretty stunned. I have about 500 pages reviewed so I am not the Wizard yet. I know you are an experienced editor and I appreciate you! I have reviewed some DYKs of yours. Glad to know you. Bruxton (talk) 02:09, 2 September 2022 (UTC)

I think everyone was acting in good faith here, but breaking out the surname from the dabpage makes sense. Articles on surnames are valid set index articles and can include info on the surname (and sources for that info) that aren't allowed in dabpages. Elli (talk | contribs) 07:31, 2 September 2022 (UTC)

I don't want to interfere in this but as a general comment do be aware that dab pages and surname pages are quite different and have different requirements in respect of references, formatting etc: it's common practice for a surname page to be broken out of a dab page. Ingratis (talk) 07:14, 2 September 2022 (UTC)

Sorry that you had to go though all this. It shouldn't have escalated as quickly as it did. We all have bad days and can overreact to things and this time it seems you just got caught up in it. I hope you stick around and don't let a one off like this discourage your important work. Dr vulpes ^{(💬 • 📝)} 23:11, 2 September 2022 (UTC)

• Don't let this discourage you Bruxton. NPP and maintenance tasks are dreary and thankless and patrollers need thick skins. The job would be less of a drudge if we had better software. Here's another place where your quick help is needed, but only if you want to of course. Kudpung กุดผึ้ง (talk) 14:52, 4 September 2022 (UTC)

• The page in question seems to have been valid and created in good faith. The creator's user page now says Discontinued editing due to persistent harassment. Good bye. Please see WP:BITE and WP:NPPNICE. Andrew🐉(talk) 09:34, 5 September 2022 (UTC)

Sure @Andrew Davidson: FWIW: I apologize for the ANI I started about you a while ago. I know you are still smarting over that ANI so I am sorry about that. It will not happen again. That ANI question about your perm would have been better asked here at NPP. Regarding Yossi Rimon They are not a newcomer based on knowledge and the fact that they started an RFC after just a few days on the project, and understand the term CLEANSTART. Also I did not bite I approved many of their first creations, here is my first post to them: Happy editing! I approved your dab page. Second post to them do not revert the redirect - it duplicates a disambig which exists and is not too long. Please read WP:DABNAME Specifically, A list of name-holders can be included in a People section of the page. The page exists for that purpose. If you have further questions you can ask at WP:NPP. Thanks and keep up the good work! They erased the posts, including one from another user. In any event I have given myself a timeout from editing. It is good to take a step back - and in doing so one can reflect and move forward with a better approach. Bruxton (talk) 16:32, 5 September 2022 (UTC)

If BITE and NPPNICE prevent us from having a discussion then fuck this shit I'm out of here. ~Styyx^Talk? 11:35, 6 September 2022 (UTC)

Article Merges

One of the reasons reviewers get frustrated is when they encounter push-back after an action. There are examples of this above. Some of this can be avoided if we rely more on consensus-based discussions rather than unilateral actions. One scenario that comes to mind is Merge/Redirect.

The tutorial says If you come upon an article on a duplicate topic… [that] has content that warrants merging, perform a merge. The flowchart says the essentially the same. They both link to WP:MERGE, which says If the need for a merge is obvious, editors can be bold and simply do it It goes on to say otherwise, start a merge discussion. The NPP tutorial does not directly mention starting merge discussions.

Occasionally, there will be a new article on “Joe actor” that should be merged into the existing article “Joseph actor”. But it is much more common that we will have a new article on a topic may not be notable but could be covered in another article. Obviously, the creator of the article would disagree. If you follow VP discussions on stubs/short articles/combining into broader articles/etc., you are aware that this is a contentious subject. Most potential merges we find at NPP probably should be discussed.

I think the tutorial should be updated to reflect this and give further guidance, such as:

1. Do not merge and redirect except in clearly obvious cases that are unlikely to be disputed, start a merge discussion instead.
2. Unlike with AFD, the merge process is less structured. The merge templates can be removed by anyone. So a proposed merge should not be marked as reviewed, it should be treated like a PROD or CSD.
3. If a reviewer finds an article in the queue already involved in a merge discussion, they should probably not mark the article reviewed either, but should consider participating in the discussion. This may not apply in all cases; a merge discussion could have been started unnecessarily in an obvious case like the “Joe actor” example.
4. Since there is no time limit for an merge discussion to be closed, the reviewer should probably watch the discussion and move for WP:MERGECLOSE after a few weeks by either closing it if there is a rough consensus or using WP:Requests for Closure.

MB 20:14, 8 September 2022 (UTC)

I entirely disagree. Our current guidance is too incusionist in nature, with poorly-thought merges being preferred over straight deletion. The community does not support deletion of content and the chasing-off of new editors, hence the mess you describe. Redirects are costly and I think deletion is the best cleanser. Looking for hundreds of small political consensuses is less efficient than a single large consensus to send junk to the bin. Chris Troutman (talk) 20:20, 8 September 2022 (UTC)

In my mind, bold merging seems similar to draftifying and also WP:BLAR. I think the advice in all these situations is something like: try it once, and if there's objection/reverting, then start a formal (AFD) or informal discussion. –Novem Linguae (talk) 23:18, 8 September 2022 (UTC)

Doing a merge can be a lot of work, which would be all wasted if just undone. Did you see the fallout from the dab/surname merge above. That could have all been avoided with a discussion. I think it is wise to be conservative at times. Our documentation does not even list Merge discussions as an option. MB 23:45, 8 September 2022 (UTC)

Doing a merge can be a lot of work, indeed it can and hence why it is not within the expected tasks of new page reviewers and anything in the tutorial that suggest it is should be removed, even if aeons ago I wrote it myself. There's nothing to stop an editor doing anything that improves the encyclopedia, but IMO the general best approach here would be AfD with 'Delete or Merge' as the rationale, and let someone else do the merging if that is the outcome. Kudpung กุดผึ้ง (talk) 00:19, 9 September 2022 (UTC)

I agree when you say Merging is not within the expected tasks of new page reviewers, but I don't agree you should AFD an article unless you really think it should be deleted. The first section of WP:BEFORE links to WP:ATD which says If editing can improve the page, this should be done rather than deleting the page and then discusses Merging. I think proposing merges would be best practice; it accomplishes the same thing and still lets someone else do the merging if that is the outcome. There are just some NPP housekeeping details to address, which are what I was proposing. MB 00:51, 9 September 2022 (UTC)

I have previously tagged with merge to and given a brief explanation why. Let the community sort out from there. Slywriter (talk) 01:12, 9 September 2022 (UTC)