While attending Wikimania this year, Selena Deckelmann (User:SDeckelmann-WMF) demonstrated a new feature for Visual Editor, Edit Check in a session. Edit check introduces additional prompts in Visual Editor when an editor tries to insert a blacklisted URL as reference and also when they try to publish a revision without inserting a reference. This greatly helps with encouraging editors inserting references in their edits. If I recall correctly, the percentage of editors inserting references increased from 11% to 40% in their tests (do correct me if I am wrong as I am going off on my recollection).see #What's next? for corrected stats
There is certainly some benefits in enabling this, primarily on improving the verifiability and reliability of content that's on English Wikipedia. Most of the sister projects have already been deployed with this feature. English Wikipedia does not have this feature enabled yet. The only thing that is holding back this feature is that Visual Editor is not set as the default editor for anonymous and new editors.
Therefore, I would like to propose that:
Visual Editor be the default editor for anonymous and new editors.
The last time I checked, new editors are presented with a pop-up box that asks them to choose which editor they'd like to use, with the solid blue button pushing them a bit toward the VisualEditor.
This thread is rather underdeveloped. For a proposal of this magnitude, I think we should figure out relevant factual questions (like what the current default is) and then draw up a more formal survey that could be CENT-listed, etc. Sdkbtalk19:05, 9 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Another question is how does it work with edits that don't need references adding (e.g. creating redirects, adding links on disambiguation pages, fixing spellings, etc)? Thryduulf (talk) 19:08, 9 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]
In theory, this sounds like a great idea. I'm eager to try it out, but I think a first step would be to make it available as an opt-in on enwiki. Then after people have got some experience with it, let's come back and talk about making it the default. RoySmith(talk)20:09, 9 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]
There's a simpler option for userscripts that should work: window.MWVE_FORCE_EDIT_CHECK_ENABLED=true;
So long as that's there before VE loads, it should force you to have edit check. Either method also bypasses the account restrictions on edit check, so you're not quite getting the pure experience that people would if we just turned it on for enwiki. By default it only shows up for new users (defined as under 100 edits), and someone might want to edit the configuration on-wiki for that. DLynch (WMF) (talk) 21:26, 9 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]
The add-reference check is very conservative currently. You need to be a user with less than 100 edits who has added a whole new paragraph of at least 50 characters (configurable per-wiki) that contains no references before it'll pop up. This can all be loosened up in the future, whether by default or through community configuration, but we figured that those criteria had pretty low odds of being a false positive to start with.
It's quite interesting that this boosts the percentages so much, because I honestly thought that complete new-editors would be doing far more minor edits. But no, major new blocks of text are pretty popular.
It's actually turned on with the reference check everywhere but 8 of the wikipedias (bn, de, en, hi, id, nl, pl, ru), so it's pretty easy to try it out on another wiki if you don't want to jump through userscript hoops here. DLynch (WMF) (talk) 21:34, 9 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Not sure where ReplyTool will put this, but nothing I'm seeing in the documentation requires VE to be the default editing interface in order to deploy the new tool. So deployment doesn't seem contingent upon answering the larger question of whether VE should be default. Folly Mox (talk) 22:17, 9 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Unless things have changed in the last year, it doesn't need it to be the default, but editor does need to be in the visual editor, and that's somewhat more likely to happen (especially for the editor's first edit) when the visual editor is the default. WhatamIdoing (talk) 01:29, 10 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]
The functionality is targeted towards new editors and anonymous editors, therefore the need for Visual Editor to be the default before the deployment of the functionality is considered complete. Also there are on wiki configuration options that we may want to adjust. As stated by Dlynch (WMF) above, the tool is configured by default for an user with less than 100 edits and making revisions of more than 50 characters. – robertsky (talk) 04:15, 10 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Minor quibble: enwiki has already got the prompts about blacklisted URLs for references/links. We rolled those out everywhere on the logic that any edits involving them were going to get blocked-on-save anyway so it wasn't going to disrupt any workflows. :D
It's a bit fuzzy because we called the project "Edit check", and we're developing a specific system called edit check (of which the "add reference" check is the first example), but we're also doing smaller edit-enhancement features along the way that colloquially get called checks just because of the project.
Conduct a thorough analysis of the potential consequences of setting Visual Editor as the default for anonymous and new users. Consider factors such as user experience, editor retention, and overall editing patterns. If making Visual Editor the default is not feasible, investigate other strategies to increase Edit Check adoption. This could include targeted outreach to experienced editors, promoting the feature through in-editor messages, or developing incentives for reference usage. Regardless of the chosen approach, it's essential to closely monitor the impact of Edit Check on reference usage and article quality. This data will be crucial for refining the feature and measuring its overall effectiveness.
I'd support making Visual Editor the default, as long as they also leave wikitext editing as an option (which I'm sure they will). VE is much better nowadays than when it was first released. As a WYSIWYG editor, I suspect it is much more new editor friendly. It is unarguably better at things such as automatic citation generation and table editing (adding and removing columns and rows, moving columns and rows around). And for the few things it is bad at (such as complicated template syntax), power users can just switch to wikitext editing. Any logged in user can select their default at Special:Preferences (under "Editing mode"). –Novem Linguae (talk) 10:47, 10 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]
I totally agree that VE should be the default for new users. I use VE every day, and it's just fine for most stuff, and getting better incrementally. Folks who think VE should not be the default should go to edit-a-thons and try teaching new users. 20 years ago, wiki-markup was the new hotness and was miles ahead of editing raw HTML. Today it's just a barrier to entry for potential new editors. RoySmith(talk)12:24, 10 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]
When I first edited English Wikipedia as an IP editor, I found WikiText editing very difficult to understand. I’m sure that most new IP editors face this issue. I strongly support making the Visual Editor the default. New IP editors are often unfamiliar with Wikipedia and may not know how to cite a reference using the WikiText editor. They may also not know how to switch to Visual Editing. Frankly, I still have to check the preview before publishing edits using the WikiText editor because I sometimes make mistakes. GrabUp - Talk11:08, 10 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Potentially minor bugbear alert: The visual editor reference creator still hasn't figured out the basic functionality of allowing for an easily accessed and obvious use of an |author= field, instead forcing all authors into |last and |first. It's not a groundbreaking issue, but it's really disappointing that it's still around after so long, especially given the many words given over the years about attracting more diverse perspectives etc. The default reference tool that we are going to create a pop up asking all new editors to use should allow for sources from authors whose names don't fit into the common European name format. It may be hidden behind an additional field button, but at least the wikitext reference creator has the option. CMD (talk) 12:10, 10 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]
My biggest bugbear is the lack of ability to set a reference name. For example in this edit I switched from visual to source editing so I could reuse citations between prose and infobox. Although admittedly this is not something a brand new editor wants to do, being able to set a name other than ":0", ":1", etc would be rather handy. Thryduulf (talk) 12:28, 10 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Is naming references a policy? Or is it something you consider useful? I don't edit the code. I just reuse citations when I need them, directly from the citation insertion menu. Very convinient. 37.169.50.102 (talk) 12:52, 11 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]
I mostly work in VE; I'm not personally bothered by the opaque names (i.e. ":0") that VE invents because I never see them. But many people work in wikitext, where having human-friendly names is important. So, I agree that improving support for reference naming should be a high priority. RoySmith(talk)12:57, 11 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]
I just went looking, and I don't see a Phab ticket for this. I was a bit surprised there was no ticket, but then I thought about it a bit more. It's probably hard to come up with a wiki-agnostic way to generate good citation names. You'd have to program it with something very enwiki specific to get it to read our unique citation templates then extract the author last name and year from them. User:Nardog/RefRenamer is a good workaround though. –Novem Linguae (talk) 13:14, 11 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]
I thought we were talking about auto-generating good names. Those tickets are for something else. Maybe I am misreading this subsection though. Apologies if we are not actually talking about auto-generating good reference names. –Novem Linguae (talk) 13:20, 11 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]
When copy pasting named references to another page, you get false matches that are not obvious. If automatic named references were more unique (slugified title) this false collision would happen less often. I am all for hiding/abstract workflows where needed. ~ 🦝 Shushugah (he/him • talk) 13:03, 11 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]
All programmers should read Falsehoods Programmers Believe About Names, and then re-read it every few years to refresh their memory. People who design database schemas should re-read it every time they start a new project. I agree that it's not a showstopper for our purposes, but it is a surprising lack of cultural sensitivity from an organization which is so into i18n.
For me, the biggest bugbear is that there's no good way to convert a {{cite web}} into another template without basically starting from scratch. It really should be smart enough to figure out that if {{cite web}} has a "first=" field, it can safely map that into {{cite news}}'s "first=" and so on. It won't be perfect, but it'll get you most of the way there. RoySmith(talk)12:57, 10 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]
@Chipmunkdavis @RoySmith Visual editor follows the definition of the template parameters at Template:Cite web#TemplateData (and so on for other cite templates). I think the developers would also wish that you didn't require the name to be split into two fields; it's a chore to fill it out this way. If you think this can be changed, please edit it there. Matma Rextalk13:58, 10 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]
@Matma Rex you are entirely correct that VE gets its field definitions from the templates. The first part of my comment about first_name/last_name ethnocentricity applies equally well to template writers.
But, the part about being able to convert one type of citation to another really is a VE issue. The "automatic" feature of the VE template editor is very handy, but it often can't intuit the proper type of template (that's not VE's fault) and falls back to using {{cite web}}. It would be really handy if you could say, "Please make that into {{cite news}}, and do the best job you can converting the fields". RoySmith(talk)14:38, 10 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]
|author= is already present in the existing template parameters, even if just as an alias of |last. Not presenting the alias in VE is a choice of VE, the buck should not just be passed to blindly following a particular table. CMD (talk) 14:56, 10 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]
It might be controlled by the WP:TEMPLATEDATA in something like Template:Cite/doc. I think VE reads the template data to determine the parameters it displays. If a parameter is omitted or set as hidden, perhaps it is not displayed. Not 100% sure but that is probably worth checking. –Novem Linguae (talk) 15:08, 10 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Assuming it is, then it would be really useful to have some statistics of how often VE (I know, I should really be saying Citoid or Zotero, or something else, but I'll just keep saying VE because that's what the end user sees) gets it wrong. I'm not entirely sure how we would define "gets it wrong", but a first pass might be "VE initially calls it {{cite web}} which is later corrected to a different {{cite xxx}} variant". Some of that might require instrumentation inside VE to detect when the user abandons a constructed citation before saving it. Some of it might require analyzing revisions to the page to see when template types are corrected after the fact. But let's assume one way or another, we could build a log of incorrect categorizations.
Then what we would do is take the full log of these reports, group them by top-level domain, and sort by frequency. If it came out that "bxtimes.com" was the most frequently domain which got mis-categorized, then it would be the highest priority for a human to go figure out how to fix and add that knowledge to the VE (Citoid? zotero?) database. After enough iterations of fixing the highest priority ones, we'd end up with a better system. If (total SWAG here) we could find the 100 top problems that accounted for 50% of the total errors, with a very small amount of human work to fix them, we could have a major win.
It sounds like a reasonable stab at the misassignment-of-citation-templates issue.
Caveat up front: I'm a developer, but I've never actually touched the internals of Citoid+Zotero, so I might be wrong about details here. That said, I believe you're right that the classification part happens entirely in Zotero, and further that if you want to teach Zotero about how to classify a new site there's some guidelines we have for that over on mediawiki.org. This coming from Zotero is also why we have vastly more classifications than we actually use on-wiki -- check out the mapping for that.
It's possible that some of the incorrect template-usage you see could be at the level of those mappings, as well -- I note that the `statute` type is just hooked up to the generic `Citation` rather than to {{Cite_act}}, for instance, though that's probably far from the most common one to need.
As for the specifics of working that list-of-sources out...
We do have some instrumentation inside VE already that could probably be looked at to work out how often someone gets all the way to the "presented with a citation-template" step and then abandons it, which would give us an okay up-front guess at the rate where something is wrong with the generated citation. Ignoring the question of other types of failure for now, the next problem is that our VE usage-instrumentation is carefully ignorant of content for privacy reasons, so it doesn't know anything about what URL was looked up when that happened. Looking for revisions which consist of just a citation template being replaced with a different citation template sounds doable, albeit slow.
I wonder if we could approach it another way. Assuming that Zotero has some internal logging of the translator it used when we make a request to it, or that it can be persuaded to tell Citoid this, we could perhaps add some logging for requests that fall back to the default-translator for unknown pages. That's not a perfect match for the misclassifications, but it's much easier to find. It does leave out cases where the translator exists but is getting it wrong, of course. DLynch (WMF) (talk) 01:46, 11 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]
it doesn't know anything about what URL was looked up when that happened does it know/track what type of template it chose? If so we can possibly work out what proportion of e.g. cite-news vs cite-web generations were abandoned? I don't think, ottomh, there would be any privacy issues with that? Thryduulf (talk) 01:53, 11 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Unfortunately not. All it tracks is that a citoid request happened, and then either that the "insert" button was chosen or that something was done to move away from the citoid results list. It doesn't even track what type was chosen if you go to the "manual" tab and explicitly pick one of the templates listed there.
I do agree it seems very unlikely to be a privacy issue. I mostly mentioned that was the guiding principle to explain why the case for so many questions like this turns out to be "we never needed this actually-very-innocuous content-related data before, so we weren't collecting it". DLynch (WMF) (talk) 02:09, 11 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Superb Owl has been maintaining a table of domain names where mw:Citoid has trouble producing a correct citation at User:Superb Owl/Community Wishlist § Automatic Citation Tool. As I understand it, Citoid's problems are partially due to how it scrapes target pages, and if domains are not putting all the information we need in <meta> tags then our only recourse is to improve Zotero translators directly.However, Citoid is understandably geared towards internationalisation and extension to all Wikimedia projects. En.wp has a considerably more complicated / sophisticated / mature citation framework than probably anywhere else. Little things like an automated citation using {{cite web}} instead of {{cite news}} or {{cite periodical}} don't bother me: User:Citation bot converts these, and the only template type it really struggles with is conversion to {{cite book}}, which has a pretty different parameter set.What does bother me about the automated citations output by the Visual Editor (apart from all the <ref name=":0">) is how often it just dumps out obviously incorrect information with no message to the user. Things like |last=B.C. |first=Sima, Qian, approximately 145 B.C.-approximately 86 (1); |last=Company |first=Rand McNally and (2); |last=Feb. 1 |first=the Office of Communications on |last2=2019 |last3=P.m |first3=3:06 (3); |last=à 00h00 |first=Par Le 2 avril 2008 (4); |first=Government of Canada National Research Council|last=Canada (5), etc, etc, etc, bonus consequence.A few days ago, I floated the idea to add a layer of error-checking into the VE citation generation interface. That's really all we need, I think. It shouldn't be the responsibility of WMF staff to ensure that every citation generated by their tools somehow makes sense for our project. But if there could just be one extra step for editors using the interface, where they could see the errors their automated citations are causing our community-maintained modules to throw, maybe they'd take the steps necessary to compare the output against the source and correct the problems before publishing.This won't fix every problem, obviously: algorithmically generated citations are only perfect when they draw on structured metadata that maps properly and completely onto our template parameters. But being able to get feedback during the edit should help editors in the VE environment clean up some of their own messes before they hit mainspace, unreviewed at the bottom of the article. Folly Mox (talk) 12:37, 11 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]
@RoySmith, @DLynch (WMF), @Folly Mox, speaking from experience from creating Zotero translators for a couple websites that I frequently use for citations, errors like this are more often than not a byproduct of missing specific Zotero translator rather than anything else. The default translator will interpret og:type = article as itemType = 'webpage', therefore citiod will use {{Cite web}}. This is unfortunate as even in the default translator's own test cases, vox.com is expected to return as 'webpage' for itemType. However, I would agree with this output, as in Open Graph Protocol, the last object type specified is 'article', and I am assuming that that's the fallback for Facebook as Facebook would use the embedded preview for articles if there's no og:type in the header (i.e. Facebook debugger on wikimedia.sg).
Therefore, what's needed to be done is to either have another translation layer on citiod to map generated citations from identified websites to use {{Cite news}} instead of {{Cite web}}, or write a specific translator for bxmedia.com, or investigate if the default translator in Zotero can be extended further so that the rework for specific websites can be minimal. – robertsky (talk) 18:16, 11 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Actually, passing Citoid's output directly to Citation bot before returning it to the editing interface – one specific implementation of another translation layer – sounds like a minimally effortful solution using tools already deployed and currently maintained. Citation bot doesn't fix everything (and breaks some things) but it usually does a good job in selecting which template type to apply to a citation, and in mapping data to appropriate parameters. Folly Mox (talk) 18:35, 11 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Yes. I have it enabled as an user script. It just won the Coolest Tool Award for improving the quality of edits. While I appreciate the work there, I also wish there is an easy way to translate the JSON files to Zotero translator format so that the work can be enjoyed by those who cannot use it out of the box on Wikipedia and everyone else who is using Zotero in general. – robertsky (talk) 08:36, 12 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]
65, I had heard of that tool, but wasn't previously aware of its functionality. It looks like a great idea, but for the fact that it is presented as an option to Citoid's output rather than a replacement of it (community generated translators for domains Citoid struggles with should – by definition – always be superior).I'm not interested in apportioning blame for Citoid's output: generalised parsing of html meta elements across the entire set of domains is a hard problem and a big task, with a lot of people involved in every step. But it remains true that for a significant portion of domains lacking structured metadata, Citoid's output ranges from suboptimal to unusable.Any additional translation layer that can be configured by the community would be superior to none, and that functionality should exist in Visual Editor so as to improve the quality of citations generated and reduce the maintenance burden shouldered by script maintainers and experienced editors on this project. Folly Mox (talk) 11:29, 13 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Please post corresponding Phabricator tickets for all mentioned "bugbears". 1) Having tickets for these things and 2) making noise in them is the best way to move these fixes forward. –Novem Linguae (talk) 14:31, 10 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Thanks all who have participated in the discussion above. I wil admit that this is my first time opening a proposal. Apologies if it is lacking in some details. While early, it seems that at this juncture, there a large support among the participants to have Edit Check deployed and/or Visual Editor be set as the default editor, keeping in mind that there are still some bugbears, or wishes to have some citations related issues resolved (honestly, I think belongs to another thread, but I appreciate the discussion nonetheless). I would like help in bringing this proposal to the next step of having it as a CENT discussion, be it by opening another thread/discussion here or elseswhere, or reformating the current one.
Impact report
In the opening, I presented a wrong statistics from the test that the product team conducted. Upon further check, I found the impact report on reference checks. Short of reproducing the whole report, these are the key numbers:
The number of constructive edits from newcomers increased from 19% to 42% (2.2 times more. As defined by newcomers with less than 100 edits and not reverted within 48 hours).
Breaking down the above number, this is consistent across all wikis with the test on. And on mobile, the increase was 4.2 times more.
Contributors that are shown Reference Check and successfully save a non-reverted edit are 16 percent more likely to return to make a non-reverted edit in their second month (31-60 days after).
10% decrease in edit completion rate for edits where Reference Check was shown
1.8% false nagative
6.6% false positive
From the report, we can see that Edit Check, in particular the Reference Check functionality, helps with improving the content contribution of newcomers and helps to improve the retention of newcomers as well. The 6.6% false postive rate may be a concern, but in my opinion, a minor one. Details from the report indicates that some of the dismissal is essentially WP:SKYISBLUE. Additionally, further finetuning of the configuration for the Reference Check may be made as well to attempt to reduce the false postive rate.
Questions asked
The following are some questions and answers summarised from above (feel free to add more):
Qn: Is Visual Editor is the default editor for newcomers on enwiki?
No. Newcomers are presented with an option to use Visual Editor upon first edit. Declining it will let editors to use source editors instead.
Qn: how does it work with edits that don't need references adding (e.g. creating redirects, adding links on disambiguation pages, fixing spellings, etc)?
The default configuration of needing 50 characters or more before the Reference Check kicks in means that most of the edits asked in the question will not have the Reference Check triggered. Further more, it is for newcomers with <100 edits, therefore it won't be presented to a majority of registered editors.
Qn: Must Visual Editor be the default editor for this to be deployed?
While the functionality is available through a JavaScript switch or through a query parameter, Edit Check is meant for newcomers. If it is not set as default editor, the effacies of Edit Check will definitely be reduced.
Having the user pick whether they want to use visual editor or wikitext editor their first time editing a page (the status quo) seems reasonable and it wouldn't hurt to leave that alone. Perhaps we should just RFC deploying edit check, and leave the visual editor issue alone? The two issues don't seem as strongly linked as I first thought. –Novem Linguae (talk) 06:16, 12 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]
If Edit Check can be deployed without changing the default or not status of VE, it would probably sail through any approval process. If it works, then later someone will be able to pull up stats saying "New editors using VE put references in 80% of their edits but those using wikitext only put them in 15%" or similar to inform that second issue. CMD (talk) 06:45, 12 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]
I should also add that the other target audience is anonymous editors. Right now the experience is as screenshot. This may be a subpar outcome for Edit Check if the primary CTA button is 'Start editing', and the anon/new editors continue to edit in source editor.
As for the statistics of how many new editors are using Visual Editor now, this is one which Foundation staff can help to answer since we do not have the access to user data. – robertsky (talk) 09:54, 12 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]
That information could be gleaned from an appropriate query, since Visual Editor tags its edits. quarry:query/84486 has the first edit for accounts registered in the first half of 2024; something similar and significantly less complicated could probably check for the "Visual Edit" tag. It would be a bit more difficult to include unregistered editors, but a basic usage ratio should be possible to estimate using public data. Folly Mox (talk) 10:32, 12 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]
@DLynch (WMF), I believe these stats are on a Superset dashboard. Can you pull them? If memory serves, there's one query for the first five edits and another for the first 100, but I don't know if one is set up for the first edit alone. WhatamIdoing (talk) 22:40, 13 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Edit check will work the same way for VE editors whether or not VE is default. Either way, any usage stats will be within VE users. The message given to anonymous editors who click edit, and the default or not use of VE, do not affect Edit check outside of absolute usage numbers. Generally for new features we have adopted small trials rather than immediate maximal pushses, so in that respect the current VE setup is more a benefit than an issue. CMD (talk) 11:42, 12 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]
@Chipmunkdavis, if the community thinks that an intermediate step to trial out this among the newcomers who enable Visual Editor first is required, we should explore the idea. This may simply mean that window.MWVE_FORCE_EDIT_CHECK_ENABLED=true; or the query parameter should be set in MediaWiki:Common.js (and maybe MediaWiki:Mobile.js as well), of course with account restriction criteria being set to limit the force enablement to newcomers of <100 edits.
letuserEC=mw.config.values.wgUserEditCount// wgUserEditCount: null for anon editors and non null value for registered editorsif(userEC===null||(userEC!==null&&userEC<100){window.MWVE_FORCE_EDIT_CHECK_ENABLED=true;}
I don't see how enabling edit check is an intermediate step, unless the plan is to later expand it to <500 or <1000 edits? CMD (talk) 03:42, 15 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]
It is intermediate step to see if Edit Check on enwiki does encourage an uplift in new/anon editors who are using VE adding content with references. Dependent on the result, we then can determine if it is beneficial to have VE to be the default editor with respect to Edit Check. – robertsky (talk) 05:30, 15 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]
@Robertsky: respectfully, I understand you've personally operationalized Edit Check deployment as involving making VE the default (which it may be recalled I thought was already the case), but these are two separate things. Linking them muddies the proposal and gives the impression of an agenda.I'd love for Edit Check to be enabled on this project, not necessarily for the initial check of adding a reference to a chunk of sufficiently long text (which sounds like a fuzzy test), but for all the stretch goals we could add to it for giving immediate feedback about identified categories of problem edits.Very little opposition should be expected if you disentangle all the Visual Editor stuff from this proposal, and if you wait until more kinds of checks are implemented – the kinds that save experienced editors from making the same kinds of corrections to newbie mistakes over and over – I think you'll see strong support for making Visual Editor the default when that separate question is revisited sometime down the line. Folly Mox (talk) 10:47, 16 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]
@Folly Mox you are mistaken that I am involved in the operationalizing of Edit Check with VE. I simply come across the feature and think that it is a good idea to have it enabled. Of course, there is also a strong desire to set VE as the default, but I am pragmatic. The immediate personal aim is to have Edit Check enabled and then we see if it is really beneficial for the English community. – robertsky (talk) 14:21, 16 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]
I must not know how to use the word operationalized correctly, which is actually something of a relief 🙃 I was trying to describe a comment of yours above where you explained the need for Visual Editor to be the default before the deployment of the functionality is considered complete. Anyway, glad you're embracing the stepwise pragmatism. Should be an easy pass for the simpler "enable Edit Check" proposal. Often mistaken, Folly Mox (talk) 17:58, 16 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]
The likelihood that newcomers will include a reference the next time they add new content
And while we are confident that enabling the visual editor by default for people who are new will have a net positive impact on volunteers across experience levels, the idea @RoySmith, @FollyMox, and @Whatamidoing raised about decoupling the decisions to enable the Reference Check and VE for newcomers and people who are logged out seems wise. [i][ii]
Reason being: doing so, as I think @CMDput well, seems like a relatively lightweight and low-risk way for us to work together to:
Further, as @CMD, @Thryduulf, @RoySmith, @Novem Linguae, @Shushugah, @Folly Mox have mentioned [iv][v][vi][vii][viii][ix], it sounds like there are some facets of the reference experience that would be worth us talking together in more detail about.
The Link Check evaluates all external domains people attempt to link to against the globally-defined meta:Spam_blacklist and the locally defined, en:MediaWiki:BlockedExternalDomains.json and MediaWiki:Spam-blacklist lists.
The Reference Reliability Checks evaluates the references people attempt to cite against the same local and global lists mentioned above.
Zooming out, I think you all are in the best position to decide what you think the most effective deployment sequence here is. And please know: the Editing Team is ready to support you in what you decide.
Alright, I think this is a good place for me to pause.
Please ping me as new questions about Edit Check and/or VE emerge so that I, or another member of the Editing Team, can try to help.
In the meantime, we're going to continue following this conversation and will chime in when we think there is helpful information we can offer.
iii. We'll be able to filter Special:RecentChanges for edits made with Reference Check. You can see this in action at wikis like fr.wiki, es.wiki, and ar.wiki where Edit Check is already enabled.
x. Please boldly add tickets/issues as you see fit
xi. There is an open task the Editing Team will soon address to ensure each time the Link and Reference Reliability Checks are activated, a log entry is recorded in Special:Log/spamblacklistPPelberg (WMF) (talk) 21:11, 16 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]
@Robertsky, hi – would it be accurate for me to understand you as asking the following questions?
What steps would we (volunteers) need to take to activate the Reference Check at en.wiki?
How might we (volunteers) go about configuring the Reference Check? E.g. whose edits has the potential to activate Edit Check, where references are placed (before/after periods), the sections Reference Check should ignore edits to, etc.
Assuming the above are accurate, to activate reference check at en.wiki you all would need to:
Ask us to turn it on
Adjust the configuration on-wiki to reflect your preferences (e.g. example of frwiki’s ignoreSections)
And the Editing Team would need to then deploy a configuration-change patch to enable Reference Check on en.wiki.
Call me wary for a number of reasons. First off is the false claim (also posted at the linked Mediawiki page) that Visual Editor must be the default to deploy this, or the later made implication that it makes no sense to deploy this without making VE the default. If these are coupled in this way, with the bigger change used as a prerequisite for the smaller one, then it is a hard no.
Then there is my last (in a long line) experience with a tool that had been tested or even deployed elsewhere, and worked oh so well (makes me thing of Flow, may it rest in peace). A year ago, we were asked to help with a new tool for the Android App[1]. We were told that "During initial evaluation of the model, it was preferred more than 50% of the time over human generated article descriptions. Additionally, Descartes held a 91.3% accuracy rate in testing." and that it had been succesfully been tested in 15 languages already. When we actually tested, it turned out to be very, very buggy and not usable at all. The result was that in August they posted "We’ve officially received grades for all languages and are now finalizing analysis. We will share the outcomes in next month’s update as well as our recommendations for next steps based on the experiment." and then crickets. So from an A/B tested in 15 languages, successful tool with 91.3% accuracy rate to an abandoned project after one short test by enwiki.
And then I tried to test this new tool here. I added a paragraph of text without a source, published, and got the "add reference" pop-up. Choose "yes", got presented with the automatic reference option by adding a title, typed "Lord of the Rings", no luck, so tried "manual". Click on "Book", and get "thank you for adding a citation!" even though no citation is added. Same result if I manually try to add a website or anything. Perhaps it works in real life, perhaps not, but this certainly doesn't give much confidence. Fram (talk) 13:39, 13 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]
@Fram You may see it as a false claim, but it may simply that for the end goal of Edit Check to encourage better content submissions among all anon and newly registered editors can be met by having VE be the default editor.
Your experience in testing out new tools certainly tempers one's expectations on the viability of tools on the platform. With respect to using AI to generated short description, I would also have similar reservations (my cautious approach to/use of AI is known), and still I have to say that it is an unfair comparison given that we are not expecting 91.3% of the new editors to give references. The A/B test in the impact report shows a more modest uplift of ~x2 inputs. Of course, further detailed analysis on a roll-out (in whatever form) on a trial basis can be made if we can tap on the existing tags (i.e. possible unreferenced addition to BLP) or edit filters or even sorting through the raw data.
With respect to the patchdemo wiki, maybe a more updated wiki mirrors better the current real world setup? The demo was generated back in June 2023, more than a year ago. I would have expected bugs and issues between then and now. Furthermore, it might be a patchdemo for limited use? i.e. to show partially the progress of the work? When testing directly on here in enwiki (until before publishing the edit), the reference are being added as a citation be it automatic or manual mode. – robertsky (talk) 19:05, 14 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]
If you insist that statements that VE must be made the default for this isn't a false claim, then I think we're done discussing this. And I see no reason to trust the WMF on any test results, considering that coincidentally just now they posted the results of that other software thing I mentioned above:
" By the time most of you provided feedback the experiment was already completed, and we already received support from some of your fellow experienced editors of English Wikipedia ". Yeah, right, like you posted in the "January update" which you posted in, er, August. And which is completely unverifiable, is based on a very small number of edits apparently by unknown "experienced" editors. They claim on that page that "If users that see the treatment do not select a suggestion more than 50% of the time after viewing the suggestions, we will not expand the feature". Let's see:
How often were Machine Suggestions Accepted, Modified or Rejected?
So why do they plan to continue with the feature anyway? Same as always, I guess, features aren't abandonded no matter how bad, no matter which promises were made, until after (usually) enwiki or dewiki find out how bad they really are, and even then only after an unnecessary, unwanted clash with WMF has been had and mutual distrust gets cemented for another 10 years. So yes, I don't trust WMF test results, I don't trust WMF promises, I don't trust WMF false claims and those defending them, and I don't support a rollout of such features without much better, verifiable (by us) testing or with added "requirements" which aren't needed but pushed by the WMF anyway. Fram (talk) 08:41, 16 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]
I don't support a rollout of such features without much better, verifiable (by us) testing sure. let's test Edit Check out, as what I have said in my previous replies to others. – robertsky (talk) 16:43, 16 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Let's test it by first providing us with a correct test environment. Sending editors to a test environment which doesn't reflect the actual environment is useless. Step 1: test if it is technically working. This should happen on a testwiki, not a live wiki. This is not an unnecessary step, there have been too many rollouts of supposedly ready new software addons which turned out to be very, very buggy and were not at the beta-stage but at some pre-alpha stage. Step 2: after approval from enwiki, do a limited test on enwiki completely reviewable by editors here, not a test where we just have to believe the results in good faith, and automatically shut down the test afterwards. Step 3: after approval, do a further rollout (larger test or full rollout). For this, we are not at step 1 yet. Fram (talk) 11:13, 19 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]
It wasn't until about five minutes ago. Beta was left with an extremely-restrictive configuration since about April as a result of some validation testing our QA was doing for that configuration process. Specifically, it would only activate the edit check if your account had less than three edits made -- though you could have tested it as an anonymous user to get around that.
I just reset the config file to the defaults, so right now it'd be fair to test it there. I can also adjust any of the values if you want to see what the experience is like.
One thing that's not obvious from the config if you want to test it is that the "add a reference" check will only trigger when you add a completely-unreferenced new paragraph. DLynch (WMF) (talk) 03:51, 29 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Besides Beta Wikipedia, if anyone prefers an English-based example can have a look at simple.wikipedia.org. It is already deployed there and anyone can monitor the changes made when References check is shown to the user, as all edits are tagged (including rejections).
Reference check is deployed at all Wikipedias but 8. It is not deployed at these wikis because we haven't yet informed them that it is an available option. Trizek_(WMF) (talk) 15:37, 29 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]
For an example at greater scale, I believe French Wikipedia is the biggest wiki with it enabled (#3 in edits). It's a bit trickier for native English speakers to judge the quality of the edits produced there, admittedly, but looking at the revert rates should be easy enough. DLynch (WMF) (talk) 06:05, 30 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Thanks. So, looking at the most recent 50 edits at Simple where editcheck was activated, it was declined 39 times, 4 times it was used but the edit reverted, and among the other edits where it was supposedly used we find cases without any reference either[2] or referencing Wikipedia[3], or of course a copyright violation from a Wordpress blog[4]. That's not really an impressive result... Fram (talk) 07:10, 30 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]
And at the French Wikipedia, 34 out of 50 were rejected, some others reverted (again e.g. for using Wikipedia as a source), others supposedly used the tool but didn't add a reference anyway[5][6]. This seems close to the results at Simple, and again shows no improvement over the baseline you gave at Mediawiki[7]: "Of all the new content edits newcomers make across Wikipedias, 12% of these edits include a reference." When this tool gives the same results, but also means that many more people are now confronted with a popup they don't want, it doesn't seem like a welcome change. Fram (talk) 07:22, 30 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Thank you for highlighting that 12% of users add a citation spontaneously, with no prompt to add one. When Edit Check is shown, you observed at Simple Wikipedia that 39 edits over 50 are declined. It means that 11 edits lead to a citation being added. If I'm not wrong, this sample shows that 22% of users now add a citation because we provide a reminder. I think +10 qualifies as an improvement.
Using recent changes and the current flows of edits, I took a larger sample set than the 50 last edits to find the number of Edit check declined edits. I also looked at more wikis. This gives me 309 declines over 500 edits at Simple, 267/500 at French, 197/500 at Spanish, 192/500 at Portuguese, 170/500 at Chinese, 175/500 at Arabic Wikipedia. The percentage of declines decreases, leading to more citations be added, respectively 38.2% (+26.2 points compared to the number given previous paragraph), 46.6%, 60.6%, 61.6%, 66% and 65%. What would be the percentage for English Wikipedia? Let's test it for a given period of time and figure out.
Regarding reverts, let's not forget that References check is an encouragement to add citations. We assume it is for good faith users. Users who have no intention of adding one will not add one. But we now have a good number of users who now add a citation, something never considered firsthand. References check will be improved and some minor issues identified will be fixed. I'm glad that you mention a copyright violation, because the Editing team is working on this as a new check.
Please read what I wrote. "When Edit Check is shown, you observed at Simple Wikipedia that 39 edits over 50 are declined. It means that 11 edits lead to a citation being added." No, as there were cases which weren't tagged as "declined" but didn't include a reference anyway. Of the 50 edits, I think 4 were actually acceptable additions of a reference (without checking in detail). That's 8% of acceptable reference additions with this tool, while 78% of edits confronted the editors with this popup and were declined, and the other 14% were either unacceptable edits or references, or people who didn't decline the popup but didn't add a reference anyway. Please, you can't simply look at the number of declines and think that the remainder is references being added, it's easy to check some of those to see that this isn't true[8][9][10]... Fram (talk) 11:17, 30 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]
In the case of this ABC News, there are hundreds of articles with broken links, such as LGBT rights in Afghanistan.
It is even more common for it to omit a link to the "work", either displaying it in plain Wikitext or not at all. This excludes important contextual information, and goes against MOS:UL which says that proper names that are likely to be unfamiliar to readers, which would include news sources as few have global recognition, should be linked.
In the case of this ABC News, there are thousands of articles with missing links, such as Joel Reddy.
Following a discussion with Robertsky, I proposed a bot that would be able to rectify one or both of these issues, as well as add additional information to the citation template that can be determined from the URL or other content already in the template, such as the publisher or publication location.
To minimize impact on watchlists, it can be configured so that only some errors or omissions will trigger an edit, with the rest being done only if the article is already being edited.
I am raising this in the community now to determine whether the community believes that this task is worth completing.
In addition, the bot uses a configuration file that I would need the communities help to expand. Currently, it addresses issues with the following sources:
Please provide details for the other sources that you wish to see corrected by leaving a comment on the configuration talk page, or if you are sufficiently familiar with JSON to understand the configuration file by editing it directly. BilledMammal (talk) 09:02, 25 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Overall, I support more frequently linking publication names. For an article that doesn't use them, though, it should be kept consistent. Sdkbtalk22:41, 25 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]
I’ve already touched on this, with the above reference to WP:UL, but to address it in a little more depth in regards to consistency:
First, I don’t think we want to follow the pattern of the majority of the article, as in most cases they will be unlinked solely because RefToolbar doesn’t add links rather than because of any deliberate editor choice.
Second, a sufficiently expansive configuration file will be able to switch from unlinked majority to linked majority.
However, I would be able to alter the program to not include links under certain circumstances if that is what the community would prefer. BilledMammal (talk) 23:19, 25 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]
add additional information [...] such as the publisher or publication location. If that's done, it should be VERY selective, erring on the side of omission. Cites for The New York Times do NOT need to show that the publisher is A. G. Sulzberger or that the publication location is New York City. Et cetera. Bots should reduce work for human editors, not create work for them; we have too much of the latter already. ―Mandruss☎22:44, 25 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]
New York Times is actually a very convenient example, as it is already in the configuration file.
Not only will it not add the publisher or publisher location, it will actually remove them if it is already editing a page, in accordance with the specifications at {{cite news}}BilledMammal (talk) 23:09, 25 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]
People keep becoming confused because they think clicking "Publish" means "Move my changes to article space". But they should think that! – that IS what "Publish" must mean to any reasonable person in their situation, and there's no good reason for them to think it might have the meaning it currently does. "Publish" means to make something generally available and accessible, to put it on public display – it doesn't mean "commit changes to upstream server" (or whatever is actually happening), and it certainly can't mean that to the average person editing Wikipedia.
The only potential good reason I can see to keep it as it is would be "We deliberately keep this process confusing" – and I don't agree with that kind of policy. TooManyFingers (talk) 17:09, 27 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]
I can see your point, but as far as editing Wikipedia goes, anything you 'publish' is both available and accessible by other people. Relabelling as 'save' could likewise be easily misunderstood. AndyTheGrump (talk) 17:17, 27 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Wikipedia's lawyers wanted the button changed to say "publish changes" to emphasize that all edits to any type of page are public. "Save" does not do that. 331dot (talk) 17:22, 27 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]
I think this is a case of 'fixing the wrong thing'. What is wrong is Drafts. It is an incomplete feature because it's just a public page in a public thing that isn't really 'public'. It could be fixed by making these particular cases "Publish draft" or something the like however, making every single control in MediaWiki super context specific is a bit difficult (it is designed on purpose to be a generic system after all). —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 19:00, 27 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Someone creating a draft has to grapple with several things...
Writing some text in their draft
Saving (which is published publicly; which means both legally it can be reused/edited/scrutinized)
Even with all that, they need to transclude {{subst:submit}} which is when it is really submitted for review...and still then it's not published in sense of being visible in Mainspace (not to be confused with Wikipedia namespace)
Every control being context specific, sure. But having the text for a few select UI elements being namespace-specific (or namespace-overridable) may not be the worst idea for a future WMF developer project. ― novov(tc)12:36, 28 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Just a general comment: even very common words do not mean the same thing to everybody. A change you think makes things clearer may make things more confusing for someone else. It's one of the areas where we have to find a rough consensus, using language that makes general sense to most users without leading too many astray. Discussions like this are how we figure it out. Donald Albury21:03, 27 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]
We're unlikely to find a word that can't be misinterpreted. "Save" is more ambiguous than "Publish", in my opinion. Perhaps "Commit". The absence of anything else that might mean "put this in the page" might be a clue. But, ultimately, any uncertainty lasts as long as it takes to try it and see what happens. Are we getting a lot of complaints from newbies who can't figure out what to do? If not, it's the proverbial solution in search of a problem. People keep becoming confused - Show me, please. Operative phrase is "a lot". A few is not enough. ―Mandruss☎23:07, 27 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]
But what you write is public, even in draft space. That's the whole thing. The only potential good reason I can see to keep it as it is would be "We deliberately keep this process confusing" – and I don't agree with that kind of policy. Come on, that's an obvious strawman. The fact that the WMF already weighed on it, and that people gave it many thoughts before making this choice, should tell you there is probably a less dishonest reason for it. Chaotic Enby (talk · contribs) 23:09, 27 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]
We do cause confusion when we say (accurately) that every edit is 'published' but also use the verb 'publish' to refer to moving drafts to mainspace. But as others have said, the problem lies with the drafts, which is a poor choice of words to begin with (people don't usually publish 'drafts'). I've never heard or been able to come up with a better phrase, though. – Joe (talk) 08:39, 28 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]
@Joe Roe A simpler change would be to change verb for move from Draft to Article as "Promote" to indicate it's a positive thing, without touching the thorny legal/technical side of publish. It's celebratory and fits other descriptions of being declined/rejected. The namespace bit is an implementation detail. ~ 🦝 Shushugah (he/him • talk) 11:55, 28 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]
I think it important that editors understand that when they click the button, they are “publishing” whatever they have written. Where it is published does not matter. It may be published in Mainspace, in Draftspace, in Talkspace, in P&G space, etc. … but it is all a form of “publication”. Blueboar (talk) 12:16, 28 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Long story short, it's gonna stay "Publish" - lots and lots and lots of prior arguments about this were already made, and the WMF is going to enforce that. The OP thesis is that editors are confused when editing in draft space. We could add additional guidance to Template:Editnotices/Namespace/Draft - which appears in the edit window for all pages in the Draft namespace if there is special guidance needed. — xaosfluxTalk13:33, 28 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]
And additionally... complicated processes will always cause confusion, not matter how much text you throw at the user. The whole process only exists because we didn't want Pending Changes/Flagged revisions in main space. Flagged revisions would have probably been simpler to understand for the users, even if it would have been more annoying to us editors. Its always a balance. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 16:03, 29 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]
The Foundation has developed a new tool at Meta:CampaignEvents which is used by other editions of Wikipedia. Anyone who organizes an Edit-a-thon knows the event management tooling is quite limited and requires lot of behind-the-scene knowledge for promotion of events.
If you believe English Wikipedia should try this feature out, please support this proposal. It does not remove any existing options or require people to use this over other forms of event management. In order to set this up, we need to establish consensus to try it out and then file a Phabricator ticket request, which I am happy to do. See the recent talk from 2024 Wikimania about it here on Youtube and notes from the same session. Here are the slides.
In the past I organized edit-a-thons using the Outreach Dashboard which helped with tracking contributions, but not collaboration between editors (see here). I am also happy for English Wikipedia to try tooling that is used by other language editions of Wikipedia and contribute insightful feedback in order to make these tools useful. ~ 🦝 Shushugah (he/him • talk) 22:24, 29 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Has the support team been looped in on this? There are 3 projects using so far, and it would be useful to know any outstanding issues. Also note, this requires a permission group (c.f. meta:Meta:Event_organizers) that we'd have to determine how to deal with. (some options: WP:PERM, autopromote). — xaosfluxTalk22:44, 29 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]
The description says "enhance the management and visibility/discoverability of events within Wikimedia". That certainly sounds like a good thing.
But going off on a tangent, as a checkuser, one thing I'd love to see is some way for an event coordinator to register the IP address(s) which are going to be used at the event, and having that be visible in the checkuser tool (@Dreamy Jazz). One of my suckiest CU experiences was blocking a whole pile of socks only to discover after the fact that what I really did was stomp on a perfectly legitimate "Learn to use Wikipedia" event for 13 year olds. There would be much awesomeness if a notification about that could come up in the tool. RoySmith(talk)23:06, 29 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Thanks for bringing this up. Regarding this tool, what are the specific implications for en.wiki? Based on Meta:CampaignEvents, it currently has two tools, Registration and Event list. I would assume we would not want Registration here, as that seems to involve the creation of a new namespace (Event:) and is a task better suited for Meta. Conversely, the Event List seems like something people may want to casually have access to, and thus locking it behind the Wikipedia:Event coordinator perm (ie. at the same level as being able to generate unlimited new accounts on a single IP) feels limiting. CMD (talk) 06:28, 30 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]
You can directly edit as a user this event: Meta:Event:Sandbox/Shushugah/Testing without any special permissions on Meta. And same would be true for English Wikipedia if approved here
We should have the Event namespace in English Wikipedia. While only users with event creator can "register" the event, any editor can still edit the content and description with project updates. To-do lists etc..
Meta:Main might be better suited for multi-wiki events it also requires advanced knowledge of Help:Interwiki syntax and is not very new user friendly. Copying and pasting a list from enwp project page to Meta wouldn’t simply work and would require juggling two different accounts. ~ 🦝 Shushugah (he/him • talk) 15:00, 30 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Is there an advantage to adding the new namespace on en.wiki in the days of unified accounts when new users can post on meta too? CMD (talk) 13:57, 31 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]
I mentioned a few cons, namely that wikilink templates would break, templates are not usable across different Wikis, the watchlist is separate for each. For advanced users this might be acceptable but for new users explaining difference between Meta and enWP would be a very high hurdle and counterproductive. ~ 🦝 Shushugah (he/him • talk) 14:01, 31 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Hello, everyone! My name is Ilana, and I’m the product manager for the Campaigns team, which developed the CampaignEvents extension. Thanks for bringing up this topic, @Shushugah, and thank you for your responses and feedback, @Xaosflux, @Pppery, @RoySmith, and @Chipmunkdavis. I’ll respond to the questions and comments so far below, and I’m happy to respond to any other questions that come up:
Event Registration was first released to Meta-Wiki in November 2022. It has been used in 600+ events with over 10k participants. The Event List was released in April 2024, and we’re now expanding it to feature WikiProjects as well (see T368115). Invitation Lists is our newest feature. It is testable on the beta cluster (see video demo), and we’re planning to release to Igbo Wikipedia & Swahili Wikipedia soon.
The extension has two sides: an organizer side and participant side. The participant side requires no special rights for access. The organizer side requires the Event organizer right for access. Wiki admins set the criteria for and manage the right. We are open to comments on how the right can be configured or expanded. We love the idea of bundling it with the Event coordinator right.
The extension comes with two new namespaces: event and event talk. You can read our rationale for why the namespaces were created. Overall, we think that there are many advantages to keeping the two namespaces, but we’re open to other ways that communities may want to define event pages. So, we are curious to hear what others think on the topic!
In the near future, we are hoping to integrate Community Configuration (T370829). This way, wiki communities can choose to turn on the extension, and they can choose which tools to turn on and how they should be configured.
I have a question for you all: How do you feel about my team inviting some organizers and/or users of the CampaignEvents extension into the conversation? Perhaps they can provide some more context. Since the extension is enabled on Meta-Wiki, we already have users from many different wiki communities.
Is there a reason the invitation list is not listed as one of the features alongside the Event Registration and the Event list on the main meta page? Anyway, if the features are separately toggleable, it sounds like enabling the overall extension is only beneficial and separate discussions can be had on the existing and upcoming features. CMD (talk) 07:50, 1 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Invitation list is a very fresh feature with some tickets still being worked on so that would explain why it's not mentioned yet. In any case, with Community integration coming soon, it will be easier for admins to automatically activate/de-activate features based on our wishes. I am quite curious whether embedding/transcluding the Event list in different namespaces is possible, e.g a Wikipedia Talk namespace for a WikiProject talk page. @IFried (WMF) what would be best way to test this assuming it's approved? I guess Admins/Event Coordinators would be the subset of people who could create events. Can you envision this tool being useful for backlog-drives? Is there any paper/findings about how Events have been used/evolved? ~ 🦝 Shushugah (he/him • talk) 22:57, 1 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Hi @Shushugah & @CMD! Great questions, which I will respond to below:
Why isn’t Invitation Lists on the CampaignEvents page? We just updated the page with information on Invitation Lists. We previously didn’t include this information, since Invitation Lists was not yet available to any live wikis. However, we just released Invitation Lists to all wikis with the extension (T373041), which means all such wikis can opt to enable it. It has also been enabled on Swahili & Igbo Wikipedia (T372582). For these reasons, the page has been updated, and we’re open to any feedback on the tool or interest from communities that would like to enable it.
Can we transclude the Event List onto a page in a different namespace?: No, there is currently no ability to do this. However, we’re interested in learning more about this request on the project talk page or in Phabricator. We’re especially interested in learning what problems would be solved by developing such a feature improvement. Thank you for bringing this up, and we look forward to learning more!
Can the tools be used for backlog drives?:
Yes, we think all three tools in the extension can be useful for backlog drives. With Event Registration, organizers can set the infrastructure in place for managing participation in the backlog drive. They can register participants, collect optional demographic information, and communicate with participants via mass email. With Invitation Lists, organizers can find people to invite who have demonstrated interest in the topics covered in the drive. With the Event List, organizers can promote the backlog drive to a wider audience. Overall, Event Registration can be used for many different types of activities, and we encourage organizers to use the tools in ways that work for them.
My colleague, @Astinson (WMF), an experienced editor on English Wikipedia, shared another use case: He signs up for backlog drives, but then sometimes he forgets to come back and work on them (like the Wikipedia:New pages patrol/Backlog drives/September 2024). He shared with me that the Event Registration tool could help organizers remind participants like him to participate in collaborative work.
Are there any papers/findings for how events have been used or evolved?:
We do not have an official paper like you mentioned. However, our work was initially inspired by the findings from the Movement Organizers study, along with other studies (see Evidence). Since the launch of our team, we have conducted regular office hours to collect feedback on our work. We have also launched surveys (for example, V0 findings). In the case of Invitation Lists, we conducted an experiment on its potential efficacy and published our findings (see April 2024 update).
Event Registration is being used for a wide range of event types, such as campaigns (example), edit-a-thons (example), training sessions (example), hackathons (example), affiliate meetings (example), office hours (example), and conferences (example).
Both Event List and Invitation Lists are quite new, but they’re focused on making events more discoverable on the wikis. We look forward to seeing what we can learn from them.
We have a survey: On the topic of continually learning, we have a survey that is going on now. We’re exploring how the toolset could be expanded for other collaboration tactics (i.e. WikiProjects, collaboration groups, tasks forces, etc). We want to see if and how the infrastructural pipeline in the extension (i.e., discovery of potential participants, registration, and communication) could be helpful to WikiProjects and other forms of collaboration on the wikis. In that case, we encourage folks to take part in our survey, and we’ll share our findings once the survey is complete: https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLScKWHPjSjSqOmca8E-eQl1HHUxYRbB4QeEV3zR2bd1_tcwuMg/viewform?usp=sf_link
I have often wished that there was a feature in the page protection options to assign a different protection to an already-protected article for a short duration, and when that different protection expires, it falls back to the original protection level. Whatever the current protection level is, it resumes when the temporary override protection level (which could even be "none") expires.
Use cases:
Content dispute between editors on a semiprotected article: I'd like to override that for a week and apply a higher protection (ECP or full as appropriate), and when it expires, the semiprotection resumes and runs it course as usual.
The current behavior is for the article to become completely unprotected at expiration.
Experimental unprotection: RFPP requests to unprotect could have the new protection level (none) override the current protection on a trial basis for a finite duration, after which the original protection resumes. This might be related to a past discussion Wikipedia:Village pump (proposals)/Archive 38#Temporary lifting long-term semi-protection of featured articles, but I would like to see just a general temporary override feature available for any article.
We currently have a pseudo-situation like this with PCP. Any protection other than "none" overrides PCP and when that protection expires, PCP goes back into effect. I am asking for temporary overrides to any protection level regardless of what it is. ~Anachronist (talk) 05:49, 31 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Not sure how technically feasible this is, but the first use case definitely happens all the time, and often leads to articles becoming unprotected that really ought not to be. So this is at minimum seeking to address a real problem. Sdkbtalk05:53, 31 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]
That would work too, except for the case of experimentally unprotecting, but that is low-priority compared to the first use case I described. I wasn't aware of that bot. I hope it can be approved. ~Anachronist (talk) 17:06, 31 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]
This appears to be a software feature request, mostly covered by phab:T41038. As such, it is not something that we can implement directly here on the English Wikipedia. Workarounds with a bot as described above are the most we can try in the absence of new software. You are welcome to follow, comment, or provide patches related to T41038. — xaosfluxTalk12:29, 1 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]
I don't know where to ask this, but why is it when I logged into Phabricator as my username "Anachronist" to make a comment, the username appears as "Amatulic", which was my username many years ago? ~Anachronist (talk) 16:49, 1 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]
@Anachronist, Phabricator accounts are separate from Wikimedia accounts, although the login process is now unified with Wikimedia accounts. So you likely made a Phabricator account under your old username many years ago, and attached it to your Wikimedia account, but while you updated your Wikimedia username, the Phabricator username has stayed the same. You can probably update it there too to keep it in sync. Sdkbtalk19:37, 1 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]
I don't recall ever making a Phabricator account. Did Phabricator even exist in 2006? It isn't a problem, I just thought it was strange. My VRT account doesn't do that. ~Anachronist (talk) 19:44, 1 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Annual readership is currently used on 53,510 talk pages. The consensus on the TfD appears to be that the template should be kept, but noincluded and made invisible, pending a solution for the Graph extension.
In the same TfD, I proposed a "Page views" link in the tools menu as an alternative of sorts. See the included screenshots. Right now, the link to the page views tool is carefully hidden in: Tools -> Page information -> scroll all the way down -> External tools -> Page view statistics. Could we perhaps make the page view link appear more prominently?
For me, the length of the Tools menu makes it harder to find specific items that I'm looking for. Thus I prefer that the page view link remain grouped under the page information menu item. isaacl (talk) 21:18, 7 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]