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I know this was discussed above, and I bet if I checked the archives it would be discussed many more times. But, as a relatively new admin (~2 months), I find myself now on the administrative end of looking at speedy deletion tagging. I find a lot of A7/A9 tags being added to articles in under 1 hour of the article's creation...heck, I find lots of them being placed within 5 minutes of the article's creation. And this makes me sad--so sad. Now, as was stated above, most of this is being done by relatively new editors (usually editors with between 1 and 5K edits). But I've even seen sysops and other editors with over 50K edits engaging in the same behavior. At the beginning, I tried to leave messages on the talk pages of the taggers, though sometimes now I don't bother because it seems like the problem is quite ubiquitous, and sometimes I wonder if maybe I'm just in the minority opinion on this issue.

Currently, the project page says only, "e. A good rule of thumb is to wait until at least 15 minutes after the last edit before tagging the article (or up to an hour for the {{newpage}} tag)." What I tell taggers is that personally I think that rule is far too lenient to taggers. My opinion (and part of me writing this here is to try to see what the consensus of other editors is) is that while it's fine to tag for G3, G12, even A3 or A10 very soon after creation, I don't think we can adequately judge A7 within just a few minutes of an article being created. When someone puts up an article about some singer that at first seems non-notable, how do we know for sure that the person wasn't just about to add some more info about an award that singer won? My personal recommendation is that we shouldn't be tagging A7 or A9 for at least an hour or two after the article is created. Is there really any harm in leaving things up for a bit, just in case? We all know that there are very series consequences to tagging too quickly (in that it drives away good faith contributors).

Am I totally on my own on this one? Or are there others that think this is important enough to consider actually writing into a guideline somewhere (or, at the bare minimum, onto this tutorial? Qwyrxian (talk) 07:12, 4 October 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Two hours is fine. Personally, I'd go for a minimum of 24 hours, but that's probably an extremist viewpoint. I really don't understand the urgency, for anything other than attack pages and copyvios. --Demiurge1000 (talk) 07:18, 4 October 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Hi. You're not on your own on this, and you can rest assured that there is currently a lot of top level research being done into these issues. A lot of common sense or judgement depends on how long to wait. Experience will show which articles are ever likely to be further developed. While waiting to tag articles, quite a lot of time will elapse while other checks on the article and its creator are being done. These checks include looking at the page history for previous deletions, looking at the creator's log and talk page for possible previous warnings of any kind. If the page appears to have the makings of a serious article, in the meantime, patrollers should be doing some basic clean up, such as format, moving a misspellt page name, adding stub templates, and adding project templates to the article talk page, searching Google for possible copyvio, and maybe finding at least one RS for a totally unsourced page. etc. One argument for not leaving it too long is to be able to catch the creators while they are still online and logged in - the majority of new pages appear to be created by SPA who will probably never return to Wikipedia to see if their article still exists. Of course, the average NPPer doesn't do these checks, but as an admin with a deletion tool, I do, before I finally delete an article page. Kudpung กุดผึ้ง (talk) 07:34, 4 October 2011 (UTC)[reply]

While I think many pages would benefit from some extra time, the problem with setting hard limits is that we want to get rid of the pages parents have written about their kindergarteners and the garage bands formed two days ago (I swear I am not making these examples up), and we want to purge spam from obvious corporate accounts as quickly as we can. There's no reason that content like Soldiers of Revenge or Family mountain days needs to exist for any longer than the time it takes to tag and delete it. The line between "potentially an article" and "irretrievably bad" can get blurred when dealing with A7/A9/G11, but we don't want to swing the pendulum too far and prevent the no-brainer quick tags that should be happening. The Blade of the Northern Lights (話して下さい) 21:25, 7 October 2011 (UTC)[reply]

The problem is that many times the baby gets thrown out with the bathwater. There are many good faith new (and not so new) wikipedians who are being demoralized when information they painstakingly add to wikipedia is removed. Ottawahitech (talk) 14:24, 19 October 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Do you have any proof of this? If you do, please let us know so that we can follow up on it. Thanks. Kudpung กุดผึ้ง (talk) 17:05, 19 October 2011 (UTC)[reply]

No proof that I can think of, but a lot or anecdotal information. Here is some I just happened to find recently:

i think we should Patrol new pages from oldest to the newest. I dont know how many contributors are good typists or are not fumbling around - i.e. not using the preview button and instead directly saving the page to get te review of their friends neighbors (who knows!) Wikishagnik (talk) 13:44, 4 February 2012 (UTC)[reply]

User_talk:TParis#Donald_Braswell_Page_Deletion

User_talk:TParis#In_a_shocking_twist..._it.27s_another_frustated_user_whose_page_got_deleted.21

Wikipedia:Missing Wikipedians Ottawahitech (talk) 14:53, 21 October 2011 (UTC)[reply]

I nearly gave up editing because of what I percieved to be aggressive speedy new page patrolling. Why is it that given the rule of thumb to wait until at least 15 minutes after the last edit and the recommendation to patrol from the back of the queue that so many NPPs, even experienced ones, seem to do some very speedy taging? Is it just to catch people still online? (Msrasnw (talk) 15:14, 21 October 2011 (UTC))[reply]

I can think of a variety of reasons. We do need to do some reviewing from the front, because we need to catch attack pages as soon as possible. I also think that some people are tagging new pages not by looking at the New Pages list, but simply by looking at Recent Changes (i.e., the tagging is a part of general vandalism patrol). Those are the "positive" reasons. I think there are a lot of personal/questionable reasons as well--I think that, for many people, there's a real feeling of "success" or "winning" when you tag a page and it gets deleted so quickly. I think it feels like "Defending the Wiki". The people commenting here seem to be more experienced users, but a lot of newer New Page Patrollers are actually relatively new users (those with less than 10K edits) and/or a few months of editing. And I think that those users tend (I'm obviously generalizing here, but I'm trying to speak out of my own experience--how I felt when I started with Twinkle and Huggle and NPP) to think only in terms of "this does not belong here get it out now." I remember early on that I tagged a page about a book (movie? something like that) under A7. The admin who reviewed it rightly declined it, since A7 doesn't cover books. I asked which category I was supposed to use, then, and the admin said that there wasn't one, and that I had to use PROD or AfD. I was shocked. Floored. I thought that there must be a mistake, because obviously this content was inappropriate and needed to be deleted immediately. It took me a long time to understand why the categories are as limited as they are (i.e., that speedy deletion is supposed to be an exception, not the norm, for deletion); even longer to think about the idea of biting newcomers by speedily removing their first contribution. Qwyrxian (talk) 23:52, 21 October 2011 (UTC)[reply]

An excellent personal revelation Qwyrx. I come across many new pages that contain simple statements such as: (Bookname) is a novel by (authorname). It's not vandalism, it's not a hoax (because WP:BEFORE shows an ISBN for it), it's not gibberish, it's not an advert - but nevertheless the author has now got his book to the top of the Google research results, and it clearly identifies the subject. However, The book has only received a few scant reviews, and is the first book of an unknown author WP:BEFORE . The article will clearly not survive a PROD or AfD, so there is no need for it to languish for another 7 days at either of those two processes, and there is no reason to expect that the page can be developed into an article about a notable subject. The vast majority of such articles are written by WP:SPA who are not likely to return and write a new article about something else. Some SPA and SEO experts are clever enough to realise that they can game the system by writing about a product rather than its nn company, knowing that where the firm can be deleted A7, the product cannot (at least for 7 days). I am firmly in favour of a new CSD criterion for products and services (which would also cover the dozens of similar articles about new software and video game, etc), but it seems to be a WP:PEREN and until consensus changes, if it ever does, we have to abide by the rules and ensure that page patrollers understand the criteria that we have, and do not apply their own feelings when tagging. A brand new landing page for new users is currently under development which may perhaps deter people from creating such 'articles'. Kudpung กุดผึ้ง (talk) 01:18, 22 October 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Unfortunately neither AfC nor NPP handle those problems too well. Smart Inventory Solutions (found at the back of NPP) Guardian Angels for a Smarter Life (found via AfC). By the way, the guideline for book notability is quite poorly written and apparently contentious; see the talk page there. Have mörser, will travel (talk) 08:52, 24 October 2011 (UTC)[reply]

I'm becoming more aware of that also. My emphasis too is shifting a little to the need to keep out spam. The problem remains, that for books, unless one actually checks properly to try to find reviews, and there is no freely available database that does it, except for the newspaper reviews one finds in Google News Archive, one cannot be reasonably sure it isn't notable. Products of other sorts are a slightly different matter, because a great many of them do have the potential for merging or redirecting, and the necessary standards for what constitutes reviews or articles that give substantial coverage is often fiercely debated in good faith at AfD. So this leads me to be a little more sympathetic to restricts on new page creation than I used to be. But still, in explaining Wikipedia to prospective new users, I continue to find the prospect of being able to write an article and have it immediately appear is such an incredibly great encouragement to good people. The danger of not getting new users is so great that it makes even spam look relatively insignificant.

The fundamental problem is,that the problems of open editing were much less significant when Wikipedia itself was less significant. Many of our procedures were good enough for the way people used Wikipedia 6 or 7 years ago, but much less suitable today.

I do not have a solution. The promise of open editing is still so revolutionary that I can only suggest we keep on tweaking what we do until something better is developed that supersedes or parallels us. I almost said nothing lasts forever, but the basic idea of selective print encyclopedias did last 250 years, through many social and intellectual revolutions. DGG ( talk ) 03:52, 23 October 2011 (UTC)[reply]

I can partially understand the WMF's blunt refusal to implement WP:ACTRIAL in spite of consensus, and I'm sure that if they had had hands-on extensive experience at NPP and as admins who do the deleting/CSD declining, they would have reacted differently. ACTRIAL was proposed together with solutions for near instant publication of reasonable articles by serious creators, but this went largely ignored; it may nevertheless have been the catalyst for the new Article Flow project, which while excellent, appears to be now languishing already for a lack of continued development time. In the light of the IEP disaster, something will need to be done very soon. While I was one of the major developers and proponents of ACTRIAL, I respect the opinions of those who intelligently opposed it, and I'm working hard with the WMF to get these new solutions moved forward. Important new tools are being developed for a brand new page patrol system, and we'll be hearing more news about this shortly. Kudpung กุดผึ้ง (talk) 04:40, 23 October 2011 (UTC)[reply]

What is this "IEP disaster"? Have mörser, will travel (talk) 08:58, 24 October 2011 (UTC)[reply]

WT:IEP and WT:Ambassadors contain it blow-by-blow. In short, the IEP is the India Education Program, which is an effort to get students from India to edit here; sounds good in theory, but we've hit two major problems. First, although some Indians indeed speak excellent English, the people in these classes were plainly not among them; I would not have mistaken any of them for the next Jawaharlal Nehru, if you know what I mean (c.f. Talk:Financial inclusion). Secondly (and this isn't uniquely Indian, it's a general issue with Asian editors), they had no understanding whatsoever of copyright, despite our repeated attempts to tell them to stop. Many, many copyvios were produced, and it's been one hell of a time trying to sort through all of them. I don't know what kind of prepwork the WMF did for this, but it's startling to me that they wouldn't have anticipated this, and their inability to recognize what's happened is decidedly disheartening. While they feel they can do whatever they feel like with ACTRIAL, they really have to be careful with this, because copyright problems could do serious damage. The Blade of the Northern Lights (話して下さい) 18:37, 24 October 2011 (UTC)[reply]

I found some more anecdotal "proof" that some wikipedians are discouraged when info they add to Wikipedia is being removed: http://www.alexa.com/reviews/single/4535591 Ottawahitech (talk) 11:01, 29 October 2011 (UTC)[reply]

I'm not sure that that "proof" has anything to do with NPP. He talks about edits and new contributors, not new pages.The-Pope (talk) 16:42, 29 October 2011 (UTC)[reply]

• I am sorry, but I don't see your point. Are you saying that the fact that many (if not most) new pages at Wikipedia disappear within minutes does not demoralize those (potential)wikipedians who wrote them? Ottawahitech (talk) 13:45, 30 October 2011 (UTC)[reply]

• I don't see your point of highlighting the comments of someone who we don't know, making generalist negative comments about this site. He may have got into a POV dispute. He may have been wikilawyered away. He may have bullied. He may have tried to spam/COI edit/ignore our rules. We don't know. I do know, from what I read, that he didn't mention New Pages at all, hence I'm not sure why you highlighted it. We all know that this can be a difficult place, if you are unable to "get to know the rules".

Getting (sort of) back onto topic of NPP, I'm not going to run out onto a sporting field (pick a sport, any sport) without understanding what I can and can't do. I'm not going to start tweeting, facebooking, linkedining, myspacing etc without spending some time understanding what is expected, what the various guidelines are. Why people (and the WMF) expect to allow anyone to create any page is beyond my comprehension. Yes, allow anyone to edit, but why don't we make sure that people have some idea about what this site is about before they create. Sure, have a AFC like process for "I'm new, not autoconfirmed, and I want to create a new article" queue, but for most people, get them understanding the game before they become the quarterback/point guard/penalty taker etc.

And getting even more onto the speedy tagging/deletion issue, the two really good things about speedy tagging is it may get rid of the really bad stuff before it gets google cached and mirrored everywhere, and it may notify the user whilst they are online and can address the issues, and not hope that they come back in a few days. If the notifications are too aggessive/confusing, then by all means rework them, but speedy tagging can be very advantageous, in some instances. And of course, the risk/reward is different depending on the topic at hand - a creator of a true, clear, undoubtedly A7 candidate article needs to realise that this is an encyclopedia, not whatever repository of non-notable people they thought it was. If the A7 is borderline or not valid, then a discussion with the tagger should be done instead.

Finally, should there be an tickbox available in twinkle to give you the option notify article creators when you cleanup tag an article, not just when you tag for deletion? New editors may not go back to their page, or to their watchlist, but they should notice the big orange bar. The-Pope (talk) 16:24, 30 October 2011 (UTC)[reply]

I've made this very suggestion many times that the twinkle application of some of the more pressing maintenance templates should be accompanied by an automated placing of a message to the creator. Such template messages don't exist and I have even offered suggested template messages. This suggestion seems to be so clearly rejected by a silent consensus that there have never even been replies to the postings on the relevant template/Twinkle/uw talk pages. I regularly manually paste my own custom messages - and it works! Kudpung กุดผึ้ง (talk) 16:54, 30 October 2011 (UTC)[reply]

• To answer The-Pope's question above: the reason I posted the URL above was in answer to Kudpung's request for a proof (it's burried somewhere at the beginning of this section). Sorry for the confusion - I find it is very difficult to carry on long conversations without having a proper conversation threading mechanism. Ottawahitech (talk) 15:27, 10 November 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Kupdung, are you sure about your statement that edits made to pages accessed from the NPP feed will automatically mark pages as patrolled? For me it does not work that way, see [1]---the entries around 10:05, December 8, 2011 were produced by going back to the NPP log, re-accessing the pages, and manually clicking "Mark patrolled". All of these articles I had before accessed from the NPP feed, and edited. I did not use any Twinkle buttons.

Could it be that having Twinkle enabled is sufficient to not automatically have such pages marked "patrolled"? --Pgallert (talk) 08:21, 8 December 2011 (UTC)[reply]

No, I am not sure at all and it's one of the issues that has confused me for a long while. There appear to be glitches in the scripts that work it, and there were more following the Wikipedia software upgrade. I am not an expert on technical matters, and my focus is on the overall human quality of patrolling. You might get the most rapid answer from contacting User talk:Snottywong or User talk:The Blade of the Northern Lights directly. --Kudpung กุดผึ้ง (talk) 08:32, 8 December 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Nah, I do not need this solved for myself. But at least for my account it always was that way, and I do agree it is a bit cumbersome. BTW, my workaround is to first mark patrolled, then click "back" in the browser and make the necessary edits. --Pgallert (talk) 08:52, 8 December 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Just to clear this up: I have tested this with an edit of my own to a new page, and editing alone does not currently appear mark a page as patrolled. The page needs to be opened again from special:new ages and marked as patrolled. The best thing to do is to mark a page as patrolled first, and then proceed with any edits. Kudpung กุดผึ้ง (talk) 09:50, 14 December 2011 (UTC)[reply]

This seems to be a software bug that should be reported by someone more familiar with the technical side than myself,But it also seems fixable by modifying the twinkle scripts, which will help those who use it. DGG ( talk ) 02:19, 5 February 2012 (UTC)[reply]

I've recently created a Toolserver tool Recent moves that shows articles recently moved from other namespaces into article space, using an interface similar to Special:NewPages. These new articles are frequently overlooked by new page patrollers, since they don't show up on Special:NewPages. There's not a lot of them, and I'd greatly appreciate one or more NPPers making a point of reviewing these on occasion. You can filter out moves by autopatrolled users. Let me know if you have any comments or suggestions. Thank you! Dcoetzee 10:47, 15 January 2012 (UTC)[reply]

One problem I've noticed as I have been patrolling is that often pages have, in fact, been patrolled and tagged for issues and simply not marked as being patrolled. I haven't been able to read through all of the extensive discussion yet, but I haven't seen this issue raised. Is there perhaps a method by which pages that have previously been tagged with various maintenance tags to be automatically marked as patrolled? I'd bet this would cut the backlog down significantly. There are obviously people who essentially patrolling outside of this system and thus not able to (or unaware of the system for) mark pages as patrolled. It would be nice to either make the un/patrolled status of a page more obvious, perhaps as a preference akin to the gadget that displays the articles assessment status? MyNameWasTaken (talk) 19:26, 26 January 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Don't think that automatically marking pages with maintenance templates as patrolled is a good idea. There are many automated or semi-automated processes which apply such templates and the fact an article has one doesn't mean it has been read and checked by a human being. Hut 8.5 19:33, 26 January 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Or even people who add tags but don't do everything you should do before marking as patrolled. ErikHaugen (talk | contribs) 22:10, 26 January 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Every page written in 2011 has now been patrolled. (Which means the queue is 25 days or so...) BCS (Talk) 23:50, 26 January 2012 (UTC)[reply]

At the end of the current patrol log sits a deleted page: http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Isaac_galland&redirect=no&rcid=484091760. This should've been solved with https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Special:Code/MediaWiki/103692 if I understand correctly. But apparently it hasn't? Jhschreurs (talk) 10:44, 5 February 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Hey there, looks like the NPPdefcon template is broken. I checked out User:Snottywong/NPPdefcon but didn't see anything obvious to fix. Having looked at several previous revisions, it appears something else the template draws on must have been disrupted somehow because its broken even in revisions from periods where I know it looked correct. Can someone more adept than I take a look? MyNameWasTaken (talk) 22:15, 7 February 2012 (UTC)[reply]

The user changed their username, the page is now at User:Scottywong/NPPdefcon. Hut 8.5 22:52, 7 February 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Not the problem I meant. I just would have sworn it used to look a little cleaner, but maybe I had it confused with the other defcon indicator. MyNameWasTaken (talk) 23:07, 7 February 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Is there an easy place to find the associated wikiprojects for a new article so I can tag the talkpage? There seems to be no standardisation of template names so most of the time I'm having to search the wikipedia namespace to find it - which is more than a little tedious and often takes far more time then it takes to review and patrol an article. Spartaz ^Humbug! 04:43, 12 February 2012 (UTC)[reply]

AFAIK, there is no definitive list, but you will find that {{WikiProject XXXXX}} is fairly standard. There are lots of alternatives available as redirects, but that has become the standard. You could check out Wikipedia:WikiProject Council/Directory for a list of projects, not templates, but I've found that most you can guess, and any which aren't obvious can be found by checking out the talk page of the topic involved - ie if you find a classical composer from Greenland, then clicking through to Talk:Composer and Talk:Greenland will highlight what projects they are in, which can be copied. From our unreferenced BLP tracking we have a list of a few hundred templates at User:DASHBot/Wikiprojects/Templates. The-Pope (talk) 05:23, 12 February 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Hey guys! Just a note to tell you that (finally) the report on the NPP survey we ran late last year has been released. All comments and suggestions are welcome on the talkpage :). I'm really, really sorry for the delay; I finished this in early December. I'm not too happy about the long turnaround time either ;p. Okeyes (WMF) (talk) 10:11, 15 February 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Over the past several months there has been contentious debate over aspects of WP:Article Titles policy. That contentiousness has led to efforts to improve the overall effectiveness of the policy and associated processes. An RFC entitled: Wikipedia talk:Article titles/RFC-Article title decision practice has been initiated to assess the communities’ understanding of our title decision making policy. New Page Patrollers play an important role in ensuring new articles are titled properly. As a new page patroller, you are encouraged to participate in the RFC.--Mike Cline (talk) 16:47, 16 February 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Anyone know anything about this: Wikipedia:Village pump (technical)#Special:NewPages queue —SW— ^chatter 15:23, 24 February 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Hey guys :). As previously mentioned in a few places, the Foundation has started work on our new patrolling software: New Page Triage. I'm posting updated specifications in a few hours, and I'd really advise everyone who is interested in page patrolling to head over to the talkpage, comment on the suggestions on the page already and the additional ideas the community has come up with.

We've also got an office hours session next Tuesday, the 13th, at 19:00 UTC (that's 12:00 PST, for the west-coast Americans around ;p). If you can make it, it's on IRC in #wikimedia-office. If you can't, drop me a line on my talkpage and I'm happy to send you the logs once we're done :). Regards, Okeyes (WMF) (talk) 21:44, 9 March 2012 (UTC)[reply]