Introduction and overview edit
Despite the immense amount of good material and help available for new and future NPP'ers, it can be difficult to get started and build fluency and a practical workable approach . This provides practical tips to assist in that process. This page seeks to highlight and explain important items.
Any simplified statement is imprecise, even if it is more useful. This caveat applies for everything in this "practical tips" page. Also the term "article" is used to also mean other mainspace pages such as redirects and disambiguation pages.
Core function of new pages patrol (NPP) edit
The core function of NPP is to be the gatekeeper for new mainspace pages on the question of "should this article/page be allowed to exist in Wikipedia"? The mechanics of this system are that new mainspace pages have a flag set for review and only a NPP'er can let them "in the gate" via removal of the flag. Pages which are allowed to exist but have other flaws can be repaired by the other zillion Wikipedia editors after the article is through the gate. So it's important to identify and separate core functions from the many other others that NPP'ers check. Because, if for some reason you are trying to do a review very quickly, you still must do the core function properly.
Whether we have a large backlog or not, it's important to do a thorough job on at least the core functions of NPP.
- During periods a large backlog, this enables speeding up throughput without sacrificing doing a good job on the core function that Wikipedia is dependent on NPP handling.
- There can be concerns about the quality of our reviews when someone does them quickly. It's important to identify the core tasks that Wikipedia relies on NPP doing thoroughly and well and do those core tasks well.
The mechanics of the system edit
NPP is the main gatekeeper for new articles. Here "gatekeeper" refers to whether or not a new article is OK to exist in Wikipedia as a separate article, not to how it needs improvement. There is a "unreviewed/reviewed" flag on the article that determines whether or not the page requires review. The "flag" is like an invisible "checkbox" attached to the article. "Unreviewed" means that it needs and is flagged for review and when finished the reviewer sets the flag to "reviewed". Setting the flag to "reviewed" requires a special privilege which NPP'ers have.
Roughly speaking there are about 450 new articles per day that need a manual review by a human. At any given moment, the 30 most active reviewers handle about 80% of these and the 100 most active reviewers handle about 99% of them. This gatekeeper function is essential to Wikipedia. With this workload for so few people, vs. hundreds of thousands of editors handling the other article issues, we need to concentrate on the essentials and let the hundreds of thousands of editors handle the other tasks.
From a flagging administration standpoint, every page in mainspace is an article (such as articles, disambig pages) except for redirects, so an article entering mainspace or via conversion from a redirect has its flag set to "unreviewed". Setting the article to "reviewed" requires a special privilege which NPP'ers have (except for on articles which they created)
The main extra tool boxes used by NPP'ers are the page curation tool set and Twinkle. On the face of it, the page curation toolset has all of the extra tools that NPP'ers need. But some areas of it (specifally AFD'ing and draftifying articles) are either so prone to malfunction or difficult to use that NPP'ers use the Twinkle tools for those instead.
Focus on the essentials edit
Broadly speaking, our essential job is to review every new article and decide "should this article exist"? The two main "rules" regarding this are WP:Not and Wikipedia Notability, a big fuzzy ecosystem which has the WP:Notability page at its center.
Only a tiny fraction of new articles violate WP:Not so clearly that this, by itself, determines that they can't be an article. A more significant fraction of articles are on topics which don't meet the Wikipedia notability requirement; most of our review work involves enforcing Wikipedia's notability requirement.
Wikipedia's notability requirement edit
Wikipedia's notability requirement is a big complicated fuzzy ecosystem. We need to keep that in mind for later but we need to start somewhere simpler, which the basic overall rules. The central guideline regarding this is WP:Notability. This guideline has two parts:
- The first part is Wikipedia's general rule for existence of separate articles (basically that it needs to comply with notability and WP:What Wikipedia is not and then defines the overall notability requirement. It also lists and links the 12 recognized subject-specific notability guidelines (SNGs).
- The second part is what is called the general notability guideline (GNG), which is a sourcing-based method to meet the notability requirement.
The main rule defined in the first part is that in order to exist as a separate article a subject needs to fulfill the GNG requirement or an applicable SNG.
Pages to start with and learn edit
The two most important pages to start with and learn are WP:Notability and WP:What Wikipedia is not They are so central to NPP work, that's not overkill to start by giving each of them several careful readings and to thoroughly learn your way around both of them. Also read the "General" and "Article" sections at Wikipedia:Criteria for speedy deletion a couple of times; these list some specific examples of violations of WP:Notability and WP:What Wikipedia is not that are so clear-cut that the article can be more quickly deleted.
Generally, if the topic of an article has an subject-specific notability guideline (SNG) you will also need to refer to or know that guideline in order to review that article. (From your multiple reads of WP:Notability, you'll know which 12 SNGs exist). Start by picking 1 or 2 SNGs and reading them to see how they are written and what types of criteria are in there.
Give Wikipedia:Criteria for speedy deletion a read, focusing only the bulleted items below. In the authors' opinion, there are only a few things there that are relevant to NPP's core work rather than it establishing standards that we implement:
- It lists the obvious cases of articles that are clearly too outrageous to exist
- It shows the types of articles that can and should go to that speedy "shortcut" to deletion.
- It shows the details on how to use that speedy process