Wikipedia:Newbie treatment at Criteria for speedy deletion/Scope

This page is for discussions about the scope of the Wikipedia:Newbie treatment at CSD project.

Duration of Project

This thread started on the prject page as "Doctor, they're coming!" and has been moved here. Ϣere SpielChequers 15:21, 3 November 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Curious, now I suspect "mystery shopper socks" more and more often... especially if the new users' new pages popped up around October 7. Some are so good! No, it's not my daily paranoia, it's worse; the swarm of competent newbies penetrated all the areas of knowledge (you wanted it you've got it) and they multiply like... like... what's the name of these green critters crawling on your shoulder, doc? NVO (talk) 06:56, 18 October 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Maybe this experiment should be permanent then. Everyone will be extra-sensitive with newbies for fear of being humiliated on this page. Equazcion (talk) 07:05, 18 October 2009 (UTC)[reply]

I suspect that most of those newby articles really are by new editors, there are many subjects that still need articles and much of what turns up is very good indeed. There is also quite a bit that is stubby and minimal but should not go to speedy deletion, I'm still declining speedies of the latter sort of article from trigger happy newpage patrollers - so I would be happy to continue the experiment. Ϣere SpielChequers 18:24, 18 October 2009 (UTC)[reply]

As the project now has two links from Wikispace I've decided to move it from my userspace to wikispace as an ongoing project, and as Equazcion make it permanent. I have no idea how long it might last for, but will try to set it up so that anyone can easily revive it in the future by adding a new test. Ϣere SpielChequers 15:21, 3 November 2009 (UTC)[reply]

This is about articles that don't deserve deletion

This started off as thread "The inevitable critique" and has been moved here after the word Doesn't was bolded, people who want to change or challenge the criteria for speedy deletion are probably better off raising their concerns at Wikipedia talk:Criteria for speedy deletion. Ϣere SpielChequers 15:14, 3 November 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Firstly, I do understand what you are attempting to show. I feel that this is at least an interesting experiment. However, I think the most important question that you forgot to ask is: "Should this article survive for seven days?". As someone who has patrolled literally thousands of new pages, I would like to offer my opinion.

A significant number of new pages should not survive more than a few minutes and should be tagged with a CSD or other deletion template. The sheer amount of vandalism, personal attacks, blatant advertising, etc. that is added to Wikipedia, if allowed to stay, would damage the project. These are just the most blatant examples, but there are many others. Without strict new page patrolling, the already large backlog of unpatrolled pages would be unmanageable. Granted, most of the pages at the back of the log simply need categories, better sourcing, wikification, etc. but some of those should be deleted as well, mostly for notability issues that aren't obvious enough for a CSD tag.

After reading the "Wikibullying" article, I came away wondering why the burden is being placed on the new page patroller. When I came to Wikipedia, I knew nothing about its policies, syntax, editing tools, etc. but I took the time to learn them. Why can't others do this? I see the complaints that "no one tells me how X works or where to go for Y", but nearly all of the deletion templates or warnings link directly to the relevant section. Unless someone is unfamiliar with clicking a link or English is not their native language, I see no excuse for not at least trying to read and understand the policies and guidelines.

Many, many pages that I mark for deletion and many of the warnings which I issue do not generate any communication with the original editor. Even the more personalized non boiler-plate explanations I leave on take pages are ignored. I actually like it when a new editor responds and asks what they did incorrectly and how they might fix it. I will go out of my way to help that person. Unfortunately, this is exceedingly rare. Most of the time, if I do get a response, it is in the form of vandalism of my talk page. According to the "Wikibullying" article, that still makes me the bad guy.

I do agree that some users (and I'm sure I have been guilty of this myself) overuse certain templates, use the incorrect CSD criteria, or don't PROD something that should have a PROD rather than a CSD tag. I do believe though that most new page patrollers are earnest, honest, and putting forth a good-faith effort to better Wikipedia. In my opinion, it is a rather thankless job and I've read many a post bashing those who do it as trigger-happy thugs. I just don't see this being the case.

That being said, I would be interested in the results of your experiment, especially any hoaxes that slip through as this is one of the hardest areas to patrol given the extensive fact-checking involved. I wish you luck in your process, and hope that you take my comments in the constructive spirit in which they were offered. Wperdue (talk) 04:22, 27 October 2009 (UTC)[reply]

You're right that a lot of new articles are by people who clearly haven't read (or if so, haven't understood) the relevant guidelines. That's obviously a problem, and there are many factors which no doubt contribute to it. But whether a poorly-formatted and ungrammatical example is the fault of Wikipedia having a Byzantine set of rules or of new contributors being too lazy to do their homework (or both, or something else), the solution is not CSD. The purpose of the exercise is, as I see it, to get a feel for the extent to which CSD - a tool designed for solving a specific set of problems - is misused to solve other, very real, problems which also occur. The question of whether patrollers are friendly enough is a separate issue.

Also, you say you'd be interested to know of any hoaxes which get through - but we're supposed to be creating genuine (if poorly presented) articles. Creating hoaxes just to experiment with how the new page patrol works would be a very bad idea for various reasons.

For all the articles in this exercise, then, the answer to your question "Should this article survive for seven days?" is yes. Olaf Davis (talk) 14:54, 27 October 2009 (UTC)[reply]

I'm the editor who started this page, and I'm a newpage patroller, and an admin whose deleted nearly 3,000 pages mostly after they'd been CSD tagged. I do not consider myself a "trigger-happy thug", and I don't dispute that there is a flood of articles coming in to Wikipedia every day that need to be deleted. This page and the articles being created as a result of it are not to test the fate of articles that should be speedy deleted and certainly not for hoax articles. We focus here on the fate of new articles by newbies that don't meet the speedy deletion criteria, and my hope is that what we do here will improve the newpage patrol process and where newpage patrollers are making errors correct them in an earlier and gentler way than at RFA. Ϣere SpielChequers 08:53, 28 October 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Agree with WSC. I have earned a reputation of being very strict with CSD and still I have speedy deleted more than 7000 pages. There is much too be deleted, unfortunately, but the problem starts when things get tagged/deleted that should not be tagged/deleted. Regards So Why 14:16, 30 October 2009 (UTC)[reply]

I've now tweaked the criteria at the top of the page to emphasise the word doesn't as in "write an article that doesn't meet the deletion criteria. Hopefully that will make clearer to everyone that the fate of articles which should be deleted is not really within the ambit of this experiment. Ϣere SpielChequers 16:16, 30 October 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Changing behaviors

I have often wondered if individual editors speedy deletion should be recorded and documented.

Maybe creating a subpage of WP:SPEEDY so editors can openly discuss such patterns of behavior?

The speedy deletion of the articles:

Talk:The Political Quarterly, documented in the PC PRO article,

Jim Wales Mzoli's Meats deleted in 22 minutes,

Article 2 million, El Hormiguero "promptly listed on Articles for Deletion by User:Alkivar within 24 hours of creation"

...is often shrugged off by the community as an anomaly and a mistake by well intended editors and nothing changes...

But this study has shown that this is a systematic problem. Documenting a pattern of such behavior is the second step (after this projects recognition) of tackling such a problem. Ikip (talk) 06:14, 10 November 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Before I started this trial I thought, as a moderately active admin at CSD, that our problem was partly over-enthusiastic taggers and partly a few trigger happy admins. What I've learned is that over-enthusiastic speedy tagging is a worse problem than I thought, but we do have quite a lot being corrected by other taggers before we admins see them. I'm hoping that individuals making mistakes can be addressed by pointing gently out those mistakes here. However one thing I've learned from this is that there are situations where the process as correctly done is bitey, I'm hoping that strategy:Proposal:Speedy deletion - 24 hour pause for some articles would address this. As for the scope of the project, perhaps we should add a section on policy proposals to address problems we've identified here - changing systems not just behaviours. Ϣere SpielChequers 08:42, 10 November 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Great idea.

I think the problem is both, the system fosters the behavior. Ikip (talk) 17:55, 10 November 2009 (UTC)[reply]