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Rethinking NPP in an attempt to better handle the backlog

Buried in the thread about admin and autopatrol Rosguill suggested the following:

I would, however, support reorienting the emphasis of new page reviewing to focus strictly on identifying threats to the encyclopedia (hoaxes, UPE, BLP violations, POV-pushing on sensitive topics, copyright) rather than the strict enforcement of notability guidelines that forms the bulk of actual review time (and which also causes the most disputes with contributors and thus burnout).

— Rosguill

This would be a pretty substantial change to NPP. But it would have the virtue of allowing the same number of NPP we have now to be more efficient. It seemed worthy enough of an idea to merit some further discussion which doesn't get lost around the holidays or because it was burried in a long discussion. Courtesy ping to Joe who commented on it there. Best, Barkeep49 (talk) 19:09, 4 January 2022 (UTC)

• @Joe Roe. Ping fix :) –Novem Linguae (talk) 19:13, 4 January 2022 (UTC)
• An ideology I have idiosyncratically optimized since I was given this perm. I applaud Rosguill for this statement and Barkeep49 for posting this here, If this is the new route NPP is taking, then it is long overdue & i wholly embrace it, in my honest opinion I believe to check for potential damaging factors as named above (hoaxes, UPE, BLP violations, POV-pushing on sensitive topics, copyright) supersedes meeting or satisfying our “notability threshold” i would love to hear the opinions of Kudpung, Usedtobecool, Novem Linguae and would even love to hear more from Rosguill himself. I have always believed in the quote “The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing” which was attributed to Edmund Burke to be a true philosophy, if NPP went in this direction, we would see more reviewers actively checking for the aforementioned, rather than scrutinize for notability solely if this was implemented COI/UPE editors wouldn’t edit with utmost impunity and boldness as they currently are doing. Celestina007 (talk) 19:49, 4 January 2022 (UTC)
• IMO checking for wp:notability / whether or not an article should exist is the main thing that needs to be done at NEW page gatekeeping. WP:notability is the main question regarding the existence of an article. Many of those other listed items are things that can get into an article at any time and so less specific to New pages. So I'd sort of recommend the reverse. Us handle only "should this article exist" questions and skip all of those other issues which can come into an article at any time in its life. North8000 (talk) 19:58, 4 January 2022 (UTC)
• A sensible idea. JBchrch talk 20:11, 4 January 2022 (UTC)
• NPP is not sustainable in its current form, so let's explore this idea. How would it be implemented? Would articles with apparent borderline notability be tagged with {{Notability}} and marked as reviewed? If we went that route, we would need some mechanisms for the wider community to follow up. Something which could be complimentary (or alternative) to this idea would be to push some aspects of NPP to the wider community. For example, every week, for each WikiProject, a bot could post a list of articles within the scope of the project, pending review, and tagged with {{notability}} or {{Unreferenced}}. So other editors interested in a given topic could add reliable sources to some of these articles, making it easier to review them if they are actually notable. MarioGom (talk) 20:18, 4 January 2022 (UTC)

  An idea I've been thinking about would be a new tag that would say something along the lines of "this article's sources are currently insufficient to establish its notability". This would allow reviewers to limit themselves to a prima facie evaluation based exclusively on the sources currently provided, and would free them from having to do any kind of WP:BEFORE (which is what Template:Notability § When to use seems to require). Perhaps they could be dumped at Category:All articles with topics of unclear notability for our grandchildren to deal with. JBchrch talk 20:36, 4 January 2022 (UTC)

• Well, I'm obviously in favor of this sort of reform. I think that a {{Notability}} tag should be sufficient when coming across the "possibly non-notable but mostly harmless" category of articles, even if we don't end up forming a formal community follow up process. It would end up a maintenance tag like any other, identifying that there are issues with the article, but not requiring the new page reviewer to initiate an AfD over it. _signed, Rosguill ^talk 20:28, 4 January 2022 (UTC)

  In my earliest days with patroller, I used to tag edge-case articles with {{notability}} and mark it as patrolled. However, what often happened was that the creator would remove the tag without having sufficiently addressed the problems, bringing their page out of the maintenance queues and having no more scrutiny; this led me to stop the practice. That's perhaps worth thinking about – unlike CSD and AfD tags, there's nothing stopping creators from removing such tags. Sdrqaz (talk) 20:43, 4 January 2022 (UTC)

Sdrqaz, I wonder if something was added to the backend to stop creators from removing certain maintenance tags. OMG this would make our job so much easier. (but also more tedious, since they would then have to request removal of maintenence tags). Hmmm, Bears thinking about. — Insertcleverphrasehere^{(or here)_{(or here)(or here)}} 22:16, 8 January 2022 (UTC)

Very interesting idea. Could do this via an edit filter, that either checks the editor's # of edits, the editor's perms (autoconfirmed, extendedconfirmed, NPP, etc.), or whether the editor is the article creator. Such a filter has been used before to prevent the article's creator from removing CSD tags, although last I checked I think it was turned off or only set to warn for some reason. –Novem Linguae (talk) 22:26, 8 January 2022 (UTC)

It might work to reduce the backlog, but it also might have unintended side-effects. Tagging articles, in my experience, almost never results in improvements to the tagged articles. All that adding {{More citations needed}} does is create an even larger backlog at Category:Articles needing additional references (434,567 articles). {{Notability}} isn't much better: has 56,716 articles. What does work is removing the unencyclopedic material. That gets people's attention. Maybe we should stop adding tags that everyone ignores. I wouldn't find working on NPP very rewarding if it was just tagging articles for someone else to deal with. But that is what triage is. And that was the original intent of NPP. Vexations (talk) 22:36, 4 January 2022 (UTC)

I sometimes get very strong reactions from creators about tagging! Also I think tags are very useful to reviewers in helping us calibrate our individual judgement with others. I have occasionally removed a tag placed by another reviewer but more commonly a tag helps direct my attention to something I might not have spotted straight off. They also give a creator warning and if they didn’t respond to the tag I think it makes stubifying, draftifying or AfDing more straightforward. Mccapra (talk) 22:50, 4 January 2022 (UTC)

With NPP not a gatekeeper on wp:notability and the word getting out, get ready for 1,000,000,000 new promotional articles in Wikipedia. Sounds like a way to add 5 or 6 zeroes to our backlog number. North8000 (talk) 20:50, 4 January 2022 (UTC)

I think the general idea here is to only relax standards around topics with low (zero?) potential for promotional incentives. In practice, this would mean that we'd only be relaxing standards for historical topics, geographic features, biological taxa, and the like. Showbiz BLPs and new/active companies would still get a thorough check. _signed, Rosguill ^talk 20:57, 4 January 2022 (UTC)

This sounds right (edit conflict with my comment below) Mccapra (talk) 21:03, 4 January 2022 (UTC)

• I agree with North8000. If we focus on just stopping the most extreme issues, we create an open door for Wikipedia to be flooded with rubbish. Individually many of the articles I take to AfD aren’t “harmful”, but they’re trivia, listcruft or nonsense about the chairman of a local party branch somewhere. The serious issues (hoaxes, copyvio, attack pages) will generally get found and dealt with sooner or later. If nobody is generally maintaining standards, there won’t be any.

At the same time I get the sense that some NPP reviewers are undertaking a BEFORE-type analysis of sources in every article they review. That’s not necessary in my view and it may be slowing us down. We can form a judgement about whether an article will survive AfD fairly quickly and we don’t have to be right, we just have to be reasonable. A full BEFORE is only necessary if you’re actually going to take it to AfD. Mccapra (talk) 21:02, 4 January 2022 (UTC)

• Some time ago, I was thinking of whether we could have a two-tiered review system, with one patrol mark for "general issues" and one for notability. I suppose this is sort of the same thing. Decoupling notability from everything else seems like a good way to improve productivity, but I do feel it is important we are looking at notability somehow. My worry is that if reviewers are patrolling articles that aren't notable, despite lack of other issues, that there might be an influx of promotional articles when certain groups realize that one of their favorite shortcuts to SEO just became more accessible. (That seems like a moot point, given that they haven't exactly been deterred yet, but I digress). Overall, I would be in favor of trying this out, to see what effect it has, and looking to better refine our workflow as we learn more. (Also, Mccapra, thanks for the bit about BEFORE, I've been considering that my review process is unnecessarily involved as I kind of seem to check everything.. I might be more useful to NPP if I didn't do all of that.) ASUKITE 21:05, 4 January 2022 (UTC)

• When I review, I find, that with very little effort, some articles that are obvious CSDs, Draftify, or AFDs. Then there are others that I can tell would survive AFD are obviously notable (that is unless they are complete hoaxes, but I AGF that they are not if the creator has a history). However, a bigger number number than the sum all those are somewhere in the middle. They may seem like a notable topic, but not have sufficient sources, the sources may be behind paywalls or offline, or in other languages. These are the ones that would take a lot of time. I know others have expressed similar thoughts in other discussions. Since these are not obvious pass/not pass, a process that helped form a consensus would remove the burden for any one reviewer to have to make this call.
  What if there was a new process for these "edge cases". A NPP reviewer would tag the article with something like {{Notability}}, that would encourage any editor to leave their assessment of notability on the TP. There would be separate tracking categories for these articles. The TP would, hopefully, resemble a informal AFD - but with no timeline or formal close. The tag could be removed at any time, but only by some "trusted" to assess notability - I'm thinking anyone with Admin/NPP/Autopatrol. As these articles are still subject to deletion by any existing process, that would be another way to in effect, remove the tag.
  I'm sure there are some rough edges to work out, but this would get the ones in the "grey area" out of the queue and reduce the backlog by marking them "likely notable" but still provide a mechanism where they can't be forgotten after that without further review. MB 02:22, 5 January 2022 (UTC)
• I agree most with North8000. I think notability is the bread and butter of NPP and should probably be kept as one of our tasks. If we are looking to make patrolling quicker and easier, I would instead suggest simplifying the flowchart by cutting out some of the non-notability tasks, such as WikiProject tagging, stub tagging, categorization, and maybe even maintenance tagging. These are things that gnomes can do and don't necessarily need an NPP to do it. I also like JBchrch's idea of a maintenance tag that says "this article's sources are currently insufficient to establish its notability". Getting away from WP:BEFORE and only evaluating the sources in the article is a good direction for NPP to head in. I also agree with Asukite who mentions the idea of two review queues: one for notability and one for gnoming. I too have had this idea before. Splitting the queues would make the checklist for each queue simpler, allowing for increased velocity. –Novem Linguae (talk) 02:59, 5 January 2022 (UTC)
• Thank you Cel. I haven't had the time to read all of the above but I will before I comment again. Here is what I thought almost two years ago. And sad to say, we were having the exact same discussions then. So, I would recommend the whole thread at Wikipedia_talk:New_pages_patrol/Reviewers/Archive_37#IMO_what's_needed_to_catch_up. Then, as now, we had hit the 10,000 mark because one of our pillars had stopped reviewing. We talked but we didn't do anything. And it fixed itself because we got a couple more high volume reviewers. Now we've lost them and we're back to having the same discussion.
  Currently, my thinking is (a) we need to try a few things to get new reviewers to stick around and learn the trade (b) we should stop worrying about borderline notable topics outside of BLPs, companies and products (emphasis on "borderline") (c) we should simplify the NPP flowchart (I can read Novem's post while typing this, so, THAT basically.)
  It is also worth considering, though it is unlikely to happen, to empower NPP to draftify all new borderline notable articles that don't show notability with sources already in the article. Regards! Usedtobecool ☎️ 08:49, 5 January 2022 (UTC)

• Emphasizing and distilling points from above and adding a few, IMHO the top things are:

1. The gatekeeper function on "should this be an article?" is our main mission, with wp:notability being the bulk of that task
2. Remove the other tasks from the flowchart. Such issues will be recurring anyway throughout the life of the article and don't specifically relate to new articles.
3. Backlog is a secondary indicator.....it's more of our "kick in the butt". I think that at most it has about 11 days worth of articles. Long term the amount of reviews is exactly equal to the amount articles that need review. A better measure/goal is building reviewing horsepower.
4. View our "reviewer horsepower" as a pyramid with the handful of rock stars at the top, and regular reviewers the next level down. Below that "sometimes reviewers" (although it's too difficult for people to exist at this level-see below) and below that people who have the the tool / are thinking about it. We need to build all levels, and the best place to focus on is to get people into the second to top level (regular reviewers) It's the hardest to get people into.
5. You folks that are expert at this seem to not understand how high barrier for entry into "regular reviewer" is. Your conversation reminds me a of hamburger stand surrounded by a moat filled with alligators saying "maybe we should offer a discount on hamburgers to get more customers". I've got 60,000 plus diverse edits, started in 2009,and am familiar with policies and guidelines and it still took me several hundred reviews to even half understand the realities of how to do this properly which is about as far as I've gotten so far. I do badly at fully implementing the flow chart, and a part of the learning process might be which parts of it reviewers actually do. Paring the flow chart would help on this. So would offering training in the missing areas (e.g. mechanics of the tools, tips from the rock stars on the practical/ realistic tradeoffs and decision making)

Sincerely, North8000 (talk) 14:20, 5 January 2022 (UTC)

I'm pretty ambivalent about the idea of making this change for the reasons you've mentioned in previous posts. I also agree with the idea in #6 that NPR is hard. This is why when I was regularly doing PERM, I ended up declining a fair number of editors. However, we already offer training and tips from rock stars have been provided in various ways so I don't think that's the solution. I am also wary, for the reasons MB notes above, at pinning this on the flowchart. I think the thing, when I was doing regular NPP, that took an overwhelming amount of time to do was borderline notability. And, not coincidentally, that is also the topic that provides the biggest stumbling block for someone becoming a regular reviewer. So to the extent that we want to increase capacity that seems like the biggest untried area. I'm not sure we should do it, but I am sure we need to be thinking about these things which is why I kicked off this discussion. Best, Barkeep49 (talk) 16:27, 5 January 2022 (UTC)

At the risk of becoming a broken record, on top of being what takes the most time, borderline notability cases are also what leads to the most conflict with other editors, which is what burns out our top contributors the most. Removing a large chunk of the cases where they could end up in a shouting match with a good-faith editor would allow us to preserve our reviewing cadre. _signed, Rosguill ^talk 17:07, 5 January 2022 (UTC)

Yes that's a good point that I hadn't mentioned and could be a way of itself increasing capacity (if fewer of the "rock stars" burn out capacity stays higher). Best, Barkeep49 (talk) 17:38, 5 January 2022 (UTC)

Yes, a good and important point. Besides being the most difficult, the borderline ones are also the most painful.North8000 (talk) 18:23, 5 January 2022 (UTC)

Barkeep, I think that you and the rock stars are so expert that you don't know what is missing from the training. You need a dummy like me to point those out. :-) North8000 (talk) 18:30, 5 January 2022 (UTC)

What is missing from New Page Patrol School that you think needs to be included? I know that when I'm training someone there I spend huge amounts of time going over notability in all its forms. Best, Barkeep49 (talk) 18:34, 5 January 2022 (UTC)

@Barkeep: Some that come to mind:

• The practical details, ins and outs of the common NPP tools and when to use or avoid using them (page curation vs. twinkle etc.)
• Which parts of the flow chart are normally skipped?
• Overview of how wp:notability actually works. (Wikipedia:How Wikipedia notability works is my attempt at that)
• Practical advice on borderline wp:notability cases.
• Common mistakes that NPP folks make

Sincerely, North8000 (talk) 19:26, 5 January 2022 (UTC)

I don't want to link to it publicly (security through obscurity at work) but that seems all covered in the NPP School training materials I point trainers towards. If you're interested in seeing that drop me an email and I'll point you towards it. FYI @North8000 but you pinged the wrong user. Best, Barkeep49 (talk) 21:45, 5 January 2022 (UTC)

Thanks, I'll do that. And sorry about the username error. North8000 (talk) 22:41, 5 January 2022 (UTC)

• As a follow up from my initial entry, Even though I haven’t read most of the rationales above, I have read enough to see that Rosguill's statements/Proposal doesn’t in any way interfere with the already laid down conventional tenets of how NPP works, i am a firm believer, (have always been) in the ideology that checking for potential damaging factors such as UPE takes preeminence over notability of any given article. Infact following what is outlined in WP:DRAFTIFY we are admonished to move back to Draftspace if an article has a potential COI. Infact I have been planning to start a site wide RFC or a proposal at the village pump where I was going to expressly state that editors who have been indicted in WP:COI or undeclared paid editing be indef blocked on sight or in the very least should not ever have access nor be ever given perms like Autopatrol or New page reviewers ever again, for example see this, that editor has had his Autopatrol removed twice and it is my candid opinion they never get sensitive perms granted ever again and should instead use the WP:AFC method to indefinitely create their articles. Forgive the digression, I guess what I’m trying to say is that this is a positive and progressive thinking move we should welcome. Celestina007 (talk) 17:45, 5 January 2022 (UTC)
• A few thoughts:

From WT:NPP/R: New Page Review is essentially the first (and only) firewall against totally unwanted content. Downgrading notability seems to me to be contrary to the fundamental purpose of NPP.

How would it be implemented? Would articles with apparent borderline notability be tagged with Notability and marked as reviewed? If we went that route, we would need some mechanisms for the wider community to follow up Isn't that just pushing the problem elsewhere? There is also a danger that notability decisions will be made by editors less conversant with the notability guidelines than NPP patrollers. I used to tag edge-case articles with notability and mark it as patrolled. However, what often happened was that the creator would remove the tag without having sufficiently addressed the problems That's my experience too.

For example, every week, for each WikiProject, a bot could post a list of articles within the scope of the project, pending review, and tagged with notability or Unreferenced. From my past experience asking for help at Wikiprojects when reviewing a difficult article in their particular area, I wouldn't hold my breath.

get ready for 1,000,000,000 new promotional articles in Wikipedia Have to agree there.

In practice, this would mean that we'd only be relaxing standards for historical topics, geographic features, biological taxa, and the like. Showbiz BLPs and new/active companies would still get a thorough check It's the latter type of articles that takes the time to check notability and are the ones that are potentially more contentious when a decision is made. Taking out the 'easy' ones doesn't help the problems.

I would instead suggest simplifying the flowchart by cutting out some of the non-notability tasks, such as WikiProject tagging, stub tagging, categorization, and maybe even maintenance tagging Tagging an article with refimprove, stub etc isn't time-consuming compared to assessing notability so won't make a lot of difference to workload or the queue.

--John B123 (talk) 19:55, 5 January 2022 (UTC)

Here are more difficult tasks which the flowchart says to do at every article which can occur or get handled at any time in the life of the article:

• Confirm that there are no copy vios
• Confirm that it's not duplicating an already existing article with a different title
• Add wikiprojects
• Add categories or tag as uncategorized

Possible candidates for removal? Or made into suggestions instead of hard coded into the flow chart? North8000 (talk) 21:17, 5 January 2022 (UTC)

• I agree that establishing notability is the greatest potential hassle/timesink with any article - because of the potential for conflict (ugly instances of which in the recent past have cost us at least two heavy workers), and because of the bewildering array of jealously defended SNGs. I've pretty much given up on all things Sports and most things Pop because of that crap, on both counts. And yes, lack of notability is less of an immediate problem to the encyclopedia than UPE, BLP violations, and copyvios.

But. If we don't do, it's not going to get done. As noted above, notability tagging just punts the problem on, into a vast category bucket that is never going to get emptied. Or assume we had those two separate assessment queues, one for notability and one for all other issues: where's the pool of editors specializing in the first queue coming from? It would be like volunteering for all the bad bits of the job while missing out on the (generally more interesting and/or easy) rest. Again, it's not going to get done. I'm doubtful this can usefully be excised from the standard workflow.

I'm also wondering whether it is easier or harder to deal with lack of notability ab initio rather than when the article has been left to sit for a bit. There's a higher chance that the original author is still around, and they are the one most likely to dig deep and find those sources that establish notability, if prodded a bit. On the other hand, they are also the one most likely to fight tooth and claw for retaining some unsourcable item, so it might be a wash :/ --Elmidae (talk · contribs) 21:41, 5 January 2022 (UTC)

• NPP is an essential process. As the only gatekeeper against inappropriate new pages, people constantly need to be reminded that its not a MMPORG with bling to be gathered on the way and that it's arguably the most important process on Wikipedia. After all, Wikipedia is an encylopedia and not a pastime for people just looking for something to do or to gain recognition in the schoolyard. Most of the aspects of its control: Notability, COI, COPYVIO, UPE, are of equal importance.

Historically, until a small group of us complained about backlogs and article quality, new page 'patrolling' was a very simple process, this was the feed, Twinkle's selection of tags was the tool, and patrolling could be done by absolutely anyone, requiring even less experience than the 8,742 holders of the Pending Changes Reviewer right.

The simple NPP flow chart

With the WMF's refusal to allow WP:ACTRIAL (which took a further 7 years of wrangling to get done), we negotiated for the build of a better NP feed and some dedicated tools for it. This was released around 2012 but although excellent tutorials had been made, including a video, the problem of quality/competence persisted. Something had to be done and in 2016 the New Page Reviewer user right was rolled out, and the original process description page was completely overhauled and turned int a tutorial and I made and added the simple flow chart which appeared to satisfy the needs at the time. A few years later, the flow chart which most people refer to in these discussions, was added by Insertcleverphrasehere. It had a mixed reception ranging from excellent to confusing to intimidating. Those who base their work on it, swear by it. Other patrollers who have been around since the days of yore don't bother with either chart - they had learned everything already.

No one is denying that NPR has a steep learning curve, and that's why access to it is surrounded by a moat full of alligators. However, I believe that while the big flow chart should stay, it needs to be de-iconised and used more as the basis for the NPP School for those who feel they need personal tuition. I'm sure that many people seeing it for the first time are put off by it and they hadn't viewed the tutorial page until after being accorded the right by an admin at WP:PERM. Let's not forget that although we dislike the term, many of the aspirants for NPP do indeed appear to be hat collectors. How many since the admins had the good sense to put new patrollers on probation first, have actually asked for the right to be made permanent? Kudpung กุดผึ้ง (talk) 02:13, 6 January 2022 (UTC) Pinging: @Asukite, Barkeep49, Celestina007, Joe Roe, John B123, MarioGom, Mccapra, Novem Linguae, Rosguill, Sdrqaz, Usedtobecool, and Vexations:. Kudpung กุดผึ้ง (talk) 03:39, 6 January 2022 (UTC)

Kudpung, I'm not sure what your point is. The flowchart is indeed complicated, but so is NPP. At least the 'big' flow chart actually gives someone advice on where to go when they are stumped. The small flowchart is at best a simple reminder of the different end points available for patrollers to target. If indeed the patroller already knows the process, the small flowchart is a pretty easy checklist reminder of what your options are... then again, an experienced reviewer probably knows off hand what to do anyway.

I won't claim that the situation of having a complicated process flowchart front and centre for new patrollers is an ideal situation, but the alternative is leaving them to wade through the process just making it up as they go along, as I had to when I learned; essentially doing the obvious ones and slowly learning more and more fringe cases until I generally had a good idea what I was doing. I made a lot of mistakes at the beginning I'm sure, and slowly I got better at it.

For those so inclined, the flowchart gives an 'idiotproof' way to review something you aren't sure about. It certainly doesn't work for everything, but it generally will get you to the right solution in the vast majority of difficult reviews (or at least one of the reasonable solutions).

For those that want to learn it the old way, they are free to ignore the 'big' chart. I share your concern about scaring people away, but NPP is complicated, and generally requires competence, hiding the big chart won't change that fact.

I did design the chart as a "this might help if you are stuck", and it wasn't intended to become some sort of gospel. The caption of the chart at the tutorial still espouses this view.

Having read through the rest of the comments here, I agree that some of the more gnomish activities listed at the bottom of the flowchart could come out. I'm not sure how much Stub tagging or Wikiproject tagging is helping these days. That said, if we don't do it, I'm not sure anyone else will. Basically, are these things valuable? If not, we should just stop doing them altogether (across the whole site). If so, then we need to find out if someone else will do this job if NPP doesn't. Finally, even if the final answer is no... do we care? Wikiprojects especially, despite the excellently designed rater that sped up the process immensely, is still a very annoying and time consuming activity with little perceived value. Most of these projects seem largely abandoned, most of the rest only care about core articles.— Insertcleverphrasehere^{(or here)_{(or here)(or here)}} 03:15, 7 January 2022 (UTC)

• Ultimately NPP will continue to get worse. I don't say this pessimistically, but honestly NPP used to be a lot of fun, because a lot of interesting new articles came through. Nowadays, most of the stuff that comes through are list articles on forgettable sportspeople, music, companies, and other semi-promotional stuff (essentially people, their fans, or their employees wanting to 'get an article' to prove that they matter). Every now and then a diamond gets discovered in the rough, and also it's not to say that this other stuff isn't important to somebody, but it seems to me increasingly clear that most of the interesting stuff to write about got an article a long time ago. Most of what's left... well, it doesn't have wide appeal, and so is unlikely to be interesting for me (the hypothetical average NPP reviewer). I don't say this to be pessimistic, but it is one of the reasons why I stopped reviewing, and is a major reason why new reviewers are hard to get engaged.

TL;DR, NPP is becoming more a of a slog because an increasing proportion of the articles being written are boring as fuck. — Insertcleverphrasehere^{(or here)_{(or here)(or here)}} 03:44, 7 January 2022 (UTC)

Just recently I created first homosexual movement and Röhm scandal. I don't think either of these was "boring as fuck"... but they didn't go through the NPP feed because I'm autopatrolled. I think maybe the interesting new articles are being created by autopatrolled editors, so the non-autopatrolled stuff tends to be less interesting. (t · c) buidhe 03:51, 7 January 2022 (UTC)

Buidhe, Yeah. I wasn't meaning to say that everything is boring, just that an ever increasing percentage of new stuff is. (maybe one in 30, instead of one in 5, like it used to be). — Insertcleverphrasehere^{(or here)_{(or here)(or here)}} 21:56, 8 January 2022 (UTC)

Buidhe, I wonder if the widespread usage of autopatrolled has ruined NPP. It makes sense to give pre-aproval out to autopatrolled users, and this does significantly reduce the workload on NPP, but I guess the problem is that it means that the stuff that is left is mostly the terrible chaf (which is a sign that the system is working as designed; it isn't funneling good articles toward reviewers). Unfortunately, this has resulted in a system where the NP Feed is a pile of dregs (mediocre topics and/or sub par offerings).

On top of this, ACTRAIL reduced the obscenely bad stuff (which, although horrible and a waste of time, it was at least fun to CSD stuff, in a schadenfreude sort of way).

What does this leave? Well, a bunch of boring stuff. In our attempts to optimize the system, we've removed all the interesting stuff from it, and left only the monotonous grind. I'm not saying that these optimizations aren't necessary, or that they aren't useful, but it helps explain why we have a lot more trouble retaining editors or recruiting new ones. — Insertcleverphrasehere^{(or here)_{(or here)(or here)}} 20:09, 9 January 2022 (UTC)

@Kudpung, I remember back a while ago you mentioning something about this, that there used to be a lot more articles being created every day, but that the amount of reviews was more than enough to keep up in the old days. Now, despite the reduction in new article creation, autopatrolled reducing our workload, and ACTRIAL reducing the about of trash coming in even more, you saying you didn't know why we were now struggling to keep up. Perhaps the overall 'monotonization' of NPP can help explain why that has happened? Some input from you would be interesting, since you've been around since the beginning. — Insertcleverphrasehere^{(or here)_{(or here)(or here)}} 23:21, 9 January 2022 (UTC)

• Wow. Lots of good discussion above. I haven’t commented before because I wanted to focus on getting the backlog on the oldest articles down to a manageable level, then take my time responding here. I can’t say I’ve read every word above, but I have read most of it. I feel that NPP is one of the most important areas of the encyclopedia. The gate, so to speak, to the wealth of knowledge which lies within. And let me say up front, I do not know what the answer is to "fix" NPP, but I have a few observations/suggestions.

First, to me, I think the biggest thing slowing reviewing down is WP:BEFORE, which I think a few other editors have already mentioned. To me, the only action taken by an NPP patroller which needs the BEFORE is if they are sending something to AfD. Second, I think that notability should remain something that NPP checks. If not, the fears of many echoed above would come to fruition. That said, I also think Rosguill's suggestion regarding easing our notability review on certain subjects has merit.

Third, I think that the smaller flow chart is excellent for describing the ‘’flow’’ of what we do, while the more detailed one is good for describing the process of how we do it. Although I would make some changes to it. For instance, the first thing I do is check for copyvios, for if there is a copyvio issue, nothing else matters. Fourth, and on a slightly different target, I think that those 630 editors on NPP for over a five years should have the NPP right removed. I think it’s more beneficial to have an accurate idea of who is active on the project. I would also extend that to those who haven’t edited on NPP in over two years.

Fifth, I think there needs to be a 4-pronged effort at the project. First, there needs to be a group of editors who weed through the back of the queue every 1-3 days. They should review the articles which are over 90 days old. As of right now, there are approximately 650 articles in that group (to give you an idea, there are 250 articles dated 9/30 and earlier, ad 400 articles dated 10/1-10/6). They need to focus on articles on just the oldest articles. Second, there should be a group who edits from the front of the queue. Third, there should be a group of specialist editors (e.g. those who focus on sports, or Nigeria/Ghana, or India, or music). I also think we need to review slightly altering WP:DRAFTIFY, so that it is not if "any" objection is raised, but "any objection raised by anyone other than the article creator". The fourth group should be editors who also focus on the back of the queue, but who look at the articles between 60-90 days old. Currently, that’s 2100 articles.

Sixth, and finally, I think there needs to be cooperation between NPP reviewers. For example, if I’m reviewing an 80 day old article, and I see that another NPP reviewer has slapped a tag on it, that’s when I go in-depth about the issue it’s already been tagged for. But I think we need even more than that. For instance, if I do my daily NPP patrol and focus on everything older than 90 days, and I knew that editors A, B, C, D, and E were also in the group of NPPers who were editing that range, I would be able to tell them what I had focused on, so that they could either go over what was left, or if I didn’t finish the whole range, they could focus on another part.

Since I decided to give NPP one more shot, I focused on the back of the queue. When I started, there were almost 4000 articles older than September 30. Now, as I’ve said, it’s down to about 250. That’s not just due to me of course, there are other folks hammering away back there. Yet, the number of overall articles in the queue has risen slightly, which says that there is a ton more article creation activity going on. We really need a solid, reliable corps of editors who have each others’ backs.

One final thought, and this just could be me, but I think it would be beneficial to have a counter of how many new articles get added to the queue each day, versus how many articles get reviewed. It’s one thing to see the overall number, and fret over the backlog, but if we’re averaging 300 reviews a day and there are an average of 280 articles being added to the queue each day, we can see how long it’s going to take to get the queue down. Conversely, if we’re averaging that 300, and then all of a sudden that 280 goes up to 340 and stays there, we will have a better understanding of why the queue is growing. Some jumps are due to large numbers of articles being re-added to the queue, sometimes its when a prolific stub creator loses their autopatrolled rights, while other times its due to an AfC drive. I just think it would be good information to know. Sorry about the wall of text.Onel5969 ^{TT me} 20:37, 7 January 2022 (UTC)

Wow, Onel5969, great comments from one of the veterans of NPP. Good to hear your insights on this. Regarding your comments on the flowchart, I agree that copyvios are high priority, and it is quite near the top of the chart; only below a bunch of obvious CSD criteria, which are much rarer now than they were when I made the flowchart (thanks ACTRIAL!). I suppose the non-english check could be put below it. I agree that for the vast majority of articles, copyvios is where to start. I love your idea for an article creation counter. It has to be somewhere on the wiki already (in fact I remember that the WMF had a set of charts that included this that were running for a while before and during ACTRIAL, but I think it got shut down later). As for the amount of reviews, I suppose this could be parsed from the data on the top reviewers list, or wherever that data comes from. — Insertcleverphrasehere^{(or here)_{(or here)(or here)}} 22:11, 8 January 2022 (UTC)

• So I take a peek just now at the feed to obtain an overview in order to comment here and make some suggestions, and the first one in the list is Hope Swinimer (volunteer). The next thing I do is look who created it and their talk page. That says it all. However, I'm more concerned that the fly-our curation tool is is not loading. Have I been away so long that I have not noticed some major changes? Kudpung กุดผึ้ง (talk) 00:14, 10 January 2022 (UTC)

  Kudpung, Heck... that one is at least fun to drop the CSD hammer on. I'd prefer that over what I found at the top of the list: Spencer Howe. Being downright bad is better than subpar mediocrity. — Insertcleverphrasehere^{(or here)_{(or here)(or here)}} 02:04, 10 January 2022 (UTC)

Not that I'm going to start patrolling new pages, I'm not - my ays of doing that kind of thing are over, but I'm stil curious to know why the the fly-out curation tool is is not loading. Kudpung กุดผึ้ง (talk) 07:52, 10 January 2022 (UTC)

Missed this comment Kudpung กุดผึ้ง - but the curation tool appears to be working somewhat. The issue is the copyvio check on it does not appear to be working. I've had to use the copyvio check function separately the last few days. Which is annoying, but at least earwig is working.Onel5969 ^{TT me} 18:33, 12 January 2022 (UTC)

Community Wishlist Survey 2022

The proposal phase for the meta:Community Wishlist Survey 2022 is now open. Should we ask for some technical improvements related to NPP? Maybe something from WP:PCSI? MarioGom (talk) 19:55, 10 January 2022 (UTC)

I know that they (and most developers) avoid such requests, but how about asking them to add the "W" option ("Works") to the page curation tool set, plus more documentation on the details of how it works / how to use it.North8000 (talk) 14:59, 13 January 2022 (UTC)

• Scroll back (and possibly in the most recent archive) for suggestions of features to request. Others are listed here. Kudpung กุดผึ้ง (talk) 08:19, 14 January 2022 (UTC)

Neil Patel review

Hi. I am coming here after a controversial review of a crap article, Neil Patel (digital marketer), (which has been deleted multiple times, Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Neil Patel (entrepreneur) and Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Neil Patel (online marketing strategist)) by an inexperienced reviewer User:Tamingimpala. The work is paid so a good look of this user contributions is warranted. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 209.191.211.194 (talk) 19:52, 8 January 2022 (UTC)

Whilst I’m going to look into the article now, please do not come to a venue reserved predominantly for NPP Perm bearers and use condescending words such as “crap” it is rude, not only to the article creator, and reviewer, but rude to this very venue. Now, if you have non private evidence then reporting this to WP:ANI as documented in WP:PAID is sufficient enough to report undisclosed paid editing, but if you are in possession of material that reveals the real identity of anyone then please do not post it anywhere on Wikipedia, rather, you send an e-mail to @paid-en-wp@wikipedia.org and attach your evidence. Thank you for your compliance in advance. Celestina007 (talk) 22:09, 8 January 2022 (UTC)

courtesy ping to Tamingimpala. Celestina007 (talk) 23:02, 8 January 2022 (UTC)

Do note that the OP has likely been forum shopping. They reposted the same request at WP:Conflict of interest/Noticeboard#Neil Patel review. See comments there. 🐶 EpicPupper ^{(he/him | talk)} 23:56, 8 January 2022 (UTC)

Yes, i made that observation also and included it in my comment at COIN see here. Celestina007 (talk) 00:05, 9 January 2022 (UTC)

Tamingimpala also created Moz.com about an SEO company, an article that was previously deleted in a 2020 AFD. I'm not sure what their interest in SEO is all about. Just thought I'd add that to the mix. Liz ^{Read! Talk!} 00:08, 9 January 2022 (UTC)

If there is a clear pattern of questionable editing bothering on possible unethical practices and if this puts their eligibility to hold the NPP perm in jeopardy, then I believe the OP is more than welcome to visit WP:ANI/I and file a formal report. I’m not sure, but I believe NPP veterans currently with the admin flag Rosguill & Barkeep49 may want to keep an eye on this editor or (this discussion) Furthermore, i’d like to add that I’m also just noting that the reviewing editor is barely 8 months old and has both the NPR perm and the AFC pseudo right, this feels rushed, but I really can’t say or see anything sanction worthy. Celestina007 (talk) 00:23, 9 January 2022 (UTC)

I didn't mean to cast aspersions and I doubt that the IP editor will return. But I think longtime editors here have an aversion to any content on the project that seeks to promote anything to do with SEO, digital marketing and internet promotion because there is so much puffery and empty claims. It's a field built on hype and "personal branding" so sourcing is often pretty loose, fuzzy and promotional. Liz ^{Read! Talk!} 03:41, 9 January 2022 (UTC)

Nah, it’s cool Liz, i don’t even believe your comments were interpreted in any manner that suggests you casted aspersions or intended to do so, you made an observation and you voiced it, nothing wrong there. Celestina007 (talk) 23:06, 9 January 2022 (UTC)

@Celestina007, @EpicPupper, @Liz, I think I clarified the case with Neil Patel at here: WP:Conflict of interest/Noticeboard#Neil Patel review. And with Moz.com, the page was created by contacting an admin beforehand. The admin later apologized for being obstructive, and appreciated me creatin the article, also suggested to carry on creating article about similar subject: Rand Fishkin (SEO expert). See: :User talk:Mark Ironie#Rand Fishkin. -- Tame (talk) 04:29, 9 January 2022 (UTC)

@Tamingimpala, I saw your comments at COIN, As I stated there I did not particularly understand the motives of the OP and didn’t see anything egregiously problematic per se. Having said, do take more care moving forward, for example, refreshing the page to check if the article was now “unreviewed” would have been a great idea. Thank you for your services at new page reviewing. Celestina007 (talk) 23:06, 9 January 2022 (UTC)

• Courtesy ping, this is now at AfD Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Neil Patel (digital marketer) should anyone want to weigh in on the subject. I am not watching this page, but please ping me if needed Star Mississippi 17:46, 14 January 2022 (UTC)

Autopatrol request

Hey there! I am a an established Wikipedia editor with 15 years' experience, but I have recently become aware that my new page creations are appearing in this list and being vetted as if I were a brand new editor. I wonder if I could please be removed from this list? Thank you in advance. :)--Coin945 (talk) 13:18, 20 January 2022 (UTC)

The place to make that request is at Wikipedia:Autopatrolled. Onel5969 ^{TT me} 14:10, 20 January 2022 (UTC)

Coin945, you may have misunderstood the purpose of 'Autopatrolled'. It has nothing to do with brand new editors and especially since ACPERM. It's simply a technical feature that might, under rare circumstances, slightly reduce the workload of the patrollers. Stubs and very short articles only take a few seconds to patrol. The autopatrolled right is losing its significance and has been recently been removed from administrators. Kudpung กุดผึ้ง (talk) 22:19, 20 January 2022 (UTC)

Rajić, Sisak-Moslavina County

Could somebody have a look at this one, I seem to be getting into an argument about it. Thanks. --John B123 (talk) 20:57, 27 January 2022 (UTC)

I understand your point, John B123, but it's not worth the grief. The one source tag, since it has a single source, is appropriate. Onel5969 ^{TT me} 22:26, 27 January 2022 (UTC)

@Onel5969: Thanks for having a look. As you say it's not worth getting upset about it. Regards. --John B123 (talk) 22:30, 27 January 2022 (UTC)

Articles converted from redirects can be autopatrolled

When someone converts a redirect into an article, it appropriately goes into the NPP queue. However, if they were not the original creator of the redirect and have NPP, they're also given the opportunity to patrol it (I just encountered this at Little New Year if you'd like an example). This effectively allows a form of autopatrol for users without that permission, albeit only in certain circumstances. Could we close this loophole? {{u|Sdkb}} ^talk 18:27, 26 January 2022 (UTC)

Sdkb, I don't think it matters. There are few NPPers, and of those many already have autopatrolled. For those that don't, I'm pretty sure any would be trusted with it if they desired to apply. — Insertcleverphrasehere^{(or here)_{(or here)(or here)}} 10:21, 28 January 2022 (UTC)

It may not be the most pressing issue ever, but I do think it matters. If anyone with NPP could get autopatrolled, the rights would be bundled and the requirements the same, but they're not and they're different. At a core level, it's important that the NPP system is not leaky, since it's our only line of defense. This issue represents a leak, however small. {{u|Sdkb}} ^talk 21:39, 28 January 2022 (UTC)

Interviews As A Reliable Source For Core Notability Claims?

This AFD; Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Titi Kuti has got me thinking if I’m the one misrepresenting or misinterpreting policy and I’d like feedback on this, are interviews a reliable source for major claims of notability? I do not believe so, but it seems other editors aren’t of the same opinion thus I’d appreciate feedback on this from anyone here. Celestina007 (talk) 19:37, 28 January 2022 (UTC)

I believe transcript-style interviews are WP:PRIMARY and thus don't count toward notability (but may sometimes be citable for other reasons). Articles that are interview-ish and have a lot of quotes may qualify for notability, if you can remove all the quotes and still have an in-depth article with significant coverage and analysis. Feel free to link the source and we can give more tailored advice. –Novem Linguae (talk) 20:25, 28 January 2022 (UTC)

The argument is that an interview with the subject of the article is not independent of the subject. This goes back to something you frequently hear people say on, for example, the help desk or the teahouse, which is that Wikipedia "doesn't care what the subject of an article has to say about itself." In an interview the interviewee has an opportunity to tell the world what they want the world to know about them, meaning if you are citing it for facts about that person you should take it with a bit of a grain of salt. Unfortunately, this position (which seems to be the most common one on Wikipedia) lacks nuance in how it treats interviews, and conflates the two purposes we have for sources (establishing notability and providing facts). I could (and maybe someday will) write an essay about what's wrong with how we treat interviews as sources on Wikipedia, but suffice it to say that in terms of notability, I consider their existence in reputable sources to be strong indicators of possible notability (because reputable journalists don't generally interview non-notable people), but not by themselves sufficient to establish notability absent other indicators/sources. If I'm considering sending an article to AFD and there are interviews with the subject, I'm going to keep doing additional WP:BEFORE checks and really, really hesitate to send it to AFD. But if the only sources cited in the article are interviews I'm going to tag it with a more sources/independent sources tag. Also, what outlets are the interviews in? Are they interviews on 60 minutes? Interviews in a small town newspaper? Interviews on with an industry specific blog or podcast? Some of these I'll take more seriously than others. Does the interviewer go along with what the interviewee is saying, or is there push back and hard questions being asked? All of that needs to be considered when evaluating the source/article/notability.~ ONUnicorn^{(Talk|Contribs)}problem solving 21:05, 28 January 2022 (UTC)

Novem Linguae, ONUnicorn, thank you for the feedback, this is exactly my thinking, an article sourced predominantly to interviews do not count toward notability, ONUnicorn mentions something I find interesting, they say reputable journalists wouldn’t interview just anybody, from the sources listed there, I do not see any reputable journalists, Infact, some of those sources used in the article are indeed reliable, but in the past have been caught publishing pieces which were pre packaged sponsored material. Take the Nigerian Guardian for example, they have been guilty of this on numerous occasions, This interaction with Praxidicae is an example of reputable Nigerian sources, publishing pre packaged material and trying to pass it as a reliable piece. Thank you both for the feedback. Celestina007 (talk) 21:55, 28 January 2022 (UTC)

“interviews a reliable source for major claims of notability” is very poor use of Wikipedia language.

Reliable sources are universally required, but the reliability of a source is rarely the issue in a claim of notability. Reliability refers to facts. Notability depends on secondary sources, which are opinion, not really subject to reliably beyond the most basic requirement.

Interviews are generally very reliable sources of facts and information.

“Claims of notability” is unclear. Whose claims? It is an odd construction. Independent, reliably published, secondary source comment on the topic is what demonstrates Wikipedia-notability. Editors may make claims, but sources demonstrate. SmokeyJoe (talk) 22:35, 28 January 2022 (UTC)

SmokeyJoe, I’m not sure anything you have said is policy based, per your comment “Interviews are generally very reliable sources of facts and information”, so in summary, are you stating interviews can be used as a source to substantiate non trivial assertions bordering on WP:REDFLAG? If yes, then that would be a factually incorrect answer, so far as policy goes, I however do appreciate your feedback/interpretation of policy, furthermore, I note you speak of reliable sources and notability as though they were mutually exclusive concepts, when in actuality both are very much intertwined, at least WP:GNG expressly establishes a relationship between both, do you mind clarifying on that comment with a policy based rationale? Celestina007 (talk) 15:46, 29 January 2022 (UTC)

• As per WP:PRIMARY, which is policy, #5 states, "Do not base an entire article on primary sources, and be cautious about basing large passages on them." Furthermore, the footnote [c], states that interviews are considered primary sources. Finally, WP:GNG states that "A topic is presumed to be suitable for a stand-alone article or list when it has received significant coverage in reliable sources that are independent of the subject", and goes on to say that sources should be secondary sources. Onel5969 ^{TT me} 20:10, 29 January 2022 (UTC)

Onel5969, thank you so very much for this policy based feedback!!!! Celestina007 (talk) 21:26, 29 January 2022 (UTC)

Reliable source?

Any thoughts on the reliability of this site? I get the feeling it is like Wikipedia.Onel5969 ^{TT me} 12:36, 1 February 2022 (UTC)

I had a look using google translate and I would agree with your assumption, certainly ask for something better if it is supporting anything that might be controversial Josey Wales ^Parley 22:34, 1 February 2022 (UTC)

Thanks Joseywales1961. Onel5969 ^{TT me} 00:59, 3 February 2022 (UTC)

Possible Signpost report

How do you guys feel about being featured in the next Signpost WikiProject report? I volunteer to do the legwork if there are a few people interested in being interviewed. Hopefully additional exposure might broaden awareness of NPP and draw in potential reviewers. (t · c) buidhe 08:02, 1 February 2022 (UTC)

Not adverse to helping out. Onel5969 ^{TT me} 01:00, 3 February 2022 (UTC)

Revisiting the scope of reviewing New Pages

'If we focus on just stopping the most extreme issues, we create an open door for Wikipedia to be flooded with rubbish. Individually many of the articles I take to AfD aren’t “harmful”, but they’re trivia, listcruft or nonsense about the chairman of a local party branch somewhere.'

One aspect that has not been mentioned is TRANSLATIONS. It's important because accuracy in content is vital. Google Translate's renderings of English prose, is now so good that it is not obvious that a new article is a translation from another language Wikipedia. However, the accuracy of such translations can in fact render a new article not only useless, but a gramatically correct gobbedygook of unintentional misinformation.

One autopatroller has just had their bit removed for churning out dozens of poor quality, seemingly respectful translations for years, with so little knowledge of the source languages that they wouldn't know if what they are getting is good enough. On the surface, such 'new articles' would pass muster at NPP because ORES doesn't flag them as having any issues. For example, due to the vast differences in grammar, and abundant false cognates, translations from German and French can be a challenge to anyone who is not bilingual and machine translation is often completely wrong and even sometimes states the opposite from the source text.

There are signs to look out for to recognise such articles, and of course they should be immediately sent to Draft and the creator asked to get the article cleaned up. The talk pages should be checked that they carry the required attribution. Kudpung กุดผึ้ง (talk) 19:53, 17 January 2022 (UTC)

User:Kudpung, This seems to be a case of synchronicity. Please see:

• my related discussion WT:NPP#Required attribution for copied or translated content
• The new subsection I added to WP:NPP under WP:NPP#Copyright violations (WP:COPYVIO) about copied/translated content (diff)
• a list of frequent WP:MT violators at WP:PNT/by user (circa 2018)

and finally, if interested in the specific user issue that brought me to NPP for the first time to raise the discussion about unattributed translations at en-wiki, please see my recent contribs in ns User talk (I prefer not to link it, as I'm interested in improving NPP process, not pointing to users). Thanks, Mathglot (talk) 03:40, 23 January 2022 (UTC)

Mathglot, synchronicity? No, not really. It just points out that some users with autopatrolled rights create machine translations by the hundred without even caring if what they are getting is accurate. Indeed very often the machine translation comes up with exactly the opposite although the actual English looks quite respectable. Example? "In the large house on the top of the hill, the dead body of a schoolgirl was found partially clothed and lying on her stomach" if you translate that with "In the cottage in the valley the dead body of a university student was found completely naked lying on her back", then there's something wrong and it shouldn't be in the encyclopedia. Such machine translations are absolutely worthless and it's scandalous that the users are bragging about being some of the most prolific creators of articles. Kudpung กุดผึ้ง (talk) 04:35, 23 January 2022 (UTC)

Kudpung, by synchronicity, I meant your edit and mine only days apart, purely coincidentally. Anyway, I've long been concerned by MT issues, see the 3rd bullet. Also, there's a template for situations similar to the one you describe, {{hidden translation}}, but it hasn't gained much use. Mathglot (talk) 04:53, 23 January 2022 (UTC)

• It seems the point of my thread has been missed or not clearly understood. While the effort is to reduce the tasks of patrollers to the most essential - after all, NP is not clean up - there are still many clearly unsuitable new articles being let through - and I'm still finding them. While Mathglot is reluctant to name names walking a tightrope should not intimidate patrollers from doing their job. The signs of a new article translated from anther Wiki are fairly obvious and such articles should be sent to draft and listed for checking by our bilingual editors. Perhaps admins can also do more background checks before according the Autopatrolled right. There is a long backlog at PERM and most of the aspirants still believe Autopatrolled to an award scheme for only having just a few of their stubs and creations deleted. While the final decision rests with an admin, non-admin comments that may be helpful are expressly encouraged. Kudpung กุดผึ้ง (talk) 02:26, 25 January 2022 (UTC)

Of course this venue is at most is a place to incubate the idea, but IMO autopatrol should be eliminated. Every new article needs a second set of eyes. E.G. If I'm not mistaken, even NPP right won't let NPP'ers pass their own article.North8000 (talk) 16:46, 3 February 2022 (UTC)

Spotting issues with articles and fixing them is a main job for the zillions of editors, not for the 100 folks actually doing NPP. IMO basic NPP should just handle "should it be an article" and finding other issues be just an optional add-on when doing that. In essence telling budding NPP'ers "you aren't doing the job properly if you aren't also catching zillions of other types of problems" is not a good thing. North8000 (talk) 16:54, 3 February 2022 (UTC)

Backlog

Greetings. Okay, so has of this time and date, we've managed to get the number of articles over the 90 day mark (at least through 11/2), down to 97. That includes 69 in October, 23 from September back, and 5 during the first two days of November. I've looked at each and every one of those remaining. I believe that I've tagged almost all of them. However, I'm getting a bit sick of picking up Wikihounds (which I've now done again on those insipid college athlete articles about some player who 10 years from now is going to be the assistant manager at some Burger King in Des Moines), as well as the plethora of AfD discussions where "enough coverage to meet GNG" satisfies the closing admin to mark it keep. If those of you who work the back of the queue could concentrate on the articles from 11/3 backwards, that would be wonderful. I've continued moving forward through the queue, and am now up to halfway through 11/20. My goal is to get through a day and a half every day, until we get the backlog down to around 4000, which at this rate should be 3-4 months. Onel5969 ^{TT me} 00:59, 3 February 2022 (UTC)

You are a machine Onel5969, incredible work. I do feel NPP's need some better protection from wikihounds, i.e. more support and recognition from admins of the vital role of NPP? Polyamorph (talk) 08:07, 5 February 2022 (UTC)

Discussion at Wikipedia:Village pump (policy) § RfC: Abolish the current version of NSPORTS

 You are invited to join the discussion at Wikipedia:Village pump (policy) § RfC: Abolish the current version of NSPORTS. –Novem Linguae (talk) 23:09, 19 January 2022 (UTC)

This discussion has been moved to the subpage Wikipedia:Village pump (policy)/Sports notability and is still going. There are now 12 subporoposals, and subproposals 5, 8, and 10 are looking like they might pass. –Novem Linguae (talk) 12:56, 12 February 2022 (UTC)

Earwig tool

Anyone else having an issue with Earwig today? Hasn't been working all morning for me. Onel5969 ^{TT me} 18:26, 11 February 2022 (UTC)

Yeah, it's down for me too. Looks like The Earwig has been alerted via their talk page: User talk:The Earwig#Copyvios outage. –Novem Linguae (talk) 19:24, 11 February 2022 (UTC)

Thanks Novem Linguae - kind of makes reviewing difficult. Onel5969 ^{TT me} 20:28, 11 February 2022 (UTC)

Same. I went to go approve a draft but I couldn't run Earwig on it. So I decided to wait. –Novem Linguae (talk) 21:05, 11 February 2022 (UTC)

Perhaps CopyPatrol https://copypatrol.toolforge.org/en/ can be helpful in the mean time? Vexations (talk) 21:56, 11 February 2022 (UTC)

Thanks for that Vexations, but I'm concerned about the accuracy. When I used it last evening, I was getting zilch in terms of copyvio issues, which is very suspicious, it's rare that I can review 28 articles with zero copyvios, even if they are simply copying 3 sentence plots from imdb. So when Earwig came back up this morning, one of the first reviews I did was for an article titled, B7 Media. Was a 90% match for a copyvio lifted from the company's website. Thought I'd check it again on CopyPatrol, and got a 0%. So not sure how reliable it is, but again, thanks for bringing it up. Onel5969 ^{TT me} 20:21, 12 February 2022 (UTC)

Oh, btw, Earwig is back up. Onel5969 ^{TT me} 20:21, 12 February 2022 (UTC)

CopyPatrol is where EranBot reports all of the edits that it finds suspicious, but the bot doesn't patrol every edit nor every namespace because we don't have an infinite supply of Turnitin credits. So while most reports on CopyPatrol are actionable, I'm not surprised that you had a hard time using it to proactively check for copyright violations because it's not designed to do that like Earwig's tool is. DanCherek (talk) 21:15, 12 February 2022 (UTC)

Are databases primary sources?

Are databases primary sources? Is the primary maintenance tag appropriate for an article whose only citations are to databases? Example: Orbicula richenii. Thanks. –Novem Linguae (talk) 14:54, 12 February 2022 (UTC)

Surely it depends on the database, which is just a particular way of presenting information. Those in your specimen article all cite their sources and summarise them, so presumably that makes them secondary. Ingratis (talk) 15:19, 12 February 2022 (UTC)

There's currently a discussion on similar sourcing at WP:ORN. I would note that the other issue is WP:NOTDATABASE - articles sourced solely to databases can't be more than a database (without synth issues) - but it doesn't appear there is a maintenance tag for that. BilledMammal (talk) 01:59, 13 February 2022 (UTC)

Wikipedia:Village pump (policy) has an RFC

Wikipedia:Village pump (policy) has an RFC for possible consensus. A discussion is taking place. If you would like to participate in the discussion, you are invited to add your comments on the discussion page. Thank you. BilledMammal (talk) 01:59, 13 February 2022 (UTC)

I'd recommend every NPP patroller offer their perspectives at this proposal. Onel5969 ^{TT me} 19:33, 18 February 2022 (UTC)

WP:VERIFY and WP:BURDEN

Interesting pseudo-discussion I've had over at Talk:Yoichi Asakawa, regarding these two policies. Thought reviewers might benefit from checking it out. Onel5969 ^{TT me} 19:31, 18 February 2022 (UTC)

AFD might be a good way to de-escalate that situation. WP:BLAR mentions AFD as an option. –Novem Linguae (talk) 21:13, 18 February 2022 (UTC)

Sorry, while I agree that BLAR is a valid avenue in some cases, this is not one of them, as the articles were wholly unsourced. In those instances, as per BURDEN, the material should not be re-added without citations, and doing so is considered disruptive editing. If, after warning the other editor of BURDEN, they re-add the material again, it is okay to revert again, and if they do it a third time, as per WP:DDE, report them at ANI. And any of you who know me, know I simply LOVE going to ANI (heavy on the sarcasm). Onel5969 ^{TT me} 02:20, 19 February 2022 (UTC)

A clear example of WP:IDONTHEARTHAT if I've ever seen one. Onel5969 has been edit warring across multiple articles, despite multiple attempts to discuss (including at User talk:Onel5969, Talk:Kayako Saeki, and being advised to take the matter to AfD in edit summaries), and was given a final warning yesterday. He has been informed (and several policies have been quoted to him) that WP:BURDEN doesn't justify his behaviour or even apply to the several articles he's simultaneously edit warring on (especially his template warring on Kayako Saeki).

So far, three different talk page discussions have been opened (including on his own user talk page) and he has been advised to take the matter to WP:AFD even before now. As you can see here, he's not interested in dispute resolution because he thinks he found a policy loophole that gives him an unlimited set of reverts (even though he's been repeatedly told that no such exemption exists), and would prefer to keep gaming the same policy instead of discussing the matter with the community.

Confronting him on policy and his disruption has been a waste of time. He will simply repeat himself over-and-over ad nauseum, without actually responding to anything that has been said, even after his points are addressed. He was warned yesterday that he had roughly 24 hours to undo his changes and get consensus for his edits. If he still hasn't done so by tomorrow, I'm reporting him for edit warring and spurious allegations. Darkknight2149 04:49, 19 February 2022 (UTC)

@Darkknight2149: Please stop WP:FORUMSHOPPING, WP:ULTIMATUM and WP:Personal attacks. You may well find escalating the situation has a WP:BOOMERANG effect. --John B123 (talk) 08:54, 19 February 2022 (UTC)

@John B123: Stop tag-teaming with Onel5969. You're well-aware that this forumshop was opened by him and everyone else can see that as well. I'm currently replying to your comment on the other thread right now. It's also standard to give disruptive users a final warning when they persist. The WP:ANI report isn't an ultimatum, I'm filing it tomorrow (currently night as I'm posting this). Darkknight2149 09:07, 19 February 2022 (UTC)

@Darkknight2149: Because other editors disagree with you doesn't make that tag-teaming. Either file the ANI or drop it, you continued statements that you're going to do it can only be seen as threats. --John B123 (talk) 09:53, 19 February 2022 (UTC)

@John B123: The ANI report is being filed, that's not in question. The reason I mentioned tag-teaming is because you replied to Talk:Yoichi Asakawa simply to say "I agree with Onel5969," then you showed to this thread (which was clearly opened by Onel5969) to accuse me of forum shopping. Darkknight2149 10:04, 19 February 2022 (UTC)

@Darkknight2149: My reply on Talk:Yoichi Asakawa was an attempt to explain policy to you, not 'I agree with Onel5969' some please stop misrepresenting other editor's comments. For the record, I do agree with Onel5969, simply because what they have said to you is correct. --John B123 (talk) 10:13, 19 February 2022 (UTC)

@John B123: Onel5969's points were not only incorrect in their application of WP:BURDEN, but disenguous and already heavily-refuted in that thread alone. Not only has Onel5969 responded exclusively by repeating himself verbatim (without addressing the many counterpoints that have been raised), but your reply was also a repeat of his pre-addressed talking points. In fact, replying to Talk:Yoichi Asakawa at all has been like talking to a brick wall where no point I make is actually acknowledged. I would be curious to hear your response to this, but I think that ship may have already sailed. Darkknight2149 10:50, 19 February 2022 (UTC)

@Darkknight2149: Multiple editors have pointed out that WP:BURDEN is applicable here. Your attempts to justify ignoring that policy by trying to misapply other policies simply doesn't hold water. --John B123 (talk) 11:29, 19 February 2022 (UTC)

@John B123: By "multiple users", you mean just you and Buidhe. And so far, you have done nothing to actually refute or respond to anything in that thread. Your replies indicate that you aren't even reading most of it. Making generalised statements, repeating yourself, and posturing isn't constructive. I'll point out again:

1. Nothing in WP:BURDEN has anything to do with Onel5969's template warring at Kayako Saeki at all. Not even a little bit.
2. As for the redirects, every one of those is an WP:ALLPLOT fictional character article that's fully cited by WP:PRIMARY sources. The verification concern is fabricated.
3. The BURDEN thing is gaslighting anyway. Per his own admission, Onel5969 went on a redirect/template spree because they failed WP:GNG due to the current revisions being poorly sourced (which goes against WP:ARTN, WP:NEXIST, and WP:ATD). Onel5969 mass-templating and redirecting with weak rationales is how this all started. He later switched his explanation to BURDEN as an excuse to keep edit warring.
4. When it comes to redirects, BURDEN doesn't override deletion criteria or the deletion process anyway and nothing in WP:3RRNO covers his behaviour, as much as you would like to think it does.
5. Onel5969 just summarily redirected more articles on the basis of the current revisions being poorly-sourced: [1], [2], [3]. Coupled with this situation, it seems like Onel5969 is just trying to circumvent the deletion process.

Repeating the same points without actually responding to anything doesn't help Onel5969's case. Wikipedia isn't a vote, it's determined by policy-based discussion and consensus and you're lacking in both departments. Darkknight2149 12:11, 19 February 2022 (UTC)

@Darkknight2149: Repeating your arguments over and over again does nothing to increase their validity. Suggesting people haven't actually read them because they don't accept them isn't logical, nor does it assume good faith. Wikipedia isn't a vote, it's determined by policy-based discussion and consensus A strange comment given that you have no support for your position and everybody else who have joined in the discussion have opposed your views. I note you are still going on about ANI, either do it or stop bringing it up. --John B123 (talk) 14:33, 19 February 2022 (UTC)

If anyone out of the loop wants to know what this situation is about, you can see the whole thing diff-by-diff at User:Darkknight2149/sandbox. An ANI report will be up soon. I'm done here. Darkknight2149 12:26, 19 February 2022 (UTC)

Darkknight2149, As far as Kayako Saeki is concerned, I added a bunch of pop-culture media sources that should satisfy most anyone on the notability front, and removed the tags. The same I believe could be done for the others. Simply restoring unsourced material isn't the way forward though. It's not hard to find refs for these characters, since the pop-media seems so obsessed with the timelines and whatnot. Just add some sources and restore it and the whole thing will be over with.

I HIGHLY recommend against going to ANI. As a user who has personally been the recipient of a WP:BOOMERANG topic ban, I feel uniquely qualified to recommend that ANI is the last place you want to go with this. ANI is not a fun place, where things tend to snowball out of control rather quickly. There are plenty of diffs in this psuedo-edit-war where you have restored a lot of unsourced material (not trying to throw blame, just indicating where your ANI report might go terribly wrong).

I recommend doing the tough work of adding sources to the articles before restoring the material, and de-escalating the whole thing. You seem to be wanting to do good work, and your main goal seems to be to expand Wikipedia's coverage on this topic. Getting yourself Topic banned won't help that situation, and even if you were successful, getting Onel in trouble also won't help the articles. Adding sources will. — Insertcleverphrasehere^{(or here)_{(or here)(or here)}} 19:58, 19 February 2022 (UTC) — Insertcleverphrasehere^{(or here)_{(or here)(or here)}} 19:59, 19 February 2022 (UTC)

Curation Toolbar

Hi, I just navigated to Cricket Hall of Fame (Hartford, Connecticut), and the curation toolbar says Previously Deleted, but WritKeeper's script isnt appearing, and going into the log (link) isnt showing any deletions. Was there a revdel on the deletion? Is the Curation Toolbar acting up? I know I cant tag it for G4 because I cant find an AfD, but I figured I should ask yall what's up. Happy Editing--IAmChaos 04:21, 23 February 2022 (UTC)

Looks like a previous draft was G13 deleted, which might be what's tripping the toolbar? Can't say I've noticed that behavior before though. _signed, Rosguill ^talk 04:37, 23 February 2022 (UTC)

Oh yeah, I see that, this was moved from draftspace. Thanks for the reply. Happy Editing--IAmChaos 04:42, 23 February 2022 (UTC)

A day doesn't go by when I don't come across something like this. Never really worried about it, but Rosguill's explanation makes sense. Onel5969 ^{TT me} 17:05, 23 February 2022 (UTC)

Centenarians

Greetings. Another question. A few years ago I remember quite a few articles about centenarians being sent to AfD, and being deleted (or redirected). The upshot of the discussion was that simply being old wasn't grounds for notability. But I can't remember if they achieved the distinction of oldest person in a particular country than qualified them. The reason I'm asking is that in January it looks like several articles are being created about Serbian centenarians, which are sparsely sourced, and the only thing the folks are notable for is living a long time. Anyone have any insight no this? Thanks. Onel5969 ^{TT me} 15:22, 25 February 2022 (UTC)

Centenarians are subject to the same notability rules as anyone else. I can't imagine that there are very many Serbians notable for being centenarians. Also, any extraordinary age claims require strong sourcing. (t · c) buidhe 17:55, 25 February 2022 (UTC)

My recollection is that since at any given time someone would be the oldest living person in a country, that alone did not make them notable. Many would hold that distinction only briefly, and we’d get a flood of articles about completely non notable people who happened to be the oldest living Albanian for a few weeks. Mccapra (talk) 18:42, 25 February 2022 (UTC)

Centenarians should be seen with the same prism as others. It is not something too great that we would want to have a different "SNG" for them. ─ The Aafī on Mobile ^(talk) 12:15, 26 February 2022 (UTC)

PageCuration date range bug

Anybody else having issues with using the date range feature in the filters for the New Pages Feed? I'll try to put in a range, and it always defaults to the current day. Onel5969 ^{TT me} 02:16, 25 February 2022 (UTC)

yes--Ozzie10aaaa (talk) 02:23, 25 February 2022 (UTC)

Ozzie10aaaa - thanks. That sucks. Onel5969 ^{TT me} 15:23, 25 February 2022 (UTC)

• Question - This is still happening. I know I've seen folks say, "I put a ticket in for this". I've never done that, where would I go to "put in a ticket", as it is still occurring, and frankly, it's annoying. Onel5969 ^{TT me} 22:08, 4 March 2022 (UTC)

  You'd probably want to go to https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/. Log in. Then in the little bookmark icon by your user profile icon (top right), open the drop down menu and click "Report a Software Bug". Under tags, tag it "PageCuration". Here's a direct link. Hope that helps :) –Novem Linguae (talk) 22:12, 4 March 2022 (UTC)

  Brilliant, Novem Linguae - worked like a charm (I think). Filed a report for that, and another report regarding the copyvio summary not loading when you click on the "i" in the curation toolbar. Onel5969 ^{TT me} 22:51, 4 March 2022 (UTC)

AFC and NPP - is there a "rights conflict"?

I am trying to work out in my head what benefit there is to editors (eg me) and to the project to be an AFC reviewer and have the NPP right.

• For an editor like me who concentrates on AFC, what "more" does the NPP reviewer right add to my ability to provide benefit to the project as a whole?
• Are there times when I will "pass" an article because I have the NPP right without knowing it? I seem to think I have been surprised that article have been marked as patrolled by me sometimes, when I took no direct action to do so
• Is it possible when accessing at AFC to mark a new article as patrolled "by default" because I have the right?

I'm aware that NPP/NPR is a user rights group and AFC is a permission list. Both are privileges after showing some form of competence. Is there some sort of "rights conflict" or clash? Fiddle^Timtrent Faddle^Talk to me 18:23, 19 February 2022 (UTC)

The AFC articles that you accept are marked "patrolled" because you have the autopatrolled right, not because of NPR. DanCherek (talk) 18:24, 19 February 2022 (UTC)

@DanCherek Now that is interesting. I have learned something from you that I had probably known and forgotten, thank you. Does that then skip the NPP validation process? Fiddle^Timtrent Faddle^Talk to me 18:30, 19 February 2022 (UTC)

Yes, that is what autopatrolled does. (t · c) buidhe 18:42, 19 February 2022 (UTC)

This is an issue which has been discussed before - don't have time now to dig through the archives, but I remember talking to Barkeep49 and some others maybe 12 or 18 months ago about it. Autopatrolled users need to be aware that if they move an AfC article from draft space into article space, it will be marked as reviewed. If you want an NPP reviewer to give it a second pass, unreview. Girth Summit _(blether) 18:53, 19 February 2022 (UTC)

@Girth Summit You say "unreview" which must be a 'thing', but I am not sure exactly what you mean. This may be because I don't use the NPR toolkit (or have not for a very long time)? I'm sure Otis obvious, but would you mind spoon feeding me, please? When I accept a borderline draft I would often appreciate a checks and balances opinion. I try to accept those where there is obvious scope for community improvement, but I am certain I am susceptible to making errors. Fiddle^Timtrent Faddle^Talk to me 22:24, 19 February 2022 (UTC)

Hi Fiddle, all you have to do is click the green checkmark on the NPP sidebar. That will put the article back in the NPP queue. (t · c) buidhe 22:45, 19 February 2022 (UTC)

And to unreview older articles where there is no NPP sidebar displayed, in the left menu, in the tools submenu, you can click "Add to the New Pages Feed". –Novem Linguae (talk) 22:48, 19 February 2022 (UTC)

Thank you to all of you. I am now (back?) up to speed Fiddle^Timtrent Faddle^Talk to me 23:09, 19 February 2022 (UTC)

To further clarify, "reviewed" in an NPR sense essentially means that it is findable by external search engines which is obviously an important way many users find articles. Best, Barkeep49 (talk) 05:22, 20 February 2022 (UTC)

That is information I had forgotten. Thank you Fiddle^Timtrent Faddle^Talk to me 09:40, 20 February 2022 (UTC)

In your case, I would say that having NPR is good, because of the AfC/autopatrolled interaction that others have mentioned. Given that you are trusted with NPR, I don't have a problem with the AfC articles that you move to mainspace skipping the queue. An AfC reviewer who had autopatrolled only would be less obvious that they knew what was acceptable (being trusted with writing good articles is a little different than being trusted to know what drafts should pass without scrutiny). In any case, there's no harm in it, you seem to know what you are doing, and that's the important thing. If you get bored with AfC, NPP can be a new avenue for you to try out. — Insertcleverphrasehere^{(or here)_{(or here)(or here)}} 19:25, 19 February 2022 (UTC)

@Insertcleverphrasehere Thank you for the compliment. I appreciate it. I had not looked at it that way. Fiddle^Timtrent Faddle^Talk to me 22:20, 19 February 2022 (UTC)

Marking as unreviewed

Novem Linguae word's; "And to unreview older articles where there is no NPP sidebar displayed, in the left menu, in the tools submenu, you can click "Add to the New Pages Feed"." This is exactly what I was looking for. But, my question is what rules we have to keep in mind before using the "Add to the New Pages Feed"? -Hatchens (talk) 11:21, 20 February 2022 (UTC)

• • Hatchens, I’m not so sure un-reviewing older articles is a good idea, if you find older articles which you believe are not mainspace worthy I’d suggest using a deletion process. I’m not so sure about the process of adding pages back to new pages feed, although this is usually done when an editor has compromised, depending on context, the articles they create if they have auto patrol or mark as reviewed if they have npr rights are added back to the new pages feed. If you trust in your judgment it is my thinking that you may to a degree decide on what course of action to follow. For example, I am familiar with policy to the point that I can perform certain actions and defend them if required of me. For example, I have unilaterally added back to new pages feed certain new articles I considered sketchy looking which had being marked as reviewed or created by one with Autopatrol, if you can not thoroughly defend your actions it is best not to do that. Timtrent, as stated by Barkeep49 & Girth Summit & others it is your Autopatrol rights that causes the article accepted at AFC to automatically be marked as reviewed. Autopatrol is also responsible for auto google indexing. Furthermore, As Girth mentioned (Perhaps a different discussion) but there was indeed a discussion wherein it was debated if or not Afc reviewers with Autopatrol rights should manually uncheck the article accepted at AFC & mark as un-reviewed. I mention this in WP:TRIO, and suggest it’s a bad idea for new editors to have Autopatrol, AFC pseudo perm and NPR rights but since you are beyond a trusted editor, I’m happy and comfortable to see you wield all three. Celestina007 (talk) 12:01, 20 February 2022 (UTC)

    I think there must be an acceptable elapsed time boundary that suggests that adding back to the queue is reasonable, otherwise that some other process be used. Do folk have an opinion on this, please?

    @Celestina007 Thanks for the reinforcement of the information, I am now up to speed on that issue. I was very confuzzled before. Fiddle^Timtrent Faddle^Talk to me 12:21, 20 February 2022 (UTC)

  • Celestina007 thank you for the clarity. And also, I'm thankful to you for putting your trust in me (w.r.t., those rights). But, I guess even if I opt for un-reviewing an old article I should seek a second opinion on the talk page. It's a generic practice at my end while reviewing new articles, and extending it to the old ones will help me to avoid creating any sort of discomfort to others. Also, I've just read your essay WP:TRIO and the menace which you have talked about is rampant. It's happening in front of our naked eyes, and still, we can't do anything about it. And the UPE issue is beyond Autopatrol, NPP, and AFC reviews... there are set of IDs, that have deeply penetrated our AfD discussions; primarily they succeed because of open-ended interpretation of wiki guidelines and overwhelming efforts being put by twisting the facts. -Hatchens (talk) 04:12, 21 February 2022 (UTC)
    • Hatchens, Hey Hatchens don’t sweat it. I’m sorry the close read something along the lines of would have their perm removed, what I intended to write was something more like “may face sanctions” but I don’t think changing it at this point would be ideal. When you mention policy and open ended interpretation I hear you, I hear you very clearly, Not so much the policy itself being open ended but editors interpreting policy very idiosyncratically. I wouldn’t point to any particular incidents but I have indeed witnessed very unique interpretation of policy by editors wielding very advanced perms, interpretations that are clearly in variance with what is being (expressly) stated at the policy page. I most certainly didn’t approve of the ANI report and kudos to Chess for being mature enough to read the room & know when something isn’t just going anywhere. There were other good faith opinions at the ANI, but unfortunately I didn’t (personaly) approve of, TheAafi, a brilliant colleague of mine at anti UPE/SPAM mentioned something about NPPSCHOOL, whilst a good faith opinion, I do not really see the point now. I should also state that for transparency sake I still go to the academy every now and again and re-read somethings I learnt under Barkeep49, I’m usually in support of NPPSCHOOL as a prerequisite to obtaining the right but in this case I just failed to see the point, no matter how fancy NPP might be in summary, or should I say the primary purpose is just gate-keeping (knowing which article are mainspace worthy and which aren’t) which you already know, thus why I admonished you in the close that coming here to ask questions should be your approach moving forward. I don’t believe attending the academy for correction of basic errors is too imperative or too much of a problem when this Talkpage exists. This is just my thinking, and as for UPE, you are right it transcends WP:TRIO, my thinking is the Antispam project can only do so much. When the collaborative project is serious about UPE it would be obliterated, for now we just aren’t doing enough. I certainly cannot blame sysops or senior editors for shying away from that area of editing, I wouldn’t say much, when you are much older and more experienced you would discover things by yourself by doing a lot of extensive reading but this much I can say; it has gotten very dedicated editors in very hot water in the past, it has gotten me in very hot water, search my name the ANI archives, although to be honest I was once very confrontational & antagonistic about dealing with UPE, now I’m mature enough to carry out my duties without being confrontational or antagonistic. Forgive the digression but do well to take each problem you find yourself in as a learning curve. my TP is open, Novem Linguae is another brilliant mind you can talk to, if you want opinions from those I can only refer to as adepts of NPP, then Barkeep49, Rosguill & Kudpung are the ones you are looking for. Celestina007 (talk) 10:05, 21 February 2022 (UTC)
• I don't know whether there is an elapsed time boundary that one could put a number on and use as a hard rule - there are other factors to consider aside from its age, like how many other people have edited, why it's no longer in the queue, etc. Example 1: an article that was reviewed by a user who was later blocked for UPE, where there is reasonable suspicion that they were abusing their reviewer permission to pass dodgy articles for a fee. Stuff like that should be unreviewed regardless of age, unless experienced users have done substantial work to it later. Example 2: an article which was never reviewed, but just 'timed out' of the queue after six months, and has had no substantial edits since that point. If a reviewer came across it and had concerns, but didn't have time to perform a full review on the spot, I think they would be justified in unreviewing regardless of age so that it would get some eyes on it.
  I think the more important question is 'why are you unreviewing it, rather than performing a review?'. In Example 1 above, there might be lots of articles affected - in that case, a mass unreview seems appropriate, to give reviewers some time to go through the list and decide what to do in each case. With an isolated article, such as Example 2, I guess it would be a reasonable choice if you were in a hurry, but a better option would be to do a review and take whatever action you would as if it were still in the queue. Girth Summit _(blether) 14:03, 20 February 2022 (UTC)
• May I suggest that this discussion is linked to at WT:AFC? It directly affects the duties of AfC reviewers—are they now also acting as new page patrollers?—yet I could see no mention on that page. Cheers! SN54129 16:25, 20 February 2022 (UTC)

  @Serial Number 54129 Please link it with pleasure (if you have not yet done so). No, this was a specific question about my own experience. It showed I had made some misassumptions, now corrected. It then grew into a slightly larger discussion. There is no extra duty on AFC reviewers that I can see here. I have to have three rights. AFC, Autopatrolled, and NPR. I was wondering about any real world rights conflict, something I now understand. Fiddle^Timtrent Faddle^Talk to me 08:56, 21 February 2022 (UTC)

• In regards to adding a time limit on marking articles as unreviewed, I'm not a big fan of time limits on NPP tools. Seems like unnecessary bureaucracy for rare use cases. We're currently about to get a (detrimental, in my opinion) 90 day time limit on draftification, for example. So NPPs patrolling the back of the queue will no longer be able to draftify, and will have to be careful to check article creation dates whenever they draftify. I do not think it would be a good idea to explore additional time limits on things like marking as unreviewed. –Novem Linguae (talk) 20:22, 20 February 2022 (UTC)

Novem Linguae, in short, we have to stick with the general consensus which should be derived case-to-case basis on the article's talk page. -Hatchens (talk) 04:20, 21 February 2022 (UTC)

@Novem Linguae I agree that time limits as hard and fast rules can be harmful. We remove common sense from the equation. I have commented on that discussion agains time limits. I was interested in general guidance once I knew there was no formal time limits here. The guidance I perceive is to use good and mature judgement. That guidance alone has made this discussion valuable. Thank you to you and others who have given it Fiddle^Timtrent Faddle^Talk to me 09:11, 21 February 2022 (UTC)

• To digest all the above-mentioned information/discussion, first and foremost, I need to head towards WP:NPPSCHOOL. This is much required for me at this moment and till then I'm ceasing all sort of NPP work at my end. Thanks to TheAafi and Celestina007. -Hatchens (talk) 08:02, 22 February 2022 (UTC)

Such is basically saying "as a reviewer, I decided that a reviewer should look at this article". :-) North8000 (talk) 14:28, 22 February 2022 (UTC)

• If it has been substantially updated or significantly altered with many more references. It is a bit hazy and vague I know. I don't see time limits as helpful anywhere on Wikipedia. They are anti-wikipedia and that is possibly a truism. The core of it should be quality. If it's ancient and it you think it needs reviewed after been updated then that is probably the best course. scope_creep^Talk 12:32, 7 March 2022 (UTC)
• Marking old articles as unreviewed is useful when discovering autopatrol or NPP abuse (e.g. UPE infiltration) by a specific user. Rare but good to have the option. –Novem Linguae (talk) 14:38, 7 March 2022 (UTC)

Concern

Reading the introduction, it states that knowledge of AFD, notability guidelines and RS is essential. If I encounter an editor with the NPR right who demonstrates a clear (somewhat severe) misunderstanding in those three areas, where would I raise this concern? Cheers. – ².O.^Boxing 11:14, 8 March 2022 (UTC)

With the editor in question first, on their talk page. Mccapra (talk) 13:08, 8 March 2022 (UTC)

@Mccapra: It's not an issue related to NPR activities, but an editor with the right who has demonstrated in an AFD that they lack the required understanding to be reviewing new articles. A review of their actions and comments is what I'm looking for, but wasn't sure if there's a specific noticeboard for such things, other than AN. – ².O.^Boxing 13:38, 8 March 2022 (UTC)

It's rather obvious who you're referring to. I'd also suggest you try discussing your concerns with the user in question. Vexations (talk) 14:36, 8 March 2022 (UTC)

First of all Vexations is right, second if it's not an issue related to NPR activities, ypu won't meet WP:NPP/R#Guidelines for revocation. Happy Editing--IAmChaos 14:54, 8 March 2022 (UTC)

I fail to see how me raising the issue with the editor will solve anything. If having a fundamental lack of understanding of the required policies isn't a cause for revocation, then...yea. Cheers anyway chaps. – ².O.^Boxing 15:41, 8 March 2022 (UTC)

If you're having a disagreement with someone, and you find that they're not responsive to your arguments, you can seek dispute resolution. Requesting removal of permissions in response to a single incident is not that, and it is not likely to succeed. In the case of an AfD, it's probably best to let it play out and trust that the consensus will be assessed correctly by the closer. If there is a pattern of poor judgment, for example if it turns out that someone with NPP rights has a consistently poor record at AfD, then that will be addressed. I don't think that a number of AfD's where a vote matched greater than 80% of the time [4] reaches that threshold. Vexations (talk) 19:12, 8 March 2022 (UTC)

Can I move a page if I am not a draft page reviewer?

I'm a bit confused on whether I am allowed to move Draft pages created by other users, which I consider uncontroversial. I have perms to move, but there is a {AfC submission}. Wikipedia says to [[Wikipedia:be_bold]. These two pages say I can:

• Wikipedia:Requested moves#When not to use this page
• Help:How to move a page

Yet this page says Editors whose usernames are not on the list are strongly cautioned not to review AfC submissions

• [[5]] — Preceding unsigned comment added by DominusVilicus (talk • contribs) 06:54, 12 March 2022 (UTC)

I believe there is no rule against it, but by taking this step you take responsibility for the content. Thus, it's essential to check for copyright violations in particular. (t · c) buidhe 06:56, 12 March 2022 (UTC)

Alternately, you could apply for AfC perms. (t · c) buidhe 07:10, 12 March 2022 (UTC)

You are technically allowed to, but I do not recommend it until you become more experienced. WP:NOTABILITY (determining if an article would survive a deletion discussion) is a complicated area of the encyclopedia. You want to avoid a situation where you misjudge a draft's notability, move it, it gets WP:AFDd and deleted, and then the draft author can no longer work on it. –Novem Linguae (talk) 08:35, 12 March 2022 (UTC)

NPP chart updating

In case you've been wondering why it wasn't updating, there was a problem with the database. It's now fixed thanks to the efforts of Nettrom, but it means there are no entries between 9 February and today. (t · c) buidhe 16:43, 13 March 2022 (UTC)

Discussion at Wikipedia:Village pump (policy) § Ban draftifying articles more than 30 days old

 You are invited to join the discussion at Wikipedia:Village pump (policy) § Ban draftifying articles more than 30 days old. –Novem Linguae (talk) 02:39, 14 March 2022 (UTC)

One final time

And with that, I bid NPP adieu. Good luck to you all. Onel5969 ^{TT me} 19:44, 15 March 2022 (UTC)

Thank you for your service @Onel5969:, enjoy your freedom! :) Polyamorph (talk) 19:58, 15 March 2022 (UTC)

Nuts. Onel, I'm sorry you're feeling like that. You'll always be welcome back, and we will sure as hell miss you. Girth Summit _(blether) 20:01, 15 March 2022 (UTC)

"So you want me to be half monk and half hitman?" It's high-wire act :/ Thanks for all the shit-shoveling! --Elmidae (talk · contribs) 20:04, 15 March 2022 (UTC)

Oh, Sad. This will create an unfillable gap in NPP, pal. --Gazal world (talk) 20:10, 15 March 2022 (UTC)

• - if only I had gotten to your UTP sooner. Please consider taking a break? I've been encouraged and expected to adopt the WP:IDGAF approach, but it's difficult to balance that approach with being a good NPP/AfC reviewer, GA/FA promoter, and striving to do one's best. It's all about perspective, and how well we're able to adjust to the perspectives of others, be they right or wrong. Atsme 💬 📧 20:41, 15 March 2022 (UTC)
• Just back myself from a wee holiday break and saddened to read this. Thank you for all your hard work and I really hope you can see fit to come back at some point. Josey Wales ^Parley 20:36, 16 March 2022 (UTC)

Retiring

I am also retiring from NPP, having patrolled new pages since August 2019 I'd like to focus on article content. Polyamorph (talk) 08:45, 22 March 2022 (UTC)

Sounds like a healthy idea. See you around! :) --Elmidae (talk · contribs) 10:53, 22 March 2022 (UTC)

Thank you for all your efforts. That's what I've been focused on this past week, article creation. Onel5969 ^{TT me} 21:45, 22 March 2022 (UTC)

REFUND

Just found a glitch, when English Ceramic Circle popped up on my watchlist. Not sure I ever noticed this before, but if an article gets prodded, and then is restored through Refund, it does not get put back in the NPP queue. Just thought you might like to know. Onel5969 ^{TT me} 22:00, 22 March 2022 (UTC)

Could it be that @Muboshgu: is Autopatrolled? Happy Editing--IAmChaos 22:24, 22 March 2022 (UTC)

Probably. Still an issue, however. imho, that is. Onel5969 ^{TT me} 22:52, 22 March 2022 (UTC)

Admin help requested - move needed to fix

During NPP I ran across an article where the editor accidentally named the article after themselves, plus left a redirect at the right place. I couldn't fix without the tools, plus I made another error which would also need the tools to undo. I explained it all at Talk:Andriy Mikhailovich Bandera could someone with the tools take a look at it for me? Thanks. Sincerely, North8000 (talk) 16:20, 8 May 2022 (UTC)

Advice - new to the process

I'm a new NPPer and would like to talk an example through to make sure I'm clear what I'm doing. I'm looking at Eggert family, created a few days ago. It is not marked as having been reviewed, but it has been tagged as needing more citations and proposed and then declined for speedy deletion. What is the most helpful thing to do with this one? On the face of it, it looks to me as if it fails GNG in its current form. Should I mark as reviewed but leave a comment for the page creator to suggest they address the citations and notability issue? Should I tag with notability concerns? It doesn't appear to meet the criteria for draftifying. Thanks. Tacyarg (talk) 16:57, 4 April 2022 (UTC)

I always check copyvio and notability before anything else. If it's notability, off to AfD. No point draftifying or calling for further work if it's a notability issue because the possibilities are 1) the person doesn't work on it, it's deleted after 6months in draftspace 2) they do work on it, wasting time on a non-notable topic (non-notability can't be fixed by any amount of editing). (t · c) buidhe 17:06, 4 April 2022 (UTC)

When reviewing, I recommend following the NPP flowchart to the letter. Here is a color coded version I made that helps me visualize it. You'll notice that the only time you should mark as reviewed is 1) if it passes everything in the flowchart, or 2) if you replace the article with a redirect, or 3) if the article is AFD'd. If the article is tagged for CSD or tagged for PROD, or if you simply apply a maintenance tag and/or start a discussion with the user but the topic is not notable, it should not be marked as reviewed, as the creator can just remove the tag and then there is no system to catch this and they have snuck an article through. Remember that marking an article as reviewed allows Google to begin crawling it, which means there's hoards of spammers, SEO folks, and undisclosed paid editors that try to sneak non-notable articles through our process in order to get their clients on Wikipedia, the #10 website in the world when ranked by traffic. Hope that helps. –Novem Linguae (talk) 19:09, 4 April 2022 (UTC)

@Novem Linguae I'm not sure that I understand: ...or if you simply apply a maintenance tag and/or start a discussion with the user, it should not be marked as reviewed.... Surely, if an article is otherwise fine, but is tagged with for example, an orphan template, it should be marked reviewed, even if the creator could simply remove that tag. Did I misunderstand you? Vexations (talk) 19:29, 4 April 2022 (UTC)

I edited my comment above to clarify. Thanks for catching. –Novem Linguae (talk) 19:31, 4 April 2022 (UTC)

Thank you all, this is helpful. Tacyarg (talk) 18:09, 5 April 2022 (UTC)

Clarification

I observed what I thought to be a sketchy looking article thus I quickly opened this AFD, my question is, do we consider NPOL to be an SNG or are the two criteria an indication of notability? as opposed to being an sng? Celestina007 (talk) 20:58, 7 April 2022 (UTC)

Recent attempts to turn the single-subject notability guidelines into single-subject common outcomes are confusing. For NPP, I assume we can treat them as single-subject notability guidelines, and for borderline cases, an AFD can determine the final outcome. Let me know if I'm off the mark here or if you guys agree.

As to that specific article/AFD, I don't think candidates have ever qualified under NPOL. Need to actually have been elected to state or federal office, right?–Novem Linguae (talk) 22:38, 7 April 2022 (UTC)

Out-of-copyright sources

1. Specific question: in terms of the [[WP:ONESOURCE]] tag, do the DNB and the ODNB count as separate sources?
2. General question 1: can I just have confirmation that an article which is a straightforward copy of an out-of-copyright source such as the DNB is acceptable? I've always thought that it was - there are, for example, thousands of articles that are direct copies of the Catholic Encyclopedia but those were mostly accepted years ago (despite being over 100 years out of date - separate issue, however) - but I'd just like to double-check that this is still OK. (Whether it's desirable is another question again, of course).
3. General question 2:and if the answer to the previous question is "yes", is an article which is a straightforward copy of an out-of-copyright source such as the DNB still acceptable if that is the only source? Ingratis (talk) 19:23, 13 April 2022 (UTC)

   @Ingratis: What do you mean by "acceptable"? That's certainly not ideal, but provided the source is out of copyright, the article would not meet any WP:CSD criteria and would satisfy WP:ANYBIO. Elli (talk | contribs) 19:40, 13 April 2022 (UTC)

   @Ingratis: I'd treat DNB and ODNB as the same source as the second is an update of the first (although that's probably an oversimplification). Agree with Elli about 'acceptable' and would probably tag the article with {{onesource}}. --John B123 (talk) 21:50, 13 April 2022 (UTC)

• @Elli: @John B123: - thanks for the replies. By "acceptable" I did indeed mean "appropriate to be marked as reviewed" (as opposed to, for example, redirected to Wikisource). What John says is what I've been doing, but I must have over-thought it, as it started to look wrong. Ingratis (talk) 00:59, 14 April 2022 (UTC)

Redirect autopatrol list notification bot

Hi there! I've proposed a bot to automatically notify new users added to the redirect autopatrol list through appending User:EpicPupper/Redirect autopatrol to their talk pages. Any thoughts? Thanks! 🐶 EpicPupper ^{(he/him | talk)} 21:34, 15 April 2022 (UTC)

Weakly against this - it implies that the bot will always work (no promises) and also the user doesn't really need to know - this is meant simply to help with patrollers' work load. --DannyS712 (talk) 04:37, 17 April 2022 (UTC)

I mainly envisioned this as to avoid confusion, as I was having all my redirects patrolled by the bot. I checked the bot's tasks, and noticed that not all of the patrolling criteria (e.g. capitalization-only changes) were met by my moves, so I was fairly confused. 🐶 EpicPupper ^{(he/him | talk)} 17:16, 17 April 2022 (UTC)

@EpicPupper what if I add a "why was my redirect patrolled" section to the bot's user page? DannyS712 (talk) 19:32, 17 April 2022 (UTC)

@DannyS712 that would be great. I could withdraw my BRFA, then. 🐶 EpicPupper ^{(he/him | talk)} 19:34, 17 April 2022 (UTC)

@EpicPupper added, Special:Diff/1083236490 --DannyS712 (talk) 20:32, 17 April 2022 (UTC)

It saddens me

- to see the huge current backlog. I may be retired for all intents and purposes, but because I consult the encyclopedia many times a day, I know what's going on. I spent years coaxing NPP into a desperately needed working function on Wikipedia and getting the WMF to improve the software. I don't want any praise for it - I just went and did what had to be done for the single most important non-admin process on the English Wikipedia, and of course I didn't do it entirely alone.

Time to stop once and for all from kidding ourselves that there are currently 711 New Page Reviewers, less than 10% of them are active in any way at all. The group membership should be heavily culled because '711' naturally leads one to believe "Ah, we have plenty of reviewers, why should I do any reviewing?"

It's also going to get much worse, a lot worse - the people who did the most work have now inevitably burned out, and will continue to do so until someone finally takes on the challenge of co-ordinating it. It's been proven now beyond any doubt that NPP cannot fulfill its critical role without some form of management - not 'governance obsessives' or authority, but structured organisation by a person or people with the necessary skills and of course time, like Barkeep49 and Insertcleverphrasehere once had for NPP. But it's like following WP:PCSI to cite one example; on a broader scale, it's like adminship, isn't it? Or getting serious candidates of the right calibre to step forward at the Arbcom elections. Or wanting to be a regular part of The Signpost editorial team. Few people these days appear to be interested in taking on a bit of responsibility or showing some initiative.

This talk page is at least a lively venue, but for many of the wrong reasons. Perhaps the few regular participants should start earnest discussions about putting right everything that's going wrong. Sorry to sound so doom-and-gloom, but it makes me feel that my and the efforts of a few dedicated editors such as Scottywong, WereSpielChequers, Robert McClenon, Jbhunley, and DGG (to name but a few) over more than a decade were wasted. Do we really want to see WP degenerate into a morass of paid editing, spam, COI, POV, and other senseless junk? Are all the genuine reviewers doing all the grunt work now wasting their own time? Kudpung กุดผึ้ง (talk) 06:42, 14 April 2022 (UTC)

I don't see my time on Wikipedia as wasted. I hope that Wikipedia continues for a very long time to come, but even if it doesn't, I'm proud to have played my small part in this incredible project that really has made the sum of knowledge, or at least a pretty decent general interest encyclopaedia freely available to anyone with internet access. I'm not convinced that we need a managerial approach, but I do think we need to make things a bit more difficult for spammers. Perhaps it is time for a sticky company prod, a little like BLP prod, but for corporations and with a minimum requirement that every new article on a commercial business or product needs two sources that are independent of the business concerned. Or take a leaf out of DE wiki's procedures and have the software prompt authors of new articles for a source. Ideally with some software behind it that rejects Facebook etc, as not being reliable sources. ϢereSpielChequers 07:38, 14 April 2022 (UTC)

@WereSpielChequers: excellent suggestions - as always - particularly the sticky company prod, but the very Catch-22 which is the leitmotif of my post above, is: who is going to take the initiative to launch the RfC to call for them, or request the WMF to develop the required software? It starts with the reluctance to even regularly check out WP:PCSI as I also highlighted. Plenty of less important/unofficial projects on this Wikipedia would barely function without their coordination (WP:Mil.Hist., WP:GOCE, etc.) whether they call them coordinators or task forces, or whatever: The project coordinators are the designated points of contact for issues concerning the project, and are responsible for maintaining our internal structure and processes...

I think most editors who have made any impact, however small, on policies and systems will always be proud of the legacy they left, even if they get superseded by better ones. However, having them left out in the weather to rust away like abandoned farm machinery, with people standing around gossiping and ignoring the real issues, can of course evoke some feeling of disappointment.

Naturally that disappointment could be converted to elation if some enthusiastic souls could/would drag them out of the weeds, repair them, and move them forward; better still, complete a list of possible and/or new realistic solutions and start officially proposing them. Kudpung กุดผึ้ง (talk) 11:05, 14 April 2022 (UTC)

I don't find any of this compelling. I'd rather just hand in the tools than listen to someone standing on the sidelines telling us that we're doing it wrong. Count me me out. Vexations (talk) 11:25, 14 April 2022 (UTC)

I think maybe we need to review the purpose of NPP. Is it:

1. To ensure that all new articles are of a sufficient minimum quality level? (If so, what should that minimum quality level be, because reviewers seem to have vastly differing notions.)
2. To act as gatekeepers with a warrior mentality trying to "prevent the flood of spammers"? (Don't get me wrong - there is a flood of spammers and we do need to prevent them, but I'm not sure that is or should be the sole purpose of NPP, and I think when we approach it with that mentality many people tend to develop almost a paranoia, as if every article must be spam. I've been declining a lot of G11 speedies lately, and it feels (again, this is subjective and anecdotal - I haven't done a true random sampling of all G11s) as if some people think any bio of a living person or any article about a company must be spam - and the G11 criteria even warns us of that attitude.)
3. To review all new articles, ensure the obvious trash is dealt with, tag obvious problems in articles, improve them if we have the time/inclination, and ensure nothing falls through the cracks without at least a cursory review? (This has been my approach when I do new page review, but I think I'm in the minority here.)
4. A combination of some or all of the above?
5. Something else entirely? (If so, what?)

North8000 recommends narrowing the job to just seeing if the article should exist - but people have vastly different notions about what should or shouldn't exist in Wikipedia, hence the age old inclusionist/deletionist debates, the existence and proliferation of subject-specific notability guidelines, and AFD itself. Moreover, if the job is just about asking "should this exist?" we don't need all the tools in the sidebar for tagging issues like tone or sourcing or grammar.

Should we approach NPP with the attitude that, "most articles are ok, they just need some clean up, but some need to go." Or should we approach it with an attitude that, "Wikipedia has most of the articles it should have. New articles are mostly bad people are trying sell something. We need to stop them." ? Because which attitude the project takes will greatly affect who is drawn to it, how they approach the work, and how likely they are to become burned out. ~ ONUnicorn^{(Talk|Contribs)}problem solving 15:39, 14 April 2022 (UTC)

By "should exist" I mean reasonably complies with wp:notability and wp:not. Doing this job does not mean being in the nasty mental states that you describe, not negative presumptions about articles that you describe. North8000 (talk) 15:58, 14 April 2022 (UTC)

NPP has been in trouble for a few years considering just what a larger percentage of work was being done by a single editor. My attempts to fix that before it became an issue were in effective and now I am, at least for the moment, largely on the sidelines as my attention is focused elsewhere. I do think WSC has it right that all the past work that has been done has had value and I think Vex has it right that all the work that's happening now has value too. I think the discussion ONU and North are having about what NPP should focus on is the right one to be having among those currently working NPP. But "NPP needs help" is a conversation that the larger community needs to be convinced of not the people on this page. Best, Barkeep49 (talk) 16:02, 14 April 2022 (UTC)

I think that it's really cool to have NPP do all of the other extra things alluded to. My comment was more of a pragmatic one. To do the full flow chart is a lot of work and takes skill and fluency in a LOT of areas. So not only does that mean that it takes a 1/2 hour per article, but it needs a wider skill set than most editors have. North8000 (talk) 17:59, 14 April 2022 (UTC)

I advocate narrowing the job to just seeing if the article should exist. The current flow chart covers things that the millions of editors should be doing, not the dozens of active overloaded NPP'ers should be trying to do. North8000 (talk) 12:36, 14 April 2022 (UTC)

If we are going to simplify the flowchart, I think removing some of the gnoming tasks in the bottom left (these 4 boxes: categorization, stub sort, maintenance tags, WikiProject tags) would make the most sense. If skipped, these tasks are likely to be done by gnomes, and present no risk of letting spam through. Or if it's important to be thorough about the gnome tasks, we could create a 2nd queue where anyone with extendedconfirmed could do this much shorter checklist, then mark the article as gnomed. –Novem Linguae (talk) 19:47, 14 April 2022 (UTC)

I want to endorse this! Personally, I never fill these out, (Unless there's some special reason, like suggesting an unusual category).nor do I add the biographic data for living people that merely repeats the article. I sometimes fix non-standard presentation and confusing organization, and I sometime adjust bibliographic data, but that's mainly when I find it necessary to rewrite the article for clarity. All these thingswill be fixed later just as always--the work of our wikignomes has always been of high quality.

We should immediately remove these from the flowchart and the template. DGG ( talk ) 23:33, 15 April 2022 (UTC)

Interesting. These gnoming tasks are usually what takes the least reviewing time for me. Stub sorting is one I occasionally skip if I can't find the right stub sorting template quickly. MarioGom (talk) 15:03, 18 April 2022 (UTC)

By the way, I've gotten pushback on this idea of "NPP is having an emergency" before, which bugs me because I do think that a 10k queue is abnormal and should be taken seriously. Another thing that bugs me is these community RFCs and discussions that either add to the size of the queue unnecessarily (admins losing autopatrol), or increase the complexity of NPP unnecessarily (90 day limit for draftification). The wider community seems fine with passing edicts that directly affect the size of the queue or the complexity of the job. I would like to see Wikipedia go in a direction where the wider community acknowledges that NPP is a difficult job with a big backlog, and considers very carefully before they pass additional changes to the NPP process. –Novem Linguae (talk) 19:56, 14 April 2022 (UTC)

We could just do a simple soft minor change. We just say the the expected tasks in a review are the "Should this article exist?" questions (implementing wp:not and wp:notability) and everything else is "above and beyond" for those who care to do so. Keep the flow chart as is for them. Sincerely, North8000 (talk) 21:25, 14 April 2022 (UTC)

• This is a bit tangential, but given Onel's past focus on the back of the NPP queue, one shift that wouldn't go amiss and which wouldn't require any formal consensus-seeking would be for reviewers to focus their attention to the back of the queue. Wikipedia:New pages patrol/Oldest has some advice for taking on this task, to which I'd add that articles that have sat in the queue for several months can typically stand being more aggressively triaged, and borderline cases involving obscure languages can often be dealt with by tagging for notability and marking reviewed. _signed, Rosguill ^talk 16:34, 15 April 2022 (UTC)
  • I have an issue with Admins bashing me over the head for tagging articles and marking them as reviewed. I stopped marking them as reviewed, which is one reason why there are many, many articles in the queue, particularly in WP:NPPSORT. If I go there, and find articles tagged but not marked reviewed, I pass them by. So, what is the correct thing to do here? --Whiteguru (talk) 01:16, 16 April 2022 (UTC)
  • In my sporadic (=failed) efforts to become a bigger NPP contributor, I'd done some back of the cue work. The two main reasons for the oldest ones being there are that it's a very old page that just got converted (e.g. a 2016 redirect that just got converted to an article) or else an article that is a particularly difficult one to review. North8000 (talk) 11:40, 16 April 2022 (UTC)
• Admittedly, I was disincentivized from editing for a while but now I'm back editing/reviewing/teaching as time permits. I always begin at the back of the queue and noticed a whole shipload full of unreviewed articles that weren't there before - one dating as far back as 2006 with source issues (that I'm using for training purposes and why I left it in the queue). As the years advance in the queue, the numbers grow. It appears 2021 was a booger year for articles needing review. Makes me wonder if CommanderWaterford was really all that bad. From what I can recall, he did an incredible amount of work for NPP, but was questioned about some articles he brought over from other language pedias that were considered copyvios or too closely paraphrased, or something along that line - I think he just forgot to tag them as being translations - but his cock of the walk responses to the accusations did exactly as one would expect. j/s Atsme 💬 📧 10:19, 22 April 2022 (UTC)

Notability tag reports

Since we have often discussed the usage of the notability tags, I'm wondering if we could use them more proactively to seek second opinions. Maybe we could generate a report of all unreviewed pages with notability tags (example SQL query), so that reviewers who are inclined to can check articles where notability was dubious (but not clear enough for an AfD nomination). Here's what the result would look like as of now:

Is this something worth trying? MarioGom (talk) 13:19, 19 April 2022 (UTC)

First question - how did the article get into mainspace if there's a GNG question? It should not have been approved if it began as an AfC draft, and if it was added by an autopatrolled user, then that user needs to fix the problem. Secondly, AfD is where we normally go if it's not notable, which would/should include any questionable notability - it either is, or isn't notable. Atsme 💬 📧 09:20, 22 April 2022 (UTC)

Atsme: This is a list of unreviewed articles. Tags might have been added by both reviewers (often giving some room for a second opinion, or improvement by the author) or non-reviewers. MarioGom (talk) 11:31, 22 April 2022 (UTC)

Yes, I get it - but see Kyla Carter for some insight into what I'm referring to relative to the time sinks that are created. Atsme 💬 📧 11:41, 22 April 2022 (UTC)

Ok, I see. Yes, there can be bad AfC accepts. And also authors will often move themselves to mainspace. As far as I know, there's also no obligation for anyone to wait for AfC approval once they are autoconfirmed. This is, together with WP:DRAFTOBJECT, a major pain IMHO. MarioGom (talk) 11:46, 22 April 2022 (UTC)

Memory refresh needed

We have a biography that was created in 2004. We have a draft that was created March 2022 by a user that was blocked for having a shared account. The user declared they are professional editors and publishers. I'm of the mind the draft should be deleted. There is currently a merge request, and I'm unfamiliar with merging drafts by blocked users into existing articles. Thoughts, please? Atsme 💬 📧 15:14, 23 March 2022 (UTC)

• Adding that there is a merge discussion at Talk:Dorothy Hewett. Atsme 💬 📧 16:05, 23 March 2022 (UTC)

  It's a soft-block for a username violation. As far as I know, WP:REVERTBAN wouldn't apply here. Merging content from the draft is ok. In fact, any user can just copy content from the draft to the article if attribution is noted in the edit summary (and noted in the draft talk page so it doesn't get deleted). I don't think a merge discussion was needed at all. MarioGom (talk) 17:50, 22 April 2022 (UTC)

External Links

It has been drawn to my attention that External links might be considered to satisfy requirements for notability. Searching around, the only (relevant) comments in varia archives is about links in External Links which are really references and should be moved out of there. My question is what is the relationship between notability and external links?. Should material in External Links count towards notability? --Whiteguru (talk) 04:11, 30 April 2022 (UTC)

Notability is based on the existence of reliable sources. They don't have to be in the article at all, so links in the EL section can certainly count. You can refer to the flowchart; I would tag such an article with {{no footnotes}} at the very least. MB 04:59, 30 April 2022 (UTC)

Paid Job

I need more eyes to take a look at this AFD which I created. The article was created by Gabriel601 who is a suspected sock of the serial contract serial UPE editor named Pptt226. The AFD seems rather off, thus I need more eyes taking a more pedantic look at it. Celestina007 (talk) 18:53, 7 May 2022 (UTC)

Reviewer blocked

Just a courtesy notice that Aloolkaparatha (talk · contribs · deleted contribs · page moves · block user · block log), a probationary new page reviewer, has been indefinitely blocked for sockpuppetry/meatpuppetry with possible UPE connections. See Wikipedia:Sockpuppet investigations/Aloolkaparatha. Aloolkaparatha reviewed approximately 130 articles; most of them seem fine at a glance but it still might be worth either putting the articles back in the queue (as we've done before) or at least looking over some of them. Best regards, Extraordinary Writ (talk) 22:55, 14 April 2022 (UTC)

• Since this editor appears to be a PIO (Person of Indian Origin) I looked at the (Indian) reviews. (I am a bit familiar with Indian and Sri Lankan ephemera, etc., as I resided there for some time). I also looked at some of the Polish footballers, given the recent change to NSPORT. The following can go back in the queue: -Whiteguru (talk) 08:20, 15 April 2022 (UTC)

Girraj Kishore Mahaur

Vidya Yeravdekar

Antoni Kot

Edward Konietzny

Paweł Kowalski

Józef Kopicera

Antoni Konopelski

Tadeusz Konkiewicz

Józef Kokot

Adam Kogut

Filip Kmiciński

Henryk Janikowski

Puja Chakraborty

DMySon

• Another one: DMySon, who's reviewed roughly 700 articles since becoming a reviewer last August, has been blocked as a sockpuppet as a result of Wikipedia:Sockpuppet investigations/GermanKity. This is a UPE case, and DMySon marked quite a few of his fellow sockpuppets' suspicious articles as reviewed, so any help checking his page curation log would be appreciated. Extraordinary Writ (talk) 19:00, 4 May 2022 (UTC)

Looks like GermanKity stopped reviewing on August 1, 2021 and DMySon took over two days later. Vexations (talk) 19:53, 4 May 2022 (UTC)

I have been on DMySon's talk page a few times. I have bookmarked the page curation log and will go over it in the next few days. --Whiteguru (talk) 22:03, 4 May 2022 (UTC)

Definitely something fishy here; didn't take me too long to find Wikipedia:Sockpuppet investigations/John Rayn. MER-C 18:25, 7 May 2022 (UTC)

• I ran through their log and found an interesting pattern: majority of their clients are from India and they review their own socks pages pretty quickly (within minutes!). I identified below socks based on that:
  • Billionaire B, reviewed by DMySon after 39 mins (JoyStick101 (talk · contribs) connection)
  • Srikumar Misra, reviewed by DMySon after 9 mins; NarangD's userpage/sandbox behavior is very much DMySon (NarangD (talk · contribs))
  • Indian Achievers Award, reviewed/unreviewed by DMySon; largely sourced with PR coverage. Userpage/sandbox almost similar to NarangD's and to an extent to DMySon's socks. This account was active on this AfD Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Rolly Lambert Fogoum with other DMySon blocked socks. DMySon supporting Inspect61 on this AfD: Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Valsa Nair Singh (Inspect61 (talk · contribs))
  • Afternoon Voice, started by (Source Wide (talk · contribs)) who's promo article Okeanos Group was reviewed by DMySon after 33 mins only and defended on Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Okeanos Group with his other socks.
    • Manto yadav (talk · contribs) creation of Vaidehi Taman (sourced entriely with PR), founder of Afternoon Voice, and a quick review by DMySon (also removal of A7) indicates both pages were paid.
  • Spkabil (talk · contribs) is their sock too. See their socks became active on Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Okeanos Group and JoyStick101's vote on Wikipedia:Articles_for_deletion/Robert_Joel. Possibly, they are part of User:TheChronium, see [6].
  • Amit Puri, reviewed by DMySon after removing tags using his sock JoyStick101 (Edusite456 (talk · contribs))
  • Rajender Singh Pahl, reviewed by DMySon; sourced entirely with press releases (Albert191 (talk · contribs))
    • K.M. Chakravarty, reviewed by DMySon; also due to the above connection.
  • Kanoria Foundation, reviewed by DMySon after 34 mins, this sock is old one (Orlandofoster (talk · contribs))
    • Shikhi Sharma, reviewed by DMySon after 18 mins
    • Guido Meardi, reviewed by DMySon after 25 mins
    • Rajat Ubhaykar, reviewed by DMySon after 18 mins
    • Saudamini mishra, reviewed by DMySon after 15 mins
    • Mooka Hakki, reviewed by DMySon after 32 mins
    • Villavan: The Vigilante, same day review by DMySon
  • Kama Ayurveda, reviewed by DMySon after just 3 mins, it has a history of UPE behavior (CommanderF1 (talk · contribs))

Thanks. 103.78.151.95 (talk) 22:28, 7 May 2022 (UTC)

Could consider filing an WP:SPI for the unblocked accounts. Careful though, I recommend having more evidence than "were reviewed quickly by DMySon and it was an Indian topic", as there could be some innocent folks caught in the crossfire. Should include additional evidence, if possible. –Novem Linguae (talk) 23:14, 7 May 2022 (UTC)

Edusite456 is another John Rayn sock, Neelima Ashadev is a SPA who added the image. The username pattern is different and matches the Albert191 lot.

NarangD, Source Wide and Inspect61 are the same.

These accounts are blocked. MER-C 10:14, 8 May 2022 (UTC)

Finished going through the page curation log. 56 articles returned to the New Pages feed. Poor handling of NSPORT, NFILM and NMUSIC. --Whiteguru (talk) 12:33, 8 May 2022 (UTC)

AFD message MIA

Often when I use the page curation to AFD (including entering the nomination message) it creates the AFD page but the AFD page is blank. Worrying about creating a blank page, I usually reenter the nomination text at the page a second time.

• Does a blank AFD page mean that something is wrong, or does it just take a while to show up?
• Does this sound like I am doing something wrong or something that I should be doing differently? ?

Sincerely, North8000 (talk) 20:03, 6 May 2022 (UTC)

North8000, you aren’t doing anything wrong, it’s page curation itself having issues every now and again, it’s very problematic to say the least, in-fact In NPP academy we are admonished to use twinkle instead. Celestina007 (talk) 20:27, 6 May 2022 (UTC)

@Celestina007: Thank you so much for the info! I think that I need to learn how to AFD in twinkle. With curation being ostensibly the way to do NPP, this brings a metaphor to mind: So we need nails hammered. And the issued hammers fall apart when used. And then we contemplate how to get more nails hammered by ideas to recruit and train more carpenters instead of giving the carpenters hammers that work. Obviously preaching to the choir except that the choir has failed to say that we need a working hammer. And that the real training is done in some obscure place to say to throw the issued hammers in the trash and where to get working hammers and how to use them. After my rant....Thanks again! :-) North8000 (talk) 23:29, 6 May 2022 (UTC)

Hey N8, I’m glad I could be of help. Celestina007 (talk) 23:33, 6 May 2022 (UTC)

I also had Page Curation failing in the middle of the AFD creation. I only use Twinkle for AfD since then. MarioGom (talk) 13:11, 7 May 2022 (UTC)

I wouldn't use the page curation tools for anything except marking pages as reviewed and navigating through the queue. Twinkle is much better and I'm not sure page curation is even maintained. – Joe (talk) 17:10, 8 May 2022 (UTC)

Thanks! North8000 (talk) 17:27, 8 May 2022 (UTC)

may be expanded with text translated from the corresponding article

Are we supposed to mark articles with this tag as reviewed? If so, what policy is relevant to articles tagged like so? --Whiteguru (talk) 09:45, 17 May 2022 (UTC)

This is just a pointer that another Wikipedia has a more developed article on the same subject, to make it easier for willing expanders to find material and sources. It should be taken into consideration when assessing for notability (i.e. don't send to AfD due to lack of existing coverage when there are five usable sources in the French version). But otherwise, go off current state for NPP, for both signing off and not doing so. For example, as usual an unreferenced article can't stay in mainspace even if there is a fully referenced version somewhere else, and should be draftified until some of those are actually added. - If you are feeling productive, it's also a good idea to make that check in other WPs yourself and add the tag if applicable :) --Elmidae (talk · contribs) 10:27, 17 May 2022 (UTC)

To expand on Elmidae's explanation: articles with this tag are sometimes notable, and the articles in other Wikipedia's can help to speed up review, or they can be not notable, or even just spam. There's some prolific UPE sockfarms who create articles in several Wikipedia projects before creating them in English Wikipedia. So... this tag does not change reviewing criteria at all. MarioGom (talk) 13:23, 18 May 2022 (UTC)

Interesting one with possible broad applicability

Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Lam Yeo Coffee Powder Factory In essence arguments that reviews in local publications for a local store establish wp:notability. North8000 (talk) 12:42, 17 May 2022 (UTC)

I think there's nothing wrong with local coverage. It could be perfectly reliable. WP:NCORP applies, and I don't think there's anything very special about that AfD? The article has pretty reliable sources like South China Morning Post, and the question boils down to whether the coverage is significant or not. MarioGom (talk) 13:31, 18 May 2022 (UTC)

I didn't mean to emphasize local coverage. I think that the main thing is coverage which is "reviews only" coverage does not comply with the in-depth coverage required. As detailed by High king. If "reviews" coverage = wp:notability, then nearly every restaurant, store, shop and business on the planet would qualify. North8000 (talk) 13:43, 18 May 2022 (UTC)

Yeah, I agree there. Short reviews embedded in "Top X restaurants in Y" articles are not significant coverage. MarioGom (talk) 13:49, 18 May 2022 (UTC)

Disagree, if the reviews are of a decent length in regional or national publications then they count for WP:GNG and always have Atlantic306 (talk) 17:06, 18 May 2022 (UTC)

In this case, the SCMP review, which is probably the most reliable source here, is a very short piece in a list. I think it does not really matter if the source is review style or not. A review could be significant, independent, reliable, and secondary. MarioGom (talk) 06:42, 19 May 2022 (UTC)

By "reviews" I mean the most common meaning. Limited to describing/rating the experience of a customer. (quality of the food, product, service, atmosphere, experience etc.) IMO both GNG and Ncorp clearly require more than that. Also inherently needed to build a real article. If there is more in-depth info in there about the business then I'd call that more than just a review / review type coverage. Sincerely, North8000 (talk) 12:36, 19 May 2022 (UTC)

Reviews were specifically included as acceptable sources in the WP:NCORP revision. If the review is lengthy, and in a regional or national reliable source it counts for WP:NCORP but the more information the better, Atlantic306 (talk) 18:13, 19 May 2022 (UTC)

Does anybody know if there is a place to see any of the total numbers?

So this page shows the total backlog, and links to one showing stats on the top 00 reviewers. But is there a place that show things like total number of new articles for a day or week or other time period, or the total number of reviewed / NPP reviewed / autopatrolled for a day or week or other time period? Thanks. North8000 (talk) 16:01, 19 May 2022 (UTC)

• Good question. --Whiteguru (talk) 23:29, 19 May 2022 (UTC)
• If it hasn't already been compiled, you can extract this data with Quarry if you can work in SQL. Patrols are in mw:Manual:logging table. – Joe (talk) 07:43, 20 May 2022 (UTC)

Would it be possible to get any of those numbers shown on this page or a page clickable from this page? North8000 (talk) 11:33, 20 May 2022 (UTC)

• Hi, North8000 - if you will look at the bottom of the page in queue view in the gray bar – to the left of the Refresh list it gives you the total of unreviewed pages (15171 total unreviewed pages) and date of the (oldest: 6515 days). Atsme 💬 📧 18:06, 21 May 2022 (UTC) Well, duh - that wasn't your question – my apologies. Maybe the stats you're asking for can be created by our tech gurus. In the past, we made requests for certain features every so often - that's how we got the curation tool. I believe Kudz led that charge. Atsme 💬 📧 23:30, 21 May 2022 (UTC)

He ain't leadin' it now - nor is anybody else interested by the look of the backlog. Kudpung กุดผึ้ง (talk) 23:38, 21 May 2022 (UTC)

I'm thinking some of it can be fixed with the right BOT. Atsme 💬 📧 23:41, 21 May 2022 (UTC)

Adding - I just added a request on the TP of Wbm1058. He operates/programs BOTS so maybe he can help. Atsme 💬 📧 13:32, 22 May 2022 (UTC)

Sumptin's wrong with the queue

The queue is full of articles that don't belong in the NPP queue - for example tagged articles dating way back, such as Thumb Wars, Feedzai, and Masinagudi noted as unreviewed. Others that are tagged may need citations, or they're orphans/no categories, etc. (Yes, I know we can set our filters to see only the ones we want to see, but that doesn't reduce the backlog). Surely, we're not expected to fix all these articles, are we? I can see fixing some as we go along, but we're talking about a huge backlog when those articles are counted. The queue shows 15171 total unreviewed pages (oldest: 6515 days). Atsme 💬 📧 18:04, 21 May 2022 (UTC)

Hey there. Thumb Wars and Masinagudi had their redirects removed. Anytime a redirect is removed, the article gets placed in the queue as an anti-spam measure. Feedzai started as a mainspace article, then was moved to draftspace, then was recently AFC accepted. Fun fact: The queue sorts by article creation date, not date placed in queue. Anyway, all this looks normal to me so far, just some quirks of Special:NewPagesFeed and Page Curation. Hope that helps. –Novem Linguae (talk) 18:19, 21 May 2022 (UTC)

Thanks for the splainin', Novem. I'm wondering if now that AfC & NPP are joined at the hip if we really need to be seeing AfC approved articles? I am familiar with redirects being removed improperly...I use them for training exercises. If only there was a work-around. Right now we have 7042 redirects in the queue. Maybe we could form a redirect task force? It's a great place for new reviewers to get their feet wet, no? And here's something else...this article was created with a notability tag attached at creation. Avivdc did make a declaration on his user page and has been cooperative about fixing what needs to be fixed. I'm of the mind that these types of articles should not be autopatrolled, and should go through AfC first. Your thoughts? Atsme 💬 📧 20:44, 21 May 2022 (UTC)

Hey Atsme. Folks with NPP permission are able to mark their own AFC accepts as reviewed, but some choose not to do so. I personally only mark mine reviewed some of the time, because there are some extra steps for NPP, and because a second set of eyes can be helpful. There are some discussions about this in the archives of WT:AFC.

Patrolling redirects is its own skill, I've worked with our redirect patrol guru Rosguill in the past to try to document the procedure for it at Wikipedia:New pages patrol/Redirect checklist. I suspect that queue is doing OK, since our current troubles seem to be due to Onel discontinuing high volume reviewing of the mainspace queue.

Looks like DataRails was draftified by Celestina, then the article author cut-and-paste-moved it back to mainspace to bypass AFC. New users creating articles with tags is always a red flag for cut-and-paste for me, and possible UPE. Many NPPs reflexively draftify COI/UPE, and I think that's fine. WP:COI says that folks with a COI creating articles should use AFC. Hope that helps. –Novem Linguae (talk) 01:34, 22 May 2022 (UTC)

@Atsme I mostly do redirects, just because I find myself more comfortable with them than full articles (and can do them faster). Novem mentioned Rosguill does a lot of them too. Plus after doing mostly redirects, I am in a bit of a rhythm. Check the history, check the target, does it violate CSD/R#DELETE? If no, pull up twinkle, add a category and hit patrolled. Plus it gets redirects out of other patrollers ways who can do articles better/faster than I can. Happy Editing--IAmChaos 01:53, 22 May 2022 (UTC)

@IAmChaos! – THANK YOU! PS: Based on all the good you do, your user name is deceiving. Atsme 💬 📧 13:35, 22 May 2022 (UTC)

@Atsme Ya know, it may be now I think about it. Luckily I have a friend, whose name may be more accurate. Happy Editing--IAmChaos 17:35, 22 May 2022 (UTC)

Marking articles sent to AfD as reviewed

I thought we decided long ago to not mark a queued article as reviewed if we send it to AfD, or has that changed? It makes sense to leave it unchecked so that it stays in the queue and serves as notice to other reviewers who stumble across it that there's an AfD in process and to please participate. Atsme 💬 📧 02:57, 7 May 2022 (UTC)

No, that goes for CSD and PROD because they can be denied or just removed by the author. If the AFD is properly nominated and unlikely to be procedurally closed without a normal discussion, it should be marked reviewed because its fate will be decided at AFD and there is no reason to waste more scarce NPP "bandwidth". MB 03:47, 7 May 2022 (UTC)

It is documented in the flowchart to mark as reviewed after sending to AFD. The bit about checking for a valid AFD covers the case of finding an article in the queue that was already nominated by a non-NPPer. MB 03:55, 7 May 2022 (UTC)

According to the flowchart, we should mark any article that is undergoing AFD as reviewed. I imagine the reasoning is that it is not circumventable, unlike CSD or PROD which can simply be removed by a bad actor. –Novem Linguae (talk) 05:08, 7 May 2022 (UTC)

It may be circumventable on a very bogus AfD which may be subject to procedural speedy close. I think this should be the only exception. MarioGom (talk) 13:08, 7 May 2022 (UTC)

One added motivation for marking AfDs reviewed right now is that there's been some issues with XfDcloser's handling of RfDs, so when patrolling articles with deletion tags there's a chance we may come across a redirect with a tag left on that needs to be removed. AfDs would otherwise clutter up this backlog. _signed, Rosguill ^talk 16:26, 7 May 2022 (UTC)

Atsme, Or Atsme, in order to avoid any convolution think of it like this, when you send an article to AFD it is indeed "reviewed" (in any sense you can think of) if it survives the AFD then fine, if it doesn’t, still fine, in the end the article would been indeed have been reviewed. This is peculiar to AFD's only. When it is a CSD you do not mark as reviewed as it can contested or declined, same as prod. Celestina007 (talk) 16:39, 7 May 2022 (UTC)

Thank you to all for your input. Fortunately, I just now found the discussion I was trying to recall – Archive 30 – the OP focused on PROD & CSD, but there was also support to keep AfDs unreviewed. The closer of that discussion did not make note of the latter in their close. I actually have an example of why I still support leaving AfD's unreviewed and will provide a link shortly. Happy patrolling! Atsme 💬 📧 17:35, 7 May 2022 (UTC) ^{Adding: Wellll....what Girth just said below about UPEs and Celestina007's comment in the new section below far surpass any example I was going to provide. I'm of the mind that both are excellent reasons to not mark an AfD reviewed because it ain't over till the fat lady sings. 🎼🎶🎤🎹 19:13, 7 May 2022 (UTC)}

I've long thought that they should be marked as reviewed until the AfD has concluded (as keep, obvs). Marking as reviewed gets the noindex flag removed, so I can imagine situations where a UPE's client sees their name appear in Google, and they pay the spammer, who walks away happy, not caring whether the article is deleted. Keeping it unpatrolled during AfD and getting AfD closer to mark it as reviewed as a part of the 'keep' process, seems better to me. Girth Summit _(blether) 18:22, 7 May 2022 (UTC)

Does the AfD Header not have the NOINDEX magicword? I thought it did, because we didn't want search results for articles that were there, much like how all the AfD subpages are filtered out by robots.txt Happy Editing--IAmChaos 19:05, 7 May 2022 (UTC)

Yep – {{Article for deletion/dated}} contains {{NOINDEX}}, which noindexes pages that are less than 90 days old. DanCherek (talk) 19:09, 7 May 2022 (UTC)

OK, that's weird. I am pretty confident that I've seen Google pick new articles up while they're at AfD. I'll have to dig into this further though, I can't bring specific examples to mind right now. A job for tomorrow perhaps. Girth Summit _(blether) 19:32, 7 May 2022 (UTC)

But that's only for pages that are less than 90 days old. I'm working on years old, and that's yet another problem. We're backlogged with old articles and redirects that have slipped through the cracks, not to mention articles that are created directly in mainspace without ever going through AfC. Atsme 💬 📧 20:41, 7 May 2022 (UTC)

Hmm. OK, I can't find any examples of new articles currently at AfD which have been picked up by Google if they were unreviewed prior to their deletion nominations. I thought I'd seen that happen in the past, but perhaps if I'd looked more carefully at the logs in those instances I would have been able to find an explanation. This assuages my concerns about AfD being a sort of backdoor to temporary acceptance of spam. Girth Summit _(blether) 11:08, 8 May 2022 (UTC)

I believe that the info above indicates that they will be picked up by Google if they are more than 90 days old, irrespective of whether or not they are at AFD? North8000 (talk) 00:33, 9 May 2022 (UTC)

Girth - thanks for doing the reseach. Just curious...does NPP have a counter to this "so-called" humorous essay? It's rather disconcerting to think our work is thought of in this manner. Atsme 💬 📧 00:40, 9 May 2022 (UTC)

@North8000. Yes. I believe this is correct. Articles older than 90 days remain in the queue until we mark them as reviewed, but become indexable by search engines. Ditto for articles at AFD, because the {{NOINDEX}} template used in the AFD notice template also appears to have a 90 day timer. –Novem Linguae (talk) 02:58, 9 May 2022 (UTC)

I once uncovered a set of I think dozens of semi-hoax articles, all by one editor. On very technical subjects, that looked very intelligent and Wikipedian but said absolutely nothing / was gibberish if you analyzed it technically. Lots of sourcing/ citing and material randomly near-copied from the sources. I think it was someone doing a "study" to show that they pulled one off on Wikpedia. North8000 (talk) 11:59, 9 May 2022 (UTC)

@Atsme There is no reason not to mark a page sent to AfD as reviewed. Once nominated it will either be deleted, or endorsed by consensus to be kept, in any case, it is out of the hands of New Page Patrol. The rationale for not marking CSD and PROD as reviewed is that anyone can remove the tag (even though the author shouldn't in the case of CSD), which can result in stuff falling through the cracks if the reviewer doesn't check back on it. The same thing cannot happen with AfD, as there are automated systems to prevent that from happening. — Insertcleverphrasehere^{(or here)_{(or here)(or here)}} 17:39, 22 May 2022 (UTC)

New Page Patrol newsletter May 2022

New Page Review queue March 2022

Hello New pages patrol/Reviewers,

At the time of the last newsletter (No.26, September 2021), the backlog was 'only' just over 6,000 articles. In the past six months, the backlog has reached nearly 16,000, a staggering level not seen in several years. A very small number of users had been doing the vast majority of the reviews. Due to "burn-out", we have recently lost most of this effort. Furthermore, several reviewers have been stripped of the user right for abuse of privilege and the articles they patrolled were put back in the queue.

Several discussions on the state of the process have taken place on the talk page, but there has been no action to make any changes. The project also lacks coordination since the "position" is vacant.

In the last 30 days, only 100 reviewers have made more than 8 patrols and only 50 have averaged one review a day. There are currently 811 New Page Reviewers, but about a third have not had any activity in the past month. All 861 administrators have this permission, but only about a dozen significantly contribute to NPP.

This means we have an active pool of about 450 to address the backlog. We cannot rely on a few to do most of the work as that inevitably leads to burnout. A fairly experienced reviewer can usually do a review in a few minutes. If every active reviewer would patrol just one article per day, the backlog would very quickly disappear.

If you have noticed a user with a good understanding of Wikipedia notability and deletion, do suggest they help the effort by placing {{subst:NPR invite}} on their talk page.

If you are no longer very active on Wikipedia or you no longer wish to be part of the New Page Reviewer user group, please consider asking any admin to remove you from the list. This will enable NPP to have a better overview of its performance and what improvements need to be made to the process and its software.

To opt-out of future mailings, please remove yourself here.
Sent 05:18, 23 May 2022 (UTC)

Newsletter

There has been no newsletter since last September. I just drafted one, to try to get some attention on the backlog. Could someone at least give it a quick review? And is there someone here with mass-sender rights that can send it? It's at Wikipedia:New pages patrol/Coordination#New Page Patrol newsletter May 2022. MB 01:02, 23 May 2022 (UTC)

I will, as I already said earlier on your TP, despite snide remarks by some users about commenting from the sidelines after I shepherded NPP and its software for well over a decade. I also wrote most of the previous newsletters and am a MMS. Kudpung กุดผึ้ง (talk) 01:42, 23 May 2022 (UTC)

Done. It can always be reverted, some people's prose is better than mine but please don't do so just for the sake of literary license. Now back to semi-retirement and creating a few more new articles (yes, I'm autopatrolled...) Kudpung กุดผึ้ง (talk) 02:14, 23 May 2022 (UTC)

Thank you Kudz!! Atsme 💬 📧 13:04, 23 May 2022 (UTC)