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Sorry for the late reply. Feel free to reuse that title for Wikipedia: Notability (numbers), or a redirect to it. Cheers. —Michael Z. 2007-10-08 20:49 Z

The Help Project Newsletter Issue IV - September 2012

Project news summary The in-person usability tests from the wub's community fellowship have been written up. Three new introductory tutorials for new users have been created: referencing, uploading images and navigating Wikipedia. The Article Feedback Tool has been deployed to pages in the Help namespace, and can be added manually to help pages in other namespaces. Read more... Page statistics were updated for the month of August.

From the editor Hi, and welcome to the fourth issue of the Help Project newsletter. It's been another busy month in the world of Wikipedia help. The results from the in-person usability tests conducted as part of the help pages fellowship have been released. There are no great surprises here, the tests confirmed that people have trouble with the existing help system, and people looking for help on the same topic often end up at wildly different pages. Editors who experienced a tutorial and/or edited a sandbox as part of their learning were noticeably more confident when editing a real article. Drawing on that, three new "Introduction to" tutorials for new users have been created: referencing, uploading images and navigating Wikipedia. These join the popular existing introductions to policies and guidelines and talk pages. Feel free to edit them, but please do remember that the idea is to keep them simple and as free from extraneous details as possible. All three have been added to Help:Getting started, which is intended to be the new focal point for new editors, and will also be seeing a redesign soon. In other news, the Article Feedback Tool (AFT) can now be used to collect feedback on help pages. By default it has been deployed to all pages in the Help: namespace. It can be disabled on any page by adding Category:Article Feedback Blacklist, or enabled for pages in other namespaces by adding Category:Article Feedback 5 Additional Articles. Once a page has AFT applied, you can add feedback using the form which appears at the bottom of it. Feedback can be reviewed by clicking "View feedback" in the sidebar, or the "Feedback from my watched pages" link at the top of your watchlist. I'm now entering the final month of my fellowship, and will be focusing my efforts on making much needed improvements to Help:Contents, the main entrance point to our help system. It's been a pleasure working as a fellow, and I just want to thank all the people who have helped me or offered advice over the past months. That definitely won't be the end of my involvement in the Help Project though, I'll be sticking around as a volunteer and continuing to write this newsletter. Any comments or suggestions for future issues are welcome at Wikipedia:Help Project/Newsletter. If you don't wish to receive this newsletter on your talk page in future then just edit the participants page and add "no newsletter" next to your name. -- the wub "?!" 20:00, 7 September 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Hello, SmokeyJoe. You have new messages at BrownHairedGirl's talk page.
You can remove this notice at any time by removing the {{Talkback}} or {{Tb}} template.

The Help Project Newsletter Issue V - January 2013

Project news summary Help:Contents and Wikipedia:Contact us have seen a major revamp. Page statistics were updated. Alerts are now available for discussions related to Help Project pages Many more Help Project pages now have the Article Feedback Tool (v5) enabled. GettingStarted is an experimental feature to guide new users with their first edits.

From the editor Hello again from the Help Project! In the last newsletter (which was quite a while ago sorry!) I talked about my fellowship and the plans for improving the main portal page, Help:Contents. Well I'm sad to say that my fellowship is now over, but very happy to say that the proposed improvements to that page have been completed and implemented. Do check it out if you haven't already. Another important and frequently used help page, Wikipedia:Contact us, has also seen a significant revamp. You may recognise the design inspiration from the new tutorial pages. In project news, we now have a subscription to the "article alerts" service. Any deletion nominations, move discussions, or requests for comments on pages within the Help Project's scope will now show up at Wikipedia:Help Project/Article alerts. So that's definitely a page which project members might want to watch. Any comments or suggestions for future issues are welcome at Wikipedia:Help Project/Newsletter. If you don't wish to receive this newsletter on your talk page in future then just edit the participants page and add "no newsletter" next to your name. -- the wub "?!" 23:34, 13 January 2013 (UTC)[reply]

The Help Project Newsletter	Issue VI - April 2013
Open Help Conference The Open Help Conference will be taking place June 15-19 in Cincinnati Ohio, USA. The conference includes two days of presentations and open discussions, followed by team "sprints" - collaborative efforts to write and improve documentation. It has been suggested to send a team from Wikipedia/Wikimedia: to share our own knowledge about help, learn from others in the open source community working on similar problems, and to carry out a sprint to improve some aspect of Wikipedia's help. There may be support available for volunteers to attend from the Participation Support program (and your editor is certainly hoping to be there!) Please join the discussion in Meta's IdeaLab if you're interested, and/or have suggestions about what we could work on.	Other news The Article Feedback Tool (v5) has now been changed to be opt-in for all pages. It can be enabled for specific pages by adding Category:Article Feedback 5 to them. There are also a number of new features. It has been proposed to merge the questions forum of the New contributors' help page into the Teahouse. Discussion is taking place here. The help menu at Help:Contents/Browse and its subpages have been largely cleaned up. User:Moxy has created a descriptive help directory. A project on Video and Interactive Tutorials has begun, supported by a Wikimedia Foundation grant. Suggestions for subjects are invited on the talk page.
If you don't wish to receive this newsletter on your talk page in future then just edit the participants page and add "no newsletter" next to your name. Suggestions for future issues are welcome at Wikipedia:Help Project/Newsletter. the wub "?!" 16:22, 25 April 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Hi Joe! I just answered your question on the article's talk page!

Thanks and God bless! Antonio Me! Martin (Whats going on?) 20:55, 24 July, 2022 (UTC)

Hello SmokeyJoe,

Much has happened since the last newsletter over two months ago. The open letter finished with 444 signatures. The letter was sent to several dozen people at the WMF, and we have heard that it is being discussed but there has been no official reply. A related article appears in the current issue of The Signpost. If you haven't seen it, you should, including the readers' comment section.

Awards: Barnstars were given for the past several years (thanks to MPGuy2824), and we are now all caught up. The 2021 cup went to John B123 for leading with 26,525 article reviews during 2021. To encourage moderate activity, a new "Iron" level barnstar is awarded annually for reviewing 360 articles ("one-a-day"), and 100 reviews earns the "Standard" NPP barnstar. About 90 reviewers received barnstars for each of the years 2018 to 2021 (including the new awards that were given retroactively). All awards issued for every year are listed on the Awards page. Check out the new Hall of Fame also.

Software news: Novem Linguae and MPGuy2824 have connected with WMF developers who can review and approve patches, so they have been able to fix some bugs, and make other improvements to the Page Curation software. You can see everything that has been fixed recently here. The reviewer report has also been improved.

Suggestions:

• There is much enthusiasm over the low backlog, but remember that the "quality and depth of patrolling are more important than speed".
• Reminder: an article should not be tagged for any kind of deletion for a minimum of 15 minutes after creation and it is often appropriate to wait an hour or more. (from the NPP tutorial)
• Reviewers should focus their effort where it can do the most good, reviewing articles. Other clean-up tasks that don't require advanced permissions can be left to other editors that routinely improve articles in these ways (creating Talk Pages, specifying projects and ratings, adding categories, etc.) Let's rely on others when it makes the most sense. On the other hand, if you enjoy doing these tasks while reviewing and it keeps you engaged with NPP (or are guiding a newcomer), then by all means continue.
• This user script puts a link to the feed in your top toolbar.

Backlog:

Saving the best for last: From a July low of 8,500, the backlog climbed back to 11,000 in August and then reversed in September dropping to below 6,000 and continued falling with the October backlog drive to under 1,000, a level not seen in over four years. Keep in mind that there are 2,000 new articles every week, so the number of reviews is far higher than the backlog reduction. To keep the backlog under a thousand, we have to keep reviewing at about half the recent rate!

Hello SmokeyJoe,

Backlog

The October drive reduced the backlog from 9,700 to an amazing 0! Congratulations to WaddlesJP13 who led with 2084 points. See this page for further details. The queue is steadily rising again and is approaching 2,000. It would be great if <2,000 were the “new normal”. Please continue to help out even if it's only for a few or even one patrol a day.

2022 Awards

Onel5969 won the 2022 cup for 28,302 article reviews last year - that's an average of nearly 80/day. There was one Gold Award (5000+ reviews), 11 Silver (2000+), 28 Iron (360+) and 39 more for the 100+ barnstar. Rosguill led again for the 4th year by clearing 49,294 redirects. For the full details see the Awards page and the Hall of Fame. Congratulations everyone!

Minimum deletion time: The previous WP:NPP guideline was to wait 15 minutes before tagging for deletion (including draftification and WP:BLAR). Due to complaints, a consensus decided to raise the time to 1 hour. To illustrate this, very new pages in the feed are now highlighted in red. (As always, this is not applicable to attack pages, copyvios, vandalism, etc.)

New draftify script: In response to feedback from AFC, the The Move to Draft script now provides a choice of set messages that also link the creator to a new, friendly explanation page. The script also warns reviewers if the creator is probably still developing the article. The former script is no longer maintained. Please edit your edit your common.js or vector.js file from User:Evad37/MoveToDraft.js to User:MPGuy2824/MoveToDraft.js

Redirects: Some of our redirect reviewers have reduced their activity and the backlog is up to 9,000+ (two months deep). If you are interested in this distinctly different task and need any help, see this guide, this checklist, and spend some time at WP:RFD.

Discussions with the WMF The PageTriage open letter signed by 444 users is bearing fruit. The Growth Team has assigned some software engineers to work on PageTriage, the software that powers the NewPagesFeed and the Page Curation toolbar. WMF has submitted dozens of patches in the last few weeks to modernize PageTriage's code, which will make it easier to write patches in the future. This work is helpful but is not very visible to the end user. For patches visible to the end user, volunteers such as Novem Linguae and MPGuy2824 have been writing patches for bug reports and feature requests. The Growth Team also had a video conference with the NPP coordinators to discuss revamping the landing pages that new users see.

Reminders

• Newsletter feedback - please take this short poll about the newsletter.
• There is live chat with patrollers on the New Page Patrol Discord.
• Please add the project discussion page to your watchlist.
• If you no longer wish to be a reviewer, please ask any admin to remove you from the group. If you want the tools back again, just ask at PERM.
• To opt out of future mailings, please remove yourself here.

Hello SmokeyJoe,

Backlog

Redirect drive: In response to an unusually high redirect backlog, we held a redirect backlog drive in May. The drive completed with 23851 reviews done in total, bringing the redirect backlog to 0 (momentarily). Congratulations to Hey man im josh who led with a staggering 4316 points, followed by Meena and Greyzxq with 2868 and 2546 points respectively. See this page for more details. The redirect queue is steadily rising again and is steadily approaching 4,000. Please continue to help out, even if it's only for a few or even one review a day.

Redirect autopatrol: All administrators without autopatrol have now been added to the redirect autopatrol list. If you see any users who consistently create significant amounts of good quality redirects, consider requesting redirect autopatrol for them here.

WMF work on PageTriage: The WMF Moderator Tools team, consisting of Sam, Jason and Susana, and also some patches from Jon, has been hard at work updating PageTriage. They are focusing their efforts on modernising the extension's code rather than on bug fixes or new features, though some user-facing work will be prioritised. This will help make sure that this extension is not deprecated, and is easier to work on in the future. In the next month or so, we will have an opt-in beta test where new page patrollers can help test the rewrite of Special:NewPagesFeed, to help find bugs. We will post more details at WT:NPPR when we are ready for beta testers.

Articles for Creation (AFC): All new page reviewers are now automatically approved for Articles for Creation draft reviewing (you do not need to apply at WT:AFCP like was required previously). To install the AFC helper script, visit Special:Preferences, visit the Gadgets tab, tick "Yet Another AFC Helper Script", then click "Save". To find drafts to review, visit Special:NewPagesFeed, and at the top left, tick "Articles for Creation". To review a draft, visit a submitted draft, click on the "More" menu, then click "Review (AFCH)". You can also comment on and submit drafts that are unsubmitted using the script.

You can review the AFC workflow at WP:AFCR. It is up to you if you also want to mark your AFC accepts as NPP reviewed (this is allowed but optional, depends if you would like a second set of eyes on your accept). Don't forget that draftspace is optional, so moves of drafts to mainspace (even if they are not ready) should not be reverted, except possibly if there is conflict of interest.

Pro tip: Did you know that visual artists such as painters have their own SNG? The most common part of this "creative professionals" criteria that applies to artists is WP:ARTIST 4b (solo exhibition, not group exhibition, at a major museum) or 4d (being represented within the permanent collections of two museums).

Reminders

• Newsletter feedback - please take this short poll about the newsletter.
• There is live chat with patrollers on the New Page Patrol Discord and #wikimedia-npp ^connect on IRC.
• Please add the project discussion page to your watchlist.
• To opt out of future mailings, please remove yourself here.

Ten years ago, you were found precious. That's what you are, always. --Gerda Arendt (talk) 07:15, 4 January 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Thank you.

you are too. SmokeyJoe (talk) 07:47, 4 January 2024 (UTC)[reply]

So as not to clutter MfD with an unrelated follow up to your comment. Doncram & DGG hit hard. Such a vital part of the fabric here. Part of why I'm trying to clear some of his drafts if I can get them to mainspace, inspired by a bunch hitting G13. User_talk:Doncram#List_of_drafts has the list of expired and expiring drafts should you have time/interest. Star Mississippi 01:58, 4 February 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Template:Vu has been nominated for deletion. You are invited to comment on the discussion at the entry on the Templates for discussion page. – Jonesey95 (talk) 16:46, 22 February 2024 (UTC)[reply]

I do not know if you're having a bad day, but accusing editors of "attempting to hide all evidence of good faith" by a blocked editor in a deletion discussion, especially without evidence, is the kind of stuff that caused WP:AGF to be written. To quote from WP:SNOW - "If a process only has a snowball's chance in hell of success, use common sense and don't follow the process all the way to the end, just for procedural sake. But if there are any doubts, do not terminate the process prematurely." This sort of language is incivil at best. DarmaniLink (talk) 01:37, 1 March 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Not a bad day. It’s my standard challenge to anyone wanting to delete content that I consider to be a good faith attempt to contribute, on the basis that the user was later blocked. And where there is no connection between the block and the content to be deleted.

I don’t think you should take it personally. You are doing what many have done before you. The consequence of the deletion would be to remove the best edits form the user’s edit history, and if they try to return, that makes them look worse.

I don’t mean that you are attempting to make them look worse, just that you are attempting to have a page deleted, and there is a bad unintended consequence. I don’t think you have considered other perspective on the outcome of this deletion. As I’ve said, I don’t think their edit history is that bad, and I think NOTHERE doesn’t hold up to scrutiny for their block. If they are serious, I think they can make a good unblock request, and an obvious good thing they could do is declare an intention to improve their draft.

Did I say “all evidence”? I shouldn’t have. The one liner new article on a band is a small bit of evidence. I support its immediate draftification. SmokeyJoe (talk) 02:32, 1 March 2024 (UTC)[reply]

for what its worth, I only reported them to UAA, not AIV since the name was arguably disruptive. I was just expecting a name change. DarmaniLink (talk) 03:00, 1 March 2024 (UTC)[reply]

I noticed the username.

I’ve been editing the draft, but am frustrated by my mobile device losing my edits when I switch between tabs. SmokeyJoe (talk) 03:41, 1 March 2024 (UTC)[reply]

In that case, I'll retract it. :) DarmaniLink (talk) 03:52, 1 March 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Hey there! This is to let you know that phase I of the 2024 requests for adminship (RfA) review is now no longer accepting new proposals. Lots of proposals remain open for discussion, and the current round of review looks to be on a good track towards making significant progress towards improving RfA's structure and environment. I'd like to give my heartfelt thanks to everyone who has given us their idea for change to make RfA better, and the same to everyone who has given the necessary feedback to improve those ideas. The following proposals remain open for discussion:

• Proposal 2, initiated by HouseBlaster, provides for the addition of a text box at Wikipedia:Requests for adminship reminding all editors of our policies and enforcement mechanisms around decorum.
• Proposals 3 and 3b, initiated by Barkeep49 and Usedtobecool, respectively, provide for trials of discussion-only periods at RfA. The first would add three extra discussion-only days to the beginning, while the second would convert the first two days to discussion-only.
• Proposal 5, initiated by SilkTork, provides for a trial of RfAs without threaded discussion in the voting sections.
• Proposals 6c and 6d, initiated by BilledMammal, provide for allowing users to be selected as provisional admins for a limited time through various concrete selection criteria and smaller-scale vetting.
• Proposal 7, initiated by Lee Vilenski, provides for the "General discussion" section being broken up with section headings.
• Proposal 9b, initiated by Reaper Eternal, provides for the requirement that allegations of policy violation be substantiated with appropriate links to where the alleged misconduct occured.
• Proposals 12c, 21, and 21b, initiated by City of Silver, Ritchie333, and HouseBlaster, respectively, provide for reducing the discretionary zone, which currently extends from 65% to 75%. The first would reduce it 65%–70%, the second would reduce it to 50%–66%, and the third would reduce it to 60%–70%.
• Proposal 13, initiated by Novem Lingaue, provides for periodic, privately balloted admin elections.
• Proposal 14, initiated by Kusma, provides for the creation of some minimum suffrage requirements to cast a vote.
• Proposals 16 and 16c, initiated by Thebiguglyalien and Soni, respectively, provide for community-based admin desysop procedures. 16 would desysop where consensus is established in favor at the administrators' noticeboard; 16c would allow a petition to force reconfirmation.
• Proposal 16e, initiated by BilledMammal, would extend the recall procedures of 16 to bureaucrats.
• Proposal 17, initiated by SchroCat, provides for "on-call" admins and 'crats to monitor RfAs for decorum.
• Proposal 18, initiated by theleekycauldron, provides for lowering the RfB target from 85% to 75%.
• Proposal 24, initiated by SportingFlyer, provides for a more robust alternate version of the optional candidate poll.
• Proposal 25, initiated by Femke, provides for the requirement that nominees be extended-confirmed in addition to their nominators.
• Proposal 27, initiated by WereSpielChequers, provides for the creation of a training course for admin hopefuls, as well as periodic retraining to keep admins from drifting out of sync with community norms.
• Proposal 28, initiated by HouseBlaster, tightens restrictions on multi-part questions.

To read proposals that were closed as unsuccessful, please see Wikipedia:Requests for adminship/2024 review/Phase I/Closed proposals. You are cordially invited once again to participate in the open discussions; when phase I ends, phase II will review the outcomes of trial proposals and refine the implementation details of other proposals. Another notification will be sent out when this phase begins, likely with the first successful close of a major proposal. Happy editing! theleekycauldron (talk • she/her), via:

MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 10:53, 14 March 2024 (UTC)[reply]

A discussion is taking place as to whether the article Where is Kate? is suitable for inclusion in Wikipedia according to Wikipedia's policies and guidelines or whether it should be deleted.

The article will be discussed at Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Where is Kate? (3rd nomination) until a consensus is reached, and anyone, including you, is welcome to contribute to the discussion. The nomination will explain the policies and guidelines which are of concern. The discussion focuses on high-quality evidence and our policies and guidelines.

Users may edit the article during the discussion, including to improve the article to address concerns raised in the discussion. However, do not remove the article-for-deletion notice from the top of the article until the discussion has finished.

IgnatiusofLondon (he/him • ☎️) 12:20, 1 April 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Hello SmokeyJoe,

Backlog update: The October drive reduced the article backlog from 11,626 to 7,609 and the redirect backlog from 16,985 to 6,431! Congratulations to Schminnte, who led with over 2,300 points.

Following that, New Page Patrol organized another backlog drive for articles in January 2024. The January drive started with 13,650 articles and reduced the backlog to 7,430 articles. Congratulations to JTtheOG, who achieved first place with 1,340 points in this drive.

Looking at the graph, it seems like backlog drives are one of the only things keeping the backlog under control. Another backlog drive is being planned for May. Feel free to participate in the May backlog drive planning discussion.

It's worth noting that both queues are gradually increasing again and are nearing 14,034 articles and 22,540 redirects. We encourage you to keep contributing, even if it's just a single patrol per day. Your support is greatly appreciated!

2023 Awards

Onel5969 won the 2023 cup with 17,761 article reviews last year - that's an average of nearly 50/day. There was one Platinum Award (10,000+ reviews), 2 Gold Awards (5000+ reviews), 6 Silver (2000+), 8 Bronze (1000+), 30 Iron (360+) and 70 more for the 100+ barnstar. Hey man im josh led on redirect reviews by clearing 36,175 of them. For the full details, see the Awards page and the Hall of Fame. Congratulations everyone for their efforts in reviewing!

WMF work on PageTriage: The WMF Moderator Tools team and volunteer software developers deployed the rewritten NewPagesFeed in October, and then gave the NewPagesFeed a slight visual facelift in November. This concludes most major work to Special:NewPagesFeed, and most major work by the WMF Moderator Tools team, who wrapped up their major work on PageTriage in October. The WMF Moderator Tools team and volunteer software developers will continue small work on PageTriage as time permits.

Recruitment: A couple of the coordinators have been inviting editors to become reviewers, via mass-messages to their talk pages. If you know someone who you'd think would make a good reviewer, then a personal invitation to them would be great. Additionally, if there are Wikiprojects that you are active on, then you can add a post there asking participants to join NPP. Please be careful not to double invite folks that have already been invited.

Reviewing tip: Reviewers who prefer to patrol new pages within their most familiar subjects can use the regularly updated NPP Browser tool.

Reminders:

• You can access live chat with patrollers on the New Pages Patrol Discord.
• Consider adding the project discussion page to your watchlist.
• To opt out of future mailings, please remove yourself here.

MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 16:27, 2 April 2024 (UTC)[reply]

New Page Patrol | May 2024 Articles Backlog Drive
On 1 May 2024, a one-month backlog drive for New Page Patrol will begin. Barnstars will be awarded based on the number of articles patrolled. Barnstars will also be granted for re-reviewing articles previously reviewed by other patrollers during the drive. Each review will earn 1 point. Interested in taking part? Sign up here.
You're receiving this message because you are a new page patroller. To opt-out of future mailings, please remove yourself here.

MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 16:15, 17 April 2024 (UTC)[reply]