User:Robth/What is to be done?

This essay is about clearing the cleanup queue. For instructions on how to construct a vanguard party, or reasons why democratic centralism is fun for the whole family, see What Is to Be Done?

The Cleanup queue is becoming an embarrasment to the project. After rapid growth in April and May of this year, it now contains over 16,000 articles. During the past two months, over 70 articles, on average, were added to the queue every day. This influx, though sizable, could be dealt with if cleanup workers could turn their attention to newly added articles immediately. Instead, cleanuppers are tied up with the backlog of articles from this time last year, and newly added articles have to wait their turn. A large number of the thousands of articles we add to the cleanup queue every month will remain there for six months; some will be there for over a year. What's more, this problem is getting worse, not better. The rate of cleanup over the past few months is clearly well behind the rate of cleanup tagging.

Something needs to be done to address the seemingly permanent backlog afflicting the cleanup queue. Applying a tag that indicates an article is severely in need of attention should bring quick response, not an extended wait. Many cleanup queue articles, in their current form, are actively inhibiting the project; a new editor, when faced with a massive, confusing, unwikified article, is unlikely to add information to it or otherwise improve it. Truly low quality in an article is self-perpetuating; it scares off new or timid editors, ensuring that the worst of the articles on the cleanup queue remain there until their monthly category is finally cleaned out.

Why are we having this problem?

Among the factors contributing to the cleanup backlog are:

Dificulty of cleaning up articles: Many of the articles in the queue are lengthy and require work on a sentence-by-sentence level. Plowing through and straightening out sizable chunks of muddled prose can be a demanding and time consuming task. New or inexperienced editors, or those with very limited time to devote to editing, are likely to shy away from plunging into such a task. You can't make it easier (no nifty tools like WP:AWB for this one), and hell, it doesn't even lend itself to building an impressive edit count!
Unpleasantness of the work: The cleanup queue is full of very messy articles. Laboring over a tangled article on a subject outside your own field can be a highly unappealing prospect.
Magnitude of the backlog: There is a sense of futility in cleaning up 1 of the 16,000 articles on the queue. If 1 person cleaned up 10 articles a day for a year, they would have cleaned up less than one quarter of the articles currently on the queue—and in that time, at current rates, over 24,000 new articles would have been added. Who wants to get involved with that?
Lack of recognition/teamwork/collaborative spirit: Cleanup queue work is solitary. There is little way to record or announce progress, or to communicate with others involved in similar work. (Attempts to create a system for coordinating efforts in this regard have previously failed: see Wikipedia:Cleanup Taskforce.) In fact, since articles, once cleaned up, simply vanish from the queue, it can be all but impossible to see who else is involved in doing the same work as you.

What can we do?

The first two problems listed above, obviously, are not things we can fix; rather, they are an inherent part of the nature of the cleanup queue. The second two problems, however, can be addressed.

I want to organize a large, coordinated effort to clear the cleanup queue. Look at the number I gave above for one person working on the queue. Now think about a situation in which 100 people work together to clear the cleanup queue. If each person cleans up 5 articles a day (a manageable number), we can clean out the queue in a month and a few days. If more people get involved, or if some people clean up more than five articles a day, it'll go faster. Many hands make light work, as the saying goes.

Implementation

This proposal is essentially about two things. Its first goal is to increase the scale on which cleanup takes place, so as to reduce the apparent size and insurmountability of the queue and make people feel like their cleanup efforts will actually make a difference. To help with this, we should have:

A definite, clearly stated goal: We want to clean up every article in the cleanup queue, in less than 45 days.
Some method of reporting progress: something like the percent complete bar over at WP:DPL, frequently updated, would be ideal. Milestones could be reported as well (e.g. 5,000th article cleaned up today! Great job!).

The second goal of this project is to inject a spirit of collaboration into the cleanup process, and to provide recognition for what has traditionally been behind-the-scenes work. To this end, we might want to have:

A list of project members (obviously): provides concrete evidence that there are indeed other people working on this.
Project subpages on which users can list their cleanup work: Instead of articles simply vanishing from the queue once cleaned up, with no clue as to who did the work, clean-uppers have a place to list their accomplishments towards the goal. Particularly notable efforts could be highlighted (Stakhanovites, anyone?).
Some sort of communication forum for members of the project. RC patrolling people seem to have succeeded in creating a sense of camaraderie through IRC channels and the like; perhaps an IRC channel called #cleanup-wikipedia could be created for the duration of the project, in which people could ask for advice on particularly tricky articles and talk to each other.

Obstacles

The obvious obstacle to getting a project of this sort started is getting enough dedicated people involved. 100-150 people actually doing work on the project would be ideal; we'd probably need 200 people signed up to reasonably expect this. If it becomes clear early on that progress is only occurring very slowly, people will lose interest; there need to be enough people on board that we can reasonably expect to finish up in about a month (and even that may be asking a lot). How do we get people, then? The only answer I have to this right now is to post to all the community meeting places I can think of; village pump, community portal, mailing list, mention it on IRC. This needs to be done carefully, however, since signing up a bunch of people who just want to put their name on a list and aren't actually going to participate wouldn't do any good and might do some harm. Essentially, the big question about this proposal is whether it's possible on Wikipedia to recruit a large number of people, all at once, to participate in a task they haven't been involved with previously. If yes, this can work. If not,it certainly won't.

Other problems may crop up down the line. If we make too big of a deal out of number of articles cleaned up, people might (1) just go after the easiest articles and (2) do an insufficient job on more difficult articles. We could try to avoid this by suggesting methods like "pick a given month and letter of the alphabet, and go through the list from the top or bottom". On the other hand, at the start of the project, inflated counts based on people hitting up easy targets might help build enthusiasm. For quality control, we could post a how-to on cleaning up, with standards for what is considered clean up, and do a cursory check of people's cleaned-up lists to make sure they were being sufficiently thorough. Also, as this goes on, we'll probably want to start encouraging use of the {{inuse}} template on larger articles, since it would be frustrating to spend an hour sorting out a real mess of an article only to find that you'd just been duplicating someone else's efforts.

This page

Having written up this little proposal, I'm now going to try to draw a bit of attention to it, so as to get other people's opinions or get people to sign up. If you're reading this and want to sign up, put your name in the section below here. If you have suggestions or comments, put them on the talk page. I'd like to keep this page as the introductory sketch of the problem and proposed solution that it is now; if this gets a sufficiently interested reaction, someone can create a project page where the more specific elements of the proposal can be hashed out.

Willing to participate

Robth^Talk

Add yourself here if you're interested!