Wikipedia:Village pump (proposals)/Proposal to require autoconfirmed status in order to create articles/Trial duration
- The following discussion is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made in a new section. A summary of the conclusions reached follows.
- There's a clear consensus for a six-month trial, followed by a one-month period of discussion to determine the trial's effects. Given the wide support and uncontroversial nature of this, combined with me not quite knowing who to ask or where to go to enact this result, I am leaving that to the folks over this way. Ed [talk] [majestic titan] 06:33, 18 August 2011 (UTC)[reply]
RfC: Autoconfirmed status required to create articles (trial)
[edit]A consensus was reached on 27 May 2011 to restrict the creation of new mainspace articles to contributors whose accounts have reached autoconfirmed status.
The preferred approach voiced by the community is that this restriction first be implemented as a trial with a recommendation for a period to be determined (3–6 months) , followed by an evaluation period (1–3 months) with the trial switched off. Other recommendations voiced by the consensus concern the use of Articles for Creation and the Article Wizard systems, regardless of the outcome of this trial, and will be discussed elsewhere.
A discussion on the software changes is taking place here.
- This discussion concerns only the duration of the trial.
- Technical Changes to the site software and user interface messages
will beare the subject of a separate discussion on a separate page here. - Required pre-trial statistics have been gathered and extrapolated for the last six months, and will be updated for the calendar start of the trial. They will be discussed here.
It is therefore proposed
[edit]- To operate the trial for a period of 6 (six) months during which the holders of registered accounts may not create pages in article mainspace until their account has reached autoconfirmed status
- After six months of trial, to stop the trial for a period of 30 (thirty) days. A new set of statistics will be gathered for direct comparison with the pre-trial data.
- A discussion will take place over the 30 days immediately following the end of the trial.
- The implementation of the editing restriction will depend on the outcome of the data comparison and the discussion.
- In the event of consensus favourable to the permanent implementation, following comparison of data and discussion, the new rule will be implemented immediately.
- The trial will not be extended.
Editors to require autoconfirmed status in order to create articles: Trial duration
[edit]A consensus was reached to limit the creation of new articles to the holders of Autoconfirmed status. This discussion concerns the duration of the required trial.
This RfC will run until either a consensus is reached, or 30 days have elapsed.
For information purposes, a stale discussion (collapsed) is included here.
Stale discussion (last edit 13 June 2011
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A consensus was reached on 27 May 2011 to restrict the creation of new mainspace articles to contributors whose accounts have reached autoconfirmed status for the duration of a trial. It was agreed that some form of evidence-based evaluation would then occur, and the question of implementing the restriction on the longer term reexamined in light of the results. Some details of the implementation of this need to be worked out. Hence this RFC. The most popular of the proposals will be implemented. Within the framework of the recommendations made in the closing discussion summary:
Discussion[edit]This seems, to me, to be the simplest way to go about this, and seems the way most likely to yield results. Waiting only 30 days will give us some vague sense, but we need to know what the longer-term impact will be. We also need to know what will happen once we shut it off, hence the 30 days afterwards. The Blade of the Northern Lights (話して下さい) 16:52, 2 June 2011 (UTC)[reply]
Trial for a period of 6 (six) months during which the holders of registered accounts may not create pages in article mainspace until their account has reached autoconfirmed status, with one exception: they retain the ability to create articles via the Article Wizard. User:Rd232/creationdraft, which would replace the current MediaWiki:Nocreatetext, illustrates how options would be presented to the new user in this case. Data should be gathered for 30 days prior to trial, and evaluation of the overall concept should begin after 4 months. If no consensus is reached by 6 months to continue the concept indefinitely, it is switched off. If consensus is reached, it is retained indefinitely. Evaluation of the Wizard immediate-creation option may begin separately at any time, if editors feel there are issues arising which require discussion. If there is a consensus to switch off that option, it may be done at any time. Discussion[edit]
The proposal above reflects the spirit of the RfC but is both too long and insufficient to gather the necessary data to evaluate the impact of restricting article creation. Instead I propose a shorter trial which requires some developer involvement and may require gathering and anonymizing information on not just contributions but potential contributions. Technical details[edit]
The trial should proceed in three phases. An initial data gathering phase to last 30 days where no external changes are made to article creation, an implementation phase where article creation is restricted (see below for details) also to last 30 days and a followup phase where the article creation is returned to the status quo ante for another 30 days. Given the volume of articles created and deleted per week, 3-6 months is more than necessary to determine the immediate impact of restricting article creation. 30 days will provide more than enough data. The pre and post periods are there to gather data for a representative comparison should contemporaneous statistics be deemed too difficult to collect.
The trial should gather data not only on number of articles created but their disposition after 15 days, the history of the accounts which created the articles and the number of articles not created during the trial timeframe. Some of these data are available to editors and administrators but some will only be available to developers. Specifically:
A primary concern among supporters of the RfC was disenchantment with wikipedia due to an aggressive (but reasonable) response by new page patrollers when faced with a grossly inappropriate article. Chief among the concerns of those critical of the RfC was the potential loss in contributors due to increased editing friction. A trial which simply changes the ability of non-autoconfirmed accounts to create articles without determining the impact on potential article creation will overestimate the effectiveness of the trial to reduce inappropriate articles and greatly underestimate the potential loss of contributors. My version of the trial solves these problems in two ways. First, breaking up the trial into three parts where data is gathered in each allows us to see the switch-on and switch-off effects of the policy change. We can compare the overall article volume and quantity as well as editor retention in the trial to both the pre-trial condition and a post trial condition where some new editors may have learned of the change. Second, the inclusion of statistics on article attempts during the trial will catch most cases where a non-autoconfirmed account attempts to create an article and what their response is. If they still attempt to create the article via the AfC we will know the source of the change. Likewise if they go on to make regular edits (or request confirmation) before re-creating the article we can measure this as well. Of course should the account simply stop editing after a stymied attempt to create an article we will know this as well.
Though I suspect that the developers will not want to engage in a trial which presents a non-uniform face to users, it would be most optimal to engage in a trial where editors are randomly selected to see one of three options when opening the "create a new page" link:
Using these three options we can track user response during the trial against each change. We would record the same data as I described above but would have the additional advantage of a randomized trial showing the effectiveness of each potential change. Since one of these three (or something like them) options will be made the default should the trial be deemed a success it behooves us to kill two birds with one stone and perform some A/B testing while we are conducting the trial. Discussion[edit]
Technical changes required[edit]Requiring developer action[edit]For implementation[edit]Currently MediaWiki's settings would only allow us to prevent non-autoconfirmed users from creating pages in any namespace, including their own userspace. (This is the
For trial data[edit]Other[edit]MediaWiki:Nocreatetext is the message shown to users who try to create an article and don't have the necessary permission.
I am very dismayed at the result that we have to have a "trial period". The pending changes trial could not have been more of a disaster. WP:PCRFC is still in limbo, no up or down decision has been made after literally years of discussion. We must not repeat the mistakes that led to that situation. We need to plan out what happens after the trial period now, or we will end up in the same indefinite quagmire, to the benefit of nobody. That being said, I really don't like the option to allow creation with the article wizard. The idea behind the wizard is a good one, and when it works it works brilliantly. Unfortunately it has also led to a lot of new articles that look more like proper Wikipedia articles but are still junk. On another note, we also need some safeguard here to prevent this from turning into another thousand headed hydra of a discussion with thirty or forty separate proposals duking it out, insuring that no one proposal will ever attain consensus. How to do that? Not sure. Beeblebrox (talk) 21:15, 2 June 2011 (UTC)[reply]
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Discussion
[edit]- Support: as proposed. The research for the restriction was made over a period of 6 months monitoring the effects of WP:NPP|new page patrol, and statistics gathering. Due to seasonal and other fluctuations in editing, 6 months is needed to asses the effect of the restriction. Thirty days without the trial should be enough for evaluation purposes. --Kudpung กุดผึ้ง (talk) 20:00, 11 July 2011 (UTC)[reply]
- Support per Kudpung. This is a reasonable follow up to the consensus achieved at Wikipedia:Village pump (proposals)/Proposal to require autoconfirmed status in order to create articles. Cunard (talk) 20:13, 11 July 2011 (UTC)[reply]
- Support per Kudpung. ╟─TreasuryTag►Not-content─╢ 21:47, 11 July 2011 (UTC)[reply]
- Support 6 months seems the perfect length of time and it's nice to have specific rules for what happens after the time period, so we don't end up with another fiasco like with that other famous trial period. Hopefully, the data resulting from this is conclusive one way or the other. SilverserenC 21:51, 11 July 2011 (UTC)[reply]
- Support Six months is an appropriate amount of time to ensure that the results are not skewed by seasonal variations in editing patterns. —SW— spout 22:11, 11 July 2011 (UTC)[reply]
- Support time frame, but question about other proposal elements. Six months seems reasonable. However, I'm concerned with the statement that "The implementation of the editing restriction will depend on the outcome of the data comparison and the discussion."
Community consensus has already been reached that such a requirement be implemented; any proposal here that opens the door to re-litigating the concept of autoconfirm-to-create after the trial is going to lead directly to exactly that: a re-litigation of the issue, with all the accompanying drama, with people having had six months to arm themselves with arguments for and against, and with a high likelihood of eventual "oh, there's no consensus here, screw it" throwing up of hands. To do that would be to fly in the face of the community, which supported exceptionally strongly the implementation of autoconfirm-to-create. I would support a wording of this proposal that specified that "the exact method of implementation of the editing restriction will depend on...", but strongly oppose any version of this proposal that allows the re-trying of the case for and against autoconfirm in general.Redacted, because I just re-read the RfC close and I clearly misrembered the trial/full-on-implementation thing. Let me try this again: I remain a little worried about the phrasing of that sentence, because without definite guidelines against which the trial results will be judged, the post-trial RfC will just be another re-litigation of the issue. Is there any provision, in this step of the trial-setting-up or another, to define exactly what metrics we will be judging the usefulness of the trial by? I feel strongly that these need to exist before the trial begins. A fluffernutter is a sandwich! (talk) 22:23, 11 July 2011 (UTC)[reply]
- I think that, to some extent, a re-litigation of the concept after the trial will be inevitable. We will have a lot of new data to explore, and perhaps the analysis of that new information will significantly change our perspective on the whole idea. The discussion period after the trial will basically be a re-litigation, except with hard data in place of theories and projections. In other words, it will ask the question: "What does everyone think of this idea, now that we know exactly what the result of its implementation is?" In general, I think that the success of the trial will likely be judged on whether or not it meaningfully reduced the number of inappropriate articles created (and therefore meaningfully reduced the deletion and patrolling workload) without alienating new editors or significantly reducing the number of legitimate new articles created. —SW— talk 23:39, 11 July 2011 (UTC)[reply]
- Without wanting to re-litigate it, my impression of the previous discussion was that the community actually supported making the change already (with the option of reversing it at any time if we decide we hate it), not testing the change temporarily and then discussing the results and maybe re-implementing it.
- I agree with Fluffernutter: There's no point in running a trial if you don't know what you're trying to find out from it. You'll end up with a study design that doesn't help you learn what you want to know. WhatamIdoing (talk) 23:53, 11 July 2011 (UTC)[reply]
- Yeah, Snottywong, I think those are reasonable grounds to evaluate based on, but I guess my point is that unless we can get people to agree beforehand on what constitutes "pass" and "fail" for those (or other) areas, people will just toss the goalposts around willy-nilly to suit the decision they want to be reached when the discussion reopens post-trial. A fluffernutter is a sandwich! (talk) 23:54, 11 July 2011 (UTC)[reply]
- I think that, to some extent, a re-litigation of the concept after the trial will be inevitable. We will have a lot of new data to explore, and perhaps the analysis of that new information will significantly change our perspective on the whole idea. The discussion period after the trial will basically be a re-litigation, except with hard data in place of theories and projections. In other words, it will ask the question: "What does everyone think of this idea, now that we know exactly what the result of its implementation is?" In general, I think that the success of the trial will likely be judged on whether or not it meaningfully reduced the number of inappropriate articles created (and therefore meaningfully reduced the deletion and patrolling workload) without alienating new editors or significantly reducing the number of legitimate new articles created. —SW— talk 23:39, 11 July 2011 (UTC)[reply]
- Oppose unless three is provision for 1/concurrent monitoring of the results with respect to the creation of valid articles, as well as invalid ones, and 3/ ptrovision for stopping the trial early in the results of the measurement is disastrous. Without a provision for stopping early, the harm can be better judged with a shorter trial, say 2 or 3 months. (I'll just observe I don't think the majority of people who work with newcomers here are aware of this, and the degree to which it contradicts the strategic goals adopted by the foundation a year ago.) DGG ( talk ) 23:35, 11 July 2011 (UTC)[reply]
- Can you describe a plausible outcome which could be defined as "disastrous"? —SW— babble 23:41, 11 July 2011 (UTC)[reply]
- Oh, maybe that we see a 25% drop in the number of new accounts making their first edit each month. (That's the proportion of accounts making a first edit, whose first edit is to create a new page.) WhatamIdoing (talk) 23:48, 11 July 2011 (UTC)[reply]
- While it's extremely unlikely that 100% of users who create an account with the intention of creating an article will just quit when they are informed that they have to become autoconfirmed first, I think that's a valid statistic to monitor during the course of the trial. My point is that it's important to identify which specific statistics need to be monitored, rather than just mandating that statistics, in general, should be monitored. —SW— squeal 23:54, 11 July 2011 (UTC)[reply]
- Oh, maybe that we see a 25% drop in the number of new accounts making their first edit each month. (That's the proportion of accounts making a first edit, whose first edit is to create a new page.) WhatamIdoing (talk) 23:48, 11 July 2011 (UTC)[reply]
- Can you describe a plausible outcome which could be defined as "disastrous"? —SW— babble 23:41, 11 July 2011 (UTC)[reply]
- Support. If we must have a trial, this appears to be a sensible way to go about it. Rivertorch (talk) 05:11, 12 July 2011 (UTC)[reply]
- Support at least 6 months—may I speak openly? This is a no-brainer: (1) admins, new-page patrollers, AfD resources, are stretched beyond their limit and have never coped with the volume of newly created articles; (2) we expose ourselves to potential embarrassment and controversy—particularly WRT BLPs creations—unless they're properly audited. Tony (talk) 14:44, 12 July 2011 (UTC)[reply]
- Support Far too many articles created by non-autoconfirmed editors result in too many man-hours and wikidrama deleting them. The wikipedian community has better things to do than mess around with AfDs on beyond-trivial stuff. Greg L (talk) 14:56, 12 July 2011 (UTC)[reply]
- Oppose this length Three or four months is the longest we should be considering for the interventional phase. The seasonal variations are well known—activity drops during the summer—and can be controlled for by comparing activity to the same months in the previous years. Also, the 30-day post-intervention phase is too short. IMO it should be 60 days. Finally, if we want to know the long-term disposition of the articles, we need more than 30 days post-intervention to find out what happens to them. Since one of the hopes is that this will increase the quality of articles created/reduce the number of articles deleted, we cannot use last year's pattern of deletion to guess what will actually happen to these articles. We'll have to get the actual data. WhatamIdoing (talk) 16:08, 12 July 2011 (UTC)[reply]
- It will be an order of magnitude more difficult to analyze the stats if we have to first try to "correct" them using previous years' seasonal variations. I don't see the harm in running the trial for a sufficiently long time such that we can make an informed decision based on raw data rather than approximated data projections. —SW— soliloquize 01:53, 13 July 2011 (UTC)[reply]
- Or you could compare "June 2011" to "June 2012", instead of assuming that "July to December 2011" tells you anything about "Janaury to June 2012". That would completely eliminate the need to correct for seasonal variations. WhatamIdoing (talk) 02:26, 13 July 2011 (UTC)[reply]
- It will be an order of magnitude more difficult to analyze the stats if we have to first try to "correct" them using previous years' seasonal variations. I don't see the harm in running the trial for a sufficiently long time such that we can make an informed decision based on raw data rather than approximated data projections. —SW— soliloquize 01:53, 13 July 2011 (UTC)[reply]
- Support a trial; slightly opposeed to a permanent implementation. I hope at the end we will be able to think clearly about the issue instead of just succumbing to social inertia. jorgenev 16:12, 12 July 2011 (UTC)[reply]
- Support a trial in the 6 month active range, I'd support numbers down to about 3 months but no lower, and I think data from a trial as short as three months would be tricky to objectively analyze because of the "lifecycle of the newly created article". The editors we may lose at day 1 are potentially being "traded off" with those we lose at days 1-60 (where new article deletion usually happens, often after a long and frustrating process). We won't even begin to have an idea of how many of the latter we're saving with the newer policy until days 60-90, unless perhaps the casualties up front are so overwhelming as to make the disaster obvious. --joe deckertalk to me 16:42, 12 July 2011 (UTC)[reply]
- Support, a reasonable and logical proposal. — Cirt (talk) 18:13, 12 July 2011 (UTC)[reply]
- Let's get crackalackin. C'mon already. --Jayron32 18:22, 12 July 2011 (UTC)[reply]
- Support. Kudpung says what I wanted to say, but more eloquently. bobrayner (talk) 20:37, 12 July 2011 (UTC)[reply]
- Support: seems reasonable. I think we could afford to be shorter with the trial. But since seasonality could be an issue, we're better off with more data than to risk making an uninformed decision. Shooterwalker (talk) 00:40, 13 July 2011 (UTC)[reply]
- Support. Sounds reasonable. Now get on with it! MER-C 03:14, 13 July 2011 (UTC)[reply]
- Support Fine with me. Just make sure there will be no PC-trial-type antics. /ƒETCHCOMMS/ 04:05, 13 July 2011 (UTC)[reply]
- Conditionl support Six months is about right if we are to get any meaningful data. OTOH, I do not wish to see the same débâcle as we had over flagged revisions. It should therefore be made clear that the restrictions will end immediately at the end of the designated period, pending evaluation of the results against clearly pre-defined objectives/criteria. --Ohconfucius ¡digame! 05:47, 13 July 2011 (UTC)[reply]
- That appears to be clear in the proposal statement, particularly to avoid the flagged revisions issue: at the end of the trial, the restriction will be reverted for the duration of the 30-day evaluation, which will alow ample time to see if there is a resurge in the number of creations. The same scripts made by Snottywong can be run again on a daily basis. It wont' take long to see the result. For reasons of clarity, I confirm that the present proposal excludes any reconduction of the trial - six months of pre-trial data and six momnths of trial data are long enough to provide conclusive results one way or another. --Kudpung กุดผึ้ง (talk) 06:08, 13 July 2011 (UTC)[reply]
- Or the community could revisit the data in Month 6 (with the trial end still the default), so if it decides the trial is A Good Thing, we could avoid on-again, off-again disruption. Tony (talk) 06:58, 13 July 2011 (UTC)[reply]
- That appears to be clear in the proposal statement, particularly to avoid the flagged revisions issue: at the end of the trial, the restriction will be reverted for the duration of the 30-day evaluation, which will alow ample time to see if there is a resurge in the number of creations. The same scripts made by Snottywong can be run again on a daily basis. It wont' take long to see the result. For reasons of clarity, I confirm that the present proposal excludes any reconduction of the trial - six months of pre-trial data and six momnths of trial data are long enough to provide conclusive results one way or another. --Kudpung กุดผึ้ง (talk) 06:08, 13 July 2011 (UTC)[reply]
- Support Sir Armbrust Talk to me Contribs 08:34, 13 July 2011 (UTC)[reply]
- Support - Non-autoconfirmed users should be directed to WP:AFC somehow. Other than that, this is fine. We had better stick to the bloody timeline this time. Sven Manguard Wha? 15:11, 13 July 2011 (UTC)[reply]
- This is indeed intended and the necessary software settins are being discussed. It also includes an option to automatically create a blank article template in the user's sub-space and/or the article wizard from where it can be moved to mainspace by an established reviewer. Kudpung กุดผึ้ง (talk) 03:47, 15 July 2011 (UTC)[reply]
- Open to supporting per Ohconfucius. We need to balance being welcoming to newbies, and preventing wholesale vandalism and promotion. Bearian (talk) 16:41, 13 July 2011 (UTC)[reply]
- Support I supported the underlying proposal. The stats have been collected. There is a very definite plan for On/Off toggle without a open ended nebulousness (Like PC). 6 full months is a good way to track a educational cycle (like a college semester or half of a pre-secondary school year) Hasteur (talk) 14:24, 14 July 2011 (UTC)[reply]
- Support A sound proposal. Dabomb87 (talk) 14:40, 14 July 2011 (UTC)[reply]
- Support – This type of measure is far overdue. Graham87 14:28, 15 July 2011 (UTC)[reply]
- Support and let's get it rolling. The Blade of the Northern Lights (話して下さい) 22:40, 16 July 2011 (UTC)[reply]
- Support per Fetchcomms. 28bytes (talk) 15:21, 19 July 2011 (UTC)[reply]
- Yes please. Salvio Let's talk about it! 13:42, 20 July 2011 (UTC)[reply]
- Support - Although I was not a great supporter of the original proposal, a trial as proposed is reasonable, given the clear sunset clause. CT Cooper · talk 20:34, 20 July 2011 (UTC)[reply]
- Support. Having ventured further into NPP over the past month, the sheer volume of articles that are clearly unsuitable for inclusion really shocked me, particularly those written solely for promoting a company. No wonder NPP is so backlogged. I am now more convinced than ever that the proposal is worthwhile, and the trial conditions sound fine. On with the trial already! Brammers (talk/c) 12:10, 22 July 2011 (UTC)[reply]
- Support - I've got various opinions about this, but I don't see benefit in elaborating here; I support the idea that, instead of new users creating articles that are often speedied - and them being deluged with warnings - they should get timely assistance from others. This proposal appears to be a step towards that. Chzz ► 04:02, 24 July 2011 (UTC)[reply]
- Support - Exactly what we needed. --Σ talkcontribs 01:51, 25 July 2011 (UTC)[reply]
- Support a reasonable proposal that will allow us to move forward with this much needed change. --Jezebel'sPonyobons mots 20:32, 25 July 2011 (UTC)[reply]
- Support the time frames are logical and a good balance. jsfouche ☽☾Talk 03:07, 3 August 2011 (UTC)[reply]
- Support Never thought I'd see the day we actually got this far! Can't quite believe the amount of bureaucracy involved with such a logical change; but, we're here now so lets get on with it. Pol430 talk to me 21:42, 4 August 2011 (UTC)[reply]
- Support, ~~Ebe123~~ talkContribs 18:09, 8 August 2011 (UTC)[reply]
Questions
[edit]The proposal says:
- Six months on (for example, "January through June")
- One month off ("July")
- One month of discussion "over the 30 days immediately following the end of the trial"
Which month is that one month of post-trial discussion? The use of the word "trial" seems to refer both to the whole scheme (in which case, the answer is "August") and solely to the interventional phase (in which case, the answer is "July", which would be idiotic).
(The correct answer, by the way, is "September", because there's zero chance that we'll have the data about what happened through 31 July 23:59 collected and organized by 01 August 00:00, but that sensible solution has clearly been excluded.) WhatamIdoing (talk) 23:44, 11 July 2011 (UTC)[reply]
- It won't take 30 days to compile stats. At most, it would take a day or two. And, if DGG's request to constantly monitor the stats is fulfilled, then there will already be plenty of stats to discuss on 01 August 00:00. The only stats that won't be immediately relevant are the number of articles that were deleted in the latter portion of the trial (i.e. an inappropriate article that was created on July 31st might not actually get deleted until the end of August), but this will likely not make a significant difference to the stats since the sample size will be extremely large. —SW— confess 23:57, 11 July 2011 (UTC)[reply]
- That depends entirely on what stats you're collecting and how you're collecting them. If you want to know, for example, how many of the articles created by newbies in "June" are undeleted six months later, or how many of the people creating accounts in "June" are still making edits six months later, then you cannot, by definition, have that data until the end of "December". Some of the previous efforts at collecting information have been entirely manual. Expecting manually collected data to be prepared within seconds is obviously unreasonable. WhatamIdoing (talk) 15:58, 12 July 2011 (UTC)[reply]
Question - At the top of this page, it states;
Required pre-trial statistics have been gathered and extrapolated for the last six months, and will be updated for the calendar start of the trial.
It specifically states "pre-trial statistics have been gathered". Has this already occured? Could somebody please clarify this or provide a link to the data? I have been unable to find it. Thank you kindly. - Hydroxonium (T•C•V) 03:42, 12 July 2011 (UTC)[reply]
- The linked page appears to give the actual (not extrapolated) data for five months, not six. WhatamIdoing (talk) 16:01, 12 July 2011 (UTC)[reply]
- The month of June can be added to the stats once enough time has passed for articles created in June to be deleted. I doubt that the average values listed in the table will change much from the addition of June, given that over half a million articles were created in the five months that were analyzed (i.e. sample size is huge). I'm also not sure what point there would be in extrapolating the data out to the future, since we're about to make a major change which is going to affect the stats in unpredictable ways. I think it would be useful to do a similar 6-month graph for the number of new accounts created per day, and the number of new accounts per day whose first edit was to create a new article (per your comments in the discussion section above). I'll try to add those stats and graphs to the page sometime soon. —SW— gab 17:13, 12 July 2011 (UTC)[reply]
- Nice data/graphs there, thank you! --joe deckertalk to me 17:51, 12 July 2011 (UTC)[reply]
- The month of June can be added to the stats once enough time has passed for articles created in June to be deleted. I doubt that the average values listed in the table will change much from the addition of June, given that over half a million articles were created in the five months that were analyzed (i.e. sample size is huge). I'm also not sure what point there would be in extrapolating the data out to the future, since we're about to make a major change which is going to affect the stats in unpredictable ways. I think it would be useful to do a similar 6-month graph for the number of new accounts created per day, and the number of new accounts per day whose first edit was to create a new article (per your comments in the discussion section above). I'll try to add those stats and graphs to the page sometime soon. —SW— gab 17:13, 12 July 2011 (UTC)[reply]
- The linked page appears to give the actual (not extrapolated) data for five months, not six. WhatamIdoing (talk) 16:01, 12 July 2011 (UTC)[reply]
- My point is only that the statement above about "six months" is actually wrong, since the data that has been collected represents five months. WhatamIdoing (talk) 02:29, 13 July 2011 (UTC)[reply]
- It's also mentioned that now that we have the required scripts (which took a long time to get organised), this can be very quickly updated to concur with the start of the actual trial. I see no problems with that. Kudpung กุดผึ้ง (talk) 05:56, 13 July 2011 (UTC)[reply]
- My point is only that the statement above about "six months" is actually wrong, since the data that has been collected represents five months. WhatamIdoing (talk) 02:29, 13 July 2011 (UTC)[reply]
- So I'm assuming that huge spike in confirmed user article creation is when we collectiveley lost our minds (April 1st) Hasteur (talk) 14:21, 14 July 2011 (UTC)[reply]
- It was a bot automatically creating a few thousand articles. I checked into it, but I forget which bot it was at the moment. I think the articles were about
mushroompotato species or something. (It was User:PotatoBot.) —SW— squeal 17:05, 14 July 2011 (UTC)[reply]
- It was a bot automatically creating a few thousand articles. I checked into it, but I forget which bot it was at the moment. I think the articles were about
Question - What will happen if, at the end of the 6-month trial, there is general agreement that it's working fine and there is no need to switch it off? Chzz ► 20:54, 23 July 2011 (UTC)[reply]
- I imagine it would get switched off for a month and then switched back on permanently. —SW— confer 23:22, 23 July 2011 (UTC)[reply]
- My concern is, who will turn it off? Who will take responsibility for making sure that actually happens - and, is there any way we can actually guarantee it'll happen? I'm sure you're well aware of the background here, re PC. Chzz ► 00:36, 24 July 2011 (UTC)[reply]
- As I understand it (=perhaps not very well), only the WMF staff are capable of making these changes (whether "on" or "off", and NB that it's far more complicated than twiddling one setting: we have all sorts of documentation and error messages that would have to be re-written). I believe that you can be reasonably confident that they will keep their commitments. (They might entirely refuse to make the changes, if they thought it not in the best interests of the Wikimedia projects, but if they make the commitment, I think you can rely on them to follow through.) WhatamIdoing (talk) 03:03, 24 July 2011 (UTC)[reply]
- Someone from WMF has to turn it on. As long as we tell that person in advance that it will need to be "turned off" in 6 months, then they should be able to build in a mechanism to make it relatively easy to switch on and off. —SW— gossip 15:23, 24 July 2011 (UTC)[reply]
- I strongly recommend getting a clear statement on that, before trial - to avoid the kind of angst that occurred when the PC trial was not ended as promised. In this case...I'm not terribly worried, because as far as I'm concerned, I'd support it just being implemented without trial. But still - I suggest getting it a lot more clear than "someone said somebody would turn it off, or something". Chzz ► 06:46, 26 July 2011 (UTC)[reply]
- Someone from WMF has to turn it on. As long as we tell that person in advance that it will need to be "turned off" in 6 months, then they should be able to build in a mechanism to make it relatively easy to switch on and off. —SW— gossip 15:23, 24 July 2011 (UTC)[reply]
- As I understand it (=perhaps not very well), only the WMF staff are capable of making these changes (whether "on" or "off", and NB that it's far more complicated than twiddling one setting: we have all sorts of documentation and error messages that would have to be re-written). I believe that you can be reasonably confident that they will keep their commitments. (They might entirely refuse to make the changes, if they thought it not in the best interests of the Wikimedia projects, but if they make the commitment, I think you can rely on them to follow through.) WhatamIdoing (talk) 03:03, 24 July 2011 (UTC)[reply]
- I think there are two more points that I think would be good to apply here:
1. Users denied the opportunity to create a page due to lack of autoconfirmed status should receive an immediate, easy to understand message telling them that if they keep their account four days and make 10 edits they can start a new page. (There's a special situation for Tor users, but... I don't know, but I find myself suspecting that you could count these on one hand. The sysops don't seem very friendly to anonymous users nowadays)
2. The definition of autoconfirmed should not be changed for this purpose during the trial; any proposal to change it should be announced here to solicit input. Wnt (talk) 22:09, 31 July 2011 (UTC)[reply]
- There is no intention whatsoever to change the definition of 'autoconformed' which will remain as it has before: Four (4) days AND ten (10) edits. There appears to be no reason why this should be changed, it was not part of the object of the proposal or it trial, and it would be an entirely different discussion.
- Each Wikipedia is responsible for its own local policies. The en.Wiki is the largest of them all and the new rule was adopted by a clear consensus (depending on the outcome of a trial which was agreed to be conducted in deference to a minor consensus). The WMF would be treading on ice to refuse a new policy that has been adopted, and their only involvement is their control over the mediaWiki software - it should be quite clear here that the resolution affects only the en.Wiki use of the Wiki software.
- The technical requirements are clear, as well as the options that will be presented to the new users for redirects to the three options of the Wizard, the Article Requests, and creation in user space, together with the wording of the messages. The software request will be going to Bugzilla today or tomorrow, with the clear indication that the software settings for the trial should be reverted be after the 6 months. After 30 days of evaluation a consensus will be reached to either restore the trial settings as a permanent software feature, or to abandon the project for this policy reform in which case other solutions would then need to be examined for the prevention of the creation of thoroughly unsuitable pages. Note that the Wizard, Article Requests, and user page drafts will not be a cheap workaround - pages will still need to be moved to mainspace by an autoconfirmed user after review for suitability. --Kudpung กุดผึ้ง (talk) 15:05, 3 August 2011 (UTC)[reply]
- "Confirmed" at present, admins can grant "confirmed" status , which works the same as autoconfirmed. (see WP:AUTOCONFIRM#Autoconfirmed users Not that many have been done, since there has been very little need for them. The current holders are listed in Special:ListUsers/confirmed -- a good many of them are authorized alternate accounts. This will be useful in some purposes, such as for the WP Ambassadors projects. We'll always need a way to handle special cases. DGG ( talk ) 04:01, 11 August 2011 (UTC)[reply]
- The main issue there would be for experienced users from other wikis wanting to come here. We'll need to figure out a way to communicate that, but that conversation should take place here instead. The Blade of the Northern Lights (話して下さい) 01:34, 16 August 2011 (UTC)[reply]
- The above discussion is preserved as an archive. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made in a new section.