Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Sweep

Welcome to WikiProject Sweep! This collaboration aims to comprehensively review every article created in Wikipedia's early days to ensure basic conformity to modern standards. This page and its subpages aim to facilitate collaboration around this goal. If you'd like to help us, please add yourself as a participant to the project, inquire on the talk page, and see the to-do list for things to do. Thanks for helping us clean up old articles!

Link=Wikipedia:WikiProject Sweep

Main • SweepTalk • Participants & News • Lists • (header source)

Transcluded WikiProject proposal

The following discussion is an archived proposal of the WikiProject below. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as the project's talk page (if created) or the WikiProject Council). No further edits should be made to this page.

The proposed WikiProject was created at WP:WikiProject Sweep. PJvanMill)talk( 14:21, 26 March 2021 (UTC)

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Description

This project will facilitate a comprehensive sweep of all of Wikipedia's early articles to ensure that they meet present-day standards.

Impetus: This has been discussed informally on occasion, but I think it's time we start considering it more seriously. The basic problem is that, in Wikipedia's early days, there were few and ill-defined notability and sourcing standards, leading to the creation of many pages that, by today's standards, should not exist. However, because many of them are on very obscure subjects with few pageviews, they have been able to survive and avoid deletion. Our current ad hoc approach to discovering these pages will never get us to the point of being able to say with confidence that nearly every page on Wikipedia is for a notable subject, since we won't know how many undiscovered non-notable pages remain.

Details: This WikiProject will address that issue by creating and facilitating a patrol process (perhaps similar to those used by AfC or NPP) that will comprehensively review every article created before a certain date that meets certain criteria. Articles that are "swept" will receive a talk page banner, and those needing tags/PRODs/AfDs will be dealt with as needed. Initial tasks for the project will include building the set of articles to be checked (e.g. determining an end date, and perhaps exempting pages rated highly or with many references), constructing the tools/templates necessary, affirming community consensus for the sweep, and establishing criteria for who is allowed to check off pages. Attention will then shift to recruiting and motivating sweepers until all pages have been reviewed. Given that around 3 million pages were created before 2010, this is obviously a huge task, but there's ultimately no way around it, and once completed, it will mark a major milestone in the maturation of the project. {{u|Sdkb}} ^talk 18:37, 26 October 2020 (UTC)

List of important pages and categories for this proposed group

• Wikipedia:Articles for deletion (edit | talk | history | links | watch | logs)
• Wikipedia:Notability (edit | talk | history | links | watch | logs)
• Category:Articles created before 2010 (edit | talk | history | links | watch | logs) (number of pages in the hypothetical category: ~3 million)
• Category:All articles lacking sources (edit | talk | history | links | watch | logs) (number of pages in the category: 174,000)

Support

Also, specify whether or not you would join the project.

1. {{u|Sdkb}} ^talk 18:28, 26 October 2020 (UTC)
2. Sure, I would join. --Danre98^{(talk^contribs)} 21:38, 27 October 2020 (UTC)
3. I am willing to join this WikiProject. Techie3 (talk) 03:49, 28 October 2020 (UTC)
4. Yep. GenQuest ^{"Talk to Me"} 00:07, 29 October 2020 (UTC)
5. I believe this is a good idea and would be willing to join, focusing on quality of reviewing rather than quantity. — Bilorv (talk) 01:58, 31 October 2020 (UTC)
6. I think this is needed, and I'd help as able, although I don't know how much attention I'll be able to give to this. Hog Farm _Bacon 02:32, 1 November 2020 (UTC)
7. I agree with this idea and am willing to help out, although I might not be super active. Remagoxer (talk) 18:47, 1 November 2020 (UTC)
8. I agree with this proposal and am willing to join. Jh15s (talk) 23:04, 4 November 2020 (UTC)
9. Great idea, would be happy to help — Yours, Berrely • ^Talk∕_Contribs 09:58, 25 January 2021 (UTC)
10. I'd like to help out with this. JesterSocks (talk) 10:18, 13 March 2021 (UTC)

Discussion

• Is there an easy way to pull up a sample of articles with early creation dates? In my (non-exhaustive, not-quantified-in-any-way) experience, many of the articles with pre-2010 creation dates are just important topics that obviously merited an encyclopedia article. If I understand your goal correctly, perhaps you'll find more articles in need of attention by patrolling Wikipedia:Database reports/Forgotten articles (articles with the longest time since last edit)? Presumably articles on non-notable topics are more likely to sit unedited after creation? Just a thought. Also, if you go with your original plan, I just stumbled upon Wikipedia:Wikipedia's oldest articles which I'd never seen before, and which may have some useful info for your efforts. Ajpolino (talk) 04:46, 30 October 2020 (UTC)

  @Ajpolino: I'd hope it'd be possible to filter out the obviously important pages by using exclusion criteria such as monthly pageviews or total number of edits. Regarding "forgotten articles", that very well might turn up some non-notable pages, but it might miss others where e.g. someone from the typo team swung by last year without even noticing the page's topic. More generally, there are certainly others trying to find non-notable pages, but what I hope this project will be able to achieve is doing so with a degree of comprehensiveness, such that once we're done, we'll be able to say that every page here has been judged notable by modern standards. Cheers, {{u|Sdkb}} ^talk 05:33, 30 October 2020 (UTC)

• It's troubling that the proposal puts so much more emphasis on deletion, than on improving articles. Andy Mabbett (Pigsonthewing); Talk to Andy; Andy's edits 13:06, 30 October 2020 (UTC)

  @Pigsonthewing: I did mention cleanup tags above, and editors who want to go beyond that and address issues directly will certainly be welcome to. However, if we're going to get through patrolling some significant fraction of three million pages, it'd be unrealistic to ask for more than just tagging and notability assessment. {{u|Sdkb}} ^talk 17:19, 30 October 2020 (UTC)

• This has excessive emphasis on deletion. This would result in proding many articles that no one would be watching, or flooding AFD with far more articles than it could cope with. I expect there would be enough prod taggers and fast deleters around to ensure that many proded pages would not get any real review. Since there is no rush, there should instead be a focus on removing puffery, adding sources and proving notability. However I do think it is a good idea to review the old neglected stuff. Graeme Bartlett (talk) 23:20, 30 October 2020 (UTC)

  @Graeme Bartlett: I've come across enough bad PROD deletions to be sympathetic to the concern. But I'm not sure what sort of restriction we would want to impose that wouldn't also be appropriate for PRODs more generally. Most unchallenged PRODs are already for pages that aren't monitored, so I don't see how this would be that different, except that we'd be finding more pages. If we were to disallow PRODs here, the same argument would probably carry to disallowing them everywhere else. That might be a good idea (the system clearly has problems, with nominators ignoring WP:BEFORE and deleters not adequately checking), but that goes beyond the scope here. {{u|Sdkb}} ^talk 00:31, 31 October 2020 (UTC)

• I think this is long overdue. For this to successfully work, I think we need to be patient and make sure we have full support of the community before action is begun, rather than once normal processes begin getting flooded. I think we also need a very clear and specific brief to be given to participants: what is the goal here? Is it (a) to delete (CSD/PROD) pages clearly contrary to WP:NOT (e.g. BLP which is an advert of someone obviously non-notable); (b) to re-review all articles for notability/suitability according to current NPP standards; (c) to re-review all articles according to the stricter (in practice) AFC standards; (d) some measure inbetween? What do we do with "permastubs" or pages created on seemingly notable topics (e.g. towns, species) but with no references? I'm thinking particularly of some of our longest-term editors who have hundreds of page creations with two-sentence content referenced to either zero or one secondary sources and maybe a primary source. We need ironclad consensus and clear protocol before flooding someone's talk page with 348 deletion notices.
  If we could establish a scope and community consensus then perhaps we could also have a dedicated process for deletion e.g. "Request for deletion" where established editors (maybe those with NPP rights or higher) vote (not !vote) in favour of delete/merge/redirect/keep and after an indefinite amount of time, when there's a vote tally of +3 on one decision, that decision is enacted; at any point, someone could put the request on hold if they wish to do deep research and improve the article significantly. — Bilorv (talk) 01:58, 31 October 2020 (UTC)
• As a way of reducing false positives, would it make sense to exclude those articles flagged as containing text taken from the 1911 and Britannicas? IIRC, a large number of early articles were pre-populated using text from them since they were public domain. If it was in the EB, it stands to reason it's notable. Matt Deres (talk) 15:40, 31 October 2020 (UTC)
• I like this in theory, and my thoughts mostly align with Bilorv's first paragraph. There are quite a few absolutely terrible articles I've found that date from the late 2000s. My guess is we can remove all articles tagged with a VA, with more than X revisions, with more than X pageviews that came from PD encyclopedias, rated as a certain class (B? GA? FA?) and have a relatively high feel that they are good. This is assuming the project is just to get rid of the most blatantly non-notable articles-- we would likely have no choice but to give the doubt to borderline cases to get through 3-million articles? I'm also concerned that this may result in flooding the deletion processes unduly. But again, it's something that does need to be done. Eddie891 ^Talk _Work 16:52, 3 November 2020 (UTC)
  • My honest prediction is that there's going to be a high percentage of albums/songs related articles that need dealt with, most of which can be redirected without PROD/AFD, for the simple reason that inclusion standards for albums/songs has gotten a lot higher lately. Although there are going to be some tougher cases. Doing CAT:NN cleanup a few months back, I found an article that had been a straight copyvio since it was created in 2008. Generally, we'll only need to sort through stuff that's kinda slipped through the cracks. Anything rated GA/FA is more than likely notable, as is anything tagged as a vital article. Eliminating articles with x number of revisions would be a good idea, as we should probably focus on the ones that slipped through the cracks. This has the potential to have massive scope creep issues unless we specifically narrow what we are looking at. IMO, the best way to do this is to find screens that will focus in on the ones that slipped through the cracks. Purging enwiki of every single non-notable article would be nice, but there's no way that can be accomplished. So let's just focus on a subset of articles, and see which ones are fine (which is surely many), and which ones shouldn't stand alone. I'm predicting a lot of WP:NALBUM and WP:NSONG failures, as well as a good deal of WP:DICDEF issues; those are generally better handled with merging/redirection. Hog Farm _Bacon 17:07, 3 November 2020 (UTC)

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Comment. Sdkb, I found this interesting former task-force that perhaps you may find useul in its approach, strategy, methodology, etc.: Wikipedia:WikiProject Good articles/Project quality task force/Sweeps. Cordially, History DMZ ^{(talk)+(ping)} 15:48, 13 November 2020 (UTC)

@History DMZ: Thanks, that's useful! {{u|Sdkb}} ^talk 16:04, 13 November 2020 (UTC)

@Sdkb, @GenQuest, @Bilorv, @Hog Farm, @... There are clearly quite a few people who'd like to see this WikiProject exist. I get that there are still some particulars to figure out and possible concerns to address, but consider creating the project now, while there is some momentum left. Otherwise, you run the risk of this proposal going stale and leading to nothing. Kind regards from PJvanMill)talk( 01:47, 24 March 2021 (UTC)

@PJvanMill: Thanks for the follow-up. I'll start building out the project at WP:WikiProject Sweep. I will definitely need some help, though, especially from more technical editors who can do things like help build the categories of articles to review. {{u|Sdkb}} ^talk 01:59, 24 March 2021 (UTC)

The discussion above is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.

Project launch

Hi all! Tagging those who commented on the proposal: @Danre98, Techie3, GenQuest, Bilorv, Hog Farm, Remagoxer, Jh15s, Berrely, JesterSocks, Ajpolino, Pigsonthewing, Graeme Bartlett, Matt Deres, Eddie891, History DMZ, and PJvanMill: welcome! I'd appreciate help spreading the word about the launch of this project. Please also feel free to help build the project page. I laid out the basic game plan I think we should follow in the stages section; the first step is discussing here which articles to include (see below), and the second step is launching a WP:CENT-listed RfC to affirm community consensus for the sweep. Please let me know how that sounds and if you think we should make any changes. Cheers, {{u|Sdkb}} ^talk 03:48, 24 March 2021 (UTC)

Building the set of articles

Okay, so our first major task is building the list of articles to be swept. Per the project proposal, this will include all articles that meet two criteria: (1) created before a TBD cutoff date, and (2) does not fall into any TBD exclusion categories. I'll create subsections below for us to discuss each of those things. {{u|Sdkb}} ^talk 03:48, 24 March 2021 (UTC)

Cutoff date

Very roughly speaking, this is somewhere in the late 2000s or the early 2010s. One potential date that comes to mind is the establishment of comprehensive new page patrolling, which I think was launched about this time. Could someone sleuth out when specifically that was? {{u|Sdkb}} ^talk 03:48, 24 March 2021 (UTC)

Patrol started logging on 16:58, 16 November 2007. Page curation first log event was on 21:54, 6 September 2012. Graeme Bartlett (talk) 04:35, 24 March 2021 (UTC)

@Graeme Bartlett: What's the difference between patrolling and page curation? Is it that page curation is comprehensive (i.e. every page goes through a queue) whereas the patrolling was just ad hoc? If so, I think the curation might be the better cutoff date. I found Wikipedia:New_pages_patrol#History, which seems to indicate that NPP was at least being set up in 2011. {{u|Sdkb}} ^talk 04:44, 24 March 2021 (UTC)

Wikipedia:New pages patrol goes back to 2004 as a proposal. Page curation is adding the tags, with an interface to allow deletion or maintenance tagging. It was a WMF extension to help with patrolling. I don't know when pages were no-indexed till patrol though. Graeme Bartlett (talk) 07:41, 24 March 2021 (UTC)

I don't think NPP was particularly comprehensive or organised before Kudpung's reforms c. 2011. Those led to the creation of Wikipedia:Page Curation, which was deployed on 20 September 2012. So that could be a good, relatively conservative cutoff. @Kudpung: would know more though. – Joe (talk) 20:20, 24 March 2021 (UTC)

Exclusion criteria

We have a whole bunch of possibilities here. I think we should aim to include all categories that indicate that an article has passed a quality review or is otherwise unlikely to be totally a mess. Here's some ideas:

• Is or was ever a GA, FA, or FL
• Had a peer review
• Is a disambiguation page or another type of non-article article
• Is listed as a Vital Article at any level
• Survived an AfD after the cutoff date
• Had non-minor edits by more than some number of editors
• Is in Category:Wikipedia articles incorporating text from the 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica

These all seem like very safe criteria. If we wanted to get a little more aggressive, we could add B-class articles (but that's a little risky, as anyone could have self-assessed) or articles with high pageviews (but this should overlap with number of editors, and I think it's better to go by that than number of readers). Something to note is that we can always loosen our standards after we get under way, but it's a lot harder to tighten them if we notice questionable pages slipping through. Also, once we agree on these standards, I think they should be somewhat fixed, e.g. if someone adds a page from 2006 to the VA5 list a month from now, it should still be swept. This is to prevent editors protecting questionable pages who get wind of the sweep from trying to evade it. Does anyone have suggestions on other criteria we might want to include, or concerns about the criteria I denoted above? {{u|Sdkb}} ^talk 03:48, 24 March 2021 (UTC)

If some of these have not been edited since the cutoff then something is wrong! and it may well not meet today's standards. Though for some of these (vital, GA, FA, Britannica, AFD survival (if individual), peer review) you can expect that notability is passed, as that will have been examined properly. One issue cropping up recently is FLs that are not notable, which should probably go to AFD. So neglected old FLs should get a checkout. Disambiguation page, set indexes, outlines, should get a checkout. Redirects probably don't need any checking. Graeme Bartlett (talk) 04:49, 24 March 2021 (UTC)

Notability is explicitly not part of the GA criteria and I've seen at least two GAs (including one I reviewed) have their notability later questioned (IMO one was notable and the other wasn't). Graeme makes a good point about FLs. Even the AfD point... I've seen some very low-quality pages survive AfD due to lack of participation (even though it seems to me like the current rule is treat the close like evaluating an expired PROD if there are no "keep"s).

However, given that the project is huge-scope, it's probably not worth the labour power to go through e.g. all the GAs to find maybe 100 that are borderline at AfD, when there are populations with much higher proportions of badness. I might even start with something like "stubs and unassessed pages created by an IP (back when IPs could create articles)". Or, the "cutoff of X edits by Y different users" would be a good one if we can establish what realistic and useful bounds on this are, by sampling some bad old pages. If the task gets close to completion, only then is it worth thinking about what the next category is.

I think what we'll be looking for is (a) people acting in good faith who have no idea of our rules; and (b) people acting constructively but the standards have now changed. So I wouldn't worry about anyone trying to evade exclusion criteria or anyone who B-rated their own article. I don't think it's a major factor or that there are many cases of someone trying to "hide" an article from us. — Bilorv (talk) 12:53, 24 March 2021 (UTC)

Surviving an AfD is not necessarily a good indicator of notability unless you can limit it to those that closed as 'keep' with >X participants (say, five). The others seem reasonable. Eddie891 ^Talk _Work 14:45, 24 March 2021 (UTC)

I might suggest avoiding FA since there is presently a parallel process. Or coordinate. W/e. --Izno (talk) 15:08, 24 March 2021 (UTC)

Izno, the FA sweeps seem to be aiming to do a much more thorough job. When we talk about "basic conformity to modern standards", we're not talking the FA standards, but more cleaning out/tagging the "how on earth does that exist on Wikipedia?"-type pages. {{u|Sdkb}} ^talk 19:48, 24 March 2021 (UTC)

That's even better reason not to add those to the list? --Izno (talk) 20:36, 24 March 2021 (UTC)

Yes, certainly. {{u|Sdkb}} ^talk 20:38, 24 March 2021 (UTC)

Thinking in terms of cost/benefit, GA+FA+FL+PR+VA+EB11 combined is going to be such a small proportion of the total that I'm not sure it would be worth the extra script-writing effort exclude them? It will also only take a couple of seconds for anyone patrolling them to see that they're fine.

Non-article articles like disambiguation pages can also hide a lot of cruft, so I think those should be included if they meet the other criteria. Again, they will be very quick to patrol so it doesn't seem like it would cost much, relatively speaking.

I would focus on the criteria to exclude articles that have been actively edited since the cutoff; that's the only one that looks like it will exclude a significant number of pages, and it will probably catch most of the others anyway. – Joe (talk) 20:44, 24 March 2021 (UTC)

One thing I notice for older articles, is that they can have a lot of minor gnome edits over the years, eg MOS compliance, spelling fixes, category renames, tagging, template restructuring without any textual change or checking if the topic is suitable. So many useless articles will be edited over the years. It will be the very basic ones with no templates that remain untouched. It would be good if we can find articles that only have minor edits after the cutoff date. This will be more work than just no editing after the cutoff date. Graeme Bartlett (talk) 23:23, 24 March 2021 (UTC)

I think we're going to run into one type of article that could cause lots of trouble - old one-liner place stubs. For instance, last year, a group of editors including myself discovered that a single editor had created about 3,000 mostly non-notable one-liners about places in California (2009-2011). The same user also created about 5500 one-liners for uninhabited locations in Iran, and looking through the first page of Special:AncientPages, that's mainly short stubs and SIAs for places in Russia. Those could be quite tricky to deal with - I don't know that we can trust mass-creation of geography stubs, and I'm aware of at least 4 situations where the mass-creation was of very low quality. Hog Farm _Talk 03:24, 25 March 2021 (UTC)

Broadly agreed—this is the thing I was thinking of in my comment at the original project proposal. WP:PLACEOUTCOMES says "Cities and villages anywhere in the world are generally kept, regardless of size or length of existence, as long as that existence can be verified through a reliable source", so I'll assume we're talking just about more minor geographical locations than that (like the uninhabited locations). I would support mass redirection of such content to the next-largest notable place, unless notability (say, three sources in something that's human-compiled, rather than from a database dump) is clearly established. Part of the reason for this is exactly what you say, that the mass creations have been found to be of very low quality in the past. This should be true as a rule, because if someone is creating thousands of sub-stubs on minor geographical locations then there's simply no way they could be doing this in a high-quality manner, due to the faultiness of underlying data sources. — Bilorv (talk) 09:20, 25 March 2021 (UTC)

June 2021 follow-up

So, following up on all this, I think to move things forward, we're going to need someone with the relevant technical expertise to create potential lists for us so that we can see how much changing various criteria expands or contracts the counts. This is more complicated than what PetScan can handle, so I'll put an invite at WP:Request a query and see if that draws anyone. {{u|Sdkb}} ^talk 21:46, 4 June 2021 (UTC)

@Sdkb There's a lot to process above. What lists precisely are we looking for? – SD0001 (talk) 09:06, 5 June 2021 (UTC)

@SD0001: It seems like 20 September 2012 may be our cutoff date, and that "had non-minor edits by more than some number of editors" may be our most significant exclusion criterion. So to start, it'd be helpful to have some figures/examples about how many/what sort articles would be in our set if we include all articles created before that date and that have non-minor edits by fewer than X editors for various values of X. Does that help? {{u|Sdkb}} ^talk 02:49, 6 June 2021 (UTC)

@Sdkb I created Wikipedia:WikiProject Sweep/Pre-2004 - not really what you asked but this alone took 2.5 hours to execute. Doing it for 2012 instead of 2004 will certainly timeout. See also WP:RAQ#Help wanted compiling list for WikiProject Sweep. – SD0001 (talk) 16:21, 7 June 2021 (UTC)

Thanks SD0001, that's helpful to see the pre-2004 list with <10 edits. Perhaps we could extrapolate out how many articles would likely be in the set total if we chose X=10. I think we still need more info before we'd be able to make any concrete decision, though; hopefully someone else at RAQ may be able to help further. {{u|Sdkb}} ^talk 17:19, 7 June 2021 (UTC)

• I've tried following up again at VPT this time; see Wikipedia:Village pump (technical)#WP:SWEEP queries. {{u|Sdkb}} ^talk 06:55, 30 June 2021 (UTC)

Level of scrutiny desired

Following up from the comment Bilorv made at the proposal, one thing we should figure out early is the level of desired scrutiny we're going to ask reviewers to pay to these pages. If we go too strict, we're never going to get through the queue, and if we go too loose, this project won't do much good. My suggestion is to use roughly the standard for NPP, or maybe something slightly weaker. Basically, determine whether the article notable and whether it has glaring problems that need tagging (e.g. NPOV, copyright violations, lack of references) but don't worry about fussier things like making sure it's fully categorized, tagged with all the relevant WikiProjects, compliant with the manual of style, etc. Does that sound about right? {{u|Sdkb}} ^talk 04:03, 24 March 2021 (UTC)

Well that won't improve things much for the pages we retain. So how about we do some things to assist, eg bolding the title, adding categories, run AWB against it to fix some common errors. If citations are structured then use citation bot, and if bare urls then refill. Graeme Bartlett (talk) 04:35, 24 March 2021 (UTC)

If we can build patrolling tools that make that stuff really easy, then sure. But if we're going to get through several million pages, we can't really set our sights too high. Keep in mind that for most pages, if they're at all important, they've likely already had those things done. {{u|Sdkb}} ^talk 04:48, 24 March 2021 (UTC)

If we are doing several million pages, then the job will never finish. But for 10,000s of pages it is feasible. 100,000s pages puts it in the same league as Wikipedia:Typo Team/moss which is multiyear. For AWB you can give it a list to deal with, and for me it takes about 10 seconds per page, with check that the right edit happens. For citation bot you can dump in a category, and let it work away by itself. Graeme Bartlett (talk) 04:56, 24 March 2021 (UTC)

I think we want to keep it as quick as possible. If individual reviewers want to also run AWB and categorise or whatever else is worthwhile, they should be encouraged to do so, but the minimum standard should just be to determine whether the article meets the standard we are assessing it for. As for that standard, I'm in several minds. "GNG or TNT" could be one idea—we move on immediately from every article that's notable and has some encyclopedic content. That leaves us with pages to CSD, PROD, AFD, or immediately redirect or merge, on the grounds of notability or that all of the content of the page is a copyvio or a blatant advert. — Bilorv (talk) 12:59, 24 March 2021 (UTC)

I think a basic check in regards to notability and whether the article is at least somewhat up to scratch followed by perhaps some minor changes (nothing major content wise but things like Graeme suggested and perhaps grammatical cleanup) and maybe an class assessment is the most we can realistically do with the amount of pages. Remagoxer (talk) 16:20, 6 April 2021 (UTC)

I agree with Bilorv, if it's notable and reasonable, move on. Eddie891 ^Talk _Work 14:45, 24 March 2021 (UTC)

No new templates

Consider modifying/using Template:Article history rather than introducing a new Template:Swept. Izno (talk) 15:55, 24 March 2021 (UTC)

Izno, I like that suggestion. The last thing I want to do is to contribute to banner bloat. Adding to article history for articles that use it would be a good option. Many of these pages will be very low-traffic, though, and might not be using {{Article history}}. An alternative would be to use talk page messages, which would allow the sweeper to leave a brief comment if they want, and would get naturally archived after time if the page is active. {{u|Sdkb}} ^talk 19:52, 24 March 2021 (UTC)

I was wondering whether the best procedure might be to tag all the articles (at the top, by bot) with something like {{Old article, needs review}}. As they're presumably very low-watched pages, it's not a major disruption; if you wake up and find 200 pages on your watchlist with this tag then that's good, because presumably you've been monitoring the pages or know that they are in reasonable shape, and can just remove the tags to save us the time. Otherwise you might be the best-placed person to review them. The other advantage is that I think I might stumble across these sort of pages naturally from time to time, and it would be good for me to see by banner at the top of the article that it's on the review list, rather than me having to navigate through a bot dump of 10,000 pages beginning with "A" and searching for the article that I just found because I was trying to do some other small task there. This approach does have its possible drawbacks, though. — Bilorv (talk) 20:01, 24 March 2021 (UTC)

Bilorv, that's another interesting idea! The main drawback I see is that, if we track the pages by a maintenance tag, that prevents us from having any sort of restriction on who can do the sweeping. Letting people choose the pages they review and letting anyone do it seems like it could be a bad combination for COI. {{u|Sdkb}} ^talk 20:32, 24 March 2021 (UTC)

Yep, this is the main drawback I had considered too. Two variants on the idea I thought were: (a) some user script you can install that highlights the article name in red or puts a line at the top saying "Unreviewed in the 2021 sweep" (problem: someone has to write it. Not sure how long writing a script takes or whether it's worth the effort); (b) you can only remove the tag by going to a Sweep subpage which is under ECP and removing the article from the "Unreviewed list", and if you try to remove it manually, a bot will just re-add it (problem: will cause major confusion to newbies and a lot of edit warring and people coming to noticeboards confused about "how do i remove this tag on my article?"; then again, that's almost a way of baiting COI people into drawing volunteer attention to bad articles that need to go). — Bilorv (talk) 20:41, 24 March 2021 (UTC)

I think that articles should probably have article history regardless. I know that SV was bemoaning its general lack of use by the major scripts/bots of late. --Izno (talk) 20:35, 24 March 2021 (UTC)

I think a good general principle would be that pages shouldn't be edited until something substantial is done to them, i.e. when they're "swept". Don't underestimate how annoyed people get by watchlist clutter, or how many old pages are lingering in old editors' watchlists! That excludes using tracking categories or a preemptive cleanup template. What you could do is maintain a central, bot-maintained list of pages to be swept, but have humans do everything through a user script. So they could click a button to patrol the next article on the list, or see an indication that a page hasn't been swept if they come across it another way. The script then updates {{article history}}/adds {{swept}} to the talk page, and a bot updates the central list accordingly. And you can restrict who has access to the script. – Joe (talk) 21:09, 24 March 2021 (UTC)

Proposed flow

I think we need a flow chart or at least a flow-list of how an article is to be addressed, to be sure we're all on the same page. GenQuest ^"scribble" 00:00, 25 March 2021 (UTC)

It depends on the standard reached. If it is the same as NPP, File:NPP flowchart.svg can be used. Otherwise it's relatively easy to make a good SVG flow chart in a program such as Flow.io. — Berrely • ^Talk∕_Contribs 07:42, 25 March 2021 (UTC)

Discord

Is anyone here (aside from Izno) in the Discord server? Remagoxer (talk) 19:24, 25 March 2021 (UTC)

Update: I'm aware that Sdkb and Berrely are in the server. Remagoxer (talk) 19:58, 25 March 2021 (UTC)

@Remagoxer: I am in the server. Danre98^{(talk^contribs)} 22:51, 1 July 2021 (UTC)

Part-offwiki methods for larger numbers of articles?

I realise that the number of old articles to check seems terrifyingly high, and so you're trying to cut down on the numbers. I'm not totally sure that this won't remove the wrong articles from the sweeping process (somebody above suggested removing EB1911 articles, most of which are fine notability wise but many of them fail NPOV and other core policies), and would suggest to think about how to do the sweeping as efficiently as possible instead.

Basically, what I'm imagining is having a Toolserver-based tool that sweepers have access to that presents you with a page created before day X, and you then have three buttons: accept and remove from sweep, skip to let others decide, and edit on Wikipedia (with or without removing from sweep). You could accept articles in a few seconds like that and get through the unproblematic 2.5 million of the 3 million articles in something like 3000-4000 people hours, which isn't actually terrible. Storing the data about what has been swept offwiki saves a couple million edits and avoids craziness on watchlists. (You could also have more buttons for semiautomatic addition of suitable cleanup tags).

Things like this (cleanup organised via offwiki tools) have been done before (and may still be happening): we used to have an offwiki tool to resolve interwikis that would present you with two pages in different languages and make you click on "same topic"/"different topic"/"don't know". —Kusma (talk) 09:12, 30 June 2021 (UTC)

revival attempt

@Sdkb Hello, I've been independently working on something similar to this project's goals, partly based on a personal metric of "link density", but also based on roughly the first million page IDs, mostly from this query over on Quarry, which I'm sure could be improved upon as I'm far from a coding expert(i haven't yet figured out how to exclude list articles, as an example), but has proved fruitful as I've been able to successfully PROD almost a dozen articles created from 2006 or prior. Mostly coming in here to get guidance from a more experienced user on this matter as I've been getting some pushback on my methods of improving these (as seen in my user talk page), as well as seeing if my "link density" metric and the related query would be useful to this project, as the above talking point of 2010 being the cutoff is I think too big, at least as a starting point, given we had about 3.2 million articles created by that point, vs my query producing just under a tenth of that, and being much less in a "transitional period" of Wikipedia's practices. Akaibu (talk) 06:39, 1 November 2024 (UTC)