Wikipedia talk:Wikipedia Signpost/2022-09-30/In focus

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Well, this is very discouraging to read. I know the project has to prioritize some projects over others but it's the patronizing attitude and the ignoring legitimate inquiries that are the most annoying. The problem is that there is no obligation for WMF to pay any attention to editors' concerns, I think they mainly respond because they don't want negative optics that would result to complaints that aren't met with some kind of response, even if it is pro forma. As far as the Board goes, I think they are so involved in big picture subjects that improving tools that some editors rely upon to do their work doesn't rank up there in what gets their attention. But, I've found in similar situations that persistence in asking questions until one gets a truthful answer can bring some results, even if one doesn't like the answer one gets. Liz ^{Read! Talk!} 00:52, 1 October 2022 (UTC)

Not to dispute the larger point that WMF may have trouble prioritizing high-impact work, but what are some concrete examples for the "Software improvements, both bug reports and feature requests, that would help and encourage reviewers do this job [but] have been languishing unaddressed at Phabricator for months and even years"? "Show, don't tell" might also work better in convincing board members, and enable them to ask more pertinent questions in their conversations with the WMF executives that they oversee. Regards, HaeB (talk) 01:59, 1 October 2022 (UTC)

Hi HaeB, this is a newspaper article about the Open Letter campaign. The WMF is fully aware of the bugs and features that need addressing, and have been for a long time. This article addresses the fact that the board stated publicly that they are not involved in worflows of individual projects. You can watch the linked video yourself or read the transcript provided in the article. Kudpung กุดผึ้ง (talk) 04:03, 1 October 2022 (UTC)

The worst bug is that it doesn't always create AFD pages. phab:T238025 Another bad one before I fixed it recently was prod tagging was broken; the reason was always blank. These bugs are so bad that many patrollers have to use Twinkle. There are also over 100 tickets open on phabricator. –Novem Linguae (talk) 07:21, 1 October 2022 (UTC)

Before you fixed it? Hope you billed the WMF for it - are you aware of the salaries and perks their devs are on? Kudpung กุดผึ้ง (talk) 07:58, 1 October 2022 (UTC)

HaeB, I had to smile at this attempt to complain about the article in an edit summary: ...not all Signpost readers might be steeped in the history of ACTRIAL, they only have to look to the right at the list of articles in the Series table of contents - there are links to two Signpost articles about ACTRIAL. Kudpung กุดผึ้ง (talk) 08:04, 1 October 2022 (UTC)

The Series ToC doesn't appear in new Vector until the last section and not at all in mobile. Given we've discovered the hard way that this piece is rather sensitive to layout adjustments, what do you think of a note that this is best experienced in desktop mode and a link to force desktop like so? Rotideypoc41352 (talk · contribs) 02:49, 2 October 2022 (UTC)

Hi Rotideypoc41352, Thanks for pointing that out. Any post-publication issues are best discussed with the Editors-in-Chief or their colleagues such as Bri or Headbomb on the newsroom talk page. A large number of editors have read the article already and you were the only one to point out the fmt bug on mobile. It's certainly worth considering for future articles that have a lot of sidebar content and quotes. Kudpung กุดผึ้ง (talk) 06:34, 2 October 2022 (UTC)

I echo the sentiments of frustration, and concern. The direction the WMF has taken is reminiscent of a RGW, political soapbox for social justice, and a voice for developing countries. While it is commendable in the context of humanity, it is not what the hand that feeds the WMF is needing. We need a focused tech team to develop the tools we need to do our job. We needs stats so we can determine what areas need the most work and help us further determine the best remedies. The shovels and wheelbarrows aren't working, we need a backhoe, frontend loader and dump trucks. We need the WMF to provide the tools we need or risk the encyclopedia being buried under mountains of garbage. Atsme 💬 📧 16:09, 2 October 2022 (UTC)

You mean the sidebar headed "RELATED ARTICLES / NEW PAGES PATROL"? It’s not visible on Timeless at tablet-portrait width, either. I didn’t know it existed until I read @Rotideypoc41352's comment. ⁓ Pelagic ( messages ) 03:37, 5 October 2022 (UTC)

Reply from WMF product staff (and invitation to continue the discussion!)

Hello everyone – I’m Marshall Miller; I’m a Group Product Manager at WMF, and I’m one of the people at WMF who has spent time working on and thinking about New Page Patrol on English Wikipedia. I’ve gathered up notes from the rest of the team and checked in with Selena Deckelmann (the WMF's new Chief Product & Technology Officer), so that we can respond to the open letter from the New Pages Reviewers, and this Signpost “In focus” piece. Thank you all for working hard on the difficult task of reviewing pages, and to those of you who have made improvements to the software by submitting patches, and I hope we’ll have good conversations going forward.

We definitely agree that New Pages Patrol's work is important: keeping out newly-created articles that are bad-faith, self-promotion, or simply not ready for inclusion in the encyclopedia. We can see that there's lots of support in the community for improvements to lighten the workload for New Pages Patrol's hard-working reviewers, and so we'd like to invite New Page Reviewers, and whoever else is interested in the PageTriage software and new page processes, to a meeting to talk more about the specific needs and work together to improve the process (more information at the end of this reply).

For those that may be newer to this topic, we’d like to share some information about WMF's support for the PageTriage extension:

• The PageTriage extension was developed by the WMF's original Features Engineering team in 2012, in partnership with English Wikipedia editors. Over the years, the New Page Reviewers have built extensive workflows and processes around the original tools.
• In 2017-2018, at NPP’s request, the Community Tech team ran the ACTRIAL research study to evaluate the impact of restricting page creation to registered users. As a result of that research, the restriction was made permanent.
• Following that study in 2018, in response to community requests, the Growth team made some improvements to the extension by adding quality assessments and copyright violation scores for each page, and allowing people to filter based on those qualities. This work also made part of the toolset usable by the Articles for Creation process.
• In the 2019 Community Wishlist Survey, User:Insertcleverphrasehere posted a proposal: Page Curation and New Pages Feed improvements. New Page Reviewers and supporters came out in force to vote for that proposal, and it ended up as the #1 proposal for the year. (Here are the results.) Because of the high number of votes, the Community Tech team worked for more than six months making improvements to PageTriage, completing 13 different wishes that were prioritized by the NPP members.
• There have been two Community Wishlist Surveys since, in 2020 and 2021, but those years didn’t have a Community Wishlist proposal about PageTriage.
• In the recording for the 'Conversation with the Trustees', we wanted to clarify that the trustees said that New Pages Patrol and Articles for Creation workflows are community developed, not that the PageTriage extension is.
• There are some more details about the WMF's support for PageTriage in a previous response posted before the letter was published.

We understand that the people who worked on the open letter would prefer ongoing dedicated resources rather than relying on the Community Wishlist. As we continue this discussion going forward, we just wanted to say that the Community Wishlist remains an opportunity. Given the success of the NPP proposal in 2019, and the strong show of support from the signatories of the open letter, it's likely that a proposal to the next Wishlist Survey in January 2023 would be successful, and would result in more improvements to PageTriage.

But thinking more broadly, (like we mentioned above) we'd like to talk further about what the group considers to be the top priorities for improving the extension. When we invest in tools and features, we want to build things that work well for as many people and communities as we can – we’re trying to think about the reviewers, the new editors, edit-a-thon organizers, and the different languages and wikis around the world. We will be inviting anyone interested to join us for a conversation where we can hear about your priorities and get perspectives from other wikis and parts of our communities that are interested in new pages work. We will work to find a convenient time in the coming weeks where we can all meet to discuss and will follow up at NPP's talk page with an invitation. Please feel free to share it with anyone who may be interested in the discussion.

We're looking forward to continuing the discussion, and also please let us know if this reply should be posted in other places! MMiller (WMF) (talk) 01:49, 1 October 2022 (UTC)

Marshall, thank you for reacting, but this is a newspaper and a place for user comments on the article. It is not the organ of the authors of the Open Letter or the NPP team. You were specifically requested by them some time ago to place any WMF comments on the letter to a designated page for any replies you wish to be considered as official. There is no guarantee that the 444 editors concerned with the Open Letter action are all readers of The Signpost. In fact when I was E-in-C I was surprised to discover just how many editors are not even aware that The Signpost exists, it was only my initiative to include a watchlist notice that brought it to the attention of a few more users. If you want to be sure that your post receives the attention it deserves, you may wish to repost it at the page you were linked to, but the NPP is really expecting some response there from some very senior staff, among whom are those who allocate the vast surplus of funds. Kudpung กุดผึ้ง (talk) 03:20, 1 October 2022 (UTC)

Now that I have read your long comment Marshall, I do want the readers to know that you and I collaborated on some PageTriage developments a few years ago and how pleased I was of the excellent experience working with you after the abuse and personal attacks we have received in the past at Bugzilla, the precursor to Phabricator. You can read about that collaboration in a Signpost article I wrote in 2018 at NPR and AfC – The Marshall Plan: an engagement, or a marriage? which credited you with that work, but at no times has PageTriage been a community initiative or development. Most scripts written since by community volunteers are workarounds for bugs or to plug holes left in the tools - effectively this has been doing the WMF engineers' work for free. As far as the Wishlist is concerned, the NPP team received a comment from Product that in the same message accused thed NPP of not availing of the Wishlist but that on the other hand hat they don't have time or money to address the NPP concerns anyway - it's all in the article above, Putting ACTRIAL back in its correct context, Mr Horn only acquiesced following a long essay from me and a community threat to end article creation through the implementation of a local filter. The results of the ensuing trial were a staggering confirmation of how completely wrong the Foundation had been in its assumptions. Let's not forget that PageTriage was developed by the Foundation as a consolation for their brutal condemnation of the massive community consensus for the first ACTRIAL attempt (at the time one of the most heavily participated RfC in Wikipedia history). There have been many software developments that the various communities have not approved of and sorry to say, but it is hardly surprising that the communities who have no other voice are sometimes obliged to recourse to radical action. The NPP community still has a blank page waiting for WMF and/or BoT response. Kudpung กุดผึ้ง (talk) 04:03, 1 October 2022 (UTC)

I will also just add, in an attempt to contextualise your comments about the Wishlist, that readers who are really interested in what went on there should read the whole discussion, including, but not only these responses to FF-11 and Jo-Jo Eumerus who opposed it:

We were not that keen to take up a slot in the community wishlist either (although the wishlist is not just for proposals that help 'all users', this is the 'Admins and Patrollers' section after all). We have been forced to come here as a last resort as we have been told in no-uncertain-terms that they won't even do bug fixes to the existing tools unless we come here. It's a crappy situation, but we don't have an alternative. As for a potential for over-proceduralization of NPP, I'd be keen to discuss in more detail elsewhere (please contact me on my talk page). Cheers, — Insertcleverphrasehere (or here) 16:28, 17 November 2018 (UTC)
[A}s can be seen, many of the various wish list requests do not address all users. However, the impact of New Page Patrolling/Reviewing affects all new users who wish to create new articles. The current level of 'proceduralization' has never changed since NPP was introduced at the very beginning of the Wikipedia. These requsts do not over-proceduralize the process, nor do they even add any more layers of bureaucracy to it. They simply improve the work flow for the users who do this thankless task and who are unable to keep up with the flood of junk that will fill the encyclopedia if they don't. Kudpung (talk) 06:38, 18 November 2018 (UTC)

And the patrollers are still unable to keep up with a new kind of junk (very recent classic examples available, you only need to ask - or do some patrolling yourselves!) Kudpung กุดผึ้ง (talk) 04:42, 1 October 2022 (UTC)

@MMiller (WMF): I spend several hours reading through, voting on and advocating Wishlist proposals most years, but I find your references to it here to be quite bizarre. Due to the extremely limited proportion of resources that the WMF gives to Wishlist implementation, the project is largely a failure on the WMF side, and year on year you have had to water down pledges to implement the top 10 proposals, to implementing the top 5 proposals, to "no promises but we'll try to implement something, but not the ones with the most votes".

NPP can only succeed in the Wishlist at the expense of some other area of Wikimedia that desperately needs it as much, or moreso. Your suggestion is that the we fights over scraps, dividing our community in the process. My suggestion would be that the WMF stops acting like a dragon guarding a pile of gold and spends its overabundance of money on bugfixes rather than on paying its employees to write written feedback on why the WMF is declining to fix high-priority bugs. Examples of "wishes" are improvements to watchlists, new translation features and expansion of the notification functionality. A non-example of a "wish" is that the button in your software that's supposed to create an AfD page reliable does create an AfD page—this is essential maintenance. — Bilorv (talk) 18:11, 1 October 2022 (UTC)

In general, I'd love to see the community tech team, the team that does the wishlist, receive around triple the devs it currently has. And also for the wishlist to run twice a year. Tools for editors and power users, requested by editors and power users, should be a very high priority. –Novem Linguae (talk) 19:30, 1 October 2022 (UTC)

Bilorv, I think most of us on en.Wikipedia will concur with you 100% - you have summarised boldly what the authors of this article avoided spelling out so clearly for fear of retribution - indeed emails from some quarters led us to have genuine fears that the powers that be would order the E-in-C not to publish it; indeed as there had been no reference in the newsroom to the article from the editorial team, we were not sure about anything until we actually saw it in print.

The NPP people were embarrassed in 2019 at having squatted the Wishlist's bandwidth for six months where other users' requests were just as valid but did not have such a powerful voice. This is the failure of the well intended voting system. A reason why use of the the Wishlist was not heavily pursued in later years was to avoid provoking the ire of others by squatting it again - which is probably what would have happened, and partly because at the time, despite huge backlogs NPP did not have a particularly strong leadership - any de facto coordinators were caught up in RL or other Wikipedia stations that demanded more of their attention. It's only now in recent months that a couple of users have picked up the thread and decided to take action which has long been overdue.

The NPPers' main contention however, is the WMF's constant claim of not having enough cash, which everyone, absolutely everyone, knows to be total hogwash. This is why NPP is expecting a few personal words of engagement and reassurance from the CEO and Ms Denkelmann on the designated response page rather than them telling their staff to reply and here in the readers' section of a newspaper. But those at the top are probably too aloof to address us unwashed hordes, and we've seen it all before from their predecessors. It looks very much like a "Someone please do something about this rubbish from the rabble" command (but probably more like: 'Selena, can you tell Danny to tell Marshal to say something to these people'). In the meantime, the BoT is still deliberating what to say on the response page and emails from them suggest only that NPP representatives should take part in their next videoed state-of-the-nation speech. (a bit like the Wishlist all over again...). Kudpung กุดผึ้ง (talk) 01:36, 2 October 2022 (UTC)

• Novem Linguae, the WMF staff structure is very opaque, but as far as I can see, the Wishlist is part of Community Tech which is a sub-division of the Growth team, which is somehow governed by 'Product' . Because the PageTriage software isn't the only thing at stake here for the quality of new articles, at least doubling or tripling the number devs is the only real solution The WMF has more than enough funds to afford it. You will know what's involved with coding in MediaWiki from the hours you have spent on having to do the devs' work on NPP for them for free. Kudpung กุดผึ้ง (talk) 06:23, 2 October 2022 (UTC)

  Hello @Kudpung @Bilorv @Novem Linguae -- thanks for reading my reply and writing out your thoughts. Like Kudpung recommend, I've now posted the reply to the talk page for the letter itself, where hopefully lots of people will see it. So I suppose going forward we should continue the conversation there? Either way is fine with me.

  Thank you, Kudpung, for giving me additional background and detail both here and on my talk page. I'm glad you're optimistic that WMF staff and volunteers can work well together in the future. The main next step will be this meeting that I mentioned, and I hope you all (Bilorv and Novem Linguae, you too) want to attend. I think in that talk, we'll be able to touch on some of why it's more difficult than it seems for us to dedicate ongoing resources to PageTriage.

  It was interesting to hear what Kudpung said about not wanting to monopolize the wishlist for multiple years. I hadn't heard that perspective before (but maybe others at WMF had).

  I also just wanted to add a little bit of clarity about our structure in the Product department, so that it's not so confusing. The department is made up of "feature teams" which have responsibility for building user-facing features (like the Growth, Editing, Language, and Community Tech teams). There are also the "functional teams" which provide support to the feature teams (like the Product Analytics or Design Research teams).

  For historical reasons, the Growth team is the owner of PageTriage -- that's because the team used to be the "Collaboration" team, which was responsible for many of the tools editors use that are not the visual editor and wikitext editor (which are owned by the Editing team). For the last few years, the Growth team primarily focuses on experiences for new editors, and tries to provide some maintenance support for things like PageTriage. That team is one of the three teams that I manage, along with Editing and Web.

  Community Tech is the team that does the Wishlist. They're a unique team because instead of owning a specific domain, they are responsive to the wishlist survey, and therefore can work on lots of different domains. They are one of the teams that Danny Horn manages. And so this is why you hear from both Danny and me about PageTriage -- both our teams have worked on it. I hope that helps! MMiller (WMF) (talk) 18:50, 3 October 2022 (UTC)

Thank you for replying Marshall. Different managers within the same groups have very different opinions as to the importance of a process such as NPP. That's why the community looks forward to working with you as soon as the Foundation staff who have their fingers on the purse strings commit to funding a few more salaried code writers and not with employees who state these requirements should be ported through the Wishlist and in the same breath say there are not enough resources anyway. The English Wikipedia community knows full well that the Foundation's claims of being short of cash are total hogwash. Kudpung กุดผึ้ง (talk) 01:12, 4 October 2022 (UTC)