[AFC reviewers] must have demonstrated that they understand WP:PROD, WP:AfD, and WP:Notability, and are able to interact with other users in a polite, friendly, and helpful manner. -- Kudpung, 18 October 2013

Relevant links RFC that set stage for this RFC Enable/disable Yet Another AFC Helper Script gadget AFC Helper Script WikiProject AFC

At Wikipedia:WikiProject Articles for creation/RfC Reviewer permission a consensus was reached to introduce a permission system for reviewers. The topics on what the permission threshold should be, and how it would be implemented, were deliberately left open.

1. This RfC discusses suggestions for the threshold of experience for users to demonstrate that they are adequately versed in the policies and guidelines involved for an article that can exist uncontentiously in mainspace.
2. This RfC does not discuss how this threshold will be granted and/or implemented. That will be the topic of a further discussion, when the threshold itself has been established.
3. This RfC is not a vote. Participants are invited to discuss what would be a reasonable threshold. The closer will assess the outcome based on the discussion.
4. Consensus has been reached for this permission, this RfC is not for rediscussing whether a permission is needed.

• Reviewer (Pending Changes Reviewer): Quick check to ensure edits don't contain vandalism, violations of the policy on living people, copyright violations, or other obviously inappropriate content. The threshold is deliberately low but Reviewers are not expected to be subject experts and their review is not a guarantee in any way of an error-free article. They are expected to have a reasonable editing history, distinguish what is and what is not vandalism, and be familiar with basic content policies.

Reviewer permission are specified as follows:

1. You have an account, and routinely edit.
2. You have a reasonable editing history – as a guide, enough edits that a track record can be established.
3. You have read our policy on vandalism and understand what is and what is not vandalism.
4. You are familiar with the basic content policies: Biographies of living persons, Neutral point of view, No original research, Verifiability and What Wikipedia is not.
5. You are familiar with the basic legal policy: Wikipedia:Copyrights.
6. You have read the guideline on reviewing.

Permission is granted by an admin.

• Rollbacker: While there is no fixed requirement, a request is unlikely to be successful without a contribution history that demonstrates an ability to distinguish well intentioned edits with minor issues from unconstructive vandalism. Users with 200 edits (generally discounting those to their own user space) can apply for training to the WP:CVUA. Admins rarely grant the tool for less than a clear run of at least 100 reverts of clearly identifiable vandalism without errors. Significant experience is needed to identify the kind of edits that may not appear to vandalism at first sight e.g. inappropriate edits missed by the bots and abuse filters.

Permission is granted by an admin.

• Stiki: The account must have either: (1) the rollback permission/right, (2) at least 1000 article edits (in the article namespace, not talk/user pages), or be approved after discussion with the developer.
• Huggle: Requires rollback permission in order to function but does not otherwise have an approvals system.
• AWB: Users must be added to a whitelist in order to use AWB. Only admins can edit the whitelist, and admins automatically have access. As a general rule, only users with more than 500 mainspace edits will be registered, and admins tend to only give access if a user has specified a task they want to use AWB for.

• I'll start the ball rolling here with a fairly low threshold. Having seen plenty of the kind of errors that are made by editors who review AfC, I suggest that the minimum should be based on candidates having the choice of satisfying either of these two criteria (but not a lower mix of each).

1. Must have both Reviewer and Rollbacker rights, and have demonstrated that they have used these correctly within a minimum of 500 mainspace edits, and a minimum of one month tenure.

or

2. Must have patrolled at least 200 pages at WP:New pages patrol without recent error and demonstrated that they are a) familiar with the tags and deletion criteria offered by the Page Curation Toolbar without error. b) made significant use of the 'message to the creator' tool.

3. Above all, candidates must have demonstrated that they understand WP:PROD, WP:AfD, and WP:Notability, and are able to interact with other users in a polite, friendly, and helpful manner.

Kudpung กุดผึ้ง ( talk) 02:25, 18 October 2013 (UTC)

Does Page Curation need to be singled out? Don't a lot of users do NPP with other tools, like Twinkle? I think you should refer to NPP-related tags and criteria in general. Also, I think reviewer/rollbacker would be fine with one-or-the-other, rather than needing both. Jackmcbarn ( talk) 03:21, 18 October 2013 (UTC)

NPP should only be done nowadays with the Special:NewPagesFeed which does not use Twinkle. There may be a few editors still using the old page feed, but that system has been redundant now for a long time. Kudpung กุดผึ้ง ( talk) 04:39, 18 October 2013 (UTC)

I happened to just ask Dragonfly67 on IRC the other day, and he doesn't use the curation tool... Not implying one way or the other whether or not he would want AfC reviewer (yes, I obviously realize as an admin it doesn't really make much difference), just wondering if someone like him that doesn't use page curation but has patrolled thousands of pages should really be excluded. TL;DR, I think that saying that curation tool use is a requirement of proper page patrolling is inaccurate. Technical 13 ( talk) 04:49, 18 October 2013 (UTC)

Ditto... I patrol off WP:SCV and #wikipedia-en-spam. What we are looking for are speedy deletion accuracy and PROD/AFD nominations getting deleted. MER-C 05:19, 18 October 2013 (UTC)

MER-C, That's probably what you do, and naturally you are perfectly free to pick and choose how, what, and when you do, but patrollers should be aware of the recommendations at WP:NPP otherwise they are not really helping the project. I, for example, generally only look for blatant candidates for ultra speedy - and some of them I then summarily delete already - leaving the rest for other patrollers to figure out and learn from; I certainly don't plod systematically through the list, well, not these days - three years ago I cleared about 20,000 from the backlog in as many days, but I guess I was still full of Wikithusiasm. IMHO the new page feed and its curation tool is a brilliant piece of software; the only problem is that it's only any good in the hands of users who know what they are doing. Kudpung กุดผึ้ง ( talk) 07:02, 18 October 2013 (UTC)

• I would like to see a certain number of articles created, perhaps 20, as a criterion for this user right. This would allow a fair assessment of the user's understanding with regard to article creation in my opinion. Additionally, I think the right could be bundled with autopatrolled just as well as sysop.— John Cline ( talk) 03:23, 18 October 2013 (UTC)

While I like the idea of requiring some article creation experience I'm afraid 20 is far too high a threshold. I had been active here for 5 years and logged about 20,000 edits by the time I created my 20th article. Many of the most suitable candidates for AfC reviewer are those editors who have a lot of "wikignome"-editing experience - they generally don't create many articles. In any case "articles" is not a very useful unit of measurement - because both a 50-word stub about a village in Uzbekistan and a comprehensive GA-rated article about an obscure disease count as "1". I would give the right to the creator of one comprehensive article before I give it to a stub-mill with hundreds of three-sentence stubs, that just barely scrape past the minimum standards, on their scorecard. Roger (Dodger67) ( talk) 06:47, 18 October 2013 (UTC)

Dodger67, for 'Autopatrolled' the default criterion is 50 articles. However, admins review these carefully, discount redirects and dab pages, and and don't generally accord the right to '100 stub wonders'. 1-line stubs about one specific topic area do not demonstrate a sufficiently broad knowledge of policies and guidelines, especially the mass creators who use AWB or their first stub as a template. Kudpung กุดผึ้ง ( talk) 09:26, 18 October 2013 (UTC)

When I saw the topic, I was going to suggest article creation as a possible prerequisite. If as high as 20, I'd recommend that it replace one or more other requirements. If standalone, I would recommend a lower threshold, perhaps 5, but those articles must demonstrate knowledge of notability, reliability, independence, etc. If more than 5 articles are created, not all need to pass this criteria (some should could be stubs), but there must be 5 that do, and there must not be recent creations that demonstrate lack of knowledge in the critical areas. 78.26 ( I'm no IP, talk to me!) 12:09, 18 October 2013 (UTC)

That largely echos my thinking. Article creation is good, but expansion of a stub to a full-blown article may be worth as much or more.-- SPhilbrick (Talk) 13:40, 18 October 2013 (UTC)

While creating content within an existing article is an important measure, it presumes the existence of a notable article, rife for improvement. Article creation better demonstrates the all important ability of identifying notable subjects. AfD participation is perhaps another good way to gage clue in this regard.— John Cline ( talk) 14:03, 18 October 2013 (UTC)

• Question as I'm seeing a lot of numbers or other rights being required here, which would be a major hurdle for many existing reviewers without of "grandfathering" of some kind. I'm not saying that these requirements are necessarily bad, just that they may be overzealous. Along the same lines as WP:CVUA for Rollbacker, I would like to think that a user without any of Reviewer or Rollbacker or 500 mainspace edits or 200 WP:New pages patrol or 20 created articles but who has demonstrated that they understand all of the proper policies (especially WP:Notability) via an AfC specific training program would be eligible. Technical 13 ( talk) 03:35, 18 October 2013 (UTC)

• Kudpung said:

  Above all, candidates must have demonstrated that they understand WP:PROD, WP:AfD, and WP:Notability, and are able to interact with other users in a polite, friendly, and helpful manner.

You nailed it right there.

Any counts or other criteria we come up with are just ways to tell those who have done this from those who haven't, without having to spend hours wading through prospective reviewer's wiki-histories. davidwr/( talk)/( contribs) 00:47, 19 October 2013 (UTC)

@ Kudpung: I hope you don't mind, I turned it into the {{ tmbox}} at the top. davidwr/( talk)/( contribs) 01:08, 19 October 2013 (UTC)

I mind. Promoting one person's comment above all others with a big flashy spotlight is not conducive to consensus-building. -- ShinmaWa^{( talk)} 01:19, 19 October 2013 (UTC)

• There was a lot of concern during the previous discussion that this would be a privilege which would be bestowed on some editors by others. This is how I envision the process working:

• The Afc helper script be changed to only function for those on the Wikiproject AfC reviewer list.
• The list could be on a protected page so that someone with regular reviewer rights would be needed to add names.
• On request, an editor would automatically be added if they had reached a certain level of editing (for example, 2000 edits and one year of experience).
• Editors wanting to review sooner or with less experience would have to meet the lower numbers of edits and time served mentioned above, and also convince a reviewer to add them to the list by demonstrating such items as Kudpung has mentioned above.
• Names could be removed if problems cropped up (such as frivolous or frequently incorrect reviews).

The reason I suggest the addition of an automatic pass level is that I believe that many of the people who supported the previous Rfc only did so because they believed that it would be an automatic rather than requested permission. — Anne Delong ( talk) 03:50, 18 October 2013 (UTC)

Despite "Consensus has been reached for this permission, this RfC is not for rediscussing whether a permission is needed." I still think that this is an incredibly bad idea and will ultimately complicate a process that is already so heavily bureaucratized and understaffed that it has had to come and beg people to help multiple times.

That being said, my suggestion is that rather than make the criterion based on vandalism fighting, we make it based on content creation. The permission would be given to:

• Autopatrolled (automatically, by making adding it to the autopatrolled package)
• Anyone with at least one GA or at least two DYKs
• Anyone that has a track record of positive work doing AfC reviews (before the RfC)

Admins should feel free to assign the permission to anyone that qualifies. Rather than set up a request board, the AfC instructions should instruct people looking for reviewer permission to ask an admin already involved in AfC.

Finally, and I can't stress this enough, the AfC reviewer userright group should never be used to determine recipients for mass messages. AfC has, in my opinion, a shockingly bad track record when it comes to soliciting participation from people that don't want to hear from AfC, and no matter what the ultimate decision about what the AfC reviewer criteria is, plenty of people are going to be given the userright despite having no interest in AfC reviewing (not least because admins will get the right automatically, as they do with almost every other right).

Cheers, Sven Manguard Wha? 06:32, 18 October 2013 (UTC)

• I'm still confused as to why we're talking about a userright. What technical privilege would it confer, and has anyone taken the time to ask the developers if this would actually be possible or even desirable as MediaWiki functionality? Ironholds ( talk) 06:38, 18 October 2013 (UTC)

We can restrict use of the AfC tool. I'm not sure if that conforms to the definition of a userright. Re: "Has anyone taken the time..." Would you mind being a bit less combative? In the previous RfC, linked above, someone with (WMF) in their sig, who seemed to know technical stuff chimed in. -- Anthonyhcole ( talk · contribs · email) 07:03, 18 October 2013 (UTC)

Ahh. Me or Sven? Sorry if I'm coming off as combative; that's not the intent. Userrights are software-recognised things that permit or restrict MediaWiki actions; admin is a userright that allows access to things like Special:Block, autopatrolled lets MediaWiki automatically mark a page as reviewed, so on and so forth. From a MediaWiki point of view, AfC does not exist; it's not special functionality, just a set of pages. So I'm trying to ascertain if people have actually spoken to the developers and asked if this makes sense as a technically-implemented userright. If not, some of the comments above (rolling it in with autopatrolled, for example) seem unnecessary, and people might want to use less confusing terminology. Userright == MW-recognised status that grants access to special functionality. AfC is not software-recognised functionality.

The WMF-person I can see is Steven Walling; his statement was "I have no idea whether it will be even possible to fulfill the request from a technical perspective". So, this probably needs further investigation before rather than after criteria are established. Ironholds ( talk) 07:08, 18 October 2013 (UTC)

Thanks for clarifying userright. We should probably determine what level of competence a person needs to have demonstrated before being permitted to review AfCs, before discussing whether we need to enforce it with a technical fix. I proposed earlier in this discussion that we use Wikipedia:Reviewer as a marker for adequate competence, and use social control to enforce it along with changing the AFC tool script to prevent anyone not on Special:ListUsers/reviewer from using the tool. But I pulled it, wondering whether that's setting the bar too low. Regardless, we can probably do what we want here without involving MediaWiki development. -- Anthonyhcole ( talk · contribs · email) 07:32, 18 October 2013 (UTC)

I don't know the plans for how to implement this, but a user right does not necessarily need to give access to extra special pages. For example, Commons has the OTRS-member, and the only difference between "OTRS-member" and "autopatrolled" is that an "OTRS-member" can add certain templates to a page without triggering Commons:Special:AbuseFilter/69. This user right could potentially be used in a similar abuse filter to prevent addition of certain AfC templates. -- Stefan2 ( talk) 13:17, 18 October 2013 (UTC)

( edit conflict)Once again, as there is little likelihood that a MedWiki solution will be granted - or even asked for, the question is moot. Some non MedWki methods have already been suggested and even by Brandon himself with whom I had a lengthy (and exceptionally friendly) discussion in Hong Kong. It's been mentioned dozens of times that permissions are needed for several MedWiki-independent actions. They are however listed at WP:PERM as the portal for permissions that are granted by admins. So again, we are discussing something that is not on the agenda of this RfC. Implementation/deployment comes later. Kudpung กุดผึ้ง ( talk) 07:35, 18 October 2013 (UTC)

I am befuddled by this counsel! Considering notes 1 thru 3 of the original RfC, how can one say another's suggestion is moot upon its rendering? Otherwise, this is not a request for comment, but instead, a request for support; of ideas apparently already decided.— John Cline ( talk) 09:35, 18 October 2013 (UTC)

Absolutely not, John. This is a think tank with an objective to define some criteria of experience for reviewing articles submitted to AfC. As stated in the previous RfC, what these criteria would be are for discussion (now here), and how it would be implemented will be discussed when the criteria have been established. One of the reasons that Wikipedia RfC fail or become overly convoluted is that there is often a tendency to discuss tangential issues at the same time, or ones that are not yet up for debate. Ironholds has made it perfectly clear that he will resist any suggestions to make this a MedWiki based 'user right', but has mistakenly assumed that that was the intention (on both this and the previous RfC). That said, if indeed any of the senior staff at the WMF decide that this 'permission' is of significant interest to entertain a MedWiki solution, we would be most pleased to hear about it, but we are not aware of any such offers as yet - in fact a closer look at my comments will reveal that I concur entirely with Ironholds that this is not a MedWiki operation, hence such suggestions are off topic as being evidently unworkable. Kudpung กุดผึ้ง ( talk) 10:27, 18 October 2013 (UTC)

In my opinion it would greatly serve this discussion if there was a definitive answer regarding MediaWiki support. If the entire modification is to be implemented at the WikiProject level, then yes, we are straying off topic by suggesting a new userright, whether automatic or granted; and should therefore focus the eye of our brain storm locally. That said, the best solution to my eyes involves MediaWiki support, and I for one wish we had garnered that support already. Otherwise I think Graeme Bartlett is correct that a blacklist is the way to segregate bad apples and I suppose we could use discretionary sanctions to ban individual involvement where cause has been shown. Notwithstanding, I am optimistic that better ideas are forthcoming, provided we don't stifle the creative flow of ideas by the heavy hand of pessimism.— John Cline ( talk) 13:24, 18 October 2013 (UTC)

Sorry to keep coming back to this John, but I think Ironholds (whichever hat he is wearing) has made it already abundantly clear. We're essentially discussing a set of criteria for a 'permission' rather than a 'User Right' per per Foundation semantics. I had an interesting in-depth discussion on this very topic with Brandon Harris, Erik Möller, and Steven Walling in Hong Kong and although they made some very interesting suggestions how we could approach an improvement to the AfC process, I do not believe there would be a spark of optimism for a MedWiki solution unless this were to have a cross-Wiki rollout. Personally I think it's best for us to find our own solutions locally. There is a faint chance that if they see we're making a superb effort in the right direction ourselves (as they did with NPP) they may step in towards the end bearing gifts, but I wouldn't bank on it. That said, although we want to avoid hat-collecting, I'm very suspicious that one of the reasons why NPP performs badly is that it ironically doesn't have a hat to collect although it demands far more knowledge than PC Reviewer or Rollbacker. Only today I came across a blatant long copyvio synthesis of multiple academic papers completely wrongly tagged by a 14-year-old patroller, who even apologised to the creator and removed the tag again! How many 100s of users would we need to blacklist before we have a few dozen reliable AfC reviewers left? A blacklist only shuts the barn door after the horse has bolted. Kudpung กุดผึ้ง ( talk) 14:54, 18 October 2013 (UTC)

What were their suggestions? And this isn't a Foundation POV, this is a software POV - the two are very much distinct. Ironholds ( talk) 16:39, 18 October 2013 (UTC)

Their suggestions are for a different discussion. As to WMF vs Software, you are best placed to know these things, but as far as the community is probably concerned, the Foundation holds the keys to development priorities, the human resources, the servers, and the funds. Please note that I support your theory that this is most unlikely to be accepted as a MedWiki request and I'm doing my best to stifle any sidetracking on the assumptions that it will. That said, from what I have heard from the Foundation staff and from competent programmers among the volunteer community, it won't be too difficult to find a local en.Wiki solution, whether a social one or one governed by some kind of script(s). Kudpung กุดผึ้ง ( talk) 17:53, 18 October 2013 (UTC)

If all that we want from this is to limit who uses the Afc Helper script, I don't see why any WMF changes are needed. The script is developed by our volunteer coders here. As I mentioned in my suggestions above, to enforce this all that would be needed is (1) The list of reviewers on the "Participants" page would be protected so that someone with Reviewer status would be needed to add a username, and (2) The script would check the list and only work for a username on the list. Whatever criteria we decide to use, this combination should prevent random new users from coming along and adding themselves to the list. — Anne Delong ( talk) 22:42, 18 October 2013 (UTC)

And what does that solve? The AfC Helper script is just a helper. There's no requirement to use it. It provides no functionality that a user can't do without it. AfC went a long time without having it, so I'm not sure what restricting it from some users accomplishes. If this whole RfC is about limiting a helper script, we really don't need an RfC at all. Just code it. However, the initial RfC made it very clear that this isn't just about the script. So, if it isn't a bit and it isn't just the script -- what is it? -- ShinmaWa^{( talk)} 23:42, 18 October 2013 (UTC)

I was just about to redirect this deep thread to ShinmaWa's question-section at the bottom. Agreed that there is no software-enforced requirement that only threshold-approved official AfC folks are permitted to perform AfC actions... but we can make that the *default* way that AfC is handled, and folks doing it *outside* the default way (with exceptions made to grandfather-in people with 10k edits that are using old-school tools or their own custom workflow or whatever) will therefore stick out. This makes it easier to see who is 'officially' doing AfC within the threshold-limits, of course... and if needed, we can tell people doing it *badly* outside the threshold helper-script world to please stop, right? I think enforcement without no cracks in the security is *not* the goal here, because WP:AGF. 74.192.84.101 ( talk) 23:58, 18 October 2013 (UTC)

• In my eyes, an AfC reviewer should experienced enough that they would easily qualify for the rollback tool. Putting that aside, I would agree that having at least 1000 mainspace edits is a good idea for an AfC reviewer. I would not say that the conventional reviewer right was enough; it's one thing reviewing and rejecting vandalism, and a whole other one reviewing a whole article. I don't see how GA/DYK/FA count should be relevant. The "autopatrolled" bar is too high for the AfC reviewer right; and as I've said before, you can be a great article writer but very poor at reviewing other's works. Having to patrol 200 things at NPP is excessive, although I agree that some experience is required (maybe 25-50?), due to that being one of the more relevant comparisons. I'll come up with my own proposal later, if I have time. Lukeno94 (tell Luke off here) 07:26, 18 October 2013 (UTC)

"Rollback" is a vandalism tool; it allows multiple edits to be undone quickly where a vandal has randomly hit multiple articles. "Autopatrolled" is intended to keep extremely prolific but otherwise harmless new page authors from flooding WP:NPP. Neither necessarily infer a better AFC reviewer, although they normally are given to someone who is doing no harm. A good or featured article usually has multiple contributors instead of being WP:OWNed by one primary author; someone who'd submitted a pile of stubs in 2002 on valid topics, left the project for a decade and then returned to find some were expanded to GA/FA level would be given more credit than due. An editor which pulls a topic off the WP:AFD pile and rewrites it to WP:FA status, conversely, is not credited with creating an article. All of these metrics have their limitations - preview nothing before you save it and you can run up edit count more quickly, for instance. Experience writing valid articles or bringing existing articles up to some standard (off AfD to viable, off stub/start to B/A/GA, ordinary article to FA) is valuable but collecting privilege flags or edit count just for the sake of doing so does not always guarantee a better reviewer. K7L ( talk) 14:18, 18 October 2013 (UTC)

We should consider what we are trying to achieve here:

• Firstly we want to build the encyclopedia. So such a person should show that they can recognise the useful content for Wikipedia. The person should be able to understand what is and is not a suitable topic. They should be able to find a duplicte topic.
• Secondly we want to encourage the contributors, so we want the candidate to be able to talk to the contributors to explain what is needed to improve or to make an acceptable article. The person should be civil in their communication.
• Thirdly we want to keep it legal, so the candidate should be able to recognise a copyright infringement, or an attack page.
• Fourthly some nice to have features: The person can add categories and stub tags. The script seems entirely cabable of adding the almost useless orphan tag, so I hope our person can also show that they can edit articles to link to pages, including use of piped links.

Graeme Bartlett ( talk) 07:59, 18 October 2013 (UTC)

Pretty accurately sums up what I said in my suggestion, Graeme. What we're looking for now are some metrics that define those qualities for the purpose of according the permission. Kudpung กุดผึ้ง ( talk) 08:56, 18 October 2013 (UTC)

So I am not so demanding in predefined standards, but the candidate should be able to show these capabilities. If a person is asking for it they can show diffs that illustrate these capabilities. I do agree that NPP is quite a useful precursor experience for AfC reviewer. The other flags such as rollback and reviewer are not directly relevant, but certainly would show that the editor is constructive. If the person does not want to do 400 NPP items, perhaps they could do some apprenticeship work, perhaps checking AFC contributions and giving feedback to a mentor that would prove that they are on the right track. Graeme Bartlett ( talk) 10:11, 18 October 2013 (UTC)

I see that 200 has grown to 300 and now to 400. Sounds a bit Falstaffian ;) Mine were but the first suggestions to get the ball rolling and I knew it would entrain some discontent; let's lurk awhile and see what others may suggest. Kudpung กุดผึ้ง ( talk) 10:38, 18 October 2013 (UTC)

I like Graeme's ideas, and as a submitter I would love to work with an AfC person who met all these criteria... but I am very hesitant that some of them can be decided without fawning, interviewing, role-playing sessions, and other expensive overhead. (Yes, we are all volunteers for the most part, I'm talking about opportunity cost here... every minute an existing AfC person spends interviewing an AfC candidate, is *two* minutes that those people could have been actually whittling down the AfC queue backlog.)

   In particular, Graeme's point#2 about being an encouraging person, explaining things well, invariably civil, good looking, well dressed... okay, not those last two. But I hope the point is clear: there is no way to automatically test and verify those things. Just because somebody is good with those things in a one-hour interview is also no guarantee they will be that way *every* day, to more or less *every* contributor they happen to work with. Some people have a naturally sunny, cheerful, helpful disposition: I've met a few librarians like that, and many teachers. But for every one of those, I've interacted with hundreds if not thousands of fast-food clerks, waiters in restaurants, checkout clerks at the grocery store, floor assistants in retail stores, tech support folks via telephone or IM, and so on and so forth. It is *hard* to be consistently nice, consistently helpful, explain intricate details fully, and all that. Such people are diamonds in the rough, not grains of sand lying on the beach. If we *do* get a gemstone in AfC, I'd recommend we use them as a second-tier, for when contributors have trouble with their first tier person for whatever reason, they can be passed to the sunny cheery natural teacher sitting in the tier-two chair.

   Since point#2 took so much verbosity, I'll hit point#3 super-lightly: don't we have copyvio bots? And aren't BLP articles a specialist niche, given their legal-kryptonite-status, which ought be directed to *only* the AfC folks most experienced with such things? Point#1 methinks we *can* auto-test, see my 74-whatever comment below, and some of point#4 is also either auto-testable, or demonstrable in a three-minute (as opposed to three-hour) interview process. 74.192.84.101 ( talk) 06:58, 19 October 2013 (UTC)

74 it sounds like you are raising the quality bar on the point 2, I was not expecting the behaviour always, but enough to do the job and encourage the contributors. The idea was not to have just gamers that can only push buttons. BLPs are most of what we have (may be companies too) so we need people to handle them too. But perhaps also we need people who can recognise their own limitations and not attempt something the mess up. So even someone that can decline a joke or vandalism can be useful if they just stick to that. Graeme Bartlett ( talk) 21:33, 19 October 2013 (UTC)

Well... I'm not really trying to raise the bar, so much as point out that cheerfulness is a spectrum, but with some pretty well-defined focus-areas. I'm actually trying to lower the bar, if anything. I think we want the tier-one AfC candidates to be the equivalent of the sales-associates at the designer clothing store: efficient-n-quick with straightforward purchases, at least minimally friendly, but do not really have time (and thus do not really need to have the skillset) for solving difficult sticky-wicket cases. If you are trying to create an article about a BLP, who was formerly a relatively unknown business owner, but just announced their candidacy for the mayorship of a large city, and leapt to frontrunner status in the polls, then the sales-associate can send your article on through. If your little brother has a garage band, and the school newspaper mentioned their name once, and that is it so far, then the sales-associate can politely tell you WP:NOTNOW.

   The grey areas are more tricky, where something is borderline-Notable, but requires more depth in the sources, or whatever. I want those types of grey-area cases to be quickly glanced over by the first-tier sales-associate, and then passed back to the second-tier cheerful-librarian-associate. If the second-tier folks cannot solve the issues in a timely fashion, I want the third-tier to be, that the submitter is redirected to the WP:TEAHOUSE to find help doing the rewrite, and their AfC submission goes to the back of the queue. TLDR, rather than insist that our sales-associates aka AfC reviewers *must* be "interviewed for cheerfulness and tested on how sunny their disposition is", methinks we just need to remind everybody to be WP:NICE, which is required of *all* wikipedians anyways. If we happen to run across somebody that is *naturally* cheery and sunny, then we should then 'promote' them to tier-two work, where their special skill is extra-applicable: handling grey-areas. HTH. 74.192.84.101 ( talk) 20:57, 4 November 2013 (UTC)

• We have copyvio bots, but they probably can't be used until AfC submissions are made on a namepage e.g; 'Draft', instead of a talk page or sub page. Kudpung กุดผึ้ง ( talk) 02:59, 20 October 2013 (UTC)

• User:MadmanBot already scans AFCs (it misses at least some copyvios) when it's working. Patroller recognition of copyvios is still a must. MER-C 04:34, 21 October 2013 (UTC)

Okay... and how do we test whether an AfC reviewer-candidate possesses that special skill, ability to sniff WP:COPYVIO? There is a tool for analyzing whether URL#1 and URL#2 have copyvio problems. And there are bots that detect plagiarism, kinda-sorta. But short of glancing over the output of such tools, can humans really detect COPYVIO? I guess some things will be obvious, like a submission that says "copyright New York Times" at the top or the bottom of the text, or more subtly, text that has a bunch of internal links that are not wikilinks, but look like they came from a view-source-cut-n-paste job. But baretext submission, that was cut-n-pasted from the middle of some obscure website? Seems unlikely an AfC reviewer will detect the plagiarism with their spidey-senses. Maybe it's not that hard, because the plagiarized portion sticks out as a different 'voice' from the other portions of the AfC submission? (If there is a knack to copyvio-sniffing, methinks the parallel-primary-criteria scheme is useful training.) 74.192.84.101 ( talk) 21:06, 4 November 2013 (UTC)

• agree -- phoebe / ( talk to me) 19:18, 30 October 2013 (UTC)

Oppose any creation of a new right that resembles a "collectable hat" in any way, or that makes editors of this, "the encyclopedia that anyone can edit" more dependent upon bureaucracy.

We have a vandalism problem that ab initio editors can pop up, trash an article, post spam links and wander off. We have no checks on this. We allow unregistered editing and we allow unregistered editors to wreak all manner of havoc on established articles. I thus fail to see why we should start narrowing down AfC in particular to a subset of editors willing to jump through hoops.

In particular, making AfC review dependent upon a discretionary permission like rollback. I don't have rollback. I did have, and it was removed for a disagreement over regarding this edit / User_talk:Andy_Dingley/Archive_2009_September#Reversion as vandalism or not. Ever since then I've made a point of never asking for such a discretionary permission, lest it be pulled by some teenage admin with an axe to grind.

I can see some virtue to restricting AfC review (and think a lot more things, up to basic editing) should be restricted. But can we please keep this to a very lightweight, automatically-granted permission, not one dependent on cliques and fawning. Andy Dingley ( talk) 09:39, 18 October 2013 (UTC)

I agree with all the goals put forward by Graeme Bartlett.

So far the suggestions have mentioned edit count, rollback, AWC, etc. as prerequisites. However none of those things truly show that one can review articles well. What is a better way to prove your worth at reviewing articles, than reviewing articles? I propose that every candidate find 5 pending articles they would decline, and 5 they would accept and they would have to explain their reasoning, citing policy. They should also be able to explain WP:BLP, WP:NOTABILITY, WP:VERIFIABILITY, etc. An admin would then review their responses and choose whether to accept them as a reviewer. Thoughts? Ross Hill ( talk) 16:30, 18 Oct 2013 ( UTC) 16:30, 18 October 2013 (UTC)

It's a bit hard to find acceptable articles...how about 5-8 articles total, whether acceptable or not? Howicus (Did I mess up?) 23:46, 18 October 2013 (UTC)

Oppose "admin would then review". I don't see any reason why administrators are required for this process, unless there's a technical implementation requirement for them to be. -- ShinmaWa^{( talk)} 23:48, 18 October 2013 (UTC)

I wasn't really focussing on any specifics. I don't care if it's an admin, or an experienced reviewer. 5 articles, or 3. I just want feedback on the idea. Ross Hill ( talk) 23:52, 18 Oct 2013 ( UTC) 23:52, 18 October 2013 (UTC)

Fair enough. Of course, how feasible this suggestion is depends upon the implementation (which is why it is folly to attempt to separate criteria from implementation). However, given all the social-based implementation ideas presented so far, including AfC mentoring, elaborate testing, and the like, this one is the best so far, I think. However, it would need to be fleshed out quite a bit on the specifics of who gets to review, based on what objective criteria, and -- to beat the dead horse -- how approving an applicant would be implemented. -- ShinmaWa^{( talk)} 00:03, 19 October 2013 (UTC)

I have fleshed out an implementation plan for Ross Hill's idea, which I believe is the only truly fair (and predictive) basis for 'testing'. (My answers to ShinmaWa's questions are nobody, based on the objective performance of existing trusted AfC folks, and automatically based on the specified X-and-Y values at the time -- or perhaps retroactively.) The other criteria being discussed (editcount/etc) are all secondary criteria, which might be useful as a way to pass-the-test-without-testing, but cannot replace the trial by fire of AfC work itself. Rather than choosing articles at random, and let possibly-biased editors make the call on whether the candidate judged correctly, I suggest using real articles that are really going through AfC. If the candidate gets right answers (where 'right' is defined by the answers the actual AfC person gave) on enough of the articles, they too become an official AfC person. See here -- Wikipedia:WikiProject_Articles_for_creation/RfC_for_AfC_reviewer_permission_criteria#Suggestion_by_74-whatever

support this. If we must have a 'crat allocated privilege, then at least let's bind it to the real task in hand. Candidates review some (clarification needed) unreviewed AfC candidates, of which at least a couple must be judged pass/fail as a result. Andy Dingley ( talk) 19:26, 19 October 2013 (UTC)

It's distracting to separate criteria from implementation here, since they are closely tied together. (The criteria you use affect how you can implement it, and v-v.) So here's a joint suggestion:

Simple option

Maintain a list of reviewers on a wikipage. Let anyone add themselves; remove those who aren't working out yet. Add a feature to one of the popular review-tools that checks to see if new articles on an AfC topic are created by users who aren't on the list -- a flag that someone else should doublecheck the work.

Tying this right to 'edit count' or 'rollback' seems like a terrible idea to me. The number of people willing and able to do this work is tiny; you can interact with them all personally. Instead, tie it to a single back-and-forth welcoming interest and asking people if they feel comfortable they know what a good article looks like [with pointers].

Future technical option

Combine this with the Reviewer flag. Make this the Flagged-Revs workflow for the very first rev of an article. Make it something that is given automatically to people meeting certain threshholds, and to anyone else who asks. Allow it to be removed for misuse; but most granting of the right should be automatic, other than time spent welcoming new collaborators.

The flag should allow access to tools that make AfC work streamlined and easy, and that update any special pages that track requested articles. (In comparison: anyone, with or without this right, can browse the AfC requests and create articles based on them. But it won't be checked off of the queue until a reviewer checks that work.)

Aside: it seems to me that the impact of the Reviewer flag has been weakened by the requirement that admins apply the right, with no automatic way to get the flag. This is unlike basically every other reputation-ladder I know of. Our lack of automatic activity-based rights (other than autoconfirmation) is a waste of energy, and seems self-perpetuating. –  SJ  + 17:14, 18 October 2013 (UTC)

I totally agree. I am still against a user right for this, and reading over what is written here, it looks like what we need is a "reviewer block" for bad reviewers, not an extra reviewer right. All of the criteria I have read above just reinforces my scepticism, because whenever someone talks about "grandfathering in" they really mean "let's keep this cabal small, trusted and among ourselves". We really need to start trusting newbies again like we did back in 2006, or the editor retention rate is going to drop more and more rapidly as the "grandfathers" start to drop off, for whatever reason. Jane ( talk) 10:16, 28 October 2013 (UTC)

Alright, I'm going to cut right to the chase. I think that in order to get the reviewer right, you need to get past this. The mentoring program is currently a work in progress, but when it's done, it would be the perfect solution for the new AFC reviewer right. buff bills 7701 20:29, 18 October 2013 (UTC)

This should be one way to get the access to the AFC Helper Script. It should not be the only way (e.g. most very experienced editors with good reputations shouldn't have to "go to school" to get access to the tool). davidwr/( talk)/( contribs) 23:49, 18 October 2013 (UTC)

Seems like a great way to open a hatshop for the currently inexperienced. No, or at least very few, long term editors would go near it. Andy Dingley ( talk) 00:40, 19 October 2013 (UTC)

Andy, I'm sure Buffbills meant 'one way' as David expanded. Every single user right from Confirmed through to Bureaucrat is a millinery in our information mall, but generally only on the lower floors - anyone who has worked extensively at WP:PERM and WP:RfA knows this. However, the systems of scrutiny that accord those rights generally function well but there will always be a tiny few who loose their flags - especially admins who have an axe to grind. At the lower levels, it is even more rare for PC reviwers, Rollbackers, File Movers, Autopatrolled, etc. to be demoted, but it does happen. I've never been subject to sanctions, but as one who was bullied by two teenage admins early in my Wiki career, and completely bullied away by an admin (now desyoped) from one topic area, never to return, where I had most to offer the encyclopedia, I do follow the ANI/AN, RfC/U, and Arbcom rituals very closely even if I don't participate much there. As an admin however, I don't have any axes to grind.

Let's not get too uptight or paranoid about the occasional hat-collector slipping through the net, a system of control over who can process AfC submissions is far better than none at all or one that is accorded automatically based simply on editcount/tenure, etc. Possibly those who work regularly at AfC and its maintenance are more aware of the issues than those who don't, but what we are here to do is ask the broader community for their opinion on, and to suggest, a set of criteria that would largely contribute to improving the quality of AfC reviewing, ensure that all reviewers are singing from the same page, and are friendly to the the submitters. The permission does not grant any further rights or hamper the work of article creators who know what is expected from an article that will survive legitimately in the encyclopedia. Kudpung กุดผึ้ง ( talk) 04:47, 19 October 2013 (UTC)

I would agree with David here. We have a need to solve the current problem of poor quality reviewing. I believe we need this right, but it should be very low, based on a simple mileage count – then if needs be, withdrawn from poor reviewers, based on the quality of their reviews. Secondly we can achieve this by encouraging experienced editors to take more part (AfC review is not rocket science) and anything that could be seen as "patronising" is hardly likely to achieve that. How many 5+ year / 10s of kedits editors want to be "mentored" by someone who has maybe 6 months of springy-tailed editing inbetween school? I spent a chunk of last week being lectured on 1950s motor racing history by someone who's barely old enough to have a driving licence, but here they have the free time to do a lot of typing, so they get to shout loudly and often. Andy Dingley ( talk) 10:15, 19 October 2013 (UTC)

Buffbills7701, editors with only double digit edits regularly add their names to WP:WPAFC/P list and due to the immense workload we're not always quick enough to do something about it. Last week one registered with the sole purpose of passing their own articles. One of our concerns therefore is for the grey area of editors who review, but whom we are not aware of. I support the idea of a school for aspiring reviewers and I'm currently working with other editors to set one up. I don't believe genuine hat-collectors are very interested in going through the rigours of our various training systems (I completely redesigned the WP:CVUA from the ground up and also set up an NPP school) . One of our standard answers at WP:PERM (Rollbacker) is "Hi, I appreciate your enthusiasm but with only 46 edits to mainspace I don't think you have sufficient experience yet. When you have made at least 200 edits, you may wish to enroll at the Wikipedia:Counter-Vandalism Unit/Academy to learn more about it." Kudpung กุดผึ้ง ( talk) 04:47, 19 October 2013 (UTC)

Here's what I don't understand about all this. You've brought up this editor who registered an account to "pass his own articles" on a number of occasions. So. What. You act as if this is some kind of real crime against the project. In reality is that once he's a registered user, he has every right to create his own articles in mainspace as much as every other user does. If he wants to clear the duplicate article out of AFC in the process, there might have been better ways to do it, but overall, he didn't hurt the project at all and he certainly didn't hurt AFC one bit in doing so. That argument is completely a red herring and I do wish you'd stop using it. -- ShinmaWa^{( talk)} 19:06, 3 November 2013 (UTC)

While this RfC is primarily about the criteria, which I fully recognise, some thought into implementation needs to take place lest we paint ourselves into a corner that can't be implemented. A lot of discussion is about a UserRight bit, which has technical issues which Ironholds discussed above. There's also been a lot about restricting scripts and tools. However, while there are a number of scripts and tools available to assist with AfC, they are 100% optional. Everything done at AfC can be done without a single tool in place and was for a very, very long time.

When boiled down to its essence, AfC requires that users be able to 1) Move pages from the "Wikipedia talk" namespace into article space and/or create new pages in article space and 2) Edit existing pages in the Wikipedia namespace. That's it. Every autoconfirmed user on the planet has the capability to do this. Restricting the tooling will just restrict the tooling. It won't actually keep a single user from participating in AfC.

So, the question is this: For this criteria/permission/etc to be meaningful, failure to meet this criteria somehow has to prevent users from creating articles nominated in AfC (which has all kinds of bad second-order impacts) and prevent users from editing articles in the "Wikipedia talk" namespace that "belong" to AfC (ditto). Just how are we going to go about this? -- ShinmaWa^{( talk)} 23:15, 18 October 2013 (UTC)

"if it isn't a bit and it isn't just the script what is it?" From what I understand, it is a community standard, used by enWiki, to see who is 'qualified' to be an AfC person. It is like the ISO standard for papersizes, where there are tolerances plus-and-minus a few micrometers, but if you are within the tolerances you can say you are ISO-standard-sized A4 paper, or whatever. That does not mean that *every* piece of paper is ISO-standard, nor even that ISO-standardized paper is the best (arguably vellum is the best). It just means that, if you have satisfied whatever threshold this discussion ends up recommending, that you become a Recognized Official AfC Member In Good Standing, subject of course to other admin-actions that might keep you from acting on your over-the-threshold qualifications. Maybe someday it will be a 'real' permbit like the admin bit, where security matters... for at present, methinks it is just metaphorically an AfC-permbit, loosely enforced by community standards rather than strictly enforced by software. 74.192.84.101 ( talk) 00:03, 19 October 2013 (UTC)

"For this criteria/permission/etc to be meaningful, failure to meet this criteria somehow has to prevent users from creating articles nominated in AfC" (emphasis added). I think the 'somehow' is going to be, by manual admin intervention. If you have not satisfied the threshold, and you keep submitting perfect articles as AfC, which always pass with flying colors, who cares? If you have not satisfied the threshold, and you 'manually' create articles without the AfC helper-script, sooner or later an admin will make it their business to care, and call you out for disruption. 74.192.84.101 ( talk) 00:06, 19 October 2013 (UTC)

So, a completely social-based implementation. How does criteria play into this then? This approach winds up being a no-op and bringing us right back to where we started. Specifically, "If you don't meet our criteria, you can't play in our sandbox" just becomes "If you are being disruptive, an admin will intervene". However, that's already the case. We don't need an RfC or a bit or criteria or any of that to have admins deal with disruptive users. So, I'm quite confused as to what that accomplishes realistically. -- ShinmaWa^{( talk)} 00:16, 19 October 2013 (UTC)

Those who do not meet the criteria will be slowed down significantly, and those who make mistakes and are warned and continue to make mistakes can rightfully be called disruptive. Likewise, those who have been given access to the tool and had it later revoked and who come back and "do it by hand" in a substandard way can also rightfully be called disruptive. Wikipedia already had mechanisms for dealing with disruptive editors. Revoking access to the tools for editors who are merely incompetent can slow them down enough to encourage them to think about what they are doing, which will hopefully mean they will have a higher rate of competent reviews. Let's suppose Joe Novice Wikipedian is trying to help out and somehow gets access to the tools and makes 30 reviews in 2 days, but botches half of them. He gets access to the tools revoked but he is determined to help out. Over the next 2 days he does only 10 reviews because he's been slowed down for lack of access to the tools. At worst, we have 10 reviews to re-review and 5 to clean up. But hopefully he'll be more accurate becuase he's working slower (and gaining experience as he goes) and only flub 2 or 3. davidwr/( talk)/( contribs) 00:42, 19 October 2013 (UTC)

I can certainly respect that. In fact, I even support this approach. It doesn't take the gun away, but it removes the fully automatic selector switch. There's certainly precedence for this with Twinkle and the like. However, this begs the question if this actually meets the consensus formed in the original RfC. While I opposed that RfC, many people didn't, and I suspect some supporters might see restricting just the script as being a half-measure. *shrug* Thanks for responding, davidwr. -- ShinmaWa^{( talk)} 01:10, 19 October 2013 (UTC)

There are some very relevant comments in this thread, and I'll just reiterate that the consensus in the previous RfC was There is community consensus for the introduction of a requestable permission which will be required to review articles at Articles for Creation. - nothing more, nothing less, and that is what was asked for. Firstly, I believe even a half-measure is better than none at all, to the exclusion of any arbitrary automated granting of the access. Having a list of users who are 'authorised' to use the script is also a kind of 'half way' that we already have, but as I mentioned somewhere above, we need to get all reviewers on a list. Naturally if they get their flag removed, under the current technological aspect of the process, there is nothing to stop them continuing to do manual reviews; it would certainly slow them down, but we would know who they are. Secondly however, with a couple of thousand submissions in the queue, we don't know who is actually doing the reviews at all - we just don't have the person-power to do a double check on every submission that gets declined, moved to mainspace, or CSDd under an appropriate criterion. But we are diverging here - we need to set the criteria for permission first - and that shouldn't really be too difficult (we have enough examples cited above for the granting of various user 'rights' that do need official WMF approval) , then see how they can be technically or socially implemented. 06:06, 19 October 2013 (UTC) Kudpung กุดผึ้ง ( talk)

As mentioned by me and several other people, it is folly to attempt to separate the criteria from the implementation and it is awkward to attempt discuss one without the other. One impacts the other at a fundamental level. Further, many of the suggestions demand a certain implementation and/or precludes others. So, if we can't talk about implementation, then our criteria options become severely limited to stuff like edit counts and other similar statistics. In essence, the "no implementation" restriction steers down a very narrow set of options -- namely the options that you suggested at the top at the RfC. I think we need to look beyond that scope. -- ShinmaWa^{( talk)} 02:55, 20 October 2013 (UTC)

A userright represents the ability to use a technical feature. Since this userright won't place any technical restrictions on anyone, there is no point at all in creating it. Access to the common scripts could be toggled with or without a userright. But they could still load the same exact script via their custom JS interface, and we can't stop them from doing that. So in my mind, the prior consensus is irrelevant because it is not possible to implement.

If there is a desire to create a socially enforced white or blacklist, then we should be talking about creating a process for that, and this RfC should be closed and reframed properly, with first a discussion about whether it should be a whitelist or a blacklist, before any criteria are proposed.

A blacklist makes the most sense to me, because there is nothing at all stopping someone who isn't whitelisted from processing AfCs, and if they do it correctly, are we going to really block them for failing to participate in the bureaucracy? Gigs ( talk) 18:31, 28 October 2013 (UTC)

Leave the "Comment" button on for everyone by default.

If an editor abuses it, they can be blacklisted.

The kinds of comments editors leave are probably the best judge of whether they should get access to the rest of the buttons. davidwr/( talk)/( contribs) 00:31, 19 October 2013 (UTC)

I do not think that new people will bother activating the tool jsut to get the comment button. However I don't think that being able to comment is harmful. After all it is not that hard to edit the article and add a comment, even using the correct afc comment template is not that hard to do. Blacklisting against adding comments I suspect would be about equivalent to a topic ban. Since it is so easy to bypass I would not suggest implementing a comment blacklist. Graeme Bartlett ( talk) 21:01, 19 October 2013 (UTC)

Tweak the AFC Helper Script so everyone can use the full set of tools on no more than a handful of different submissions in a rolling 2-3 day period.

Those who abuse the tools can be blacklisted. davidwr/( talk)/( contribs) 00:31, 19 October 2013 (UTC)

I assume that you do not want to rate limit it for every one, so the users with the permission can review faster. Although I suspect our bulk and speedy reviewers do make some errors too, such as we can see by the number of AFDs and prods that pop up. Also the stuff declined for a weak reason will not show as a problem that way, but just drive away contributors and content. However I do like the idea to do a rate limit for the people with no permission, but then also add their work to a special list for extra review by others. Graeme Bartlett ( talk) 20:54, 19 October 2013 (UTC)

There shouldn't just be one route to get access to the full AFC Helper Script.

I'd give access to these buttons to anyone requesting them who:

• is a long-time Wikipedia editor with no recent relevant problems
• is grandfathered in because of significant recent AFC participation and no recent relevant problems
• demonstrated competence through intelligent, accurate AFC comments or direct feedback to editors over an extended period of time and a significant number of articles
• demonstrates competence through intelligent collaborative content-improvement in other areas of Wikipedia over an extended period of time and over a significant number of articles
• is under the training or sponsorship of another experienced AFC editor, editors, "acadamy," or similar, or has been declared to be competent to have the tools by their sponsor
• while not clearly making the cut on any one of the above, goes through a short (1-3 days?) discussion period and get the rights if there is a consensus to give it to them.

Revocation should be relatively easy, with the typical "appeal" taking the form of the 1-3 day discussion period outlined above.

Even after adoption, this list should not be cast in stone. davidwr/( talk)/( contribs) 00:31, 19 October 2013 (UTC)

I was not aware of the existence of the previous RfC and I suspect that many others were not aware either. Consensus can change, so there is no reason why we cannot now discuss whether any new permissions are needed at all. James500 ( talk) 20:03, 19 October 2013 (UTC)

Well alternatives could be a whitelist or a blacklist of those who can or those who can't. Other ideas were a series of awards to indicate progress or achievement. And there should be hat for the hat collectors. We already have barnstars and a listing of project participants. Perhaps someone can vet the newly added names to see how they are going. Graeme Bartlett ( talk) 20:44, 19 October 2013 (UTC)

That's been dicussed further up. The problem is that currently, no reviewers are obliged to enter their names on that lit, hence we do nots always even know who is reviewing until problems come to light and are brought to the AfC talk page. Most issues are handled locally on the reviewer's talk page: 'Why did you decline my submission?' which begs the question: Why was the creator not provided with more detailed information?.

Hat collecting is an unavoidable but necessary evil. We get plenty of them at WP:PERM but we are fairly good at filtering them out. Kudpung กุดผึ้ง ( talk) 03:23, 20 October 2013 (UTC)

The 'why did you decline my submission' enquiries occur even if you do explain the reasons when declining. Particularly troublesome are autobiography and WP:COI as a decline (even on material previously declined by another reviewer) often gets a flood of WP:OTHERSTUFFEXISTS and "but I worked so hard" pleas as to why the author really deserves to have their own article. This will continue even if you create roadblocks to entry for new reviewers. K7L ( talk) 21:56, 20 October 2013 (UTC)

I don't like any of the proposals that have been made, but I think that a blacklist of those who have demonstrated that they are incompetent, compiled by human beings, would be the least worst option. James500 ( talk) 07:06, 24 October 2013 (UTC)

Of all the solutions, I found Ross Hill's solution to be the most practical and useful, and hence I propose the following steps for selecting the AFC reviewers, based on a few adjustments I think should be made on it

• A selected few active and/or trusted reviewers will be grandfathered in. The exact details of how it will be done will be decided later.
• Anyone who wishes to become an AFC reviewer would be submitting their reviews of at least 10 articles currently at AFC. This would be done at a special requests page for
  • The review must be clear on why it is rejected, and any other such comments.
  • There must be at least 3 declines and 3 approvals among those submitted reviews
  • The reviews should be among pending submissions at the time of submission
  • Once any particular review is submitted, there should be no changes to it.
• These reviews are all open for comment from any current AFC Reviewers, who may choose to "Endorse" or "Disagree" with a particular review.
• Any article among the list which gets rejected or accepted externally would auto-count as an endorse or disagree by itself.
• After a period of time/ after all the reviews have been looked into, a designated person (the qualifications of which will be decided in future discussions) would close the request as pass or fail. In general, 8 or more correct reviews would count as pass, and 6 or less correct ones would be a fail.
• ^{[Additional proposal under discussion]} Any sufficiently trust candidates who have demonstated enough competence might not be required to go through this process, but handed over the tools directly on request.

This is the general schematic of how I think it should proceed. Every specific point in this suggestion is open for discussion, and would be altered as per consensus and common sense. TheOriginalSoni ( talk) 00:42, 21 October 2013 (UTC)

Support Because reviewing skill is what matters, so that should be what we test. Ross Hill ( talk) 00:59, 21 Oct 2013 ( UTC) 00:59, 21 October 2013 (UTC)

Support as ONE way Oppose as THE ONLY way. Anyone who comes in having already demonstrated competence regarding content guidelines/policies and who doesn't have anything negative should be given a pass on this. Basically, any editor who has an edit history that would make them a credible candidate at RfA (I didn't say he would pass, just that he wouldn't be WP:SNOW-closed or otherwise fail miserably) and who doesn't have any thing negative in their recent history should not be required to do more than ask for access to the tools. The same goes for editors who might fail miserably at RfA only for reasons not relevant to AFC work. davidwr/( talk)/( contribs) 01:57, 21 October 2013 (UTC)

• I failed to notice this point. I agree that WP:IAR should apply to obviously trusted candidates and they shouldn't have to go through the entire process. But at the same time, I wonder if there is any harm in having them go through this simple enough process. If others also agree to the additional proposal, I'd be willing to add it. TheOriginalSoni ( talk) 09:33, 21 October 2013 (UTC)

Neutral Overall those points look good, however the no more than "7/10 one direction" rule is going to jump up and bite a lot of hopefuls. Hasteur ( talk) 13:55, 21 October 2013 (UTC)

I'm assuming that the intent is for the candidate to have at least 3 approves and at least 3 declines among the 10 reviews, so that his competency on both approvals and declines can be evaluated. A person may be fine when evaluating an article that should be declined but he may routinely over-decline and mis-evaluate things that should be approved, or vice-versa. Too many errors in either direction is counter-productive. davidwr/( talk)/( contribs) 16:14, 21 October 2013 (UTC)

The problem I was trying to indicate is ast least in my experience, I do about 80 to 90% decline simply because it takes a lot of effort to get a submission up to the level that I would pledge my reputation to the submission by accepting it. Hasteur ( talk) 23:43, 21 October 2013 (UTC)

• Even then, I am of the opinion that there should be some limit of this sort to check for both sides of whether the reviewer knows the policies. If your concern is indeed correct, maybe we could lower it to at least 2, but I wouldn't want to remove it. TheOriginalSoni ( talk) 13:07, 22 October 2013 (UTC)

Sure, we need proof that the person can approve at least 3, and decline at least 3, and we want to have at least 10 example-decisions to look over. Rather than saying that they must have ten cases, and they must approve 3 of *those* ten, and decline at least three of *those* ten, instead make this the rule: There must be no more than 7 declines or approvals among those 10 reviews The ten selected example-reviews *must* include at least 3 approves, and at least 3 denials; note that the reviewer-candidate often may actually need to review more than ten actual cases, to achieve 3 of each type... but only ten selected cases (including at least 3 approves and at least 3 denials) will really "count" when determining whether the reviewer-candidate passes the examination. HTH. 74.192.84.101 ( talk) 21:21, 4 November 2013 (UTC)

• @74 Does the current wording of the proposal make more sense, or should there be further rewording on it? TheOriginalSoni ( talk) 07:45, 6 November 2013 (UTC)

Looks fixed to me. I noticed a spelling error and fixed it, while I was here. That said... I think your idea, like my own suggestion elsewhere on this same page, is testing the "wrong" thing for what Kudpung is really trying to accomplish. See my TLDR explanation below. At this time, I've collapsed mine, for resubmission as part of a future RfC discussion.

  The motivating problem (unstated in the RfC-intro-text which was a mistake) seems to be that Kudpung only want editors that are Ethically Committed To Wikipedia's Values to be able to perform AfC-review-approvals. There are incidents where a spammer will create an account, 'review' a small set of AfC submissions -- often given *randomized* answers which is awful for both the submitters and for the NPP folks that have to clean up the mess later -- and then approve ten of their own blatantly promotional submissions. This is particular bad when socking is involved, because without checkuser (which everybody is rightly *very* hesitant to go handing out all over the place), you end up with what looks like one username submitting to AfC, another seemingly-unrelated username adding some cites, a third username reviewing-and-approving using the AfC-helper-script, and then several 'other' usernames which make more changes to the article once it is in mainspace. But it is all the same person, or same spambot!

  Very tough to fight, right now. Even worse, the sockpuppet could pass *your* quiz, though, right? Because it only takes 8 out of 10... and then they are free to approve several hundred spamvertisments, before they finally get caught. The same problem applies to my suggestion: a motivated spammer can pass my ten-or-more quiz, just like yours. Anyways, long story short, it turns out this RfC is not about passing the 80%-correct-mark... though that skill is still crucially important, it is orthogonal. This specific RfC is about moral-n-ethical *secondary* criteria (e.g. min-edit-count to prove you love wikipedia), whereas what you and I are testing is technical-n-policy *primary* criteria (e.g. ability to get 8 out of 10 reviews correct). Suggest we submit our ideas to another, future RfC. Hope this helps. 74.192.84.101 ( talk) 22:31, 18 November 2013 (UTC)

I worry that asking potential reviewers to conduct trial reviews leaves too much room for 'instructor creep' and who will assess their performance? One person or more than one? The idea strikes me as fertile ground for creating a 'priesthood of gatekeepers' or turning the process into pseudo-RfA. I think we need to keep the process as simple as possible with a fairly black and white set of metrics to work to. Also, whatever form this permission takes, it should be transparently requestable via a noticeboard in the same way as other permissions. In my involvement at AfC, I have found that reviewers need to be able to demonstrate the following essential qualities:

1. Must be able to judge what constitutes vandalism, attack pages, and wholly negative unsourced BLPs
2. Must be able to identify copyright violations
3. Must be able to recognise WP:ARTSPAM and blatant hoaxes
4. Must demonstrate a sound understanding of notability, verifiability/reliable sourcing, and the BLP policy
5. Must be able to communicate with patience and clarity with new editors

I believe that these qualities would be best evidenced against the following criteria:

1. Must have carried out at least 50 good vandalism reverts -- a common threshold for granting of rollback (includes the speedy deletion of pages as blatant vandalism).
2. Must have correctly identified more than 5 attack pages or wholly negative BLPs, by whatever means.
3. Must have correctly cleaned up 20 articles with copyright concerns or correctly nominated 15 pages for speedy deletion as blatant copyright violations.
4. Must have copy edited/cleaned up at least 20 articles to make them NPOV compliant or correctly nominated 15 pages for speedy deletion as blatant spam/advertising.
5. Must have participated in at least 20 AfD discussions and !voted/commented with correct policy-based observations that demonstrate knowledge of notability, verifiability and reliable sourcing.
6. Must have demonstrated a sound knowledge of BLP Policy issues, by whatever means. For example, working at the BLP noticeboard.
7. Must have demonstrated an ability to help and work patiently with newer editors. For example, tea house host, adoption, help boards, user talk page assistance.

These minimum criteria could be assessed by any administrator patrolling the noticeboard, but should be rigidly applied. In the case of the right/permission being abused, any administrator may remove the right as a discretionary sanction in the same manner as other rights. Pol430 talk to me 18:00, 21 October 2013 (UTC)

I've been an editor and AFC-participant for many years and I don't think I meet all seven of the items on the bottom list, and I know that I have weaknesses in notability in certain subject areas and an inability to communicate with patience and clarity with certain editors. I'm also not as good at detecting advertisements disguised as articles as I would like, but I am getting better at that with experience. davidwr/( talk)/( contribs) 19:51, 21 October 2013 (UTC)

I'm pretty sure that you have made 50 good reverts in your Wiki career and most of the CSD criteria would be easily evidenced by someone who spent a few months patrolling new pages. Equally, participation in 20 AfD discussions is not hard for most long-serving Wikipedians to evidence. Knowledge of BLP policy can be demonstrated by various means and I think your interaction with users on your talk page demonstrates point 7 just fine. I think notability is an area that AfC can sometimes get a little hung up on. In terms of notability, AfC's job is to keep out articles about obviously non-notable subjects; this includes cases where a very solid policy-based argument for not including a subject can be made. Where notability is borderline, then articles need to have the opportunity to receive community discussion about their inclusion in Wikipedia, this means accepting a submission without prejudice to it being nominated at AfD. In cases where notability is difficult to establish because of the specialised nature of the subject area then help may be forthcoming from a relevant Wikiproject. If not, we still have an obligation to AGF and accept a submission without prejudice to an AfD nomination -- that is where the responsibility for ruling definitively on a subject's notability lays. Pol430 talk to me 16:40, 22 October 2013 (UTC)

Huh? First you said "keep it simple" and then you came up with the most complicated possible process. You laid out seven specific numerical criteria which you think should be "rigidly applied". Who in the world (either applicant or administrator) is going to go through histories counting how often someone has cleaned up copyvio or identified attack pages? This process would be unworkable, and furthermore it is not based on any evidence that these things would matter. I agree with "keep it simple", namely, let administrators review the person's contributions and decide if they seem competent enough for the task. Period. -- MelanieN ( talk) 21:39, 23 October 2013 (UTC)

Good luck with trying to search my 30,000+ contributions to check that I pass all seven "must have" criteria. Roger (Dodger67) ( talk) 09:58, 29 October 2013 (UTC)

I recognise that cross-checking those seven criteria would be laborious, but I thought the purpose of the exercise was to ensure high standards rather than dish out a new hat as quickly and widely as possible. I have struck out the criteria that were so evidently wide of the mark. Thanks for your feedback. Bellerophon _{talk to me} 00:10, 31 October 2013 (UTC) (formerly Pol430)

The list of articles waiting to be reviewed is backlogged enough, so while I agree that we do need something to make sure reviewers are qualified, those standards should not be so high that only a select few can access them. I think that the criteria should be rather vague, leaving it up to a case-by-case basis. There can be a few strict ones, like a certain amount of article space edits, but things such as "must have rollback and/or reviewer rights" seem a bit too constricting and would be thoroughly unconstructive to the main purpose: reviewing articles to add to Wikipedia. ö Brambleberry of RiverClan 23:48, 21 October 2013 (UTC)

I agree with this. The process should be simple, not stringent; we are simply trying to stop the current situation where unsuitable and/or inexperienced editors are trying (mostly in good faith) to review at AfC without sufficient knowledge of Wikipedia policies. IMO the AfC Reviewer right should be awardable by any administrator who believes the user has sufficient relevant experience to know an acceptable Wikipedia article when they see one. We trust administrators to make far more difficult/controversial decisions than this, and I don't really think Wikipedia will suffer any harm from letting them use their judgment in awarding this right. The qualifications for Reviewer, as listed at the top of this discussion by Kudpung, would serve equally well as qualifications for AfC Reviewer, but the one should not be a prerequisite for the other. As for Rollbacker, that right is both trivial and annoying; personally after having it (and cussing at it) for six months I asked that it be removed. Presence or absence of a Rollbacker right does not in any way reflect the user's ability to review submitted articles. -- MelanieN ( talk) 21:31, 23 October 2013 (UTC)

Part of the reason for the backlog is that many experienced users will not participate. One reason is the many useless, complicated ,and counterproductive procedures in the AfC process, for which see my user talk special archive. But the main reason is that unless most reviewers are moderately competent, what a good reviewer can contribute will be wasted. there's no point in contributing to processes which work poorly and on which one can not make an impact. Otherwise there is a much higher priority for anyone who knows what to do--which is checking their work, and trying to teach those who most need it. Ten good people without interference from the unqualified can do the process better than ten good ones trying also to cope with fifty unqualified.

If we cannot get high standards, we will need to see this only as a first screen, and the accepted articles are going to have to go into NPP so they will be checked a second time. As for the wrongly rejected, they will mostly continue to be lost to us. DGG ( talk ) 04:58, 25 October 2013 (UTC)

If the commonly used tools do not maintain a log page, they could be modified to do so. Gigs ( talk) 18:43, 28 October 2013 (UTC)

DGG, a very accurate summary, and so much of it applies equally to NPP. Allowing them through to NPP would be counter productive, the NPP system has the same kind of flaws as AfC and there is no guarantee that the patrollers, who need no qualifications at all, will pass or tag such an article correctly. Most worrying of course, are the 'lost' incorrectly rejected articles, while a significant concern is whether articles are correctly checked for spam or copyvio etc. (BTW: I have taken the liberty of correcting the link to your talk page archive - that thread is very important and although long, I would recommend the participants here to read it). Kudpung กุดผึ้ง ( talk) 07:09, 29 October 2013 (UTC)

A quick note regarding wrongfully rejected articles – that is also an editor retention issue ... if newcomers are being encouraged to send articles to AfC under the guise that "an experienced reviewer will double-check everything before sending it to mainspace" (which is usually what they are told at places like the Teahouse, and I at times am the one telling them that), then that is a problem. I think DGG's comment regarding sending pages to NPP may have a valid point, however agreeing with Kudpung, NPP draws inexperienced reviewers as well, but at least if you have two chances to catch a problem, that is better than only one. Nevertheless, the more I read about this and think about this, the more I am convinced that the new AFC academy is a good idea if people actually use it and have a desire to do things correctly, and frankly, perhaps a user right is in order. I would think anyone trusted with reviewer or autopatrolled would have necessary qualifications to review new articles, but I don't know for sure. I know user rights mean more bureaucracy, and a manufactured debate over the haves and have nots, but at the end of the day, bad reviewing of AfC and NPP has ramifications on copyright, editor retention, and, perhaps most importantly, missing content that can fit into the breadth of the world's knowledge; that is what we need to protect in these discussions. We can discuss whether someone should have 500 edits or 750 all day long, but that is not what is important. We need people who simply know what they are doing, and if they are doing things wrong, we can firmly, yet gently suggest they utilize training of some kind, and if they refuse that, they simply must be told to stop, as they hinder progress. I think the best way to maintain our NPP and AFC processes would be if experienced editors – article writers, content gnomes, admin, etc. – would all simply commit to reviewing x articles per week, and keep up with it. That would prevent massive backlogs, improve the quality of the reviews, and reduce potential ensuing burnout from one person trying to simply bust the backlog on their own. Go Phightins ! 10:46, 29 October 2013 (UTC)

Another very appropriate comment. However, have you tried herding cats? It works, but you have to give them something. Kudpung กุดผึ้ง ( talk) 11:04, 29 October 2013 (UTC)

@ Go Phightins!: totally agreed. -- phoebe / ( talk to me) 19:29, 30 October 2013 (UTC)

I don't have an opinion on the technical details of a right, how it is implemented, what the threshold is, etc. But I am worried, in general, about the impact of AfC on new users. The difference between a constructive, welcoming review -- even if the article isn't really up to par, a constructive review can still be made -- and a snarky or brusque one (made for whatever reason, including working fast because of the backlog) is huge for a new contributor. If a right can help with standards-setting among AfC reviewers on interacting with new users -- and maybe even make AfC a more attractive place to participate for experienced editors -- then I'm all for it.

I am well aware of our backlogs and the huge amounts of spam etc. But AfC is also a touchpoint for hundreds of new contributors who if they make it to AfC in the first place are generally also well-meaning and interested enough to perhaps be converted into active editors. Currently, AfC is sort of a Wikipedia backwater, and I feel like it should be front-and-center as a place for us to triage and work. I think a right if done well *might* help with this -- so to the extent it does, I'd support it. (If, however, it turns into simply 'one more collectible thing' as someone else pointed out, or somehow limits participation in AfC by existing helpful reviewers, then I wouldn't). -- phoebe / ( talk to me) 19:27, 30 October 2013 (UTC)

I certainly agree that it should be a 'front-and-center' operation and akin to the importance of NPP which was granted a complex set of tools by the Foundation. However, alone the 60,000 abandoned G13 drafts, of which I have physically deleted several hundred, demonstrate that what comes through AfC includes a vast amount of totally unacceptable junk, often far worse that what comes through NPP, and the fact that the creators have gone through the Article Wizard or AfC does not prove at all, unfortunately, that they are all good faith submissions. At AfC there is a cohesive and supportive dedicated team driving things forward; NPP has nothing of the kind bar its instruction page, has a talk page that sees a message once in a blue moon, needs no qualifications, and suffers from the same ailments as AfC. Kudpung กุดผึ้ง ( talk) 04:42, 31 October 2013 (UTC)

NPP has one advantage over AFC: By definition, every page they looked at was created by an autoconfirmed or confirmed editor. davidwr/( talk)/( contribs) 15:21, 31 October 2013 (UTC)

by G13 drafts you mean random userpage drafts, right? 1) If so, I don't know why you or anyone else would delete these; userpages are meant for drafts, and perhaps except in extreme libel situations or similar are doing no one any harm even if they're not destined to be good articles. 2) Not sure how this relates to the good-faith-edness of AfC. When I teach people how to edit, I tell them to start in their sandboxes. By your measure, if their userpage drafts aren't up to speed they're not contributing in good faith? That makes no sense; these are two different measures. Good faith is largely unrelated to whether the article is complete, referenced, notable, etc. And I've looked at enough AfC submissions myself to be pretty sure they're not all "Johnny sucks" or similar. -- phoebe / ( talk to me) 15:43, 31 October 2013 (UTC)

See WP:CSD#G13, a relatively recent speedy deletion criterion which specifies that AfC submissions which have not been edited at all (not even a keystroke) in more than 6 months may be deleted. DES ^(talk) 16:00, 31 October 2013 (UTC)

Yes, there are many good (or eventually good) submissions to Afc. As well as beginning editors, it's also widely used by COI editors who want to make sure that their articles won't be deleted as advertising. Afc reviewers help tone these down. To date there have been over 34,000 successful accepted submissions, and most of them left Afc in far better condition than when they arrived. Here are the ones accepted this month: CatScan report Also, articles eligible for deletion under the G13 criteria aren't always deleted; there are a number of editors who are checking through them and picking out ones to improve. — Anne Delong ( talk) 08:20, 1 November 2013 (UTC)

Thanks for the pointer to the CatScan tool Anne. That's very useful. Steven Walling (WMF) •  talk 05:52, 7 November 2013 (UTC)

Hey all. I don't have an opinion about the RFC in question, at least in an official WMF capacity. However, my team is just barely beginning to explore potential improvements to article creation. As a part of this, myself and our research scientist are working on measuring the current state of article creations and creators each month. That includes the volume at AfC, which though unique to English Wikipedia, is obviously an important route for new authors here. If you can help us think of strategies for accurately measuring the number of submissions, as well as decline/accept rates, that would be most welcome. Our notes are at Research:Wikipedia article creation. Many thanks, Steven Walling (WMF) •  talk 05:57, 7 November 2013 (UTC)

As one Foundation staff member has emphatically suggested that AfC is niether in the interest of nor within the remit of the WMF, I'm rather surprised to see this. AFAICS, the community has therefore accepted to investigatigate the possibilities of its own local solutions for improvement to AfC. However, any research that can save volunteers' time would be most welcome. That said, the project you linked to may appear to be a duplication in part of the buried(?) project here and here which, along with Page Curation, was offered as an olive branch to WP:ACTRIAL; it saw no further development. Kudpung กุดผึ้ง ( talk) 18:09, 7 November 2013 (UTC)

Yeah I don't mean to suggest that we're interested in making software updates to AfC as it exists now. Rather, that any new article creation software support we build needs to take in to account lessons from AfC, and the beginning of that is understanding the volume of submissions, the success rate, and so on. Steven Walling (WMF) •  talk 20:34, 7 November 2013 (UTC)

@ Steven (WMF): The feedback from en's AFC team to you would probably be best done in a central location. Where would you like us to do it? davidwr/( talk)/( contribs) 20:45, 7 November 2013 (UTC)

@ Davidwr: A good question to which I don't have the perfect answer. Most helpful for us is going to Research talk:Wikipedia article creation. But if people have comments and want to stick to WT:AFC for now, I'd be okay with that. Steven Walling (WMF) •  talk 00:28, 8 November 2013 (UTC)

@ Steven (WMF): - then perhaps you should take a look in your talk page archives at the thread you allowed to die out. Kudpung กุดผึ้ง ( talk) 04:52, 9 November 2013 (UTC)

Stevan, we do not want or expect the WMF to know how to improve page creation, except by implementing whatever requests for technical features the community here decides on. But it is always helpful if people new to a problem take a look at it, because they may well see things those of us who have been specializing in it may miss. DGG ( talk ) 05:59, 10 November 2013 (UTC)

Given that A) many people at the WMF are community members B) we spend countless hours doing research in to the quantitative and qualitative characteristics of activities like article I think you probably would be surprised how much we know about activities like page creation. ;) We're not just janitors sweeping things up and taking requests these days. Steven Walling (WMF) •  talk 01:23, 20 November 2013 (UTC)

What if, were this change to be implemented, we only allowed people with the AFC reviewing userright to view the AFC submissions, not just review them? Because they can be potential copyright violations, and, given that anyone can create one, may also contain defamatory material. Jinkinson talk to me What did he do now? 23:10, 14 December 2013 (UTC)

This would "break the wiki" - even if those who had edited the page before were allowed to see it, if I submit an article with a dynamic IP address then come back the next day with a different IP address, I would be unable to improve the submission, defeating the whole point of AFC. davidwr/( talk)/( contribs) 02:10, 15 December 2013 (UTC)

Back on track, or partly - because there are mixed opinions whether an MedWiki-independent solution could be achieved, there is something for our resident programmers to look at: here. Other ideas may be coming soon, but I still feel that a set of criteria comes first, then to see how they can best bee implemented. Kudpung กุดผึ้ง ( talk) 03:05, 5 November 2013 (UTC)

In looking at your question to this user, you specifically asked We are having a discussion on how to implent[sic] a local user permission system for a script that is used at WP:AfC. (Emphasis mine.) I'm sorry, but when did this discussion get reframed to be just the script? That is a broad departure and narrowing of the stated purpose of both this RfC and its predecessor. Additionally, you keep saying that we should not be talking about implementation (even though 3 of the 5 of your own examples at the top speak directly to implementation), but then you frame this RfC as an implementation discussion (and specifically, your preferred implementation) to people like West.andrew.g. Frankly, this RfC is fundamentally flawed and really needs to be blown up and redone. -- ShinmaWa^{( talk)} 23:02, 8 November 2013 (UTC)

I can't agree. This RfC is about setting a suitable criterion or criteria for permission to review article submissions at AfC. You have incorrectly interpreted the examples of permissions cited in the preamble as being suggestions for the creation of a MedWiki solution, which the Foundation has clearly stated will not be entertained anyway. I have repeated many times that when those criteria have been agreed on, then we should look at how they could be technically or socially implemented. Any preemptive research into possible local or non MedWiki technical solutions has nothing to do with setting the criteria. And BTW, there is more research going on than only the message to Andrew. Kudpung กุดผึ้ง ( talk) 04:49, 9 November 2013 (UTC)

"You have incorrectly interpreted the examples of permissions cited in the preamble as being suggestions for the creation of a MedWiki solution". No, I didn't. Not once. Not in thought, not in words. That's a complete fabrication on your part. I was actually referring to the fact that your background examples include implementation details such as admin interaction, script developer interactions, and whitelists, which conveniently enough seem to overlap with the implementation solution that you are "preemptively researching". Funny that. However, in addition to completely fabricating my words and intent, you have also failed to address my main point that you have framed this discussion externally as how to "implement a local user permission system for a script" while at the same time insisting that no one else discuss any competing implementation ideas, which seems to me that you are using this RfC as nothing more than a thin facade of consensus building to force the implementation of your preferred solution. -- ShinmaWa^{( talk)} 05:57, 9 November 2013 (UTC)

I don't have a preferred solution other than hoping that the community will come up with some criteria for sufficient experience for reviewers. All I have done is cited some examples as possible leads, but they are absolutely neither my recommendations nor preferences, I simply made the first suggestion to get the ball rolling, and I am as entitled to make a suggestion there are you are. Having reviewed every further comment I have made, I don't see me insisting on them; more to the point, I have simply attempted to keep this discussion on track. I stress again that any possible implementation of such criteria should/would come later. There is no harm whatsoever in looking into how permissions for Stiki, Huggle, or AWB are locally implemented - it's called 'gathering knowledge'. I don't see how you or anyone can suggest I have claimed otherwise. I am tempted to view your accusations as lacking in good faith. If you have some suggestions for criteria, please make them, but this RfC is not for redebating whether AfC needs competent reviewers or not. Kudpung กุดผึ้ง ( talk) 06:49, 9 November 2013 (UTC)

Where have I redebated whether AfC needs competent reviewers? Again, you are putting words in my mouth. While I came to this discussion assuming good faith, you have shaken that assumption. I am moving on to other things and will no longer participate here as this RfC is not a request for comments but a request for confirmation. -- ShinmaWa^{( talk)} 18:34, 9 November 2013 (UTC)

ShinmaWa, methinks I can understand the ongoing back-and-forth here. I was personally confused about what Kudpung was trying to accomplish, myself, also, but believe I'm on the same page with them now. (Due to my confusion, earlier, my suggestion-by-74 above absolutely positively demands a very specific implementation -- very different from what Kudpung envisions I will not -- but more importantly solves a completely different problem!) See deeper explanation below. Hope this helps. 74.192.84.101 ( talk) 21:23, 18 November 2013 (UTC)

The motivation is, reading between the lines, there are plenty of examples -- of increasing frequency if I correctly read between the lines -- of new editors with WP:COI difficulties signing up as AfC-reviewers, and then approving the blatantly-policy-violating-articles of their buddies, or in some cases of themselves. To stop such shenanigans, we need to agree on a set of secondary criteria (minimum edit-count being the most obvious). Then, once we have got consensus on the thing we will be using to secure the AfC process against abuse, there would be a discussion about how to best implement -- in software or in human-administered-policy or whatever -- some sort of security mechanism that *enforces* those secondary criteria.

  The mechanism itself, Kudpung does not wish to get bogged down in, as yet... but that topic is supposed to be the very next RfC, right after this one! Also, since Kudpung is not a programmer, that makes it hard for them to be the host a mechanism-oriented discussion (as opposed to this current policy-oriented RfC). But the point is, that the nuts-n-bolts implementation mechanism... although it will clearly have *something* to do with software that *some* sort of programmer will have to mess with at least some of it... would ideally be out of scope (aka "off track" or perhaps rather "cart ahead of the horse" or somesuch homely metaphor), at least until we decide upon what specific secondary-criteria we are actually trying to secure! Note well the careful use of ideally. Furthermore, we do have a few relevant facts, that are "implementation" facts, but which may influence our discussions here about "criteria-slash-policy" decisions.

1. First, the WMF will not be footing the bill. That means, the implementation has to be simple enough that volunteer hackers, here on enWiki (like perhaps User:mabdul) to implement on a spare-time no-pay basis. That is why suggestions to modify mediawiki are out of line: we do not want to fork mediawiki just for enWiki's use!
2. Second, *most* of the folks already working in AfC today, are already using the existing javascript-based AfC-helper-script-gadget (which is maintained by User:mabdul and others), and it makes sense that whatever secondary-criteria-security-solution we come up with, should interface with our existing wiki-tools. That is the 'script' that Kudpung speaks of, nothing more, nothing sneaky going on here.
3. Third, and finally, it is a plain-and-indisputable-fact that we would like whatever 'implementation' mechanism is chosen to be low-bureaucracy-required, because there are literally thousands of AfC-submissions pending in the queue, and anything that takes our AfC reviewers away from that queue, is a Bad Thing. That is why any solution involving laborious additional tasks for the existing AfC reviewers is seen as strongly counterproductive; they are already under too much pressure now, and adding these criteria cannot help, and might easily hurt.

Finally, in terms of out-of-scope discussions, we have my own suggestion, which I now understand is "off topic". The separate issue, which I concentrated on in my suggestions, is whether it is possible to assess *primary* criteria, namely, whether a given AfC-reviewer-job-candidate is actually any good aka technically-competent at performing reviews (without later getting reverted for mistakes). This is my main concern... but this question is utterly orthogonal to the question of whether an AfC-reviewer-job-candidate is any Good aka morally-competent at performing reviews (without later getting banned for abuse). Both types of competence are important, sure... but only the morally-competent secondary-criteria are under discussion here. Well, that is to say, those are what ought to be under discussion here.

  Kudpung tried valiantly to explain what was going on, but most people misinterpreted the actual intro of the RfC, which used examples in a way that looked like preferred-outcome, and which failed to inform newcomers like myself that the motivation for the whole shebang is prevention of WP:PUPPET folks abusing the AfC queue. Stopping that sort of behavior requires moral-competence, and technical-competence is a distinct issue. Most discussions above are trying to solve all three problems simultaneously: implementation details, technical prowess at AfC duties via primary/secondary criteria (in the relevant decision-areas), and moral competence at AfC duties via secondary-criteria (in terms of ethical-commitment-to-wikipedia-metrics).

  Anyways, while I disagree that Kudpung has tried to ramrod some particular implementation down our throats, I cannot disagree that the current RfC is in trouble. Either we need to have an arbitrary-section-break, with a rewritten-motivation-and-examples section, so we can then copy the proposals down there that *specifically* address the moral-competence and the ethical-commitment-to-wikipedia angles (only!), or alternatively, maybe even take ShinmaWa's suggestion to deploy the WP:TNT, and reopen round-two of this RfC with the rewritten-motivation-and-examples. I will ping ShinmaWa about this long-winded explanation, and hope that they return to assist us. 74.192.84.101 ( talk) 21:23, 18 November 2013 (UTC)

It's outlived its usefulness and is run by a clique of editors who treat it like a personal fiefdom operating under its own rules, ignoring rules that govern the project as a whole, and beat away those contributors who think differently (despite being well-supported by those ignored policies and guidelines). If anyone wants to create an article, let them open an account and create the article already--let speedy deletion or AfD deal with it if it should be deleted. Clear out the backlog, get rid of the endless drama and fiefdom-ownership politics, and let this dinosaur finally die. -- ColonelHenry ( talk) 21:09, 30 December 2013 (UTC)

We've had the discussion, now it's time to gather consensus. To reiterate, the above discussion was about setting criteria for allowing users to review pages submitted to AfC. There was no mention in the proposal that the methods of implementation or other methods of reviewer control were up for discussion. It was stated that the criteria should come first, then the community can discuss how best to implement them. This straw poll is not for discussing the implementation either. The criteria mentioned in the preamble were cited strictly as examples only and were not suggestions either for what we should do, nor for a traditional 'user right' implementauion.

There are two major issues concerning reviewing at AfC:

• Poor quality of reviewing.
• Abuse of the system.

To review pages at Articles for Creation, users should have made a minimum of 500 non-automated edits to en.Wikipedia mainspace, with an account registered for at least 90 days.

• Support, as proposer. Kudpung กุดผึ้ง ( talk) 23:49, 18 November 2013 (UTC)
• Support - a sensible amalgamation of the aforementioned ideas. Not too stringent, not too lenient. Ultimately, I think this is the best way to go. Go Phightins ! 01:22, 19 November 2013 (UTC)
• Support Let's take into account that before this, there was basically no requirement. This proposal screens out obvious new users and does not create an opportunity for a backlog to occur of those seeking the AfC reviewer permission and is objective, not subjective. Ramaksoud2000 ^{( Talk to me)} 03:22, 19 November 2013 (UTC)
• Oppose any requirement on second thought. If someone wants policy-violating material in the mainspace, they can simply create it themselves. autoconfirmed to move the page is enough and is more than the requirement to create articles the normal way. Ramaksoud2000 ^{( Talk to me)} 18:37, 30 December 2013 (UTC)
• Support - It's simple, unambiguous and straightforward, and anyone who doesn't meet the criteria can do so with time and experience. Ritchie333 ^{(talk) (cont)} 14:50, 19 November 2013 (UTC)
• Support - I like it because it assumes good faith and allows everyone with a little experience to take part. There needs to be a way to prevent misuse, but there is already the "topic ban", which could be used in case of problems with specific editors. I assume that these would be 500 undeleted edits, so that spam and copyvios wouldn't count. — Anne Delong ( talk) 15:26, 19 November 2013 (UTC)
• Oppose as I feel this is too lenient. See proposal 3 below (as much as I hate to make another proposal splitting up the votes...) Technical 13 ( talk) 15:56, 19 November 2013 (UTC)
• Support. It's a low bar, but at least it's a bar. The documentation should indicate somehow that this is not an entitlement to review. -- Anthonyhcole ( talk · contribs · email) 03:03, 21 November 2013 (UTC)
• Support - A nice bar that will allow anyone with good faith and a decent handle on Wikipedia to work. Will prevent an insane backlog from forming. Nice and simple. ö Brambleberry of RiverClan 16:09, 27 November 2013 (UTC)
• Support, as the lowest proposed bar. Ironholds ( talk) 07:41, 2 December 2013 (UTC)
• Support low bar with minimal "overhead". All it requires is a "filter" to be added to the AFCH script that simply checks the user's mainspace edit count and registration date. It doesn't add to the workload of the existing reviewers. This criterion will also be easy to carry over to whatever review mechanisms will be implemented for the upcoming Drafts namespace. Roger (Dodger67) ( talk) 09:40, 2 December 2013 (UTC)
• Support- minimal standard. Rankersbo ( talk) 10:51, 9 December 2013 (UTC)
• Support with one addition, namely this: any two approved-at-the-time AfC reviewers X and Y, can by mutual agreement, appoint a third person Z, thereby making Z an AfC reviewer, despite Z not meeting the criteria. 74.192.84.101 ( talk) 16:15, 9 December 2013 (UTC)
• Support. This is certainly not burdensome, and if anything is too lenient. I think the second proposal, just below, would create additional workload for whoever does the reviewing, and the third proposal really isn't a significant improvement on this one, so I support this one as a step in the right direction. -- Tryptofish ( talk) 21:02, 12 December 2013 (UTC)
• Monumental oppose for the reasons I have given in proposal 5. James500 ( talk) 13:57, 31 December 2013 (UTC)
• Support, This is the only practical workable proposal I see. Alanl ( talk) 08:15, 12 January 2014 (UTC)
• Support - Quite simple, users with these requirements show knowledge in the policies and guidelines. ///EuroCar GT 00:32, 13 January 2014 (UTC)

Reviewers at Articles for Creation will be selected after evaluation of 10 sample reviews performed (as detailed out at the relevant suggestion section from TheOriginalSoni above)

• Support as proposer. TheOriginalSoni ( talk) 01:33, 19 November 2013 (UTC)
• Oppose . A good idea, but would overload an already hugely overloaded existing pool of reviewers. Kudpung กุดผึ้ง ( talk) 01:55, 19 November 2013 (UTC)

• Kudpung There is no overload on the existing pool of reviewers, if you look at the proposal carefully. TheOriginalSoni ( talk) 02:31, 19 November 2013 (UTC)

Too complex and someone still needs to control it. Kudpung กุดผึ้ง ( talk) 05:53, 19 November 2013 (UTC)

My now-collapsed proposal is very similar to what OriginalSoni proposes, except fully automated (no burden on existing AfC folks at all)... but therefore dramatically more complex (adds burden to mabdul/Technical_13/Theopolisme/etc who are the AfC devs right now. See below, suggest we finish implementing the Kudpung approach, and then later open another RfC about the OriginalSoni approach, as complementary (not conflicting). This is not a zero-sum-game, we can actually have our cake an eat it too, in this rare case.  :-)   — 74.192.84.101 ( talk) 16:08, 9 December 2013 (UTC)

• Oppose Too stringent and long and creates the opportunity for a backlog to form. It is also subjective, and not objective. Ramaksoud2000 ^{( Talk to me)} 03:25, 19 November 2013 (UTC)
• Oppose as I feel this is too stringent. I agree that it requires too much reviewer time UNLESS there is someone (like me) that doesn't spend a lot of time on reviews and focuses on AfC project management (like helper script development) that has the time to go through and review these users. See proposal 3 below (as much as I hate to make another proposal splitting up the votes...) Technical 13 ( talk) 15:56, 19 November 2013 (UTC)

• Are you suggesting that we start a new proposal for a "reviewer reviewer" hat? Noooo..... — Anne Delong ( talk) 16:40, 19 November 2013 (UTC)

• Defer proposal#2, for consideration as a future RfC. The point of OriginalSoni's proposal is to grade potential reviewers on the *merits* of their technical proficiency at reviewing. If they are good at it, they will get 9 out of 10 correct, on the quiz. This is not only different from, but orthogonal to Kudpung's proposal, which is primarily intended to prevent *abuse* of the AfC reviewer infrastructure, by folks that are not committed to the long-term goals of wikipedia. 500 edits and 90 days is a security-system, in other words. Getting 9 out of 10 correct is a competence-check. As Technical_13 points out below, it is theoretically possible to perform 6 spelling-corrections each day for three months, and thus "pass" the security-system, yet still be Not Very Good at correctly reviewing submissions.

  But my suggestion is that we should be careful to neither confuse nor conflate the two goals. Testing competence at correctly reviewing submissions should be *ongoing* and not just an "interview" which means there is a need for what OriginalSoni is proposing, that directly test competence in actual reviewing-work. At the same time, plenty of COI sockpuppets will be able to pass the 10-question-quiz with flying colors, so we also need some sort of morality-quiz that proves a minimal dedication to the five pillars. This necessarily will have to be a secondary criterion: 90+ days editing, and 500+ edits, seems like a reasonable proxy-for-commitment. HTH. 74.192.84.101 ( talk) 16:08, 9 December 2013 (UTC)

• Monumental oppose for the reasons I have given in proposal 5. James500 ( talk) 13:57, 31 December 2013 (UTC)
• Oppose . A good idea, but alas we don't have enough experienced reviewers doing AfC to devote to do the auditing. Alanl ( talk) 08:18, 12 January 2014 (UTC)

To review pages at Articles for Creation, users should have made a minimum of 500 non-automated, non-minor edits to the English Wikipedia mainspace, with an account registered for at least 90 days with regular activity.

• Support as proposer. Technical 13 ( talk) 15:56, 19 November 2013 (UTC)
• Oppose - I think this is too restrictive. Spelling fixes may be marked as minor edits, but they're most definitely helping the project. What's "regular activity"? I took a Wikibreak in April this year - would that count against me? Ritchie333 ^{(talk) (cont)} 16:17, 19 November 2013 (UTC)

• What's the point of a 90 day requirement if the user creates an account, makes a couple hundred punctuation fixes, goes away for 85 days, comes back and gets their edit count to 500 fixing spelling and what not. There are no significant edits and they have maybe 10-15 days of editing. I think we gain nothing by this, and this minor adjustment to P1 rectifies this. Technical 13 ( talk) 16:32, 19 November 2013 (UTC)

Do you think that's a likely scenario? Anyone can game the system if they want. You can run for RfA the minute you score 500 on Scottywong's tool - it doesn't mean you'll succeed! For those people, we can simply nudge them in the right direction, and topic ban them if necessary. Ritchie333 ^{(talk) (cont)} 16:43, 19 November 2013 (UTC)

When I first had 500 mainspace edits on the English Wikipedia, I would've had no place reviewing AfC submissions. I think it is a very likely scenario. If there are going to be count and time restrictions, let's make sure they actually do something other than look pretty. Technical 13 ( talk) 18:16, 19 November 2013 (UTC)

• Comment (edit conflict) - I don't think that this proposal is significantly less lenient than Proposal 1, since the user chooses whether or not to mark edits as "minor". Please explain why you think that evenly spaced edits are better than bunched-up ones. I suppose that you are hoping to ensure that they are five hundred substantive edits (rather than, say, adding a piece of spam to 500 articles...) — Anne Delong ( talk) 16:26, 19 November 2013 (UTC)

• Anne, I do believe you misunderstood what I wrote about minor edits. I did not mean necessarily edits marked as minor, I meant edits that qualify as minor in that only superficial differences exist between the current and previous versions. Examples include typographical corrections, formatting and presentational changes, and rearrangements of text without modification of its content. Whether or not the editor knows how to properly mark such edits may be out of scope (other than I would question a user with the first 500 sequential edits and having none marked as minor as really having any CLUE about policies and how to review articles). Technical 13 ( talk) 18:29, 19 November 2013 (UTC)

• Oppose, after the above explanation. Not because I disagree with with anything you've said above, but I wouldn't be willing to do the work of measuring the value and complexity of hundreds of edits, so I can't !vote to put that work on someone else. — Anne Delong ( talk) 18:55, 19 November 2013 (UTC)
  • Administrators already do this at WP:RFPERM to hand out rights like reviewer and rollback. (Personally I don't think any rights should be necessary to review AfC nominations. If you wish to clamber through Wikipedia's crap pile to find the odd gem, have at it. Rather them than me.) — Tom Morris ( talk) 13:56, 27 December 2013 (UTC)
• Oppose Anybody at all can create articles. Anybody. So why would you think someone would try to game the system as you said above and accept or deny a review if they can go ahead and create an article. Ramaksoud2000 ^{( Talk to me)} 18:15, 30 December 2013 (UTC)
• Monumental oppose for the reasons I have given in proposal 5. James500 ( talk) 13:57, 31 December 2013 (UTC)

We already have two user rights we give out to people who have reached minimal competence with Wikipedia: pending changes reviewer and rollback. Because of the potential for hat collecting, it seems generally preferable to not duplicate entities beyond mere necessity. At a time when we have few enough people willing to delve through the ever-regrowing crap pile not only at WP:AFC but at a wide number of backlogs across the 'pedia. The main problem with AFC isn't bad reviewers, it's no reviewers. Adding another layer of gate-keeping on the front of an already backlogged process seems rather pointless. Instead, use the existing permissions structure: rollback, or pending changes reviewer. This isn't unheard of: when Article Feedback Tool v5 was still in operation on English Wikipedia, we reused the "reviewer" permission for reviewing AFT5 comments.

The advantage of this: administrators don't have to start handing out new permissions. The number of hats on offer is kept to an absolute minimum. We neatly sidestep the addition of more bureaucracy. — Tom Morris ( talk) 14:41, 27 December 2013 (UTC)

• Support As proposer. — Tom Morris ( talk) 14:41, 27 December 2013 (UTC)
• Oppose: This RfC does not discuss how this threshold will be granted and/or implemented. That will be the topic of a further discussion, when the threshold itself has been established. Kudpung กุดผึ้ง ( talk) 21:36, 27 December 2013 (UTC)

• Kudpung, I do not think Tom made any statement towards that context. All he stated was to use a simple Reviewer or Rollbacker as the required permission threshold. (Correct me if I'm wrong on the reviewer-rollbacker part.) TheOriginalSoni ( talk) 22:21, 27 December 2013 (UTC)

• Support This proposal neatly sidesteps any possible hat-collection issues we had, while still solving our basic competence requirements, like Proposal 1. It also makes it technically simple to implement any such requirements. TheOriginalSoni ( talk) 22:21, 27 December 2013 (UTC)
• Question. What is being suggested here, exactly? That we dramatically reduce the count of viable candidates for AfC duty? Or that we dramatically increase the count of people with the R&R userRight?

  Possibility#2, Tom_Morris is suggesting that we dramatically increase the number of people who are given R&R bits... and in fact, might even be saying that every person with 500+edits and 90+days should automagically be given the pending-changes-reviewer bit, which could then also double as the AfC-submission-reviewer bit. Possibility#2 is something I could support... but as Kudpung says, that is an implementation question (we could also implement the 500-n-90 restriction purely as a jscript hack inside AFCH or as a custom server-side PHP kludge or as a pure social system using moral suasion or in various other ways). It's not clear that it will be easy to gain consensus for dramatically lowering the traditionally-pretty-dern-high level of experience that R&R bits have demanded in the past, to just 500-n-90. Therefore, if possibility#2 is the aim, in that case I would suggest deferring proposal#4 as an implementation-question, to the next phase of this RfC-sequence. 74.192.84.101 ( talk) 00:52, 30 December 2013 (UTC)

My point is that "500 edits + 90 days" (plus a quick manual check to make sure they aren't mad as a hatter) is about the rough guideline that admins use to hand out rollback or reviewer. I'm simply saying that we already have a process to determine whether or not new users are sensible enough to start reviewing (and indeed rolling back) other people's edits. — Tom Morris ( talk) 11:02, 30 December 2013 (UTC)

Remember that anybody can create articles with an account. Suggesting that you need rollback and reviewer is kind of too much. Ramaksoud2000 ^{( Talk to me)} 18:10, 30 December 2013 (UTC)

• Ramaksoud2000, this discussion is for who can review AFC submissions. I think a large number of our current AFC reviewers will have either of these priviledges, and almost all of the rest would be given the permission should they request it. TheOriginalSoni ( talk) 21:58, 30 December 2013 (UTC)

• I'm saying what's the point of making the requirement so high when they can just create the article another way. Ramaksoud2000 ^{( Talk to me)} 05:56, 31 December 2013 (UTC)

• Ramaksoud2000, AFC Reviewers do not write the articles. The articles are written by newcomers, and reviewers "review" them, thus approving or declining the article. As I said, most current AFC reviewers alaready have this right. TheOriginalSoni ( talk) 10:54, 31 December 2013 (UTC)

• In all fairness, there is no difference in principle between accepting an AFC submission and creating a new page from scratch. James500 ( talk) 12:29, 31 December 2013 (UTC)

• Monumental oppose for the reasons I have given in proposal 5. James500 ( talk) 13:57, 31 December 2013 (UTC)

Any registered user can accept an AFC submission. Only users with either the reviewer or rollbacker user right can decline an AFC submission.

• Support as proposer. It would be absurd to prohibit users who can create new pages in the mainspace from accepting an AFC submission. It would not be consistent with existing user rights at all. James500 ( talk) 11:37, 31 December 2013 (UTC) In fact you could argue that, in order to be completely consistent, only admins should have the right to reject an AFC submission, because they are the only ones who, at present, have the authority to remove an article from the mainspace by deletion or otherwise. James500 ( talk) 12:10, 31 December 2013 (UTC)
• Oppose as that is entirely inaccurate. Any autoconfirmed user can move a page from mainspace to a subpage of a user's space or to Draft: effectively removing from mainspace. Allowing any user to accept, is also counter productive as AfC is intended to help new users create an article with out it getting speedily deleted half a dozen times for simple issues like promotional tone or lack of indication of importance, allowing all users unable to see these things or whom are unfamiliar with the policies/essays/guidelines that can give constructive feedback is a bad idea. Technical 13 ( talk) 12:48, 31 December 2013 (UTC)

I disagee. What WP:USERFY actually says is "Except for self-userfying and obvious non articles such as accidentally-created user pages in the main namespace, it is generally inappropriate to userfy an article without a deletion process". The recommended process is AfD. So, assuming the essay you have linked to is accurate, a non-admin cannot userfy an attempt at a proper article that someone else has created. James500 ( talk) 13:08, 31 December 2013 (UTC) And the other limb of your argument is absurd. James500 ( talk) 13:17, 31 December 2013 (UTC) And "promotional tone" is not a criteria for speedy deletion. What is required is blatant advertising. James500 ( talk) 13:27, 31 December 2013 (UTC)

• Oppose - Any confirmed user can move an article out of Afc and into mainspace to create an article (at risk of being reverted, or course). The above proposals 1-4 won't prevent that. They are only about limiting the use of the Afc reviewing tools and Afc review templates which give the appearance that the person placing them is an experienced and knowledgeable editor, and not someone who joined Wikipedia last week. There are exceptions, of course; a use with a new account could have been editing under another name, or as an IP, for years, but as usual the application of the criteria will be tempered by common sense. — Anne Delong ( talk) 14:32, 31 December 2013 (UTC)

As far as I am aware, a page move from AFC to the mainspace cannot be reverted without a deletion process (such as AfD), except in very limited circumstances. James500 ( talk) 15:11, 31 December 2013 (UTC) If the proposals above are only about access to scripts and templates, their wording needs to be made much clearer. I can't actually find a project page that defines the meaning of "review" and "reviewer" in this context. It sounds like "move into the mainspace". It is clear to me from the foregoing discussion that I am not the only one who thinks this. James500 ( talk) 15:59, 31 December 2013 (UTC)

I hope some others will weigh in about the meaning or "reviewer". And yes, you are right; I shouldn't have said "revert". The more likely (and more serious) results of an inexperienced editor moving a draft prematurely to mainspace would be: (1) speedy deletion under a number of categories from which the draft submissions are protected so that the problems can be fixed, and (2) being dragged to Afd. In either case the poor draft creator, usually a beginning user, could be very bewildered and have an unnecessarily negative experience, all so that some other new user can have the freedom of creating an article out of someone else's draft without having to take the time to learn any of Wikipedia's policies. — Anne Delong ( talk) 19:16, 31 December 2013 (UTC)

Prohibiting "inexperienced" users from moving drafts into the mainspace might help deletionists in their mission to prevent the creation of perfectly valid stubs. James500 ( talk) 20:35, 31 December 2013 (UTC)

• Oppose as already detailed by Anne and Technical13. The need for this RFC is to make sure AFC performs better in making sure it's articles survive Mainspace, not the other way round. The current proposal is detrimental to the AFC process, and will work against getting better articles out of here. TheOriginalSoni ( talk) 21:26, 31 December 2013 (UTC)

I disagree. It is clear to me that AFC reviewers are rejecting submissions that would survive (and have survived) an AfD. In any event, if you are worried about articles on valid topics surviving in the mainspace, what you need to look at are the deletion processes, because that is where the problem will be. James500 ( talk) 07:34, 1 January 2014 (UTC)

• Oppose. I seriously doubt any AfD proposal will survive, and there been many attempts over the years. There are enough orphaned stubs out there in mainspace, and as a mature project, the whole point of AfC is to improve the quality of new articles. If you allow this, then you might as well disband AfC altogether. Alanl ( talk) 08:26, 12 January 2014 (UTC)

Any registered user can move an AFC submission into the mainspace, whereupon it will be treated like any other article. Only users with either the reviewer or rollbacker user right can use AFC scripts and templates. Subject to the following exception, only users with the admin user right can decline an AFC submission. The exception is AFC submissions that are clearly not intended to be articles (ie those that , if created in the mainspace, could be legitimately userfied by a non-admin). Non-admins can nominate an AFC submission for rejection, using a template created for this purpose.

• Support as proposer. This is probably my first choice on grounds that rejecting an AFC submission is equivalent to deleting an article from the mainspace. James500 ( talk) 07:34, 1 January 2014 (UTC)
• Strong Oppose This isn't even consistent with deletion processes as your title claims. Ramaksoud2000 ^{( Talk to me)} 05:20, 7 January 2014 (UTC)

This is proposal is exactly consistent with deletion processes. In what way is it not consistent? James500 ( talk) 08:47, 12 January 2014 (UTC)

• Absolutely Oppose the proposers completely erroneous claim that "rejecting an AFC submission is equivalent to deleting an article from the mainspace" only shows that the proposer has no clue at all about how AFC actually works. An AFC rejection is simply: "this draft isn't ready yet because of this problem, here is a guideline on how to fix it. When you've fixed it please resubmit it. If you need further assistance you can get it here". Roger (Dodger67) ( talk) 08:29, 12 January 2014 (UTC)

My claim that "rejecting an AFC submission is equivalent to deleting an article from the mainspace" is based on similar reasoning in WP:USERFY, and I don't believe that there is any difference in principle. Bear in mind that rejection also facilitates CSD G13, so we don't want it done in error. G13 does not, in express words, require the admin to vouch for the correctness of the rejection. It seems to me that he could just rubber stamp it. So, if you allow reviewers and rollbackers to reject submissions you are potentially giving a user with 500 edits the power in effect to speedy delete large numbers of articles at his discretion with no questions asked. James500 ( talk) 08:38, 12 January 2014 (UTC)

Amend CSD G13 so that it authorizes the speedy deletion of a rejected AFC submission only if that submission was correctly rejected.

• Support as proposer. This would remove what is, in my view, a potentially serious problem with allowing non-admins to reject AFC submissions. See my comments under proposal 6. James500 ( talk) 04:03, 13 January 2014 (UTC)

The user Amayorov, despite having an eight-year-old account, made their first edit on 3 July 2024 before proceeding to pass 500 edits and receive extended confirmed permissions on 6 July 2024. All of the edits made, 100s a day, were on European politics and history. Shortly after achieving EC permissions, suddenly it's all 1948 Palestine war, specifically inserting Benny Morris as a source all over the place and doing some work on the Benny Morris biography. Apparently European content has lost its appeal. Make of this what you will. I also have to wonder if, despite having an extant account for 8 years, achieving 500 edits in three days (rather than the 30 days as envisaged in the ECR rule set) is somewhat of a violation of the spirit of the restrictions, even if not the technical function. Iskandar323 ( talk) 19:08, 7 July 2024 (UTC)

Were there any issues with the edits?

Discussions recently have come to the conclusion that absent obvious abuse - unproductive or disruptive edits, or repeatedly making a dozen edits to do what could be done in one or two - it’s acceptable for editors to work towards ECP.

To an extent, this makes sense - if we tell people "this is what you need to edit this topic area" we can’t reasonably expect editors interested in the topic area to not work towards it. BilledMammal ( talk) 19:16, 7 July 2024 (UTC)

see my reply Amayorov ( talk) 19:19, 7 July 2024 (UTC)

Issues other than that pushing Benny Morris here there any everywhere with little regard for any other sources is a terrible form of disregard for NPOV? That alone, in a contentious topic area, is pretty disruptive. The 500/30 rule is aimed at ensuring a minimum level of understanding and competency. Yes, some are encouraged to rush the requirements, but we shouldn't encourage editors to rush the requirements. Iskandar323 ( talk) 19:20, 7 July 2024 (UTC)

I did not "push Benny Morris" but rather expanded on the already existing citations to his work. Recall that Benny Morris' 2008 book had already been the most quoted reference on that page. When necessary, I've added phrases such as "some scholars allege that" etc.

When you and other users disagreed with my edits, I didn't proceed, but rather created sections on the Talk page. Unlike other users, you didn't engage.

I think the extensive sourcing I use in any of my edits illustrate that I at least possess "a minimum level of competency". Amayorov ( talk) 19:26, 7 July 2024 (UTC)

I have engaged. As of the time of me writing this, there are at least two comments from me to you that you have not responded to. Again, this can be checked. I suggest you desist from misrepresenting very verifiable information in this forum. Iskandar323 ( talk) 19:39, 7 July 2024 (UTC)

You wrote those comments less than an hour before reporting me on the Admin board. Yes –– all of this can be checked.

I suggest you desist from misrepresenting very verifiable information in this forum. Amayorov ( talk) 19:51, 7 July 2024 (UTC)

I meant in regardless to the substance of this complaint - with the edits to reach 500.

If we don’t tell editors that they can’t work towards 500/30, then how should they know we don’t want them to work towards them? If the goal is to ensure a minimum level of understanding and competency, and 500 edits isn’t sufficient for that, then let’s modify the requirements - for example, require edits to be a minimum byte size to count, as I have proposed in the past. BilledMammal ( talk) 19:28, 7 July 2024 (UTC)

I think that would be a good idea. However, I have clearly written plenty of bytes in my 500 edits, in some cases going as far as copy-editing entire pages that had been poorly translated or unsourced. You can see all that in my edit history. Amayorov ( talk) 19:30, 7 July 2024 (UTC)

This is patently false. I have made extensive edits to various topics, including military history and Central Asian history, paganism, and engineering. All my corrections were extensively referenced. I have also rewritten several large articles, requiring copy-edit and verification.

It is true that I have re-activated my account in the week. This is simply a reflection of the fact that I have free time, and have grown fond of Wikipedia.

Benny Morris' 1948 book has always been the most referenced book on the topic. I have used not only that book but also others by different authors, as well as sourcing UN archives.

I have added corrections and more references on the subject, including 1948 Palestinian expulsion and flight and Palestinian nationalism. None of the other users had an issue with my work.

By contrast, @ Iskandar323 has reverted my edits without giving a justification. They also ignored my attempts at a discussion in the Talk pages. Amayorov ( talk) 19:19, 7 July 2024 (UTC)

I had a justification, and I have responded on talk. I suggest that you avoid misrepresenting things that can be checked up on (on an administrative noticeboard). And yes, other users have taken up issue with your edits. I'm not sure why you would misrepresent this. Iskandar323 ( talk) 19:24, 7 July 2024 (UTC)

Your justification was RV gf edits - unfortunately, adding random titbits of background information from Morris, removing dates and badly rephrasing other parts is not an improvement.

This is not specific or constructive. In order to clarify your objections, I created discussion topics on the Talk page – which you have ignored. Amayorov ( talk) 19:27, 7 July 2024 (UTC)

I have responded to some, not all of your posts. However, I would prefer to see what administrators think of this situation before potentially unduly spending more time on explaining why expanding claims from a single source that is, in your own words, already the most [(over-)]quoted reference on the page, is not particularly in the service of NPOV. Iskandar323 ( talk) 19:35, 7 July 2024 (UTC)

You have responded to them half an hour ago, almost immediately posting on the Admin board.

Yes, Benny Morris is the most quoted historian on the 1948 war. I barely added new references to him, usually simply extending the existing ones. Amayorov ( talk) 19:37, 7 July 2024 (UTC)

I suppose I should be grateful that you've helped illustrate quite how over-represented Benny Morris is (more than 50 citations and mentions), but again, that begs the question of why you think this clear imbalance problem should be worsened. If you can't see that there might be an imbalance problem there, that somewhat illustrates why the 500/30 rule exists and why a month of actual editing is, in spirit, what is expected of it. Iskandar323 ( talk) 19:47, 7 July 2024 (UTC)

Because Morris has written multiple, highly regarded books on the 1948 war. He's cited by plenty of other authors, such as Shlaim, Khalidi, Ben-Ami, and others.

Besides, and as I've previously explained, I didn't add much new material. I've clarified previous references and added qualifications to partisan statements. Amayorov ( talk) 19:53, 7 July 2024 (UTC)

This seems like a content dispute, Iskandar323, moreso than any actual gaming. It seems like it might be better to have discussed this with the editor on a talk page, not hauled them to AN. The editor's contributions appear to be in good faith, and while I haven't gone into a full deep-dive or anything of the sort, they don't seem to be unconstructive at first glance. Favoring a specific historian isn't necessarily a behavioral issue, so long as they are willing to discuss inclusion and abide by the results of consensus. Building a culture of continually questioning those who take the time to build a constructive editing history in order to prove they can be trusted with access to contentious topics is a terrifying idea. If I was to accuse someone of gaming for rollback, for example, because they spent a lot of time reverting vandals, it would likely be considered at the very least rude, and at worst a personal attack. EggRoll97 ^{( talk)} 21:18, 7 July 2024 (UTC)

There is a content dispute for sure, which I will continue in good faith. At the same time, there is only one type of account that I have ever seen that goes from 0 to 100 edits a day on some random topic before switching (after 3 frenetic days) to almost pure ARBPIA edits, and it isn't the constructive variety. There are plenty of dubious accounts that have just passed this threshold currently operating in the contentious topic area. This account, however, caught my eye due to the rapid edit aggregation and glaring topic switch. I have raised the issue of quite a few gaming accounts on this noticeboard, and to date, most of them have raised eyebrows for admins too. Iskandar323 ( talk) 21:39, 7 July 2024 (UTC)

FWIW, from my perspective there appears to be some unnecessary edit farming in this user's background. For instance, Sukhoi Shkval did not require 40 edits in a row to achieve this relatively minimal difference, while not managing to add a single in-line citation or new source. On 9К512 Uragan-1M we got some extremely minor, non-substantive copyediting that frankly didn't change the readability of the article much. An improvement? Perhaps trivially, but reasonable editors could disagree there. Worth sanctioning over? IMO probably not, but I don't think Iskandar323's concerns are without merit. ⇒ SWATJester ^{Shoot Blues, Tell VileRat!} 22:44, 7 July 2024 (UTC)

Regarding 9K512 Uragan-1M, the article had been marked as “roughly translated.” I did my best to correct residual grammatical errors, before marking the issue as resolved.

Regarding Sukhoi-Shkval, I agree that 40 edits were excessive. One reason for this was that I was still learning about the editing tools, discovering new templates and features. Another justification is that I had to decipher some unclear text, such as “Each wing has a rudder that functions as a rudder and aileron.” Here, the first “rudder” is in fact not a rudder at all, but a flap. I had only figured that out once I read through the sources. Amayorov ( talk) 18:03, 8 July 2024 (UTC)

It wouldn't require 40 edits from an experienced editor who knew everything about how wikitext worked, but for somebody figuring it out for the first time I am inclined to assume good faith. jp× g 🗯️ 20:36, 9 July 2024 (UTC)

I was going to report this user as well. Account created in 2016 but first edit made a few days ago and quickly put in 500 edits, immediately jumps into Israeli-Palestinian conflict topic area, seemingly POV-pushing. Seems to be an experienced user as well. I agree with @ Starship.paint that there seems to be something going on with ARBPIA, specifically a surge in sock accounts. IOHANNVSVERVS ( talk) 05:25, 8 July 2024 (UTC)

I don't know whether these plots can provide any illumination. The dramatic change in slope and shape of the bytes added and page byte size change curves after extendedconfirmed has been granted at 500 edits is consistent with the notion of gaming to obtain the privilege in order to enter the contentious PIA topic area. These kind of signal shapes for users that enter the PIA topic area can often be seen for sockpuppets of AndresHerutJaim/יניב הורון, not that that suggests this is an AHJ sock. Wikipedia provides tools to help new users rapidly gain EC. Sometimes this kind of impressive efficiency is thanks to the Wikimedia Foundation Growth team's "Newcomer tasks" project. Also, their first edit being an WP:ARBECR violation is not great. Sean.hoyland ( talk) 09:42, 8 July 2024 (UTC)

When I was doing my edits, I was using almost exclusively Wiki’s backlog. I chose the issues that I could conceivably help with, such as Rough Translation from Russian and French (the languages I speak), and lead rewrite requests. I intend to continue on with this work in the future.

And, yes, I’m interested in the IP history, about which I’ve read a lot. Since gaining extended privileges, I’ve made improvements to those articles. Those edits have arguably been better-sources than any of my other work, due to my having more knowledge to my having more knowledge on the topic. I do not deny that I wanted to contribute to these topics from the start. Amayorov ( talk) 10:47, 8 July 2024 (UTC)

Thanks for the info Amayorov but you don't need to defend yourself to me. I'm nobody. I'm just providing information. Either way, the notion of gaming in Wikipedia and its relationship to the WP:ARBECR barrier is currently rather vague. Sean.hoyland ( talk) 11:12, 8 July 2024 (UTC)

Where did you learn to add a colon prefix to the category name in your busy schedule by the way e.g. :Category:Wikipedia backlog|Wiki’s backlog? Sean.hoyland ( talk) 05:02, 9 July 2024 (UTC)

The visual editor adds it automatically, when I link to the url /info/en/?search=Category:Wikipedia_backlog Amayorov ( talk) 13:45, 9 July 2024 (UTC)

Either way, regardless of the specifics of this editor, it's important for the community to acknowledge that a) WP:ARBECR was introduced as an entry barrier for good reasons and b) highly motivated people have already discovered ways to essentially tunnel through that barrier. Sean.hoyland ( talk) 10:17, 8 July 2024 (UTC)

Not being a tech wizard, I can only judge by what I see over time. I am in the habit of adding awareness notices if I notice new editors (non EC or EC) making edits in the topic area and off the top of my head, I would say that occurs 3 or 4 times a month at least, there appears to be an increase in the number of such editors in recent times, as to what proportion of them are WP:NOTHERE I couldn't say but experience tells me that some at least are in that category. Selfstudier ( talk) 10:57, 8 July 2024 (UTC)

I think you are underestimating your contribution. This year I think you have provided the awareness notices to 202 users, or thereabouts. That is based on your revisions to user talk pages where the byte size change is in a range consistent with the awareness template size. Sean.hoyland ( talk) 16:08, 8 July 2024 (UTC)

The top of my head is very unreliable then, lol. Selfstudier ( talk) 16:13, 8 July 2024 (UTC)

@ Sean.hoyland: There is an easier way to check; see this log search. Selfstudier has posted 210 this year. BilledMammal ( talk) 21:41, 9 July 2024 (UTC)

Ah, that's useful to know. Thanks. I've not really spent any time looking at the filters, despite them being a likely information goldmine. On the other hand, the pointlessly harder path is often more fun. Sean.hoyland ( talk) 04:08, 10 July 2024 (UTC)

No comment about the gaming accusation, but the ARBPIA edits themselves seem fine. Morris is arguably the most prominent historian in this area, and one of the more neutral ones, with critics from both sides. It's debatable whether some of the added content is important enough to include, but it's reasonable enough, and Amayorov seems open to feedback and compromise. POV pushing involves aggression, which I don't see here. If we were to expect some kind of strict symmetry in editing behavior, the vast majority of us ARBPIA editors would fail that standard. — xDanielx ^T/ _C\ ^R 18:19, 8 July 2024 (UTC)

I think it's quite natural that hot topics attract new editors trying to fix (perceived) gaps or biases. I myself got to 500 edits within two months after getting involved in another contentious area. At the end of the day the question should be whether an editor understands and follows the rules. Alaexis _¿question? 21:28, 11 July 2024 (UTC)

I would say, at the start of the day the test should be - is an editor violating the rules merely by being here evading a block or ban. Unfortunately, it's not possible to tell whether an editor understands and follows the rules, all of the rules, not just a subset, by looking at the content they generate and the image they present. If an editor violates the rule against sockpuppetry by employing deception, a very common occurrence in the PIA topic area, it's reasonable to assume they will likely violate other rules while generating content or interacting with editors at some point. Sean.hoyland ( talk) 02:50, 12 July 2024 (UTC)

• Amayorov can you explain why your account was created on July 8, 2016, but your very first edit [13] is on July 3, 2024? To me that's a red flag. A proposed remedy is that Amayorov's 30 days start from July 3, 2024. VR _{(Please ping on reply)} 19:59, 12 July 2024 (UTC)

  I explained it here. In 2016, I created an account for a university practical that required me to create a web page about a chemical compound on Wikidata. In my case, it was a terpenoid, Q44009079‬. I don't know why the page doesn't exist anymore, but I found emails from 2018, notifying that other pages have been linked to it (see screenshots).

  A couple weeks ago, I started to be interested in trying out Wikipedia editing. I'm currently waiting to start a new job, and have plenty of time. Amayorov ( talk) 20:23, 12 July 2024 (UTC)

  Actually, I've been able to retrace this a bit more, and what I said wasn't entirely accurate. In 2017, I created a new account, @ Alexmayorov, specifically for that practical. I used it to create Q44009079. Both Amayorov and Alexmayorov are registered on the same email address. Regarding @ Amayorov, created in 2016, I can't recall why I made it.

  In April 2023, I decided to restore access to my account. I couldn't recall my username, and requested a password reset using my email. That reset came back with Amayorov as the user. Amayorov ( talk) 20:41, 12 July 2024 (UTC)

  Hello, this is my second account, which I've only just realised I had! Alexmayorov ( talk) 20:43, 12 July 2024 (UTC)

  @ Alexmayorov, @ Amayorov if you're going to have two accounts, you should disclose on your userspace of each what the alternative account is. Just to cover yourself from accusations of socking in the future. TarnishedPath ^talk 10:49, 17 July 2024 (UTC)

  Have just added the relevant userbox, thanks! I only intend to be using one though Amayorov ( talk) 10:58, 17 July 2024 (UTC)

  I'm confused. It says "20:42, July 12, 2024 User account Alexmayorov talk contribs was created automatically", as opposed to 2017. VR _{(Please ping on reply)} 23:18, 12 July 2024 (UTC)

  https://m.wikidata.org/wiki/Special:Contributions/Alexmayorov IOHANNVSVERVS ( talk) 23:25, 12 July 2024 (UTC)

  Because it was a wikidata only account. So the en.wiki one poofed into existence when they logged in here. Iskandar323 ( talk) 05:31, 13 July 2024 (UTC)

  @ Vice regent Amayorov ( talk) 11:57, 13 July 2024 (UTC)

  Got it, thanks! VR _{(Please ping on reply)} 18:04, 13 July 2024 (UTC)

  @ Vice regent Ping as requested Amayorov ( talk) 22:05, 12 July 2024 (UTC)

• I don't see this as "gaming" anything, but more of a content dispute (which should be resolved amicably at the talk page). Buffs ( talk) 15:37, 16 July 2024 (UTC)