A consensus was reached on 27 May 2011 to restrict the creation of new mainspace articles to contributors whose accounts have reached autoconfirmed status.
The preferred approach voiced by the community is that this restriction first be implemented as a trial with a recommendation for a period to be determined (3–6 months) , followed by an evaluation period (1–3 months) with the trial switched off. Other recommendations voiced by the consensus concern the use of Articles for Creation and the Article Wizard systems, regardless of the outcome of this trial, and will be discussed elsewhere.
A discussion on the software changes is taking place here.
A consensus was reached to limit the creation of new articles to the holders of Autoconfirmed status. This discussion concerns the duration of the required trial.
This RfC will run until either a consensus is reached, or 30 days have elapsed.
For information purposes, a stale discussion (collapsed) is included here.
Stale discussion (last edit 13 June 2011
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A consensus was reached on 27 May 2011 to restrict the creation of new mainspace articles to contributors whose accounts have reached autoconfirmed status for the duration of a trial. It was agreed that some form of evidence-based evaluation would then occur, and the question of implementing the restriction on the longer term reexamined in light of the results. Some details of the implementation of this need to be worked out. Hence this RFC. The most popular of the proposals will be implemented. Within the framework of the recommendations made in the closing discussion summary:
DiscussionThis seems, to me, to be the simplest way to go about this, and seems the way most likely to yield results. Waiting only 30 days will give us some vague sense, but we need to know what the longer-term impact will be. We also need to know what will happen once we shut it off, hence the 30 days afterwards. The Blade of the Northern Lights ( 話して下さい) 16:52, 2 June 2011 (UTC) reply
Trial for a period of 6 (six) months during which the holders of registered accounts may not create pages in article mainspace until their account has reached autoconfirmed status, with one exception: they retain the ability to create articles via the Article Wizard. User:Rd232/creationdraft, which would replace the current MediaWiki:Nocreatetext, illustrates how options would be presented to the new user in this case. Data should be gathered for 30 days prior to trial, and evaluation of the overall concept should begin after 4 months. If no consensus is reached by 6 months to continue the concept indefinitely, it is switched off. If consensus is reached, it is retained indefinitely. Evaluation of the Wizard immediate-creation option may begin separately at any time, if editors feel there are issues arising which require discussion. If there is a consensus to switch off that option, it may be done at any time. Discussion
The proposal above reflects the spirit of the RfC but is both too long and insufficient to gather the necessary data to evaluate the impact of restricting article creation. Instead I propose a shorter trial which requires some developer involvement and may require gathering and anonymizing information on not just contributions but potential contributions. Technical details
The trial should proceed in three phases. An initial data gathering phase to last 30 days where no external changes are made to article creation, an implementation phase where article creation is restricted (see below for details) also to last 30 days and a followup phase where the article creation is returned to the status quo ante for another 30 days. Given the volume of articles created and deleted per week, 3-6 months is more than necessary to determine the immediate impact of restricting article creation. 30 days will provide more than enough data. The pre and post periods are there to gather data for a representative comparison should contemporaneous statistics be deemed too difficult to collect.
The trial should gather data not only on number of articles created but their disposition after 15 days, the history of the accounts which created the articles and the number of articles not created during the trial timeframe. Some of these data are available to editors and administrators but some will only be available to developers. Specifically:
A primary concern among supporters of the RfC was disenchantment with wikipedia due to an aggressive (but reasonable) response by new page patrollers when faced with a grossly inappropriate article. Chief among the concerns of those critical of the RfC was the potential loss in contributors due to increased editing friction. A trial which simply changes the ability of non-autoconfirmed accounts to create articles without determining the impact on potential article creation will overestimate the effectiveness of the trial to reduce inappropriate articles and greatly underestimate the potential loss of contributors. My version of the trial solves these problems in two ways. First, breaking up the trial into three parts where data is gathered in each allows us to see the switch-on and switch-off effects of the policy change. We can compare the overall article volume and quantity as well as editor retention in the trial to both the pre-trial condition and a post trial condition where some new editors may have learned of the change. Second, the inclusion of statistics on article attempts during the trial will catch most cases where a non-autoconfirmed account attempts to create an article and what their response is. If they still attempt to create the article via the AfC we will know the source of the change. Likewise if they go on to make regular edits (or request confirmation) before re-creating the article we can measure this as well. Of course should the account simply stop editing after a stymied attempt to create an article we will know this as well.
Though I suspect that the developers will not want to engage in a trial which presents a non-uniform face to users, it would be most optimal to engage in a trial where editors are randomly selected to see one of three options when opening the "create a new page" link:
Using these three options we can track user response during the trial against each change. We would record the same data as I described above but would have the additional advantage of a randomized trial showing the effectiveness of each potential change. Since one of these three (or something like them) options will be made the default should the trial be deemed a success it behooves us to kill two birds with one stone and perform some A/B testing while we are conducting the trial. Discussion
Requiring developer actionFor implementationCurrently
MediaWiki's settings would only allow us to prevent non-autoconfirmed users from creating pages in any namespace, including their own userspace. (This is the
For trial dataOtherMediaWiki:Nocreatetext is the message shown to users who try to create an article and don't have the necessary permission.
I am very dismayed at the result that we have to have a "trial period". The pending changes trial could not have been more of a disaster. WP:PCRFC is still in limbo, no up or down decision has been made after literally years of discussion. We must not repeat the mistakes that led to that situation. We need to plan out what happens after the trial period now, or we will end up in the same indefinite quagmire, to the benefit of nobody. That being said, I really don't like the option to allow creation with the article wizard. The idea behind the wizard is a good one, and when it works it works brilliantly. Unfortunately it has also led to a lot of new articles that look more like proper Wikipedia articles but are still junk. On another note, we also need some safeguard here to prevent this from turning into another thousand headed hydra of a discussion with thirty or forty separate proposals duking it out, insuring that no one proposal will ever attain consensus. How to do that? Not sure. Beeblebrox ( talk) 21:15, 2 June 2011 (UTC) reply
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The proposal says:
Which month is that one month of post-trial discussion? The use of the word "trial" seems to refer both to the whole scheme (in which case, the answer is "August") and solely to the interventional phase (in which case, the answer is "July", which would be idiotic).
(The correct answer, by the way, is "September", because there's zero chance that we'll have the data about what happened through 31 July 23:59 collected and organized by 01 August 00:00, but that sensible solution has clearly been excluded.) WhatamIdoing ( talk) 23:44, 11 July 2011 (UTC) reply
Question - At the top of this page, it states;
Required pre-trial statistics have been gathered and extrapolated for the last six months, and will be updated for the calendar start of the trial.
It specifically states "pre-trial statistics have been gathered". Has this already occured? Could somebody please clarify this or provide a link to the data? I have been unable to find it. Thank you kindly. - Hydroxonium ( T• C• V) 03:42, 12 July 2011 (UTC) reply
Question - What will happen if, at the end of the 6-month trial, there is general agreement that it's working fine and there is no need to switch it off? Chzz ► 20:54, 23 July 2011 (UTC) reply
1. Users denied the opportunity to create a page due to lack of autoconfirmed status should receive an immediate, easy to understand message telling them that if they keep their account four days and make 10 edits they can start a new page. (There's a special situation for Tor users, but... I don't know, but I find myself suspecting that you could count these on one hand. The sysops don't seem very friendly to anonymous users nowadays)
2. The definition of autoconfirmed should not be changed for this purpose during the trial; any proposal to change it should be announced here to solicit input. Wnt ( talk) 22:09, 31 July 2011 (UTC) reply
A consensus was reached on 27 May 2011 to restrict the creation of new mainspace articles to contributors whose accounts have reached autoconfirmed status.
The preferred approach voiced by the community is that this restriction first be implemented as a trial with a recommendation for a period to be determined (3–6 months) , followed by an evaluation period (1–3 months) with the trial switched off. Other recommendations voiced by the consensus concern the use of Articles for Creation and the Article Wizard systems, regardless of the outcome of this trial, and will be discussed elsewhere.
A discussion on the software changes is taking place here.
A consensus was reached to limit the creation of new articles to the holders of Autoconfirmed status. This discussion concerns the duration of the required trial.
This RfC will run until either a consensus is reached, or 30 days have elapsed.
For information purposes, a stale discussion (collapsed) is included here.
Stale discussion (last edit 13 June 2011
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---|---|---|
A consensus was reached on 27 May 2011 to restrict the creation of new mainspace articles to contributors whose accounts have reached autoconfirmed status for the duration of a trial. It was agreed that some form of evidence-based evaluation would then occur, and the question of implementing the restriction on the longer term reexamined in light of the results. Some details of the implementation of this need to be worked out. Hence this RFC. The most popular of the proposals will be implemented. Within the framework of the recommendations made in the closing discussion summary:
DiscussionThis seems, to me, to be the simplest way to go about this, and seems the way most likely to yield results. Waiting only 30 days will give us some vague sense, but we need to know what the longer-term impact will be. We also need to know what will happen once we shut it off, hence the 30 days afterwards. The Blade of the Northern Lights ( 話して下さい) 16:52, 2 June 2011 (UTC) reply
Trial for a period of 6 (six) months during which the holders of registered accounts may not create pages in article mainspace until their account has reached autoconfirmed status, with one exception: they retain the ability to create articles via the Article Wizard. User:Rd232/creationdraft, which would replace the current MediaWiki:Nocreatetext, illustrates how options would be presented to the new user in this case. Data should be gathered for 30 days prior to trial, and evaluation of the overall concept should begin after 4 months. If no consensus is reached by 6 months to continue the concept indefinitely, it is switched off. If consensus is reached, it is retained indefinitely. Evaluation of the Wizard immediate-creation option may begin separately at any time, if editors feel there are issues arising which require discussion. If there is a consensus to switch off that option, it may be done at any time. Discussion
The proposal above reflects the spirit of the RfC but is both too long and insufficient to gather the necessary data to evaluate the impact of restricting article creation. Instead I propose a shorter trial which requires some developer involvement and may require gathering and anonymizing information on not just contributions but potential contributions. Technical details
The trial should proceed in three phases. An initial data gathering phase to last 30 days where no external changes are made to article creation, an implementation phase where article creation is restricted (see below for details) also to last 30 days and a followup phase where the article creation is returned to the status quo ante for another 30 days. Given the volume of articles created and deleted per week, 3-6 months is more than necessary to determine the immediate impact of restricting article creation. 30 days will provide more than enough data. The pre and post periods are there to gather data for a representative comparison should contemporaneous statistics be deemed too difficult to collect.
The trial should gather data not only on number of articles created but their disposition after 15 days, the history of the accounts which created the articles and the number of articles not created during the trial timeframe. Some of these data are available to editors and administrators but some will only be available to developers. Specifically:
A primary concern among supporters of the RfC was disenchantment with wikipedia due to an aggressive (but reasonable) response by new page patrollers when faced with a grossly inappropriate article. Chief among the concerns of those critical of the RfC was the potential loss in contributors due to increased editing friction. A trial which simply changes the ability of non-autoconfirmed accounts to create articles without determining the impact on potential article creation will overestimate the effectiveness of the trial to reduce inappropriate articles and greatly underestimate the potential loss of contributors. My version of the trial solves these problems in two ways. First, breaking up the trial into three parts where data is gathered in each allows us to see the switch-on and switch-off effects of the policy change. We can compare the overall article volume and quantity as well as editor retention in the trial to both the pre-trial condition and a post trial condition where some new editors may have learned of the change. Second, the inclusion of statistics on article attempts during the trial will catch most cases where a non-autoconfirmed account attempts to create an article and what their response is. If they still attempt to create the article via the AfC we will know the source of the change. Likewise if they go on to make regular edits (or request confirmation) before re-creating the article we can measure this as well. Of course should the account simply stop editing after a stymied attempt to create an article we will know this as well.
Though I suspect that the developers will not want to engage in a trial which presents a non-uniform face to users, it would be most optimal to engage in a trial where editors are randomly selected to see one of three options when opening the "create a new page" link:
Using these three options we can track user response during the trial against each change. We would record the same data as I described above but would have the additional advantage of a randomized trial showing the effectiveness of each potential change. Since one of these three (or something like them) options will be made the default should the trial be deemed a success it behooves us to kill two birds with one stone and perform some A/B testing while we are conducting the trial. Discussion
Requiring developer actionFor implementationCurrently
MediaWiki's settings would only allow us to prevent non-autoconfirmed users from creating pages in any namespace, including their own userspace. (This is the
For trial dataOtherMediaWiki:Nocreatetext is the message shown to users who try to create an article and don't have the necessary permission.
I am very dismayed at the result that we have to have a "trial period". The pending changes trial could not have been more of a disaster. WP:PCRFC is still in limbo, no up or down decision has been made after literally years of discussion. We must not repeat the mistakes that led to that situation. We need to plan out what happens after the trial period now, or we will end up in the same indefinite quagmire, to the benefit of nobody. That being said, I really don't like the option to allow creation with the article wizard. The idea behind the wizard is a good one, and when it works it works brilliantly. Unfortunately it has also led to a lot of new articles that look more like proper Wikipedia articles but are still junk. On another note, we also need some safeguard here to prevent this from turning into another thousand headed hydra of a discussion with thirty or forty separate proposals duking it out, insuring that no one proposal will ever attain consensus. How to do that? Not sure. Beeblebrox ( talk) 21:15, 2 June 2011 (UTC) reply
|
The proposal says:
Which month is that one month of post-trial discussion? The use of the word "trial" seems to refer both to the whole scheme (in which case, the answer is "August") and solely to the interventional phase (in which case, the answer is "July", which would be idiotic).
(The correct answer, by the way, is "September", because there's zero chance that we'll have the data about what happened through 31 July 23:59 collected and organized by 01 August 00:00, but that sensible solution has clearly been excluded.) WhatamIdoing ( talk) 23:44, 11 July 2011 (UTC) reply
Question - At the top of this page, it states;
Required pre-trial statistics have been gathered and extrapolated for the last six months, and will be updated for the calendar start of the trial.
It specifically states "pre-trial statistics have been gathered". Has this already occured? Could somebody please clarify this or provide a link to the data? I have been unable to find it. Thank you kindly. - Hydroxonium ( T• C• V) 03:42, 12 July 2011 (UTC) reply
Question - What will happen if, at the end of the 6-month trial, there is general agreement that it's working fine and there is no need to switch it off? Chzz ► 20:54, 23 July 2011 (UTC) reply
1. Users denied the opportunity to create a page due to lack of autoconfirmed status should receive an immediate, easy to understand message telling them that if they keep their account four days and make 10 edits they can start a new page. (There's a special situation for Tor users, but... I don't know, but I find myself suspecting that you could count these on one hand. The sysops don't seem very friendly to anonymous users nowadays)
2. The definition of autoconfirmed should not be changed for this purpose during the trial; any proposal to change it should be announced here to solicit input. Wnt ( talk) 22:09, 31 July 2011 (UTC) reply