Wikipedia talk:New pages patrol/Coordination/2022 WMF letter

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

Note: I originally posted the below as a comment on this Signpost article about the open letter, where it has gained some discussion. I was then encouraged to also post it here so that the people interested in the letter would be more likely to see it. Thank you for reading, and let's continue the conversation!

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

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

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

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

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

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

We're looking forward to continuing the discussion, and also please let us know if this reply should be posted in other places! MMiller (WMF) (talk) 18:08, 3 October 2022 (UTC)

Hi Marshall. Thank you for reposting here, it's nice that we finally have an official response from the WMF and/or the Board of Trustees that our reviewers can follow and join in, and I know from our previous collaborations that you and our team can work very well together. These issues are of such importance that we are still expecting a reply from Ms Iskander herself or at least from CPTO Ms Denckelmann with at least a short word of assurance from them that they are personally aware and have instructed their managers to take this on. I, and I'm sure the lead NPP coords MB and Novem Linguae will be pleased to have a live meeting with you that will be a genuine multi-way dialogue rather than the one-sided lecture our colleague received from the BoT.

The goal is not only to make urgent upgrades to PageTriage to make it more streamlined and comprehensive but, but also–and equally important–to develop a first and correct onboarding system for new users and make all these systems available to other language Wikipedias whose editors desire them. These tools will be invaluable o the organisers of the growing number of edit-a-thons and Wiki Education programmes that are often the source of problematic new articles. I would like to emphasise therefore, that due to the full scope of what is needed, we are looking first and foremost for a commitment from HR and the financial deciders that funds and personnel will be allocated to these developments, and probably the creation of a dedicated section parallel to Growthn/Community Tech that will not encroach on their bandwidth.

Rather than clutter the reviewers' general talk page, this page here is probably the best venue for all discussions on these specific issues and back-and-forth collaboration on development once priorities are defined and it gets underway. Kudpung กุดผึ้ง (talk) 20:43, 3 October 2022 (UTC)

On this last note, I will just add that this project and its talk page are an excellent example how well a dedicated team from NPP and from AfC were able to collaborate successfully, with the WMF under your tutelage. As Primefac was also a major participant and as our NPP goals will ultimately lighten the workload of AfC, he might wish to follow and comment on what we would like the WMF to undertake. Kudpung กุดผึ้ง (talk) 21:10, 3 October 2022 (UTC)

Hi again Marshall. We have now received a very cursory comment from Ms Iskander that she is aware of the issues. There is no further comment that she understands or is concerned with the importance of NPP and controlling the flux of new articles and how the reputation of Wikipedia depends on it. Likewise there has been no response from Ms Denckelmann whom we assume to be slightly more directly involved but in overall responsibility for your department. No one within the en.Wiki and even some of the WMF staff who are also regular editors here are sure about the lines of authority/responsibility within the WMF. Apart from a couple of emails, there has also not been any official response from the BoT.

I have been reminded again that dialogue with the WMF on moving forward will be difficult if at first there is not a commitment to increase the staff. I have been sent a complete breakdown from Phabricator volunteers of the estimated time and costs involved, and as a non-programmer I was surprised that only a very small budget is required. Mr Horn has organised work on Page Triage through his Wishlist that cost considerably more, and the project that you and I worked on in 2018 didn't appear to have difficulty on getting resources assigned. We think that it should be possible to establish the way forward through a preliminary meeting very soon (days rather than weeks) before discussing the actual details. Perhaps you would like to have a quick chat with one of us next week on FaceTime or Telegram. (FYI @MB and Novem Linguae:). Kudpung กุดผึ้ง (talk) 07:02, 6 October 2022 (UTC)

Hi @Kudpung -- thanks for your update. I just wanted to assure you that we haven't forgotten about this! I agree that once a project is underway, it is helpful to have detailed conversations in small groups. But the first step is figuring out the when/what of the project, and our plan is still for the first step to be this larger conversation that helps us all see the "new pages" challenge broadly, so that we can figure out what action to take. That's still getting scheduled, and we'll keep you all posted on that. I know that the call with the Board is in a few days, but we're not going to be able to get the new pages call scheduled before then. I know you've put a lot of work into getting these conversations going, and thank you for being patient. MMiller (WMF) (talk) 22:29, 17 October 2022 (UTC)

Hi Marshall, we're being as patient as possible but Mr Horn's improptue comment was 6 weeks ago and it's now already three weeks since the Open Letter was officially published.

The NPP team can explain in 5 minutes for the WMF to see the "new pages" challenge broadly. It does not take a big meeting with the entire staff and representatives of all the other Wikis and Commons. We have a holistic plan that will at the same time encourage more reviewers to do the work, and, most importantly, encourage new users to submit new articles that are not time wasting inappropriate junk, thus reducing the workload for both NPP and AfC. This is separate from Growth's major project to mentor and retain new mobile device users, which again is a WMF initiative and AFAIK not one that was asked for at the Wishlist, and it seems to be what is using all your capacity.

The greatest problem however, is one of communication with the WMF and the feeling of being ignored. We have qualified, experienced software engineers in our group who know their way round MediaWiki, and it's been calculated that developer time for what's needed would not be more than the time spent on the work you and I collaborated on in 2018 together with the fixes that were done through the Wishlist campaign in 2019. However, it's not acceptable that our NPPers should be doing the Foundation's work at Phab for free. I'll mention again that it is expected that the first meeting will conclude with a firm commitment from the WMF to allocate a budget and deploy human resources to the required tasks.

I'm sure you understand all this and that the en.Wiki is the most important of all Foundation projects, but it's convincing your superiors, and they are currently far more concerned with pursuing abstract long term plans for the future of the movement rather than the reliability and quality of the articles and the reputation of the encyclopedia. Let's move forward. FYI @MB and Novem Linguae:. Kudpung กุดผึ้ง (talk) 03:55, 18 October 2022 (UTC)

New page processing flow chart

Page process flow chart

As the effort is two-fold:

1. To address the bugs and features for PageTriage
2. Assist newly registered users to create their first page, thus reducing the workload on NPP & AfC

I'm just parking this image here that I made a while back because if and when resources are allocated it will be one of the hinge factors for discussion and development. Kudpung กุดผึ้ง (talk) 08:20, 8 October 2022 (UTC)

Reply from the CAC

Dear all, The Board of Trustees' Community Affairs Committee (CAC) is following this. We hope you will continue to engage and work with the Product team to discuss priorities. On behalf of the CAC, Shani (WMF) (talk) 19:31, 13 October 2022 (UTC)

No need to 'hope'. I will certainly be more than ready and pleased to engage and work with the Product team to discuss priorities. Kudpung กุดผึ้ง (talk) 21:25, 13 October 2022 (UTC)

New page review conversation: November 3 at 18:00 UTC

Hello everyone -- in my original reply to the open letter above, I said that our next step will be a conversation to talk about priorities for New Page Patrol and for the reviewing of new pages in the wikis more broadly. We now have a set a time for that, and this message is the invitation to attend! (@Novem Linguae -- you asked about this in the call with the Board's community affairs committee last week).

I'll be facilitating this conversation, and it will have several staff members from WMF Product leadership. In addition to people interested in NPP on English Wikipedia, we're inviting some people who review new pages on other wikis, as well as people who work on efforts to submit new pages (e.g. edit-a-thons). We think this will help us get a well-rounded perspective on new page reviewing, so that we can think about what investments could help the most people around the movement.

We're planning this as a video call (you can, of course, be off-camera) on November 3 at 18:00 UTC. Note that this is during the part of the year when the United States is on a different daylight savings schedule than other parts of the world, so please double-check what time this will be for you. This zonestamp tool may help.

We're still settling on which video conference software we want to use, and I'll be following up here with the specific link later this week.

If you plan to attend, please reply here so we know how many people to expect! Thank you, and I'm looking forward to the conversation. MMiller (WMF) (talk) 18:15, 24 October 2022 (UTC)

Attendance list

1. Planning on attending (18:00 UTC = 01:00 AM Thai time) Kudpung กุดผึ้ง (talk) 23:52, 24 October 2022 (UTC)

   Thank you for making that time work, @Kudpung. I know it's late for you, but we wanted to be able to get the right product people on the line. MMiller (WMF) (talk) 03:27, 25 October 2022 (UTC)

2. Looking forward ~ 🦝 Shushugah (he/him • talk) 02:05, 25 October 2022 (UTC)
3. Can attend. MB 04:22, 25 October 2022 (UTC)
4. Will attend. Thanks for the details. If anyone wants to double check my calculation, I think for USA pacific time, this meeting is at Nov 3 @ 11AM. Please correct me if I'm wrong. –Novem Linguae (talk) 21:15, 26 October 2022 (UTC)

   @Novem Linguae -- glad you'll be there! Yes, it's at 11 AM PT. MMiller (WMF) (talk) 21:26, 26 October 2022 (UTC)

5. Atsme here! That will be 2:00 pm Bonaire (EST) time on Nov 3rd? Atsme 💬 📧 02:05, 27 October 2022 (UTC)

   Yes, @Atsme -- thank you for attending. I can't speak to Bonaire's timezone, but it will be at 2:00 PM eastern time (e.g. New York). See you there! MMiller (WMF) (talk) 15:52, 27 October 2022 (UTC)

6. Should be able to attend this — TheresNoTime (talk • they/them) 07:15, 27 October 2022 (UTC)

   n.b. I just wish to note that I am attending entirely in my capacity as a volunteer 🙂 — TheresNoTime (talk • they/them) 20:43, 27 October 2022 (UTC)

7. I'll be there on behalf of Wiki Education. :-) --Sage (Wiki Ed) (talk) 16:30, 1 November 2022 (UTC)
8. I will be there from the Hungarian Wikipedia and from Wikimedia Hungary. Samat (talk) 21:31, 1 November 2022 (UTC)
9. I would like to join the call (not representing any affiliate or project) Ainali (talk) 09:32, 3 November 2022 (UTC)
10. I will be there.. :) --FShbib (talk) 17:21, 3 November 2022 (UTC)

Details

Hello MB, Kudpung, Novem Linguae, and Shushugah -- I now have all the details for the meeting. Let me know if you have any questions, and thank you for attending!

Time: November 3 at 18:00 UTC. Please be mindful of daylight savings in your location!

Link: We'll be using open-source Jitsi for a video call (you may be off-camera if you prefer). The link is https://meet.jit.si/NewPagesRoundtable.

Hi, Marshall. As you already know all the people from the en.Wikipedia who will be attending, we think it would be helpful if you would tell who will be attending from the WMF and from other Wikimedia projects. It would help us to formulate our part of the discussion to the benefit of the others who are not familiar with NPP. Thanks. Kudpung กุดผึ้ง (talk) 09:10, 30 October 2022 (UTC)

Hi again, Marshall. As we we have not been informed who will be participating from the WMF and as 01:00 AM is not really a convenient time, I will probably not be attending the meeting after all. The meeting was called due to an initiative of the English Wikipedia's NPP team and I have every confidence that @Novem Linguae and MB: can explain any details that you or your colleagues are not aware of already. When you have increased the resources, I will be more than happy to work with you or your team on the development as we did most successfully in 2018. Kudpung กุดผึ้ง (talk) 22:28, 1 November 2022 (UTC)

Hi @Kudpung -- I've asked the people who are planning on attending to put their names on the list above, and I see a couple have now (Sage and Samat). I know this is at a tough time for you, and I hope you're able to make it. MMiller (WMF) (talk) 23:45, 1 November 2022 (UTC)

Hi, Marshall, I was asking about your colleagues from the WMF. Will you be alone to facilitate the meeting and represent your team.or will there be others? Kudpung กุดผึ้ง (talk) 01:39, 2 November 2022 (UTC)

Hi @Kudpung -- I'm sorry for the misunderstanding, and I'm happy to say who will be attending from WMF. I'll be there along with Selena Deckelmann (CPTO), Danny Horn (Director of Product for Contributor Tools), Mayur Paul (Director of Movement Communications), and Gergő Tisza (Staff Software Engineer). I think with this group, we'll bring lots of institutional knowledge and different skillsets to the conversation. MMiller (WMF) (talk) 02:02, 2 November 2022 (UTC)

Hey there. Is there an agenda available for this meeting? If so, feel free to post it here. –Novem Linguae (talk) 08:44, 2 November 2022 (UTC)

Hello @Novem Linguae -- I haven't set too much of an agenda, because I want us to be able to have an organic conversation about whatever surfaces as most important. We'll start with introducing everyone in the meeting, and then with NPP people setting the table around the most important things to discuss. As the facilitator, I may also prompt people to chime in with their perspective (e.g. to the person from Hungarian Wikipedia: "Do you see similar problems in Hungarian Wikipedia?"). It's possible that we get into the weeds on some of the needs (an engineer will be present if we do: @Tgr (WMF)), or it may wind up being more high-level. How does that sound?

Is there anything you think we should definitely include in the agenda? MMiller (WMF) (talk) 17:39, 2 November 2022 (UTC)

Sounds good. I'll probably be providing some direction to the meeting from the NPP side, and I'll probably just go over the bullet points I emailed. Hope that works. Looking forward to a good chat :) –Novem Linguae (talk) 18:13, 2 November 2022 (UTC)

Feedback

I was happy to see so many folks interested in attending today's meeting and was a bit disappointed we weren't addressing the needs of this pedia's NPP more. It was an initial conversation, so more direct contact will be better, with any luck and focus. While I'm excited to see everyone's willingness, just like a new user's focus might be on initial success, we would be wise to keep our focus on improving the user experience and pure enjoyment of our new volunteers, a word we do not use often enough on Wikipedia, often instead using the term wikipedian as embracing all of us. A new volunteer is like found money. Positive experiences and feedback can retain many. We want more volunteers and we especially want happy volunteers, so there must be some code-related process for new users which not only helpfully facilitates, but also encourages, appreciates and even trains them in the moment. They came here to participate; many are anxious to know just how to do so. Enjoyment, activity, service, and training; these are elements which improve the user experience. If we can nail a system embracing all four, we'll have so many new helpers even Kudpung might sleep more soundly. BusterD (talk) 20:07, 3 November 2022 (UTC)

Summary of meeting #1 from Novem's perspective

New page patrol requested the following from WMF:

1. Software engineer to work on all of the 25 high priority tickets ("soon" column on this workboard)
2. Software engineer to work on some of the 100 low priority tickets ("backlog" column on this workboard)
3. Software engineer to review/approve/merge PageTriage patches written by volunteers. This is a major bottleneck in the patch writing process because so few users have access to "approve" patches (called +2)
4. Help with fleshing out a better workflow for new users who try to create an article. In particular, creating a new user welcome page, and revamping Wikipedia:Article wizard and Help:Your first article.

Also discussed:

        5. Making PageTriage work on other wikis (phab:T50552)

WMF:

• Agreed to bullet point #3, and didn't sound optimistic about the rest.
• Seemed inflexible/unable to create new resources such as new developers or new teams.
• Seemed unable to escape the bureaucracy of their Annual Planning / Budgeting process undertaken in May/June every year. Gave the impression that no software work can be done ever at WMF unless it gets planned in May/June, which seems like a very rigid system with no flexibility.
• Said to work on our software, they'd have to take software engineers away from other projects and teams.
• Think the scope of this project requires more than one software engineer.
• Don't seem to want to prioritize this software because it is too enwiki-centric.
• Packed the meeting with folks from other wikis, who talked about a bunch of other things unrelated to PageTriage and our open letter, such as FlaggedRevs. This made the scope of the meeting too wide, the focus too wide, and reduced the amount of time and focus spent on our issue.

I would prefer that our next meeting be much more focused on our open letter and PageTriage, and much more enwiki-centric. If other wikis have problems with their software, they are welcome to communicate this to the WMF and have meetings directly with WMF about it.

Ending on a positive note, thank you for having some key staff attend the meeting. The meeting was well-attended by top WMF staff. Also, thank you for 1) pledging to review volunteer patches and 2) for being open to a second meeting. Let's move forward with those two items and re-evaluate.

Sincerely, –Novem Linguae (talk) 20:53, 3 November 2022 (UTC)

Feedback from Kudpung

Very much the same as Novem Linguae and BusterD and I'm very grateful to Buster for having taken part and underlining the issues explained by Mike, Novem, and me. I do feel that Selena's answers were not quite what the en.Wiki community is hoping for, but she is new on the job. IMO the WMF could quite easily be more flexible with its glut of funds without waiting for the next callendar plan from the foundation's 'Minister of Finance' (whoever that is). The WMF's work is so diverse nowadays that it still does not fully understand that the experienced volunteers are its biggest asset, the en.Wiki is the biggest puller of donations, and that NPP is what keeps the corpus clean and maintains the movement's reputation for neutrality and accuracy of its encyclopedias.

These are all in my opinion far greater priorities than using up the Growth team's entire budget and bandwith on the mentorship programme they have been developing. I will takes years for any metrics to emerge that demonstrate any impact it may have had on new user participation and retention. This kind of planning leaves no Spielraum for contingencies and other eventualities that could and always will arise at any moment. I am still convinced that on the subject of new page creation workflows and UX, the volunteers who do this day-in, day-out, know best, and some of them are expert coders and UX professionals. The allocation of a dedicated WMF engineering team to en.Wiki's workflows is however, nevertheless absolutely essential.

The meeting was nevertheless an excellent (and the first ever of its kind) opportunity to air the communities' concerns and in this it was a success. I am confident that the next meeting will be more focused and that concerns discussed by representatives of other Wikis can be topics for other, separate meetings, but without losing sight of the goal of making PageTriage wiki-agnostic. This meeting was a new and important step towards bridging the 'us vs. them' divide between SF and the Foundation's volunteers since Danny Horn's help getting ACTRIAL approved and demonstrating that the Foundation can indeed be flexible; it has certainly led to relieving a lot of built-up tension and has paved the way to a much better understanding all-round. Kudpung กุดผึ้ง (talk) 05:04, 4 November 2022 (UTC)

Meeting #1 follow up questions

Hey @MMiller (WMF). Was great chatting with you earlier today. I had a couple follow up questions I was wondering if you can answer here. 1) Who will be assigned to review PageTriage patches? 2) Will this be a one time thing or ongoing? 3) Should we start tagging them in reviews? 4) Should we add them to mw:Git/Reviewers? 5) Should we look into calendaring the next meeting? Please share the date when you have it. Thanks a lot. Looking forward to your feedback. –Novem Linguae (talk) 07:56, 4 November 2022 (UTC)

Hello @Novem Linguae, @Kudpung, and @BusterD -- thank you so much for participating in last week's meeting and for your reflections and notes. I just wanted to let you know that I've seen them, and I'll be posting my own notes, links to the meeting recording, and next steps here a little later this week. Just taking a little time to talk to some of the engineers to figure out what can come next. Thank you! MMiller (WMF) (talk) 00:43, 8 November 2022 (UTC)

I'm not altogether happy about missing MB of the thanks list. I would just like to remind everyone that it was MB's initiative alone that made it possible to obtaining the Foundation's attention. Unfortunately, having listened/watched the video of the meeting a couple of times, I am not wholly enthusiastic that the WMF will be able or want to move this forward in the way the Wikipedia volunteers would prefer. It seems clear (to me at least) from the dialogue that funds are unlikely to be made available any time soon and that the Growth team will continue their other developments with little collaboration with the volunteers who run the processes that really matter. I'll bow out now as gracefully as possible and hand back to the NPP coordinators. Kudpung กุดผึ้ง (talk) 00:04, 13 November 2022 (UTC)

Hey @MMiller (WMF). Just a quick ping to follow up on this. It's been a week. A lot of stuff was undecided in our meeting, but I think the two actionable items are 1) picking someone to do code reviews and letting us know who it is, and 2) getting a second meeting on the calendar. Would be great to move forward with those so we have something to show for our meeting. Also full disclosure, I think someone is working on a Signpost article about our meeting, so would be nice to have something positive to report for that. Thank you. –Novem Linguae (talk) 18:55, 13 November 2022 (UTC)

@Novem Linguae -- thanks for the ping. I know this is taking me several days longer than I planned to post a reply, but it's because we're figuring out the resourcing for these things we agreed upon. Selena explained that it can be tricky to shift things around as all teams already have projects in flight, and that's exactly what I'm navigating right now. But progress is being made, and I'm hoping to post more tomorrow! MMiller (WMF) (talk) 17:34, 14 November 2022 (UTC)

Sounds good. Thanks for checking in. –Novem Linguae (talk) 18:34, 14 November 2022 (UTC)

Notes and next steps from the meeting on Nov 3

Hello everyone – thank you for your patience since our roundtable meeting on November 3.  It has taken us some time to upload the video, assemble our notes, and figure out how we can help going forward on the Wikimedia Foundation (WMF) end.  Our meeting included several WMF staff, including our new Chief Product and Technology Officer, Selena Deckelmann.  Volunteers attended from New Page Patrol, other parts of the English Wikipedia community, and from the Arabic, Hungarian, and Swedish Wikipedia communities.  Like several of you said, we agree that this was a great experience in talking openly about challenges, weighing different perspectives, and just generally understanding each other better than before.  Thank you all so much for participating and working with us to think things through!  WMF’s annual plans run from July - June, and we’re currently in the midst of this year’s plan. Having had this meeting and gone over the PageTriage needs with the NPP community, we are now well-equipped to consider those needs during the next annual planning process (planning happens in the first months of 2023 for a plan to start in July).  But during this fiscal year, we have several promising paths forward, a key part of which will be looking at PageTriage architecture to consider how it might be made easier to maintain and extend.

Materials

• Video from the meeting: Jitsi limited the length of this video, and it cuts off a little before the meeting actually concluded.
• Audio from the meeting: this was our backup recording, and begins around the place where the video cuts off.  After the meeting concluded, we continued some technical discussion, and this recording extends through those additional 20 minutes.
• Detailed notes: although several volunteers already posted notes above, I included my own detailed notes at the end of this post.  If you have anything to add or correct, please reply!

Decisions and next steps

• Organizing: we asked Novem Linguae to organize the PageTriage Phabricator board into priority order.  It looks like he has done that and reorganized the columns already – thank you!
• Code review: we decided that WMF engineers will be available for code review of volunteer patches to PageTriage on an ongoing basis.  The Growth team will be responsible for this code review.  New patches will automatically notify Growth engineers, but you can always tag kharlan, gtisza, and sgimeno.
• Longer term architecture: we will spend some time over the coming weeks looking into whether there are architectural opportunities to make PageTriage easier to maintain and extend in the future, and possibly available to other Wikipedias.  For instance, we have ideas around how volunteers might adjust and enhance the Page Curation Toolbar and New Pages Feed without requiring code changes.  Depending on what comes from this investigation, we may be able to make improvements during this fiscal year (July 2022 - June 2023).  WMF staff from the Moderator Tools team will be pursuing this line of thinking, and will be in touch with Novem about it.  The contact point for this will be Sam Walton.
• Newcomer experience: an important aspect of our meeting was discussion around how the experience of being a new article creator can be improved so that newcomers create better new articles in the first place. This would give them a more satisfying initial editing experience while also making the new page patrol work easier. Folks from NPP had ideas around onboarding and the Article Wizard which sound like they could be aligned with the roadmap of the Growth team. Kirsten Stoller from the Growth team will start a conversation about those ideas.
• Next meeting and updates: we decided together that we would like to have another meeting, hopefully before the end of the calendar year.  I will be on point for planning and scheduling that. We'll also be sure to post an update during the week of November 28 on how things are going so far.

We're getting started on these things now, and please reply with your thoughts and additional notes as we keep this conversation going.

Detailed notes from the meeting

These are notes as they were right after the meeting, and do not cover the decisions made afterward, which are listed above.

Expand to read the detailed notes

We started with introductions. Novem Linguae reviewed the open letter and the priorities of New Page Patrol. Novem and MPGuy2824 have solved many of the biggest bugs in the past months. Novem showed the PageTriage Phabricator board and highlighted some of the most important tasks to NPP (e.g. Draftify). A major priority is resources for code review.  When volunteers make patches, it would help tremendously if WMF engineers could help with code review so that the patches can be merged. New page patrollers are interested in thinking about the new article creation flow and the experiences newcomers have when they are first trying to create an article. Selena explained some of her thinking around PageTriage and New Page Patrol. We definitely want to address code review – this seems like a relatively simple way to help PageTriage improve.  We will have to figure out which engineers and teams can do this in an ongoing way. Because there is a long list of improvements to make to PageTriage, and because there will always be new good ideas in the future, we want to take a little time to consider a more systemic approach.  Rather than working on each issue one at a time, might there be ways to re-architect the extension so that it is easier to make changes in the future, or easier for volunteers to configure on their own without code changes?  For instance, perhaps new functions could be added to the Page Curation Toolbar without code changes. We’ve noticed that other tools, like Twinkle, do similar things as the Page Curation Toolbar.  Perhaps there are ways to increase the efficiency in both so that code and functionality can be shared between them. These sorts of architectural considerations are what WMF engineers are best-positioned to bring to the conversation. Volunteers talked about how page patrolling works on their wikis Samat from Hungarian Wikipedia brought up questions about Flagged Revisions, which has its own maintenance issues and how it’s confusing for newcomers. FShbib from Arabic Wikipedia said that they don’t have any tools for managing article review – they find them on Special:NewPages and tag them manually with templates and categories.  They have a backlog of thousands of pages, and he is interested in using PageTriage on Arabic Wikipedia. Samat and FShbib talked about sorting articles by topic to direct to reviewers who understand the topic (e.g. History, Music, Physics). Ainali from Swedish Wikipedia says they also have no tools for reviewing pages – they just use Special:NewPages and RecentChanges.  He pointed out that Movement Strategy Initiative 16 calls on us to “make tools easier to use in all the different Wikimedia Projects”.  He recommends that we make PageTriage wiki-agnostic before making further improvements to what it can do. We talked about making PageTriage wiki-agnostic. Novem said that although staff members had recommended a rewrite, there may be simpler ways to do it incrementally, such as by creating configuration variables to turn off functionality specific to English Wikipedia.  He has started working on this. The extension is already translatable in translatewiki.net. Novem recommends that we start by making the extension work on one additional wiki, iron out any issues there, and then proceed with another, and so on. Samat asked about our general policy for making things wiki-agnostic, and Marshall said that PageTriage is an exception, because WMF almost always builds things to be wiki-agnostic. We talked about whether English-specific improvements would have to be sequenced with going wiki-agnostic, or whether these things could happen in parallel. We talked about the experience of newcomers who submit articles to NPP. Sage from WikiEdu said that their students benefit from high-quality reviews from NPP, and they want that to continue. Sage said that the way the NPP process works and how to interact with it are very opaque and distressing for newcomers. For instance, “your page was patrolled” is a good thing, but it sounds scary.  It would be really good to make the process visible from the article view so the author can see it. Justice from Wikimedia Ghana said that he wants more people from his community to become reviewers so they can help. Kudpung explained that NPP wants to bring the creator into the process of their article being reviewed, and wants to communicate with them more clearly – even if with a talk page message instead of a notification.  There are newcomers who come with the express intention of creating a new article.  We don’t want to frighten them off – we want to help them.  And this will make page reviewing easier. Samat would be in favor of a clear button to create a new article, plus a wizard that can make sure you don’t duplicate an existing article. We concluded the meeting. Novem pointed out that the meeting did not focus specifically on solutions for PageTriage. Selena said that WMF can commit to addressing code review, and to investigating what kinds of investments WMF can make in PageTriage.  The issue around new user onboarding connects well with the existing roadmap from the Growth team, and that is a clear opportunity for further discussion. BusterD reminded us that volunteers participate when they’re happy.  Volunteers need to have a positive and fun service experience.  He wants to see more frequent calls like this to work together. We had an additional twenty minutes of technical conversation after the meeting. Tgr and Novem agreed that it is worth investigating how to make PageTriage configurable and reuse code from Twinkle. We decided to put the “Soon” column of the Phabricator board in priority order. We talked more about “Draftify” and other ideas. We talked about improving the Article Wizard to include thematic page templates, filling in infobox, etc.

-- MMiller (WMF) (talk) 06:01, 16 November 2022 (UTC)

Moderator tools team / investigation of codebase

Hi all - I’m the Product Manager for the Moderator Tools team. As Marshall noted above I’m spending some time digging into this further to better understand what the highest priority options might be for making improvements to PageTriage and NPP workflows.

Novem Linguae - since you've been working on the extension recently it would be helpful if I could get on a call with you and one of our engineers to learn more about the technical side of things. We’ve been chatting to some WMF engineers with experience of the codebase and I think it would really help to understand your perspective as we explore that side of the problem. If you’re happy to meet I’ll send you an email to organise a time (for next week, probably). I'll follow up with notes on our discussion for the benefit of everyone else if you're happy with that. Samwalton9 (WMF) (talk) 16:15, 17 November 2022 (UTC)

Hey @Samwalton9 (WMF). Sounds good. I'm happy to work out a meeting time. Feel free to email me. Thank you. –Novem Linguae (talk) 07:46, 18 November 2022 (UTC)

Thanks! For the benefit of discussion watchers - we're meeting next Tuesday (22nd), and I'll post notes on our discussion here afterwards. Samwalton9 (WMF) (talk) 11:04, 18 November 2022 (UTC)

Here are the meeting notes from my chat with Novem Linguae yesterday - Novem, feel free to edit these as necessary! Samwalton9 (WMF) (talk) 16:32, 23 November 2022 (UTC)

Sam Walton - Novem Linguae meeting notes (22 Nov)

I started with some background, explaining that our team (Moderator Tools) is spending some time looking into PageTriage, in terms of the tickets logged on the Phabricator board, doing a surface-level investigation of the codebase, and speaking with WMF engineers who worked on the extension in the past. We’re collecting this information so that we can have clearer internal discussions about priorities. One thing we’ve learned so far is that PageTriage is an old extension, using outdated technologies and designs, and this may result in a steep learning curve for current WMF Product teams which could make quick wins challenging. Novem shared some information about his history of contributing to the codebase, in addition to others like Twinkle. Since the NPP letter was sent he’s been able to submit 20 patches fixing high priority issues alongside other volunteer developers. There’s still a lot of room for improvement in the extension, but many of the most frustrating smaller issues have been resolved. The WMF Growth team have been added as reviewers for the codebase and have been providing helpful reviews and +2s. Novem hopes to gain +2 rights after submitting some more patches. We discussed the differences between PageTriage and Twinkle, and the code and functionality which is duplicated between them. Novem shared that PageTriage is harder to work with than Twinkle owing to it having both backend and frontend components, and being hosted on Gerrit rather than Github. We talked a little about whether these tools should have centralised functionality, which they could both pull from. Novem noted that PageTriage should ideally be a one-stop-shop for new page patrolling, without needing other tools or scripts. We also discussed how TwinkleStarter/TwinkleCore was intended to make it easier to setup Twinkle on other Wikimedia projects, but it doesn’t seem like it has been widely adopted, potentially because it remains technically challenging to configure. I asked for Novem’s opinion on which few tickets on the Phabricator board were the highest priority and best suited for a WMF Product team to pick up. Novem pointed to the ‘Priority big features’ tickets, specifically the top three: T124396, T207237, and T321179. We spoke about making the extension wiki-agnostic, and the work that Novem is doing to add a feature flag to turn off certain features on other wikis. This is actively being tested with some interested community members. I brought up the Growth team’s “Community Configuration” system for managing settings for the Newcomer Homepage, and we discussed how this might be useful for PageTriage. Novem agreed and has filed T323632 to explore this idea - the Growth team is in contact on that ticket. Novem asked what resources we were committing to the project. At the moment we’re just in a phase of exploring and better understanding the problem space, and I explained that all this information and the other research we’re doing is being collated to discuss in more detail.

Growth team / newcomer experience

Hello, I'm the Product Manager for the Growth team. To continue the Newcomer experience discussion as it relates to article creation and NPP, I've started a discussion here: Newcomer experience + new article creation.

Please join that discussion if you are interested. Thanks! KStoller-WMF (talk) 18:57, 17 November 2022 (UTC)