[WikiEN-l] Improve quality by reviewing all new articles

Fri Dec 16 00:38:58 UTC 2005

If we're going to improve the quality of new articles,
we'll going to need an actual quality check, not just
a block on anonymous editors' ability to start
articles. Most of new articles don't meet basic
quality standards. A significant number are so bad
that they need to be speedily deleted, or put on AFD. 

I suggest that we tackle this by putting all new
articles into an approval queue - they shouldn't
appear on Wikipedia unless they meet basic quality
standards. If a reviewing editor judges that the
article meets an objective set of criteria, it should
be "published". If not, the submitted new article
should either be deleted or sorted into a "needs
improvement" category outside the main namespace.

Here's some background data on the problem. I checked
50 new articles tonight, all created between 22:46 and
23:03. I graded them into five categories as follows:

* Speedy deletion fodder (falling into the categories
set out in [[WP:CSD]]):
- 10 articles (20% of the total)

* Sufficiently poor to warrant a deletion vote
([[WP:AFD]]):
- 2 articles; 1 of them a copyvio, 1 a probable
spamvertisement (2% of the total)

* Serious content problems (no wikilinking or
references, badly written, non-English; generally
these were just plain blocks of text dumped into
Wikipedia):
- 7 articles (14% of the total)

* No obvious problems with content, but problems with
the formatting, spelling or layout:
- 12 articles (24% of the total)

* No obvious problems
- 19 articles (38% of the total)

Note that I didn't check whether the content was
*accurate*, merely whether it was organised, formatted
etc in accordance with Wikipedia standards. As these
figures indicate, the majority of new articles created
during this period failed the quality check. Nearly a
quarter failed so badly that they were worth deleting.
This certainly accords with my previous experiences in
monitoring [[Special:Newpages]]. 

We already have a huge amount of crap in the database,
as we all know. Unfortunately the problem is getting
bigger all the time. No amount of work to fix existing
articles is going to help if we don't also fix the
problem of poor-quality new articles being published.
We're effectively trying to bail out a leaky boat
while the water is still entering.

Note also that quite a few of the speedy deletions
were things like personal attacks, patent nonsense,
tests etc (e.g. "wow, hey carly, i cant believe i can
put this on a site! :O its so cool!"). I strongly
suspect that people wouldn't submit this sort of thing
if they knew that they wouldn't see it appearing
instantly on a Wikipedia page. 

So how could we deal with this? Three measures, I
think:

1) New articles should go somewhere outside the main
namespace until reviewed and passed. They should *not*
immediately enter the main namespace.

2) We need a simple, clearly defined set of criteria
for assessing whether an article passes the grade. Is
it wikilinked? Written in English? Correctly
formatted? Includes references? etc etc...

3) Reviewing editors should assess newly created
articles against these criteria. If the article
passes, the article should be cleared to enter the
main namespace. If not, it should be sorted into a
queue to deal with whatever the problem is. For
instance, an article lacking any wikilinks and
incorrectly spelled should first be sorted into a
"needs links" queue, then moved to a "needs spelling
corrections", then finally moved to the main
namespace. 

Because reviewing editors would necessarily need to be
people with a bit of experience of editing, I would
limit the ability to review and approve new articles
to editors with a certain number of edits - say 500+.
However, any editor should be able to work on
improving a queued article. 

Any thoughts on this idea?

- ChrisO

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