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Please for the love of all that is holy, can we either revamp these to require some degree of human oversight in terms of suggestions, or just remove them entirely? My experience both with peeking at them briefly as a newbie myself and reviewing edits made by others is that they give vague and unhelpful suggestions on articles that need major improvements, so we get these new editors with no understanding of the subject making equally unhelpful (and sometimes nonsensical) changes that other editors then have to review and usually revert. It's creating extra work without actually improving the articles. It would be one thing if the tool was actually capable of identifying truly minor edits needed, like spelling and grammar, but that doesn't seem to be the case. We'd be better off leaving newbies to look around on their own and make edits where they feel they adequately understand both the subject and the changes that are needed, rather than trying to guess what some automation has identified. ChompyTheGogoat (talk) 02:31, 25 August 2026 (UTC)
I'll just dump here what I wrote on my user page a while ago:
"I started editing by going through "Newcomer Tasks". After three days and a handful of edits, I have given up. The vast majority of the "Newcomer Tasks" I was shown were completely unsuited for actual newcomers. I mostly looked at tasks in the history topic. Most of them consist of being asked to improve very poor articles on very obscure topics. In many cases, there seem to be only few books or articles covering the article topic, and they tend to only be available in specialized libraries.
I do not know how these "Newcomer Tasks" are chosen. Based on what I've seen, most of the articles seem to have what I found to be called "maintenance templates". I suspect that these articles are automatically assigned to newcomers based on these templates.
That is a very poor way of introducing newcomers to editing Wikipedia. It feels more like being given the odious tasks that nobody else wants to perform, than tasks tailored to the needs and skills of newcomers. It feels like starting an internship and being given the tasks of making coffee and cleaning up behind the staff.
I expect those "Newcomer Tasks" to drive away a lot of people who might have gone on to become valuable contributors if they hadn't been turned off right at the start. While that isn't the case for me, it seems that I will have to find my own way on Wikipedia." Long is the way (talk) 13:44, 26 August 2026 (UTC)
At least those (IRL) tasks are actually easy to understand, just tedious. These are more like being asked to tidy up and walking into a building actively on fire. The ones I've seen newbies attempting to "fix" lately didn't have maintenance templates that I recall, so I really have no idea how they're being suggested. They suddenly started popping up on a group of related articles that have received attention recently. ChompyTheGogoat (talk) 17:12, 26 August 2026 (UTC)
Nope, no template. The latest was a "revise tone" with the summary "Removed bias and slang", when it fact the only substantial change was a misinterpretation based on lack of knowledge of the subject matter. There was no slang of any kind. ChompyTheGogoat (talk) 17:46, 26 August 2026 (UTC)
Before I settled on the History topic area I also looked at tasks in the Philosophy and Religion area and the Computer (it's been a while, I'm not sure if that was the title) area. In the Philosophy and Religion area, most articles that showed up were about random churches, religious colleges and religious schools in the US. And if that's not bad enough, every time I did a quick search for reliable sources (I won't do a thorough search for an article about a random church that interests me not one jot) came up empty. So what should I do? Nominate article after article for deletion as a newcomer when the author couldn't be bothered to provide proper sources for their edits and someone else couldn't be bothered to do more than tag it? And in the Computer area most articles were about random software and tagged for promotional language. Again, a quick search for proper sources usually came up empty. Once you've wasted a few hours like that it's hard not to come to the conclusion that Newcomer Tasks (if not Wikipedia in its entirety) are thoroughly broken. Long is the way (talk) 18:21, 26 August 2026 (UTC)
I think I was looking at Science - which is incredibly broad, with no way to narrow down my actual interests - and my "1-2 minute copyedit" tasks needed a full top to bottom rewrite (and probably sourcing too). I literally didn't know where to start. Instead I just dabbled with very minor fixes that I stumbled across during my normal reading, or occasionally when someone else mentioned it at Teahouse and didn't know how to do it themselves. Honestly, I think basing it on templates would be better than how it currently is. Even moreso if there was a specific "newcomer level" that could be appended to indicate that it's an easy fix for someone who's still learning - based on actual human judgement - leaving the more complex issues out of the newcomer database. Of course most experienced editors would just fix something that simple, but there could be an active choice to leave it in if it doesn't interfere with the overall reader experience. ChompyTheGogoat (talk) 19:22, 26 August 2026 (UTC)
The lack of filter options is a major drag. I found some stuff to do via WP:Backlog which seems to be entirely based on templates, but at least allows for (some) filtering. Long is the way (talk) 20:35, 26 August 2026 (UTC)
Thank you for taking the time to describe your experiences. I work with the Growth team, which developed newcomer tasks, so I wanted to let you know that I'm following along and thinking about all of the feedback shared in this thread.
New editors make mistakes, and that's true whether they arrive through Suggested Edits or on their own; our goal is to make those early mistakes smaller and easier to learn from, and we know we don't always succeed. Suggested Edits clearly aren't the right path for everyone, but in multiple controlled experiments they've increased the share of newcomers who make a first edit and who are still editing weeks later (2020 analysis, 2021 analysis, 2025 analysis), so many new account holders do find them valuable.
Two current efforts speak directly to what you've described. Newer tasks like Revise Tone are far more in-context than the broad "copyedit this article" tasks you encountered: they point to specific sentences rather than leaving a newcomer staring at an article that needs a rewrite. ChompyTheGogoat, since your recent example was a Revise Tone edit gone wrong, I'm curious if you've looked at other Revise Tone edits? Although newcomers are still making some mistakes, it seems like this task is helping provide enough structure to support newer editors, while still teaching more valuable skills than a super simple task like Add a Link.
And our Early onboarding / Home experiment is testing whether newcomers do better when they can choose specific interests instead of overly broad topics like "Science", which is exactly the gap several of you have identified. In early testing, this surfaces far more specific suggestions and lets people find the niche topics they actually know something about. Does that sound promising?
Finally, as @Johannnes89 notes, much of this is tunable locally via Community Configuration (which tasks are enabled, which templates feed them).
And if you have further ideas for how the Growth team can better support new editors, I'm always eager to hear feedback and ideas at Wikipedia talk:Growth Team features. - KStoller-WMF (talk) 20:54, 26 August 2026 (UTC)
Like I said, there needs to be actual human oversight for me to consider it viable - not problematic automation, and absolutely not this LLM suggestion crap. We spend far too much of our time fighting LLM content and in no way shape or form do we need it further misleading new editors. The problem isn't just the edits they make using such a tool, but what they would learn from it and apply in the future. And on that note, just the fact that newcomers are more likely to keep editing is not a very useful metric on its own - the edits themselves need to be beneficial. Quality over quantity. How many of the newcomer task edits are actually reviewed by more experienced editors, and what's the reversion rate on them compared to non-suggested newbie edits? How many of those editors continue to be productive over months or years, not just weeks? The automation we need is education - a walkthrough for new editors that covers the basics of editing; both the technical how-to aspect and an overview of the four pillars plus the most crucial guidelines. WP:NOTABILITY, WP:COI, and WP:NOLLM come to mind as the most obvious "read before editing" candidates (with checkboxes for the latter two affirming whether or not they have a COI to disclose up front, and that they agree to not insert LLM content). Actually teach people what they should be doing instead of just tossing them in the deep end and saying "here, change something and wait to see whether you get corrected or not". WikiEdu has been highly successful, right? There's no reason we can't package up the basics for all new editors who don't have time or access to such programs. Add an FAQ in too, and links to various sources for additional help.And as long as I'm ranting - better navigational structure. A site index. If I'm wondering "is there a guideline about this" or "where should I report such and such problem" I should be able to scan a list for anything that sounds relevant, instead of attempting to dig through namespace filtered search results - and newbies may not even know about namespaces yet. Once again, more often than not it comes down to "screw up and get corrected", which is a valid learning method but shouldn't be the primary one, because it gets extremely discouraging. Far better to set people up to succeed. ChompyTheGogoat (talk) 21:20, 26 August 2026 (UTC)
You raise a fair point about quality over quantity, and it's one the team shares. All of the Growth team's experiments account for reverts: when we report that Suggested Edits increase activation and retention, we're counting only "constructive" activation and constructive edits, meaning edits that were not reverted. A newcomer whose changes get reverted isn't counted as a success in that data (definitions in our data glossary). If it would be useful, we can also pull recent English Wikipedia data comparing revert rates on Newcomer Task edits vs. other newcomer edits; just say the word.
I've also filed phab:T436196 asking Movement Communications to share more about newcomer metrics as a whole, because I suspect some of the current frustration may relate to the recent increase in new accounts and new editors. More newcomers means more newcomer mistakes reaching patrollers, even if per-editor quality hasn't changed. Does that match what you're seeing?
On education: this is an active area of work. Together with the Community Development team, we're developing short micro-learning videos based on the Wikimedia Core Curriculum, to help new contributors understand the basics and build confidence before and while they edit. That said, no single onboarding path works for everyone: some people want to read the guidelines first, some learn best from a video walkthrough, and some only absorb things by trying a small edit and getting feedback. If we want an encyclopedia written by a broad, representative group of editors, and one that stays as neutral as possible, we need to support several ways in rather than optimizing for just one type of potential editor.
Where I fully agree with you is that we can do more to set new editors up to succeed, and your navigation ideas are a good example. What would a site index that doesn't overwhelm a newcomer look like to you? Namespaces alone are a bizarre concept for most newcomers to grasp, and we do very little to explain them. As always there's so much room for improvement and limited capacity to "make it so" but I'm committed to doing the best I can to improve onboarding for newcomers on the wikis. Thanks - KStoller-WMF (talk) 00:16, 27 August 2026 (UTC)
Yes, I would like to see the comparison stats. I'm particularly interested in which ones have actually been reviewed and confirmed to be an improvement vs just not noticed, but I realize that's harder to prove. I'm aware that new editors make lots of mistakes, but my personal experience has been that nearly 100% of those flagged as newcomer tasks are at best useless, if they don't actually make things worse, vs more of a dice roll for normal newbie edits. What exactly are the existing criteria for them to be suggested anyway?As far as the education side, I'm someone who prefers text learning over videos, so I'm aware that multiple approaches are needed. What I'm suggesting here is just a very brief intro - a popup (with option to skip) with a few slides mentioning the absolute basics and linking to additional learning resources. <2 minutes to get through. I would hope anyone who wants to edit Wikipedia could handle that amount of text, and the COI/LLM agreements are universal. As mentioned elsewhere, the situations we want to avoid the most are the novice good faith editors who are truly WP:HERE and end up with significant reversions purely because they're unaware. We had a case at WP:AINB recently where a new editor had made substantial LLM changes across numerous articles before anyone noticed and called it out. They were very apologetic and actively participated to help with the cleanup. Those are editors with real potential that we don't want to discourage. And removing plausible deniability would streamline disciplinary actions on other cases as well.For navigation, at minimum we should have top level links in the main menu to WP:List of policies, WP:List of guidelines, WP:Manual of Style, and WP:Noticeboards. Maybe WP:Template index too. I'd also recommend considering a customizable shortcuts section that logged in editors can add any pages they want to reach quickly to; internal bookmarks. And personally I dislike the current structure of internal navboxes such as Template:Wikipedia policies and guidelines - in theory if I'm already on the right overall section I can jump around from there, but my brain has a tendency to skip over them because they feel disorganized, and it's worse the busier they get, like with that example. I think stylistic changes could help with that - maybe color coding, collapsible sections, and some kind of change to the layout of the lists themselves within the cells? It's not something I've given much consideration to, but could be workshopped here at VP. And for the sake of being thorough, there could also be one site directory page linked in the footer with a complete list of all the main internal pages in WP space. Obviously It can't be 100% comprehensive, what with all the subpages and minor pages that are frequently created or deleted, but primary perennial ones. Other projects could implement these ideas too - if I want to go edit on one I'm unfamiliar with it would be helpful to know I can go through the menu to find their own policies and guidelines to ensure I'm in compliance with any standards that are different from here. It's especially difficult to try to track such things down via searches if you're dealing with foreign languages (I swapped out a few images across several foreign wikis the other day to avoid breaking pages via changes made at Commons).I'm probably well over my allotted time here, and it's only tangentially related, but one other idea I had recently was some area for more collaborative work on article creation. Not just the brief feedback from reviewers or general "how to use Wikipedia" questions for mentors, but a longer term partnership aimed at getting articles completed and published together. I'm sure newbies would find it the most useful, but I can also foresee situations where people need a specific type of help - for example, one person might be a subject matter expert while the other can help with translation. It could potentially improve AfC rates as well as the initial quality of articles that are directly published in "notable but needs work" condition. ChompyTheGogoat (talk) 05:11, 27 August 2026 (UTC)
Example pop-up for the "Find references" task
What I'm suggesting here is just a very brief intro - a popup (with option to skip) with a few slides mentioning the absolute basics – that's exactly what each newcomer task offers? Johannnes89 (talk) 05:47, 27 August 2026 (UTC)
@ChompyTheGogoat - Thanks, I appreciate the additional thoughts on onboarding, navigation, and ways to better support newer editors! I’ve shared the Newcomer Task comparison stats in my response here. KStoller-WMF (talk) 21:42, 28 August 2026 (UTC)
Not for tasks. A "how to edit Wikipedia" the very first time someone goes to edit. ChompyTheGogoat (talk) 08:07, 27 August 2026 (UTC)
Could you reduce "how to edit Wikipedia" to a handful of sentences? In my experience, "how to" depends a lot on the context, and what you're trying to accomplish. How to fix poop vandalism is a completely different skillset from how to add a new paragraph. WhatamIdoing (talk) 17:35, 28 August 2026 (UTC)
Of course - I just mean the very basics that would be most useful to good faith editors with zero experience. Brief references to things like WP: NOTABILITY, WP: RELIABLE SOURCES, WP:NPOV, and WP:MOS as well as the aforementioned WP:COI and WP:NOLLM, with links to all of these places as well as additional resources like WP:TEAHOUSE and WP:HELPDESK. We can't stop vandals from being vandals, and we can't fit all of the educational material into a single popup, but we can inform people that these things exist and help them find them, to hopefully prevent some of the most common genuine mistakes. I couldn't begin to count the number of new editors who come to Teahouse asking about a reversion, warning template, etc based on guidelines that they had no clue even exist, because how would they? Even the welcome templates are only dropped after they make an edit, see the notification, and go read it. We should be offering these resources upon account creation/first attempt to edit to be proactive instead of reactive. We could also include a mention of reversions and why they're a part of the learning experience (even for seasoned editors), not automatically criticism, to help people feel less offended by it. ChompyTheGogoat (talk) 03:35, 29 August 2026 (UTC)
Most newcomers don't try to start an article, so why should they care about our notability rules? Similarly, MOS violations are usually easy enough for editors to fix, and it's thousands of small rules, most of which are either automatic (basic grammar) or irrelevant (e.g., the name of a gene should be italicized, which 99.9% of newbies will never need to know). I wouldn't bother with that. But RS and NPOV and COI and NOLLM all sound like reasonable things for us to educate people about. WhatamIdoing (talk) 04:13, 29 August 2026 (UTC)
I think the definition of "most" is debatable, but certainly so is the specific content that should be included. I'm just trying to get the overall concept across. Which mistakes are good faith new editors most likely to make in their first handful of edits, and what can we offer them that would be the most useful to help avoid those? Collecting a pool of early edits that have been selected for good faith attempts at improvement - filtering out vandalism etc - would help us establish specific targets, and there would probably be some adjustments as we see the results. ChompyTheGogoat (talk) 04:21, 29 August 2026 (UTC)
The last time I saw the numbers, which was some years ago, about 25% of newcomers tried to start and article. Therefore, 75% of newcomers didn't. 75% is "most" under all mathematically sound definitions.
Teahouse folks probably have some good ideas about which problems they see most often. WhatamIdoing (talk) 04:31, 29 August 2026 (UTC)
@WhatamIdoing: 'Most' is your subjective perception of the math. In real terms, in an official quality control project in which you don't participate, 25% is massive. 25% of newcomers tried to start and article' was provided by Kersin Stoller herself, and the statistics to day are worse. The WMF was presented with a community project several ties and as recently again March this year. They are working on a project led by the language team but it will mot have any impact on the quality of the hundreds of new articles that are submitted daily to the English Wikipedia.The community's project could be rolled out in a couple of months and would stop all his nonsense dead in its tracks.Kudpung กุดผึ้ง (talk) 06:48, 2 October 2026 (UTC)
25% can be massive in absolute terms and still not be "most". If 25% of new accounts create an article, that's around 100,000 newbies creating an article each year, which is a lot of pages. But even though that's a lot of articles, it's still true that 300,000 newbies didn't try to create a page. For every one newbie (or alleged newbie, since some of those are experienced undisclosed paid scammers) who tried to create an article, three others didn't.
Therefore "most" new editors don't create articles, and (relevant to the context, which was a proposal that all newbies get "brief" education on at least eight separate pages, some of which are extremely long) therefore "most" newbies don't need to be forced to read the rules about whether and how they can create an article before they make the non-article-creating contribution that they actually wanted to make, such as fixing a typo or reverting vandalism, etc. IMO there is no need for newcomers to be forced to read about how to do something that they don't want to do. This is, as indicated, merely my personal opinion, and you are, of course, always entitled to hold a different opinion. WhatamIdoing (talk) 19:23, 2 October 2026 (UTC)
Please read my post again for context. Let's not split hairs over semantics - I'm agreeing with you (for once) - 'most' new editors do not want to create an article as their first contribution but that is a very narrow 'most'. 25% (now actually 27.9%) do, and that is a massive number of articles arriving in the New Pages Feed every day, but as you are not a New Page Reviewer, I can understand your perspective of the math being different. Kudpung กุดผึ้ง (talk) 06:20, 3 October 2026 (UTC)
Note: The AFC is heavily backlogged, and most are either AI slop or AI slop mixed with COI. Or there are other articles where people misunderstand policy. The drive in August worked, but immediately after it is on track to go back to pre-drive levels. 16dvnk (talk) 10:50, 3 October 2026 (UTC)
Learning by doing, especially learning from mistakes and feedback, is very effective when the experience is not demoralizing. The challenge is to keep this in balance. And getting corrected, or reverted, is unavoidable.
Newcomer tasks are visible and easy to categorize. This permits testing, tracking, improvement. It can also promote confirmation bias and a (possibly false) sense among experienced editors that newcomer tasks are especially error-producing. Newcomers who get "bitten" for completing a structured learning activity understandably feel let down. Even if the net success rate of these tasks is better it is for newbies left to their own devices the experience can be frustrating.
Related to (1) is figuring out the optimal way to introduce our myriad policies, guidelines, practices, and jargon. Presenting too much "required reading" up front is likely to discourage some newcomers while others feel set up for failure by not having fundamental principles put in front of them. We should make this information visible and accessible in a variety of ways. There will still be problems. I like policies and guidelines but they have to be applied and interpreted in context.Related to (2), it's funny that you mention WikiEdu. My sense is that it is successful but it is a frequent topic of discussion. Some editors feel that it disproportionately generates bad contributions that require cleanup. I haven't seen convincing evidence of that but WikEdu contributions leave a trail and (may) come with a set of expectations, like newcomer tasks, that can increase the frustration. These are good problems to talk about, and it's beneficial to have relatively new editors in these discussions. —Myceteae🍄🟫 (talk) 01:18, 27 August 2026 (UTC)
See my above comment re: 1. My intent for that is just a very brief "Welcome to Wikipedia, here are a few of the most crucial things you should know and places you can go to learn more", not a master's course in editing.I don't have a lot of experience with the outcome of WikiEdu myself - I'm mostly going off what I've seen others say - but what little I have seen usually seems to fall more in the "this is a good start, but here are some more suggestions" where reverting and explaining is helpful, as opposed to "this never should have been suggested in the first place so there's nothing to improve and both of our times were wasted". I definitely could have benefited from more useful suggestions; I was very wary of making any mainspace edits until quite recently and stuck to extremely simple ones (the opposite reaction from LITW). My suspicion - again difficult to prove - is that there's an inverse relationship, where those of us who have a better understanding of Wikipedia from the start and are able to handle the learning curve better look at these tasks and see what's inherently wrong with them, while those who don't know how anything works here assume the suggestions are valid so they just go ahead with changes even when they don't really understand the assignment. ChompyTheGogoat (talk) 05:32, 27 August 2026 (UTC)
The other big differences with WikiEdu is that there are much fewer edits produced by the program, and that when people have pointed out issues with those edits, they actually did make changes to the workflow that seem to have improved the situation. Gnomingstuff (talk) 18:05, 28 August 2026 (UTC)
Yeah, I'm sure it's not perfect, but right now it's our best resource for a more structured program to help support new editors, so I think we should be using what's been learned there to do the same in a more hands off way for others who don't have access to such things. Use what works and discard what doesn't. ChompyTheGogoat (talk) 03:41, 29 August 2026 (UTC)
WikiEdu claims its performance to have led to the contribution of 1,000s of new articles over the years. That may be true, but put in perspective, whether they are fine or require further clean up, it's a drop in the ocean of the massive waves of new articles that have to be processed daily at NPP or AfC. I personally do not see the work of WikiEdu to be in any way superior to that of Editathons that I and many other volunteers have hosted. Kudpung กุดผึ้ง (talk) 09:18, 2 October 2026 (UTC)
I think editing events (e.g., Wikipedia:Art+Feminism) are more likely to create articles, on average, than WikiEdu classes. WikiEdu steers most (but not all) classes away from creating articles. For many editing events, creating new articles is the main goal. I think we need both programs. WhatamIdoing (talk) 19:27, 2 October 2026 (UTC)
@ChompyTheGogoat, what does "actual human oversight" mean to you? From where I'm sitting, the newcomers are human, and so if and how they decide to make the edit constitutes "actual human oversight" of the edit already. But I think you mean something else. WhatamIdoing (talk) 16:08, 27 August 2026 (UTC)
Oversight by someone with more experience (hopefully) of what actually gets added to the task database, to ensure the suggestion itself is valid and easy to comprehend. ChompyTheGogoat (talk) 22:49, 27 August 2026 (UTC)
Are you volunteering to check all the pages that are identified as needing work, to make sure that they actually need that kind of work?
We need about a thousand brand-new accounts to not only register, but also to make their first edit every day. Anything that reduces that number risks Wikipedia's future, because I am going to die. Only a small fraction of them will complete a Newcomer task, but the newbies who do those tasks usually do multiple edits to multiple articles. We probably get about 1,000 to 1,500 newcomer tasks completed per day. Some tasks result in multiple edits to the same article, but we also need a buffer in case a pre-screened article doesn't find an interested editor. I estimate that manually pre-screening would therefore require pre-screening about a thousand articles a day. At a sustained rate of one article per minute, that's 16 hours of work, every single day of the year. It would also have the downside of introducing personal preferences (e.g., this editor wants to minimize links, that editor is unusually sensitive to 'promotional' content...). Do you think it would be worth it, in terms of improving the edits? WhatamIdoing (talk) 17:07, 28 August 2026 (UTC)
If only a small fraction of new edits are made through newcomer tasks then yes, I absolutely agree it would be justified to spend more editor time screening tasks instead of going back and fixing bad edits that result from them. Higher quality suggestions would also result in higher uptake by those of us who avoided them because they're problematic. Even if they actually were based on templates, as has been suggested in this conversation but not substantiated by the evidence, that would mean a human editor read the article and chose to add the template - something that already happens and doesn't add labor. Turns out my gut was right and this is a BS LLM doing BS LLM things. Sure took some tooth pulling to get that admitted. ChompyTheGogoat (talk) 04:15, 29 August 2026 (UTC)
My question isn't whether you think somebody else should prescreen the articles for each task. My question is whether you wanted to do that.
Different tasks have different triggers. The tasks also change over time. For example, the Add a link task used to look (only) for Template:Underlinked; now it is based on a statistical calculation.
Related to this, can we please disable the link suggestions feature in mathematics articles? It consistently causes new editors to add links which are either overlinking or even semantically incorrect (i.e. a different concept with the same name). These editors are often not mathematically advanced enough to understand the difference between a good link and a bad link in a mathematical article. It just ends up creating work for others who have to revert these changes. Elestrophe (talk) 00:05, 28 August 2026 (UTC)
Isn't that one of the newcomer tasks also? Same overall issue. They mean well, but the suggestions just aren't good for newbies with no Wikipedia experience or subject matter knowledge. ChompyTheGogoat (talk) 01:28, 28 August 2026 (UTC)
It is a newcomer task. There was a discussion about this quite recently: Wikipedia:Village pump (proposals)/Archive 231#We need to get rid of the "suggested links" tool. Some tweaks were made and other potential interventions suggested or were already being worked on that might improve the fidelity. There's a lot of discussion there of data indicating that links created via the newcomer task get reverted less often than links inserted by newbies going at it alone. There were some questions about the precision of these figures but nothing that suggested to me that the observation was directionally wrong. —Myceteae🍄🟫 (talk) 01:52, 28 August 2026 (UTC)
That statistic doesn't mean the feature is a good thing. It's not like the existence of the feature prevents new editors from adding links they would have already made, so it's still just creating a bunch of bad links that have to be reverted. Elestrophe (talk) 02:58, 28 August 2026 (UTC)
You're correct that the existence of the tool doesn't prevent manual edits, but the numbers show that it does encourage newbies to make that kind of edit. If nothing else, it educates them that this is the kind of thing that Wikipedia wants to have done. WhatamIdoing (talk) 17:12, 28 August 2026 (UTC)
See my comments below re: comparison between new editors who utilize the tool vs all new editors, which are definitely a mixed bag. ChompyTheGogoat (talk) 07:17, 28 August 2026 (UTC)
@Myceteae Re "links created via the newcomer task get reverted less often than links inserted by newbies going at it alone", is there? I've seen data on add a link vs overall newcomer edits, but not specifically vs non-task link additions. CMD (talk) 04:21, 29 August 2026 (UTC)
If you know a way to identify when an edit adds a link from metadata, then Wikipedia:Request a query should be able to give you the numbers. (Maybe compare all edits with a byte size of +4?) WhatamIdoing (talk) 04:47, 29 August 2026 (UTC)
@Chipmunkdavis As I understand it, the Add a Link structured task is a newcomer task. In the recent VP discussion, there was discussion of the original testing (mw:Growth/Personalized first day/Structured tasks/Add a link/Experiment analysis, December 2021) and other data. Initial testing compared newcomers who had the Add a Link task turned on to those who did not. Further analysis looks at edits with the Newcomer task and Suggested: add links tags in edit summaries. I'm not involved in this work and had not followed this previously. This is my understanding per recent discussions; please correct me if I have gotten something wrong. —Myceteae🍄🟫 (talk) 18:14, 29 August 2026 (UTC)
Yes, there have been a massive number in the last week alone, just from a single user Special:Contributions/Mathworkofpast. You can just take a look at how many of their recent contributions are link additions which have been reverted. Elestrophe (talk) 06:22, 28 August 2026 (UTC)
I count 94 edits to the mainspace, of which a total of 50 were newcomer tasks and a total of 63 were reverted. Specifically, I count 34 reversions of newcomer tasks (68% of newcomer tasks) and 29 reversions of ordinary edits (66% of non-newcomer tasks).
Maybe you want to run some proper calculations, but that doesn't sound like a statistically significant difference to me. Therefore, I think it would be difficult to blame the existence of newcomer tasks for those edits. WhatamIdoing (talk) 17:22, 28 August 2026 (UTC)
The reason all of these edits have not been reverted is because I have not slogged my way that far down the list yet, and because several of the edits have been subsequently buried under a deluge of other edits making cleanup even harder.
This is just one person. Multiply by a thousand and you have an idea of the cleanup burden. Gnomingstuff (talk) 17:37, 28 August 2026 (UTC)
No, the reason all of these edits have not been reverted is because the community did not consider them worth reverting. For example, picking a "revise tone" example from the middle of their contribs, I see this:
Perhaps the greatest Harbor Dynasty was that of Girls' Soccer who won 9 CCS Championships in 14 years → Harbor High School has seen notable athletic success over the years. The Girls' Soccer team won 9 CCS Championships in 14 years
It may not be perfect (e.g. neither version complies with MOS:SPELL9), but I think that rephrasing it to get rid of puffy "greatest Harbor Dynasty" language constitutes an incremental improvement. Maybe you would agree with me.
Remember that you don't have to clean up after a thousand newbies each day all by all yourself. In fact, you don't have to do any of it, unless you actually want to. WhatamIdoing (talk) 20:58, 28 August 2026 (UTC)
No, the reason all of these edits have not been reverted is because the community did not consider them worth reverting.
But you still have to go through every single one to see whether they are or not. Many of them are.
I do not actually "clean up after a thousand newbies every day all by yourself," because there are not enough hours in the day for that. I don't see why I am the one who is being scolded here instead of the people creating the cleanup work. Gnomingstuff (talk) 22:11, 28 August 2026 (UTC)
Why are you assuming that those edits haven't already been checked (and probably checked repeatedly) by the RecentChanges patrollers? WhatamIdoing (talk) 04:15, 29 August 2026 (UTC)
Because they clearly haven’t, or else they would have gotten fixed? Gnomingstuff (talk) 19:15, 30 August 2026 (UTC)
I picked one out randomly from the user's contribs, and I found no need for it to be fixed. Why should I assume that all the others need fixing, or even most of them? It's of course possible to find the one outlier, but it's not generally reasonable to assume that the one you found is an outlier.
I checked another, chosen for being a net negative number of bytes (because I thought a reduction in page size would be less likely to be a whole-page re-write, and I didn't feel like looking at a complex diff). That, too, was a good edit – not perfect, but better than what was there before.
My point isn't that the editor is any good. My point is that you don't have to take on reviewing those edits unless you actually want to. Those edits have almost certainly been reviewed by someone else. That someone else will be less adept at your particular skills (we are all less adept at AI detection than you), but they will have been checked for an ordinary level of reasonableness, and determined not to be obviously bad. As a result, it's IMO not necessary to treat this user's contribs as a significant threat to Wikipedia. Review them if you want, and don't if you don't. WhatamIdoing (talk) 20:00, 30 August 2026 (UTC)
It doesn't indicate that they improve edits at all either. That's exactly the point I was getting at all far as editors who use newcomer tasks at all vs the total sum of new editors, which includes vandals, UPE, SPAs and the whole range of LTA sockers. Most people who come in with any form of bad faith won't bother with the tasks, unless it's purely an attempt to game user rights. ChompyTheGogoat (talk) 03:50, 29 August 2026 (UTC)
This person seems to be a WP:SPA. An unorthodox one, to be sure, but their editing pattern is the same: spam out a bunch of newcomer tasks until Number Goes Up enough that they can do what they're really here for. In this case that's a low-quality draft on their favorite math problem rather than a low-quality draft on their marketing startup, but the pattern is the same. They even all but admit here that they mostly care about getting their edit count high enough to get permissions. Gnomingstuff (talk) 18:11, 28 August 2026 (UTC)
It's once again not clear that the newcomer task creates or promotes the problem as opposed to being a thing that can be used in conjunction with extremely common problematic newbie behavior. There are always newbies who try to juice their numbers so they can gain more tools and start working on their pet projects with fewer restrictions. —Myceteae🍄🟫 (talk) 21:09, 28 August 2026 (UTC)
The difference is that it provides them a frictionless way to very quickly spam out edits they don't care about, and one that directs them to articles that already have problems, drowning out the people who actually do care about and are competent at fixing the problems. Gnomingstuff (talk) 22:13, 28 August 2026 (UTC)
It's my experience that most newcomers actually do care about their edits. They may not be competent (yet), but most of us, including me, weren't competent in our early edits. WhatamIdoing (talk) 04:17, 29 August 2026 (UTC)
@Elestrophe, this one looks like a WP:CIR case to me. I'm not sure they'd be any more or less annoying if Suggested Links didn't exist, honestly. If they don't change their tune in the next couple of days, feel free to ping me about it and I'll get them out of your hair. If there are individual math articles that are getting a disproportionate number of bad links, you can add {{No newcomer task}} to the article to keep them away. In solidarity, asilvering (talk) 21:36, 28 August 2026 (UTC)
If Newcomer Tasks are based on maintenance templates then it's not surprising that they are poor because the maintenance templates are usually too vague and stale to be useful. In theory, they should be supported by talk page discussion which goes into detail but this is rarely done. And the actual talk page suggestions are often left dangling without being closed in a formal way.
There is a project called This week's article for improvement which is going to be featured on the main page soon. The idea is to encourage readers to become new editors. This will provide a good focus for improvement in the workflow for such tasks. I reckon that To do lists should be encouraged to provide a list of actionable tasks but I don't often see them on articles currently. The overall structure and workflow needs work.
I checked the latest one that caused me to start this discussion and the page did not have any template in place, nor do I believe the related ones that started to get on my nerves before that did either. They said in the replies that it is an LLM. ChompyTheGogoat (talk) 09:42, 29 August 2026 (UTC)
There are some overall stats at Special:NewcomerTasksInfo. The Revise Tone tasks seem to be quite a small proportion. Andrew🐉(talk) 09:58, 29 August 2026 (UTC)
Edit conflict - see below. ChompyTheGogoat (talk) 09:58, 29 August 2026 (UTC)
Per Special:NewcomerTasksInfo, the vast majority of all newcomer tasks are link-recommendation. If I'm reading Special:CommunityConfiguration/GrowthSuggestedEdits correctly, I believe that is the "Add a link (Structured task)", which is not defined by templates - only excluded by them. revise-tone is also not mentioned there at all and therefore I assume that one is AI generated as well. For those tasks that are template defined, I'd recommend improving the suggestions by adding a parameter to define the level of work an article needs - maybe a 1-5 scale, with levels 4-5 automatically excluding them from newcomer tasks based on the level of work required, as Template:No newcomer task is meant to (which I've never seen utilized, and I would imagine most editors don't know it exists). Levels 1-3 could correspond to easy, medium, and hard tasks, instead of just assuming that all copyedit is easy. I would also recommend excluding articles with three or more maintenance templates for the same reason. ChompyTheGogoat (talk) 09:58, 29 August 2026 (UTC)
18,000 articles are tagged with {{Promotional}}. How many of those are you personally willing to add a level-of-work parameter to?
That's just one of many templates. I believe that we've only added a requirement for an explanatory parameter in one instance ({{Cleanup}}), and until last month, more than a decade after we "required" it, Category:Cleanup tagged articles without a reason field had hundreds (previously thousands) of articles in it. WhatamIdoing (talk) 16:46, 29 August 2026 (UTC)
Going back to modify existing templates would certainly be a slog, but there's no reason we can't append a new parameter going forward. If we add a flag that would help editors notice and drop it in if they're doing any work on an article with an existing one. ChompyTheGogoat (talk) 05:56, 6 September 2026 (UTC)
You could ask the Twinkle folks if they would build something to support that. WhatamIdoing (talk) 06:09, 6 September 2026 (UTC)
Well, we'd need consensus to update the templates first, and if we don't settle this newcomer task issue there's less point to it. My biggest concern is which tasks are being fed to newbies who expect something simple - advising people who find the article through normal routes of the anticipated workload would be a minor secondary benefit. ChompyTheGogoat (talk) 06:34, 6 September 2026 (UTC)
@ChompyTheGogoat, I've been trying to explain that copy-editing is not "easy" to Growth to no avail for years. I continue to wish that community configuration allowed us to set the difficulty of individual tasks. In solidarity, asilvering (talk) 16:49, 29 August 2026 (UTC)
have also been trying to explain this, as well as the fact that copy-editing skill and Wikipedia familiarity are not the same thing, and training someone to use the Wikipedia UI does nothing to improve their copyediting ability, especially if you are giving them unconditional virtual pats on the back via widget for doing such a good job Gnomingstuff (talk) 21:06, 29 August 2026 (UTC)
Well, it CAN be - I make very minor spelling and grammar corrections all the time, and that's the kind of work I expected to see in the newcomer tasks - not full article rewrites (2 minutes; ha!) IMHO a level 1/"easy" CE task should only require decent English fluency, not a high degree of WP competence. A professional (non-WP) editor (or comparable ability) could maybe do level 2, and level 3 would start getting into more MOS details for newbies who are starting to get the hang of things. It would be a judgement call of course, but it would still help. ChompyTheGogoat (talk) 06:01, 6 September 2026 (UTC)
I wonder if the "2 minutes" estimate is meant to discourage full rewrites/to encourage making one improvement and then moving on. WhatamIdoing (talk) 06:11, 6 September 2026 (UTC)
But which small fix is going to have any measurable improvement on an article that does need a total rewrite? What's the point to me fixing one or two typos when the whole thing is an unsourced disaster? That's precisely why I walked away from them - I literally did not know where to start. I don't have a clue where those estimates come from anyway if CE is indeed template based, because it sure isn't the editors who added it. If we're going to improve the templates, maybe we could have a way to select which specific passage needs work (and indicating the entire article would automatically upgrade the difficulty level). ChompyTheGogoat (talk) 06:40, 6 September 2026 (UTC)
Expanding on that idea, maybe the difficulty level could be calculated by default based on the byte size of the selection, with editors having the option to adjust it as they see fit. That way they would be sorted automatically even if editors don't bother to set it manually. I'm not a programmer so I don't know what would be required on the backend to accomplish that, but it seems like it would be fairly simple. ChompyTheGogoat (talk) 06:44, 6 September 2026 (UTC)
It looks like we do have Template:Copy edit span as well as Template:Copy edit section. I wonder if we might be able to bundle them all into a single template with optional parameters for the sake of simplicity - I've never seen the span one used (and it's displaying the selection in code formatting for me, which is not great in an article body).I know this would need to be workshopped on the actual templates - just spitballing. ChompyTheGogoat (talk) 07:37, 6 September 2026 (UTC)
There is also a practical value in letting a newbie work on a disaster of an article: The odds are higher that if they do anything, they'll make it better. If we invite them to improve an article that is nearly perfect, then the odds are significantly higher that they won't understand what's wrong, or they'll pick the wrong thing to fix. WhatamIdoing (talk) 19:04, 6 September 2026 (UTC)
Not if we're talking CE - find and fix the error. Don't fix things that are correct. If they don't understand the difference that's a WP:CIR issue. Especially if we implement my suggestion to actually flag the specific part that needs work. Tossing disaster articles at them is overwhelming and it's highly likely the part they work on will end up reworked or deleted entirely once the article is actually brought up to snuff (if ever). No one is going to notice there's one less typo when it's still a mess. It might be a statistical improvement if it is correct, but not a meaningful one. (The Revise Tone task that was incorrected by the newbie was then deleted by the patroller who saw it because it was unsourced in the first place and not particularly useful. Neither the LLM that flagged it nor the newbie with no experience realized that.)I believe it was @Gnomingstuff who said their reaction to such a task was to dive headfirst into learning all the relevant guidelines and eventually fix the entire article, but that's obviously not the intended result nor a common outcome. Mine in the same situation was to just leave it and find easier work on my own. Others might give up entirely if they think monumental work like that is what's expected on a regular basis. ChompyTheGogoat (talk) 19:59, 6 September 2026 (UTC)
In my experience this has not happened; the articles just turn into a hundreds-of-edits deep morass that makes reverting a bad edit (of which there are many, with Newcomer Tasks) difficult and tedious. Gnomingstuff (talk) 21:06, 6 September 2026 (UTC)
Which part doesn't happen - the progressive improvements (which I haven't seen either)? It might have been someone else who said they turned the task into a long term project instead. My memory sucks. ChompyTheGogoat (talk) 01:00, 7 September 2026 (UTC)
The progressive improvements.
(It doesn't help that very few people actually remove the tag when they do their changes -- which is completely expected and nonmalicious behavior from a new user, but does mean that the changes don't stop coming and people get increasingly confused at what is tagged.) Gnomingstuff (talk) 15:11, 7 September 2026 (UTC)
The newcomers I've spoken with always expect someone else to double-check their work, and for that checking editor to remove the tag. WhatamIdoing (talk) 21:56, 7 September 2026 (UTC)
It sounds like we need a specific patrol group for any newcomer tasks that are retained. It would be useful to prioritize edits by all new editors, for that matter - are there filters that could pull changes made by non-autoconfirned and non-EC as well? That could be useful work for people who are involved with welcoming/mentorship/etc - sort the bad actors to appropriate noticeboards and offer support to the good faith ones who need help. ChompyTheGogoat (talk) 01:57, 8 September 2026 (UTC)
So I'd recommend such patrollers start with something like this, then expand to the learners group and eventually skim "likely good" edits. Depending on whether they're focused on damage control or outreach they could either look at bad faith filters first, or good faith and newcomer tasks.I checked one at random and found yet another instance of a problem with newcomer tasks: Special:Diff/1373819817 This appears to be a relatively competent new editor making useful contributions who hasn't been reverted yet (with 19 live mainspace edits), but even they failed to comprehend what the "expand" task is meant to be and just did minor CE instead. The edit itself is fine, but it speaks to the larger issue of newcomer tasks not being clear about the objectives. ChompyTheGogoat (talk) 03:52, 8 September 2026 (UTC)
Or they decided that it didn't need expanding, but while they were there, they wanted to make some other changes. Or they decided that they didn't want to expand it. The task isn't your schoolteacher, and you don't flunk if you don't do what you're told. It takes you to an article, makes a suggestion, and lets you do whatever you choose, which might not be what it suggested. WhatamIdoing (talk) 05:52, 8 September 2026 (UTC)
(I didn’t do any of these at the outset though, I just reverted vandalism) Gnomingstuff (talk) 21:07, 6 September 2026 (UTC)
About Not if we're talking CE - find and fix the error. Don't fix things that are correct: Copy editing (which is different from mere proofreading) is not limited to finding and fixing errors. Sometimes what's needed is improvements in clarity, organization, style, wordiness, tone, and so forth. Sometimes you can't actually flag the specific part that needs work because the whole article (or section) needs work. Sure, some people would prefer to fix a single typo and stop. Some people struggle to do even that much. For example, we have many experienced editors, including some admins, who have dyslexia and are happy to leave that part to others, while they get on with the many things they are better at. But others actually do substantial re-writes, and some of us even enjoy the work (e.g., presumably most participants in the Wikipedia:WikiProject Guild of Copy Editors). WhatamIdoing (talk) 21:51, 7 September 2026 (UTC)
And I did say the entire article can be flagged, but again, we should be trying to serve new editors easy tasks. If one particular section or paragraph is problematic flag it so they know what to focus on, with a difficulty rating to filter which editors it gets served to, and potentially even a comment about what needs to be changed. Drive by tagging rarely helps - if someone doesn't want to do the work themselves they should endeavor to make it clear what they think actually needs to happen. You saw the new example I gave below - the editor has no idea what they're supposed to be doing with the task, OR how the "ask your mentor" feature works. AI has no comprehension of the underlying issues and basing tasks on templates that the adding editor never intended to serve up to newbies both fail to grasp the point. It should be seen as training, not a labor source for issues other people skipped over precisely due to the complexity. ChompyTheGogoat (talk) 02:08, 8 September 2026 (UTC)
We actually don't know whether "drive-by tagging" works. It's never been studied. And some of the drive-by tagging is actually quite simple. WhatamIdoing (talk) 03:12, 8 September 2026 (UTC)
I'm not referring to all article flags, but simply inserting a standard template with no additional details on an article with complex or confusing issues. It might be enough to alert readers to potential issues with content but isn't always sufficient to inform other editors about what needs to be addressed - and once again, I don't believe most editors who add them have newcomer tasks in mind. If we're going to utilize them for that purpose there needs to be some thought about how they're implemented. Adding things like selections and difficulty levels would be covered in updated documentation, and editors who are aware of the changes could make an effort to notify others when they see templates being added without them. ChompyTheGogoat (talk) 03:19, 8 September 2026 (UTC)
"Maintenance templates should not be used to "warn the reader" that an article needs improvements or that a Wikipedia editor disagrees with the current state of the article."
Bold in the original. In other words, maintenance tags don't exist to "alert readers". WhatamIdoing (talk) 07:23, 8 September 2026 (UTC)
That sentence includes quite a bit after the bold explaining what purposes they shouldn't be used to warn. The entire purpose of those templates is to alert readers, like you and me, to changes that should be made. CMD (talk) 08:32, 8 September 2026 (UTC)
So the guideline says that they shouldn't be used to warn the reader that an article needs improvements, but you think that the entire purpose is to warn readers that changes should be made? WhatamIdoing (talk) 21:09, 8 September 2026 (UTC)
I think the text you added without disclosing that here is difficult to understand, but the main thing I'm not doing here is trying to force myself into a position where I'm trying to argue that the big orange box with bold for emphasis, and some even with a large exclamation marks, will not alert readers. CMD (talk) 22:51, 8 September 2026 (UTC)
I think it's called the Principle of double effect: We aren't (and shouldn't be) trying to warn the readers, even if it sometimes has that effect.
For years, none of the maintenance templates were displayed on the mobile site. What's changed isn't a desire to warn the readers, but the fact that we now get more editors on the mobile site than we used to.
(If I had to "disclose" every edit I've ever made to a policy or guideline, it'd be impossible to carry on an ordinary conversation. I apologize for not remembering that I edited that guideline a couple of years ago.) WhatamIdoing (talk) 00:27, 9 September 2026 (UTC)
The principle of double effect would be a possible argument for the existence of templates, but it is not reflected by their design. There is even a scale of alertness, from the yellow ones to red. CMD (talk) 00:48, 9 September 2026 (UTC)
Why do you assume that this design is aimed at non-editing readers, and not at editors like us? WhatamIdoing (talk) 02:18, 9 September 2026 (UTC)
For a start it's on the actual page, we hide the normal maintenance categories or put them in the talkpage. More philosophically, we do try to make those categories one and the same. This is a thread about newcomer tasks, after all. CMD (talk) 02:42, 9 September 2026 (UTC)
It's on the actual page ...so that actual editors can see it. WhatamIdoing (talk) 02:45, 9 September 2026 (UTC)
These eyesore banner templates have extremely limited value, mostly serve to bash readers over the head telling them things that were already obvious (e.g. "this section has no footnotes" or "this section is incoherent" or whatever), and the way they have been spammed all over the place for years is one of the biggest examples of Wikipedians shooting ourselves in the foot. Cf. User:Jorge Stolfi/Templates that I sorely miss §"Templates are too discrete" template. –jacobolus(t) 08:30, 9 September 2026 (UTC)
Acceptable disclaimers: ... Temporary cleanup templates, such as {{POV}}, {{original research}} or {{cleanup}}. These point to deficiencies in the article that should be corrected promptly.If they aren't for readers to see, they should be hidden. Lots of other things are. ChompyTheGogoat (talk) 09:36, 8 September 2026 (UTC)
And regardless of whether or not it's their stated purpose, my point was about what they actually accomplish. If it's unclear what needs to be fixed it's less likely to happen, meaning the template stays up longer, meaning more readers see it while editors keep skipping it. ChompyTheGogoat (talk) 09:38, 8 September 2026 (UTC)
If you can come up with a programmatic way to tell which logged-out people are non-editors, then we probably would do that more often. We have already done that for a handful of maintenance templates, e.g., {{orphan}}, which used to be displayed by default and is now only displayed under limited circumstances.
But generally speaking, we can't hide them from "readers" because it's impossible to differentiate between a "non-editing reader" and a reader who would use a temporary account, as well as editors who aren't logged in on every device they use. We want potential editors to be able to see these calls to action. WhatamIdoing (talk) 21:13, 8 September 2026 (UTC)
If they don't want non-editors to see something it's usually only displayed in editing mode, like template errors - and like the new edit suggestions mentioned elsewhere. They generally don't show things strictly related to editing to people who aren't trying to edit. Logged in editors can enable display of such hidden messages if it's something they want to see and potentially work on. These templates are visible exceptions to the disclaimer rule for a reason, and they absolutely have that effect - it's one of the things that made me start wondering about what goes on behind the scenes here, because they started showing up a lot more in the last few years, and I have found them useful in my pre-editing days when an article seemed unusually low quality. It helped me take things with an extra grain of salt. ChompyTheGogoat (talk) 22:00, 8 September 2026 (UTC)
"They" aren't doing this. "We" are. And one of the reasons we do it is to recruit editors. Your experience shows that works occasionally. WhatamIdoing (talk) 00:03, 9 September 2026 (UTC)
You realize this is all completely irrelevant to my original point about templates not telling editors what needs to be fixed, right? In fact, if your argument is that that's the only purpose they're intended to serve then they're doing an even worse job, because as I've stated if the template is vague and no one addresses it then it just continues to sit there as a flag to readers. Improve templates > improve articles > fewer visible templates. ChompyTheGogoat (talk) 14:21, 9 September 2026 (UTC)
Yes, I too have problems with newcomer tasks. I think that, at the very least, once you become a confirmed (or whatever you call a 500 edits, 3 months user) user you should have them turned off, or have the option to turn them off. -I sometimes eat bananas, and you can talk to me here: (talk) 22:01, 11 September 2026 (UTC)
500 edits + 30 days is called "extended confirmed". The links task turns off at 150 edits, even if it's still your first day and even if none of your first 150 edits did any newcomer tasks or added any links. WhatamIdoing (talk) 01:22, 12 September 2026 (UTC)
The problem is that my experience has been that the newcomer tasks are not by any stretch of the imagination "an easy way to learn how to make an edit", but an easy way to waste hours looking into an issue (real or imagined) and ending up not making an edit or learning anything other than to avoid newcomer tasks. Yes there should be newcomer tasks. But they need to be very different from the ones I encountered. Long is the way (talk) 20:30, 26 August 2026 (UTC)
They sound good in theory, but they reality is that they aren't good for helping people learn nor improving articles. They're confusing and waste editor time, especially when we have to clean up the "improvements that aren't". Like I said, they either need to be fully overhauled so they DO help, or removed to stop creating more problems. ChompyTheGogoat (talk) 20:57, 26 August 2026 (UTC)
Fully agree with the above and other comments here. As they are set up, they aren't helping anyone. Johnbod (talk) 02:53, 27 August 2026 (UTC)
I think that most of them are helpful. But we don't have to wonder about which one of us is correct; we could set up the mw:ORES review tool and get some editors (all of us in this discussion?) to manually do a blind comparison of a random collection of newcomer tasks vs unprompted tasks by new editors. WhatamIdoing (talk) 16:12, 27 August 2026 (UTC)
I'm not familiar with the tool. How exactly does it evaluate "overall quality"? I do believe that most newcomer task edits are good faith non-vandalism attempts to improve, but often not helpful because of the tool giving inappropriate suggestions and new users not having the experience to recognize that (or know what actually needs to be fixed). New editors who are vandals, UPE, etc wouldn't be likely to use the tool at all, so naturally more of those bad faith edits would be found without it. We'd need a narrower pool of test cases to avoid that bias. ChompyTheGogoat (talk) 21:26, 27 August 2026 (UTC)
As a matter of fact, that could easily be skewing the existing metrics - purely the fact that most editors who'd use it are indeed good faith and WP:HERE. Maybe an examination of edits made with and without the tool by the editors who do utilize it? ChompyTheGogoat (talk) 21:28, 27 August 2026 (UTC)
That tool works manually. It shows you a diff, and asks you what you think of it.
So imagine, e.g., that we set up this tool to show (without showing the Special:Tags) 10 edits from newcomer tasks and 10 similar-ish edits from equally inexperienced newbies that aren't from newcomer tasks. Then you rate them based on whether it's (in your best editorial judgement) a good edit or a bad one. WhatamIdoing (talk) 16:42, 28 August 2026 (UTC)
That's not what it sounds like to me. My read is that it automatically flags edits for patrol based on this internal automated scoring system. Is there some other function of it I'm missing? ChompyTheGogoat (talk) 04:08, 29 August 2026 (UTC)
Before ORES could produce those automated assessments (ORES is what color-codes watchlist items for "Likely have problems" and such), we had to feed it the original data. I guess the page I linked you to is more about the end result than about the tool for collecting the data, so that wasn't a very helpful link; sorry. WhatamIdoing (talk) 04:23, 29 August 2026 (UTC)
So for a specific use like this editors determine which tasks are part of the pool to be evaluated, then it crunches the numbers for us - not just scanning and feeding us what it runs across in the wild based on given params? ChompyTheGogoat (talk) 04:35, 29 August 2026 (UTC)
Well, more to the point, if we could resurrect the data-collection software that was used back then, we could feed it any set of diffs we wanted, editors could score them however they wanted, and we could crunch the numbers ourselves. WhatamIdoing (talk) 04:48, 29 August 2026 (UTC)
Ok, so the current implementation of it doesn't allow us to designate a specific pool for evaluation? I thought that's what you were saying in your initial comment. ChompyTheGogoat (talk) 05:06, 29 August 2026 (UTC)
I find it absolutely enraging that WMF would drop an AI feature onto English-WP as some sort of a beta test because somebody got a wack idea, a manager approved it, and engineers made work and developed it. I ran into a driveby "Newcomer Task: Suggested: Revise Tone" editor on a page I was actively working on that was flagged with a CONSTRUCTION template just yesterday. That is how I discovered the feature. That is how little regard that WMF paid staff has for the community and for the decentralized community decision-making process that has served us well for two decades. If it were up to the tech-worshiping, unforeseen-consequences-damning preferences of WMF, Wikipedia would by now approximate Grokipedia-With-Junkets. Something like this should NOT be unilaterally implemented by the engineers without community discussion. And I don't mean displaying notice of the forthcoming change in the bottom of a locked filing cabinet stuck in a disused lavatory with a sign on the door saying "Beware of the Leopard," either. Carrite (talk) 16:27, 28 August 2026 (UTC)
Just a note on this, the feature as a whole is several years old. Which means there have been several years for stuff like Special:Contributions/Aritonoko to accumulate. Gnomingstuff (talk) 18:17, 28 August 2026 (UTC)
People who earn a checkuser block aren't really evidence of a problem in editing software. WhatamIdoing (talk) 20:45, 28 August 2026 (UTC)
The problem is that they were given a tool that encouraged them to spam out over 100 edits at a rate of roughly 1 every 3 minutes. No one fixed them for over two years, despite their very much needing fixing. Gnomingstuff (talk) 21:07, 29 August 2026 (UTC)
The task itself is fairly simple: it highlights a paragraph containing language that the model has identified as commonly being reverted. In that respect, it is not all that different from the machine learning models that have been used for years to flag potentially problematic edits in Recent Changes. Revise Tone is also Community Configurable, so communities retain control over whether they want to offer the task. Any administrator can disable it if there is consensus.
Of course, I hope communities will choose to keep it enabled. Revise Tone, along with the other Newcomer Tasks, is intended to give people who are new to editing a relatively approachable way to make their first contributions. We know that getting started with Wikipedia editing can be difficult, and we need to provide newcomers with accessible ways to take that first step if we want to support the long-term sustainability of the projects. KStoller-WMF (talk) 22:35, 28 August 2026 (UTC)
Community members were involved does not equate to consensus. This comes across (yet again) as "We're going to shove LLM down your throat, and if people protest loudly enough we'll consider removing it after the fact." And you wonder why editors are hostile to WMF involvement. ChompyTheGogoat (talk) 04:23, 29 August 2026 (UTC)
I have asked for Newcomer Tasks to be disabled for several months now. I have done an audit on Newcomer Task quality -- the amount of good ones is dismally low. That's still true. I could do another audit, but I don't even know if that would help, because I have otherwise presented every piece of evidence I can possibly think of. There is no concrete evidence that anyone actually cares. (defined by anything actually being done about it beyond "we're listening") The situation is especially perverse for a number of reasons:
The articles hit by Newcomer Tasks are often articles that people tagged a long time ago. I assume that when they did so, their intent was not to make the articles worse, but that's what has happened.
The justification that we get, over and over, for why these are still around despite being a demonstrable net negative is the sunk-cost fallacy and how so much work has been put in. I don't know how to be any more polite here, but I don't care. If someone comes along and bashes a hole in my roof, I don't care how hard they worked to bash the hole, I care that my house is now being ruined by rain.
The other justification is that "well they're not being reverted so they must be good." The reason so many of them have not been reverted is because A) the firehose is spewing them out too quickly for "reverting" to even happen (in a way that puts the "reverted" tag on), and B) there are so many of them that everyone doing cleanup is swamped. The last time I brought this up I said I had over 100 tabs open with cleanup work. Now it's over 200. Just how fast am I expected to work to be able to make Number Go Down to a point that makes any impression whatsoever on the people who want see Number Go Up?
I don't remember anyone giving a sunk-cost justification.
Looking at Special:RecentChanges right now, I see just under 1,000 mainspace edits from newcomers (1–10 edits) in the last ~6 hours. About 11.5% of them are Newcomer tasks. 14% of them are already reverted. But: Only 3.7% of the Newcomer tasks are already reverted, whereas 16.2% of the non-Newcomer task edits have already been reverted. That's more than a fourfold difference. Newcomer task edits are only 23% as likely to get reverted as non-Newcomer task edits.
It might be that the daily ~4,000 mainspace edits from newcomers is more than our current Wikipedia:Recent changes patrol can handle. But it seems unlikely to me that the community is preferentially ignoring the Newcomer task edits, and if newbies using the Newcomer tasks are "only" as bad at editing as the rest of us were when we started, it would take a very significant level of ignoring edits to produce that big of a difference in the reversion rates. I therefore conclude that Newcomer task edits actually don't need to be reverted as often as other edits from newbies. WhatamIdoing (talk) 20:43, 28 August 2026 (UTC)
Could you please respond to my numerous comments referring to the difference in editors who actually utilize the tool at all before you continue to rely on this logic? ChompyTheGogoat (talk) 04:32, 29 August 2026 (UTC)
Sure: As has been pointed out repeatedly by multiple people in this discussion, Wikipedia:Long-term abuse socks, poop vandals, and other abusive actors might not look at Special:Homepage at all.
And as has also been pointed out, when you compare randomly assigned Group A, with the opportunity to complete newcomer tasks, against Group B, without that opportunity, and you see that Group A does the same or better than Group B on approximately every metric ever checked during the last ~seven years, even though most of the members in Group A never completed a task, then it's fair to assume that "actually using the tool at all" isn't necessary to get a benefit from it. The editors in Group A who use the tool are likely different from the editors in Group A who see the tasks and decide to edit independently (but who may have been influenced by the information they saw), and both of those subgroups are different from the editors in Group A who didn't look at the homepage at all, but there is no reason at all to assume that the randomly assigned members of Group A have a different number of abusive editors than the randomly assigned members of Group B, none of whom had the opportunity to see the page. And since Group A, including its voluntary non-users and its fair share of abusive editors, did much better than Group B, it's reasonable to think that the tool actually improves behavior overall. WhatamIdoing (talk) 05:02, 29 August 2026 (UTC)
Do you have a link to that information? ChompyTheGogoat (talk) 05:04, 29 August 2026 (UTC)
The Revise Tone experiment compared two different types of newcomer tasks, not a control group without any access to them at all. And the Add-a-link link is (ironically) broken (404). ChompyTheGogoat (talk) 10:05, 29 August 2026 (UTC)
Also, from the Revise Tone experiment the changes in constructive edit rates did not meet the threshold for statistical significance. ChompyTheGogoat (talk) 10:07, 29 August 2026 (UTC)
Yes, the individual subtasks have differing levels of value, which is why proposals, such as yours at the top of this thread, to remove all of them indiscriminately, are a bad idea. We should keep the ones we like, configure the ones we're okay with, and turn off the ones we dislike. WhatamIdoing (talk) 16:30, 29 August 2026 (UTC)
Add a link is probably the only one I've seen that doesn't cause blatant issues, but I have to wonder if the lower reversion rate is simply because it's such a minor change (and a judgement call on whether or not it's appropriate in a given situation) that patrollers often won't bother, in comparison to edit types that are more prone to cause issues in general. Copyedit or revise tone can insert statements that are flat out incorrect (as with the instigating edit I saw), to say nothing of more general edits that add or remove material. The feeling I get from the data in your link is that there's a slight benefit in terms of new editor retention because they feel successful, but not necessarily much benefit to the actual articles. It's essentially busywork. I'd rather have some kind of training module for different types of practice edits, but obviously that's a far bigger proposal. The reason I started out with "just shut it down" is because it's clear there have been ongoing problems with the tasks and discontent among seasoned editors for some time, but there doesn't appear to have been any concerted effort to improve things. If people aren't willing to make one, disabling them entirely is easier and would prevent additional problems going forward. ChompyTheGogoat (talk) 06:24, 6 September 2026 (UTC)
I feel like there's a tendency to let the perfect be the enemy of the good on this subject. If a tool has any benefit compared to doing nothing, we should keep it instead of doing nothing. WhatamIdoing (talk) 16:18, 6 September 2026 (UTC)
I tried that early on and wasn't impressed.What part of "experienced editors spend a bunch of time patrolling and reverting bad edits" sounds like a net benefit? ChompyTheGogoat (talk) 17:38, 6 September 2026 (UTC)
Because if we've got a thousand edits from newbies, our realistic options are:
We get a higher rate of bad edits, requiring experienced editors to do more reverting, and we end up with fewer editors coming back on a subsequent day/week/month, causing Wikipedia eventually to die.
We get a lower rate of bad edits, requiring experienced editors to do the same amount of patrolling but less reverting, and we end up with more mid-level editors, giving Wikipedia a chance to survive the next 20 years.
The option in which edits from newbies don't require "a bunch of time patrolling" doesn't exist. The thing we can actually affect is the number of reverts and therefore whether the newbie will try again another day. WhatamIdoing (talk) 20:24, 7 September 2026 (UTC)
And I'm not convinced most newcomer tasks accomplish that. In fact, I feel like it's more discouraging to have something reverted when Wikipedia specifically said "this is something that needs to be fixed and we think it's an easy task that you can handle without experience" as opposed to something that a newbie chooses to try to improve on their own. If we're going try offer them specific work, the work needs to actually be appropriate and provide support to maximize their chance of success. It's like starting a new job with no experience and having someone plop a pile of work on your desk with minimal instructions, then come back at the end of the day and tell you you've done all of it wrong. I sure as hell wouldn't be coming back after that. In my metaphor I chose to instead wander the halls looking for things that I felt competent to work on and asking whatever editor happened to be passing by any questions to try to ensure I was doing it correctly, which helped keep my reversion rate down and my confidence up (somewhat). I also spent lots of time dropping into random "meetings" to learn from the discussions instead of diving headfirst into editing without a foundation of knowledge to work from. A successful workplace with low turnover would offer more structured support to new workers instead of this sink or swim philosophy. ChompyTheGogoat (talk) 02:21, 8 September 2026 (UTC)
Let's stipulate that it's worse to be reverted for an edit suggested by the software than for an organic edit. How much worse? WhatamIdoing (talk) 03:13, 8 September 2026 (UTC)
I don't think that's something you can quantify. The effect it'll have on motivation and retention depends entirely on the editor in question, and of course how often it occurs. If they make a whole mess of edits right away thinking they're doing the right thing because it was recommended and come back to find a large number of them have been reverted that's a far greater impact than my initial "oops, my keyboard inserted a blatant error" reverted edit. I fixed it and went on with my day. If they do something similar with a single newcomer task and get reverted before continuing, maybe they realize things are more complex than they thought but don't get as offended because they didn't devote that much time and effort to it. It's all situational. ChompyTheGogoat (talk) 03:24, 8 September 2026 (UTC)
I think that a good economist would say that everything can be quantified. Actuarial work seeks to quantify just how much worse it is to lose a thumb than to lose a toe, or to die when you're 35 than when you're 55 or 75, so I'm pretty sure that it's possible to quantify whether it's worse to be reverted for a suggested edit in an article you don't really care about vs an organic edit in an article on a subject that interested you. It might be situational, but there will still be an average. And based on that average, we can easily determine just how much better system A has to be, compared to system B, for the benefits to overcome the disadvantages.
And that's apparently happened, because people with access to the newcomer tasks actually stay more than people without it. WhatamIdoing (talk) 05:59, 8 September 2026 (UTC)
Just because capitalism assigns a dollar value to human suffering doesn't mean it's an appropriate approach to life. Still only seen a single clear stat for retention from a valid A/B test on the link suggestions - not other tasks or the newcomer module in general. You cannot extrapolate from the least problematic type. ChompyTheGogoat (talk) 09:43, 8 September 2026 (UTC)
@ChompyTheGogoat We've run several other A/B tests that include newcomer retention stats, a few others are here:
Revise Tone Experiment analysis - this was one of our first experiments using a new testing platform (Test_Kitchen), and if I'm remembering correctly, Newcomer Retention simply wasn't an available metric at the time we tested, which is why we looked at "Constructive Edit Rate" for this experiment. We now have short-term and long-term retention metrics defined and we plan to use them for future experiments.
I also wanted to share that the work the Growth team is doing on Home is aimed to help address some of the gaps you have identified in this thread: newcomers should receive more relevant suggestions, more learning support (including short micro-learning videos), and more opportunities to grow and progress on to more meaningful work on the wikis. I won't pretend that this one project is an answer to everything you raised in this thread. But I think it's another step in the right direction to support newcomers, and should hopefully address some of the Newcomer Task frustrations you've named.
One thing I'd especially like your take on: do you think there a future where junior editors take on more of the reviewing and patrolling of "low risk" newcomer edits? You gestured at something like this above with the patrol group idea. Right now that work falls to the most experienced and busiest editors, so a very basic newcomer edit can end up costing several of them time that could go toward harder cleanup work (or perhaps just more enjoyable wiki work). - KStoller-WMF (talk) 22:51, 8 September 2026 (UTC)
Sure - I don't think it's particularly difficult work. It's not something I'd personally dedicate a lot of time to, but I'll frequently take a quick look through a newcomer's edits and try to address any issues I spot, and I'm sure there are others more involved with welcoming/outreach that wouldn't mind setting aside a bit of time for it. Most editors who are ECP could probably do it. I find work like that useful in small doses for improving my own skills via checking sources and pulling up the relevant guidelines, as well as expanding my horizons on subjects I wouldn't normally look up on my own. I do think it would be helpful to implement a tool that allows said editors to verify a given edit has been reviewed so others can skip over it, although it wouldn't necessarily need to be removed from the list altogether. A checkbox would probably be fine (might be scriptable?) If it's something that needs to be fixed but that editor doesn't feel like addressing it in that moment they just leave it unchecked and it would still show as unreviewed. ChompyTheGogoat (talk) 23:09, 8 September 2026 (UTC)
@KStoller-WMF, I think that patrolling "obvious" edits (both obviously good and obviously bad) is a good way to get started in anti-vandalism and other patrolling efforts.
That said, there's a risk: highly active RecentChanges patrollers don't like doing difficult clean-up work, and if one were to filter most of the easy reviewing work out, they'd feel like a fun, high-speed, usually easy task had become a long, slow slog. Speed appears to a significant motivator for some of the long-time RecentChanges patrollers, and anything that makes them pause or slow down is demotivating. The little dopamine hit from reverting blatant vandalism is important. And no matter what the task, if it's always the difficult question, then that rapidly becomes tiring. This isn't unique to Wikipedia; there was research ~10 years ago about the problems that Facebook's underpaid reviewers had when their filtering system got better, and the review queue that had been a mix of reported posts became endless queues of serious problems. So if most of the easy calls were to be checked by newcomers, we might end up with fewer and fewer experienced editors doing RecentChanges patrolling. WhatamIdoing (talk) 00:21, 9 September 2026 (UTC)
@ChompyTheGogoat Thanks for sharing your thoughts on the idea of reducing review redundancy. We have a software feature that could help with this, but it's currently not enabled on the English Wikipedia. On some other wikis, there's a 'patrol' button for each edit, so users can mark an edit as 'patrolled'. Other editors can then filter this edit out of venues like Recent Changes, and focus on unreviewed edits. There have been some discussions here about the feature, but no consensus to enable it. I'm interested in thinking about how we might be able to update the feature so that it could be enabled, if the community wanted to do so. I've been collecting notes at T409165 - would love to know if you have additional thoughts! Samwalton9 (WMF) (talk) 09:57, 10 September 2026 (UTC)
There's a whole lot more to that story (some of which is under NDA). I don't think a task group focused on good faith newcomer edits would have too much impact on the overall Recent Changes workload though, and reaching out to help newbies who made honest mistakes appears to be one of the things that's lacking. I often see them reverted with only a cursory edit summary that would be sufficient for a more experienced editor, but isn't likely to help newbies learn from it - and I know regular patrollers might not even realize it's a newbie when they revert, but someone who's specifically patrolling for them would know and could take extra time to try to help them improve. ChompyTheGogoat (talk) 14:13, 9 September 2026 (UTC)
@Gnomingstuff Thank you for taking the time to respond and for the previous audit work. I understand the frustration, especially the feeling that the cleanup burden has become overwhelming. Is there a particular task that you think is especially problematic, or do you feel that Newcomer Tasks as a whole are problematic?
I completely agree that we cannot equate “not reverted” with “good.” It is, however, one of the signals we have available. Looking at English Wikipedia article-namespace edits from January through July 2026, among editors with fewer than 30 days of tenure and fewer than 100 edits:
Newcomer edits overall had a 30.1% revert rate (900,292 of 2,994,419 edits). [1]
Edits made through Newcomer Tasks had a 4.7% revert rate (5,416 of 115,188 edits). [2]
There is an important caveat to this comparison: people who choose Newcomer Tasks are likely good-faith editors, while the overall newcomer figure includes vandalism and other clearly problematic newcomers. So this comparison almost certainly overstates the difference. And, as you point out, neither number captures cleanup that happens without a formal revert. Even with those caveats, though, the data suggests that Newcomer Tasks are not disproportionately contributing to the revert workload relative to newcomer editing overall.
The reality is that newcomers will always make some mistakes as they learn. That is part of bringing new people into the project. At the same time, I do think there are several promising projects underway that should help:
Better onboarding and task matching: The Growth team is working on early onboarding changes, including changes to the Newcomer Task feed. We are working toward a smaller, more curated set of tasks that better matches contributors to tasks based on skill level and interests.
More accurate Add a Link suggestions: The Machine Learning team is working to improve the accuracy of Add a Link suggestions, which should reduce the number of poor-quality suggestions reaching newcomers (T434259). The Growth team will also work on an Add a Link improvement soon that will both decrease the quantity of suggestions available and also increase the quality of suggestions (T429417).
More learning support: The Community Development team is working on "micro-learning" videos based on the Wikimedia Core Curriculum, giving newcomers more guidance at the point when they need it.
Catching mistakes before publication: The Editing team's Edit Check work catches some common mistakes before they are published.
Expanding the moderator pool: The Moderator Tools team is working on ways to onboard moderators and patrollers, so that the work of reviewing newcomer edits can be distributed among more people.
None of this clears your 200 tabs today, and I don't want to pretend that it does. But the direction we're investing in is fewer, better-matched tasks, with more support for newcomers and better safeguards around the edits they make, while also helping newer editors develop toward appropriate moderation and patrolling roles.
Does that feel like the right direction to you? And are there other approaches or ideas you think we should be considering? KStoller-WMF (talk) 21:31, 28 August 2026 (UTC)
@KStoller-WMF, would you also consider coming up with some better way to categorize articles for the purposes of showing "relevant to your interests" articles to newbies? There's someone complaining about that upthread, and I recall also finding this pretty useless for the same reason. I was under the impression that those ORES topics were going to be replaced by something much better years ago, and that hasn't happened. Is anyone still working on that? In solidarity, asilvering (talk) 21:42, 28 August 2026 (UTC)
Design showing how newcomers could select articles of interest before arriving to their Homepage
We hope to release an A/B test as early as next month in which we actually allow newcomers to select articles of interest to populate a more limited set of suggestions. Related project page: https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Home
Here's an early prototype if you want to test out the idea. Do you think something like that could be more promising than providing suggestions based on ORES topics? KStoller-WMF (talk) 22:04, 28 August 2026 (UTC)
@KStoller-WMF, this is much better!! All the articles it gave me are related to my interests, and none are in quite such a horrible state that it's depressing to look at them. And, well, it couldn't have known, but... it suggested one of my own articles (Richard Caudray) for expansion. In solidarity, asilvering (talk) 22:26, 28 August 2026 (UTC)
My suggestions are also much better, but I can't click through to check on anything. The crosslinks and references tasks seem reasonable - I'm not sure what "bring up to date" is looking for, which sounds rather vague. I didn't get any revise tone suggestions, which I honestly feel is better because newbies don't have a good feel for Wikipedia voice and NPOV yet - especially since it's marked an "easy" task, which to me should be the very first edits someone ever makes. Crosslinks and basic copyedit are about as easy as it gets. (Crosslink suggestions aren't always accurate or needed, but very low in terms of the actual problem they cause.) ChompyTheGogoat (talk) 05:01, 29 August 2026 (UTC)
I'm going to WP:AGF and assume that a WMF employee knows better than to use LLMs in discussions - we know these tools aren't fully accurate - but I cannot stress enough that if you're spending so much time engaging with AI that you start to sound like them you should seriously check yourself. ChompyTheGogoat (talk) 04:48, 29 August 2026 (UTC)
All of the tasks are net negatives in practice with the exception of Suggested Links, since the damage an individual editor can do with it is very small and contained, and does not affect the prose.
The type of the task also doesn't matter, as people disregard it all the time. Just a few examples taken from the hundreds of tabs I am slogging through:
Special:Contributions/HelloHop (Note the **Suggested edit-summary (copy-paste into the “Edit summary” box):** chatbot response in one edit summary, an indication of how thoroughly this person reviewed the edits they have spammed out)
Have you looked at the edit trail of new editors to try to classify their intentions? My guess is that some people have rather specific goals, e.g. taking political positions in a specific country. Others become unhappy when they see glaring errors in technical articles and feel they just have to fix them. Others feel that their small town has too little info. Others may be ....? Have you done a survey on this? It would be interesting to know. Thanks. Yesterday, all my dreams... (talk) 02:00, 5 September 2026 (UTC)
I'm going to ask a newcomer which likes using the feature for their opinion. 16dvnk (talk) 14:12, 5 September 2026 (UTC)
Let's not forget that their response to sunk cost concerns is to barge ahead anyway instead of pumping the brakes, so I have zero sympathy for that at this point. If you want to ensure your work will have a lasting beneficial impact, make sure it's something anyone bloody well wants before you ram implementation through. Or eat the consequences. ChompyTheGogoat (talk) 04:30, 29 August 2026 (UTC)
Sunk cost fallacy is one of those power words that power users like to throw around, usually when they have a gut-level revulsion to a change and don't think they'll be able to stop the change. There's a relevant source linked at the end of Wikipedia:You don't own Wikipedia that might prove to be interesting reading, if you haven't seen it before.
But, as a point of fact, the stated response in that discussion (which comes from a long-time Wikipedia editor, BTW) is that they've designed this project so they can easily "abandon" anything that doesn't look promising. A lot of the ideas the WMF evaluates don't see the light of day (e.g., the most recent round of "let's change the font!", which comes up every five years or so – but never from someone who lived through the last attempt), so you probably wouldn't hear about them unless you watch phab: regularly. Consequently, it is important not to assume that the continuation rate for the few projects you've heard of is the overall continuation rate. WhatamIdoing (talk) 05:23, 29 August 2026 (UTC)
Perhaps not, but it seems to be their preferred response on these related subjects. It was clearly communicated that numerous editors are uncomfortable with that project and a desire for consensus was expressed, and the response was "we can always abandon it later", which does nothing to address the underlying concern. Do they believe the community is going to magically change our opinion on LLMs by that point, or are they then going to argue that they should keep going after putting so much work into it? What harm does it do to pause and see whether people really do want this tool at all, instead of "what suggestions can be used going forward because we're definitely going forward"? It feels like they're willing to reconsider specific aspects based on input, but not the project as a whole. Rather WP:IDIDN'THEARTHAT of them, IMHO. ChompyTheGogoat (talk) 05:57, 29 August 2026 (UTC)
No, but they might believe that (a) people who haven't tried the tool don't have the information they need to make an informed decision, and (b) that even if the tool is abandoned, something useful could be learned from it. And, of course, we all know that (c) the ~five dozen people in that discussion, some of whom support the project, are not even remotely representative of the three-quarter million registered editors who make at least one edit in a given year.
More generally, we have the problem that (d), if you reach out to the communities early in a project, when it would be cheap and easy to abandon it, then people don't understand the project or its goals, and even complain that you brought the idea to them so early, when you don't even know how it will behave or whether it works or what it looks like. But if you bring it to them later, when you can provide solid answers to most of their questions, they say "How dare you not involve me early in the process! Nobody asked for this! (Pay no attention to those diffs behind the curtain that prove that someone else in the community did ask for it.) It wasn't discussed! (a common enough complaint that experienced people create lists of prior discussions such as Wikipedia:Vector 2022#List of discussions, but you still get nonsense, like this IP claiming "that nobody saw" an RFC that 344 people participated in) I hate it! (but a couple of months from now, I'll probably have gotten used to it). It was before your time, but the RFCs for Vector 2022 was so predictable (and predicted) that I should have started a betting pool on when the first rollback RFC would be started, measured in hours after deployment.
The WMF product folks who are involved in the project being discussed likely remember my views on anything that sounds like Microsoft's Clippy: I'm not a fan. But I don't think that the work they're doing is useless, or that any editors will be forced to use it. WhatamIdoing (talk) 06:42, 29 August 2026 (UTC)
Consensus is never expected to require input from the entire editor pool, just enough who have interest in the specific proposal to get a solid feel for the overall sentiment based on rational arguments (especially, but not exclusively, made by senior editors who do understand both the relevant guidelines and history of the subject on-wiki). And I don't think early consensus should be the final say on wide scale implementation, but an indication that most people think the general concept has enough promise to be worth developing and evaluating once it's functional. If they built a full Grokipedia style bot to write unreviewed articles and didn't listen to the community until it was in on-wiki testing I expect there would be a few opinions. I also did read your previous reference to Wikipedia:You don't own Wikipedia and I really don't feel it applies in this situation. Obviously not to me - I haven't even been here for a year, but I've seen how much harm AI can do both on wiki and off, and I've seen how the general community feels about its implementation, as reflected in existing guidelines. I've also seen similar sentiments on a smaller scale when it comes to newcomer tasks, which is why I started this, and I'm not at all surprised to learn it's also AI because the randomness and low quality of the suggestions is exactly what I expect from slop that can't comprehend the task at hand because it has no comprehension. An RfC would garner input from a wider variety of editors so no "power users" can attempt to strongarm their opinion through. Obviously the WMF should and does have ultimate authority when it comes to legal issues, finances, etc - but that's not what this is. Individual projects are supposed to have a wide degree of latitude for how to manage content that doesn't cross any legal lines, and English wiki is largely against AI implementation. If they want to develop it for different projects that have wider acceptance, have at (but I suspect they wouldn't devote the resources to it if we reject it from EN). ChompyTheGogoat (talk) 09:38, 29 August 2026 (UTC)
@ChompyTheGogoat, the way WAID's essay applies here is that we desperately need more new editors to step up, to replace those of us who inevitably will wander away from the projects (or die in office). It's going to be a group effort to make the projects more welcoming to newcomers, and this is one possible way. AI has some real promise in surfacing appropriate tasks for newcomers, because of the WP:SOFIXIT attitude that longtime editors have - if we spot something easy, we just fix it ourselves. That means that what's left - the stuff that's tagged - is often an absolutely horrible slog to deal with. That was my own experience of the newcomer homepage, when I started - it was entirely the tasks generated by maintenance templates, and what it sent me to was articles so broken that I felt completely demotivated to try to fix them. The tool was suggesting I get some basic editing experience in, and sending me to articles that needed to be completely rewritten, not things that were a quick job at all. Things like the suggested links task and revise tone can help find spots that need help that are much more within the capabilities and inclinations of newbies. In solidarity, asilvering (talk) 16:58, 29 August 2026 (UTC)
Revise Tone is precisely what I've seen the most problems from. It might look easy to someone who doesn't know what they're doing - because they don't know what they're doing. I'm not sure that one can be fixed either, because "phrases like these often get changed" is in no way shape or form indicative that it's a simple task appropriate for new editors, and just changing it doesn't mean it's been improved. It might be useful as a feature that more experienced editors can utilize, or as a flag that pops up to indicate the problematic phrase when someone is already editing the article in question, but we need to keep newbie tasks simple and more objective (if we keep them at all). ChompyTheGogoat (talk) 06:53, 6 September 2026 (UTC)
or as a flag that pops up to indicate the problematic phrase when someone is already editing the article in question - this exists (as a beta feature) in the form of Suggestion Mode. OutsideNormality (talk) 17:46, 6 September 2026 (UTC)
Sounds good in theory, except it only applies to visual editor. Most seasoned editors (who would have the skills to handle more complex and subjective situations) use source mode. Hopefully they can expand it with additional implementation.In any case, that's neither here nor there re: newcomer tasks. ChompyTheGogoat (talk) 20:04, 6 September 2026 (UTC)
Most experienced editors use both editing environments, based on what kind of work they're doing. Choose the visual editor for copyediting and table structure edits; choose one of the four wikitext editors for fixing wikitext problems. And, of course, you don't always have a choice: the 'Undo' button always uses the 2010 wikitext editor, no matter what your preferences say (and falls back to the 2003 WTE if you have javascript disabled). WhatamIdoing (talk) 21:54, 7 September 2026 (UTC)
I've spoken to many editors who've been around for a long time and don't know how visual works because they're never felt any need to use it. I hardly ever toggle it myself, despite mostly editing on mobile. I only leave it switched on for diffs. Regardless, if they don't think the work they're doing at the time requires visual and don't see that the flags exist, they're useless in that scenario, so I think wider implementation for as many editors to see them as possible (whether or not they choose to address it in that moment) would improve outcomes. I fix a lot of things that I stumble across at random, and if I had something flagging a wide variety of issues I'd usually at least take a look to see if it's something I felt capable of doing. That's a much better use of such features than serving them up to newbies. ChompyTheGogoat (talk) 02:31, 8 September 2026 (UTC)
Many editors only do a narrow range of tasks. I've never met one that preferred adding a column to a table in the wikitext editor after they've experienced doing it in the visual editor, even among those of us (including me) who can type the wikitext syntax by hand from memory. WhatamIdoing (talk) 03:16, 8 September 2026 (UTC)
And how much of the total editing on all of Wikipedia involves adding columns to tables? That's certainly a narrow focus. As I said, some editors will choose not to address the flag while they're there, and that's fine - but some will. The same people who might not actively seek out the article from some list of such problems might be willing to make additional improvements if they're already there working on whatever they're personally interested in. The more eyes on it (especially experienced ones) the better the odds are that it'll get addressed appropriately. ChompyTheGogoat (talk) 03:28, 8 September 2026 (UTC)
The problem with a non-representative group of editors is that you don't "get a solid feel for the overall sentiment"; you instead "get a solid feel for the overall sentiment within a non-representative group, which may or may not differ significantly from the overall sentiment of the whole community". Sometimes there's no important differences; that's why most RFCs, with a typical participation of 5 to 15 editors, work. But sometimes it does matter.
I suspect that the bigger weakness with the Small language model is that it can't compare article content against source content, so calling William Shakespeare "the greatest writer in the English language and the world's pre-eminent dramatist" will seem puffy, and that saying Martin Shkreli has a "reputation as 'the most hated man in America'" will seem disparaging. But both of these are justified by the sources, and the SLM machine learning tool has no way of knowing that. WhatamIdoing (talk) 17:16, 29 August 2026 (UTC)
What's your definition of a representative group in this context? We're not going to get an even slice of the editor population, because people who don't have an opinion on it (which is likely to be most of them) won't chime in. How do you propose improving said group, except through RfC? We have the tools we have. ChompyTheGogoat (talk) 06:56, 6 September 2026 (UTC)
I'm not at all surprised to learn it's also AI
Just to clarify, the problem is that people are using AI to spam out the tasks. If people weren't using AI to spam out the tasks, there would be less of a problem. But the tool itself encourages this behavior, by design:
The gamification system, by design provides an incentive for them to do so as fast as possible so Number Go Up as fast as possible, and provides repeated praise, implicitly and explicitly, as they do it.
The tool funnels them to articles that have already been identified as problematic, making those articles worse: a slap in the face to everyone who tagged articles for improvement in good faith because they wanted them improved.
The tool funnels multiple editors at a high speed, meaning that those articles' edit histories become so drowned beneath bad edits that none of them can be reverted without painstaking work. Essentially, it gives less-trafficked articles the edit volume of something on the front page, except without the people watching it.
I have the impression that Chompy's concern is that the "Revise tone" task is using a Small language model to find pages for its suggestion list.
I've just done six Revise Tone tasks. Five needed help, sometimes badly. The other was correct. It only proposed changes to a single paragraph at a time. It promptly asked me to switch to a more advanced task. If we're concerned about people doing too many of these in a single day ("as fast as possible so Number Go Up as fast as possible"), then maybe we should ask for daily limits. WhatamIdoing (talk) 00:32, 30 August 2026 (UTC)
Drive-by comment:
I skimmed through the overly tedious conversation. Apparently, the filing editor wants to upgrade the newcomer task feature or remove it, citing concerns over whether the tool is accurate, and how the new editors leave out work for the more experienced editors to fix. While I support a better system, it appears that this is just a WP:Competence is required case. Also, reading through, I am unsure what exactly they want to change. Further, this newcomer system is flawed by design, making a negative feedback cycle.
Is it possible that some PendingChanges type of monitor list shows a subset these edits for human review? Or, change the system so there is a complete Wikipedia course, something that is quite lacking to newbies. 16dvnk (talk) 11:46, 1 September 2026 (UTC)
Is it possible that some PendingChanges type of monitor list shows a subset these edits Well, this shows Special:RecentChanges filtered by edits that are tagged with newcomer task, which one can patrol at will. It's possible to filter further by type of task. Cheers, SunloungerFrog (talk) 14:32, 1 September 2026 (UTC)
However, there doesn't seem to be a way to approve or decline the edit, and what you suggested is a very tedious way. Given that PendingChanges has manpower and the backlog is often empty, it would be nice if those had their own place too. 16dvnk (talk) 14:16, 5 September 2026 (UTC)
Well, there is no way to approve or decline the edit, because Newcomer Tasks are not under pending changes protection. They are just edits that anyone can make, which I think is the whole point. You can still patrol them and revert them if you would like to. Cheers, SunloungerFrog (talk) 15:52, 5 September 2026 (UTC)
If you (anyone) want to check them, then this RecentChanges link will give you a list of all newcomer task edits. At the moment, it looks like it's a bit less than half adding links, a third copyedit/revising tone, 10% adding refs, 5% updating outdated articles, and 5% expanding articles. The 'tags' button on the side will let you change the all-encompassing newcomer tasks tag to a specific tag for just one of these, if you want. WhatamIdoing (talk) 00:42, 6 September 2026 (UTC)
That's just it - it is flawed by design, and when the entire purpose is to improve the level of competence we shouldn't have features that require advanced competence to understand how to utilize them correctly. ChompyTheGogoat (talk) 06:59, 6 September 2026 (UTC)
I'm not sure that "the entire purpose is to improve the level of competence". I'm not sure that any of its goals could be fairly described as "the entire purpose". WhatamIdoing (talk) 19:55, 7 September 2026 (UTC)
If we don't want new editors to get better at editing what are we even doing here? Why provide them any support at all? We don't want to retain them if they only continue to make bad edits. We block people who refuse to improve to a basic extent under WP:CIR. Shouldn't the goal of every editor be to always continue improving their abilities? It's a huge learning curve and if we can get them up that initial steep slope they'll be more empowered to continue improving on their own. ChompyTheGogoat (talk) 02:36, 8 September 2026 (UTC)
"That's not the entire purpose" ≠ "That's an anti-goal". WhatamIdoing (talk) 07:19, 8 September 2026 (UTC)
Which goals would still be relevant even if editors never improve in any way shape or form? If it's "Retaining more users that can improve their competence and make constructive contributions" that's a sub-goal. Would you prefer "The primary goal upon which all others should be contingent"? ChompyTheGogoat (talk) 09:51, 8 September 2026 (UTC)
Yes, that is what I meant (although the use of AI to compose edits is certainly a secondary problem too). Whether or not the tasks are identified correctly is also just part of the issue - it's whether these brand new editors who don't know anything about the subject or how Wikipedia works can actually make a substantial improvement in a very subjective situation.I've also make numerous suggestions regarding expanded introductions to editing for new users that would help them understand the basics before they start editing. I have no idea whether those suggestions are being seriously considered or not. ChompyTheGogoat (talk) 07:02, 6 September 2026 (UTC)
If you think that expanded introductions will help, why don't you draft some suggested content for those expanded introductions somewhere for others, e.g. on the WMF Growth team, to consider? And I couldn't see it anywhere above (may have missed it) but does Help:Introduction cover some of the topics you would expect to see put in front of new editors? I think I remember seeing it early on, but can't quite remember when it was surfaced. Cheers, SunloungerFrog (talk) 08:00, 6 September 2026 (UTC)
Wikipedia:Nobody reads the directions (except Chompy). Seriously, we have three-quarter million registered editors making an edit each year, and the number of people who later say that they read a lot of help/policy/etc. pages before making their first edit appears to be a single digit number. Per year. For typical newcomers, the iron laws of the internet (e.g., WP:TLDR) apply. WhatamIdoing (talk) 20:00, 7 September 2026 (UTC)
And yet I still see so many people saying they had no idea such resources existed. If we smack them in the face with it and they choose to ignore it, then and only then can we hit them with WP:CIR. Much like the AI and COI affidavits would remove plausible deniability. Part of WP:AGF is ensuring people have every possible opportunity to do things correctly. I don't think my particular skillset is so much the willingness to read guidelines, which is required of all editors, but the ability and determination to go to extra lengths to look for things myself. I can't count the number of times I've gone to fix something, then wondered where there's any relevant guidance that would ensure it's both necessary and correct, and proceeded to spend far more time looking for said guidance than it takes to actually make the edit. Once you have some idea of the basics (which would be presented in my pop-up idea) it's easier to know what else you might need to look up in other situations, and I've also made recommendations for improved organization to enable people to find such things easily, but you still have to know they exist in the first place. ChompyTheGogoat (talk) 02:48, 8 September 2026 (UTC)
As an aside, I did not in fact read any guidelines before my very first edit, because I alsodid not know they existed. Fortunately it was a very simple correction to mirror the source that I'd continued my reading on, so I didn't need any specialized WP knowledge. I just wanted to fix that single passage and didn't try to make any more live edits right away, so I got welcome templated and (presumably?) followed that link to Teahouse, and gradually found my way to additional resources before continuing to do any substantial mainspace edits. I think it would be extremely beneficial to encourage other newbies to hit that pause button for anything beyond a single minor correction that motivated them to start editing in the first place. If they come here with the general goal of working on Wikipedia instead of fixing a specific issue they spotted as a reader then taking that time to learn how to be successful shouldn't be a deterrent. ChompyTheGogoat (talk) 02:58, 8 September 2026 (UTC)
Regarding "the tool funnels them to articles that have already been identified as problematic" that can be a serious problem and can also cause chaos in software management. Sometimes new programmers who can not be trusted to write major new pieces of code are assigned the task of "fixing" bugs in the system. In the process they introduce many new bugs, exactly because they are newbies. Only one word can describe the situation: nightmare. Yesterday, all my dreams... (talk) 13:15, 7 September 2026 (UTC)
It's somewhere around here, and I think one of their team was involved with the latest discussion. I want to see a "Welcome to editing" pop-up that appears when you first create an account (or attempt to edit from a TA) that will give a very brief overview of the most critical policies and common mistakes, and links to various other resources for continued learning. The more proactive we can be instead of reactive the better retention is likely to be. It currently feels like you're tossed directly in the deep end and have to keep your head above water while searching for a flotation device - then maybe someone stops by and offers to help. We should loop people from WikiEdu in and try to learn from what's worked for them; condense the basics down for people who don't have access to those programs and need to be able to learn on their own. There's a lot more we could do as far as things like training modules, but I think this is one of the simplest things that could be implemented quickly and would have a huge impact. The goal would be to keep it under 5 minutes reading time (preferably more like 2) but strongly encourage them to follow the additional links. It would also be skippable for people who already know what they're doing. ChompyTheGogoat (talk) 09:43, 6 September 2026 (UTC)
Sorry, I should've been clearer: I meant "I can't remember when I saw Help:Introduction when I first started editing" not "I can't remember when Help:Introduction first came up in this thread".Re your popup, I am trying to think what I would have done had I been faced with such a thing when I started editing, and I'm afraid that I would probably have done whatever I needed to do to make it go away - ticked the boxes, clicked OK, chosen "Skip", whatever - so that I could get on with the edit I wanted to make. I won't generalise from my experience, but it certainly wouldn't have had a huge impact on my editing.
What edits would you make to Help:Introduction to cover things that you think are missing in that? Cheers, SunloungerFrog (talk) 10:13, 6 September 2026 (UTC)
You might have clicked out if you already felt confident that you knew what you were doing, but many wouldn't, and it would start with a splash screen saying essentially "We're glad to have you, but there are a lot of rules and we want to help you avoid common mistakes so we strongly recommend reading the following if you're new here". I probably would have read it - I made a couple TP suggestions before actually creating an account because I was afraid of screwing up if I tried to edit an article directly - and in fact my very first live edit WAS reverted, but only because of a glitch with my phone. The issue isn't necessarily what resources are available, but people being able to find them easily. ChompyTheGogoat (talk) 17:37, 6 September 2026 (UTC)
Help:Introduction wasn't even created until 2015, so I think that it's fair to assume that more than half the admin corps definitely didn't read it before starting. The problem with "if you already felt confident" is that confidence is a poor predictor of knowing what you're doing. WhatamIdoing (talk) 20:14, 7 September 2026 (UTC)
Obviously. We can't force people to read, but we can at least provide them with the opportunity. Isn't your base argument than any improvement is a win? We're obviously not going to see 100% success from literally anything. And I would recommend that the initial splash screen (possibly with additional details on the second slide) try to stress exactly why it's so important to understand how things work, and that we really want them to be successful instead of being reverted because they didn't know something basic. If people can't even be bothered to read a few sentences right in front of their face their chances of making it as an editor are far lower. Some of them are going to wash out - it is what it is. Our target audience is good faith editors who are WP:HERE and truly want to make edits that are constructive and well formed. We can't change their motivations, but we can provide them with the tools to learn if they choose to utilize them. ChompyTheGogoat (talk) 03:06, 8 September 2026 (UTC)
If our target audience is people who "truly want to make edits", we should close up shop now and go home, because we're going to die for lack of editors. Most people don't "truly want to make edits". Most editors start off in the range of "eh, I see a typo, and I heard you can edit" and (just) a few of them find the experience so appealing that they keep doing it. Prior research has shown that even putting a small barrier in between the newcomer and their first edit causes significant reductions in the number of edits. We are operating on a principle closer to "First one's always free, kid" than on "Please read the instructions before you touch the delicate machinery".
As you say, "we can't change their motivations", which is mostly either "I'm willing to help out if it's really easy", but we can avoid putting up barriers. I particularly object to your desire to "hit them" with a complaint that they're incompetent if they don't read, remember, and follow all the directions (most of which will be irrelevant to most of their intended edits) before making their first edit. As I've said before, Wikipedia:Too long; didn't read is one of the iron laws of the internet. If you make people read a bunch of stuff first, they'll quit instead. We need them to try that first edit. WhatamIdoing (talk) 18:00, 10 September 2026 (UTC)
That's a blatant misinterpretation of what I said. Not only did you literally drop the inconvenient part of a sentence, but I specifically said we can only apply WP:CIRif they've had the opportunity to learn. As in, we cannot expect competence if they don't, and I certainly didn't mean for their very first edit. If we could manage to stop more of the editors who will mostly or exclusively make bad edits during their tenure, I'd call that a win. More editors isn't always a good thing. Of course it's significantly harder to track complex stats such as "how many good edits are made over time" instead of just "how many new editors make their first edit", but you can't know what the effects are at all if something hasn't been tried. Testing is important. As I've already stated, using encouraging language and making it easily skippable would both be priorities. I'm definitely the person who skips through tutorials most of the time, because usually what I'm doing is easy and obvious, but this is one situation where I was less sure of what I was doing and would have welcomed more information. When I did find that information later it drew me into editing (particularly Teahouse) instead of pushing me away. If I hadn't found the discussion boards I highly doubt I would have come back. For people who do skip it and make a mistake, we continue to treat them the same way we do now. Really the only difference in how experienced editors respond to newcomers would be if they agree to the COI and AI affidavits and then violate them. Otherwise we're just providing them with more information and hoping it improves their rate of good edits and lowers necessary reversions, which then improves retention of those that are reasonably competent. Washing out those who aren't (despite being offered resources and given multiple chances) is the system working as it should. ChompyTheGogoat[Bleat|Munched] 18:41, 10 September 2026 (UTC)
Well, this was timely.Special:Diff/1373683524 Special:Diff/1373682228 Special:Diff/1373680292 Special:Diff/1373677809Plus User_talk:WXchaser#Question_from_Ainigushenzouanxiang_on_NYChrisG_(06:22,_7_September_2026) (and subsequent sections). This appears to be a good faith new editor who has no idea what they're doing and is fumbling around not understanding what the newcomer tasks are asking of them, particularly revise tone. The only edits that seem fine are link suggestions - one of the articles already appears to be overlinked to my eye, but I'm not going to attempt to guess whether their addition is more or less appropriate than all the existing links. So out of seven mainspace edits this user has already had four partially or fully reverted - and the other editor who did so didn't bother dropping them a TP note, so they're probably unaware of it. ChompyTheGogoat (talk) 10:03, 7 September 2026 (UTC)
Which is kind of the problem here, because if someone doesn't understand why an edit like Special:Diff/1373682228 does not change the tone at all, then all the Wikipedia training in the world is not going to help a problem that's fundamentally about English writing/editing skills. Gnomingstuff (talk) 15:24, 7 September 2026 (UTC)
Yes. Adding a preposition to a WP:PLOTSUM doesn't change the tone. @Sdkb-WMF, can you talk to the Growth team about having the Revise tone task avoid plot summaries? WhatamIdoing (talk) 20:16, 7 September 2026 (UTC)
I don't mean this to be rude, but this is a strange and overly literal interpretation of what I pointed out. Adding one preposition to anything is unlikely to change its tone. It might change its grammar, or fall into one colloquialism or another ("he found that" vs. "he found out that"), but the edit above doesn't change the tone, and I highly doubt the person can explain why.
Basically, the problem is that this editor is not proficient enough in the English language to do English-language editing tasks, much like I am not proficient enough in the Swedish language to do Swedish-language editing tasks. Newcomer Tasks are not equipped to teach people English, and the English Wikipedia interface should stop encouraging them to do something they currently cannot do well. (Of course, the editor could always recognize by themselves, on their own volition, that this isn't their skill set, but for whatever reason people don't do that.) Gnomingstuff (talk) 05:59, 9 September 2026 (UTC)
I think that plot summaries, particularly in fantasy or other forms of non-realistic fiction, are highly likely to correctly contain phrases that seem to have tone problems. The problem isn't the edit that was made; the problem is that the Revise tone task suggested improving that plot summary in the first place. WhatamIdoing (talk) 18:13, 10 September 2026 (UTC)
Following up on this, @WhatamIdoing, we've documented a Phabricator task that would create the ability for the community to exclude plot summary sections: T437637. Cheers, Sdkb‑WMFtalk 19:30, 10 September 2026 (UTC)
They may or may not be capable of doing the actual work, but I still think the bigger issue is not understanding what's being asked for in the first place - just like I wasn't, and not for lack of English skills. I've seen plenty of other fluent editors have the same problem. But we're in agreement on the tasks encouraging them to complete work that they don't actually comprehend. ChompyTheGogoat (talk) 14:04, 9 September 2026 (UTC)
Precisely my point. They don't even understand what the task is meant to accomplish, in addition to not flagging things appropriately. The feature itself is the problem. ChompyTheGogoat (talk) 02:02, 8 September 2026 (UTC)
I disagree. The fact that some newcomers struggle doesn't mean that the software is bad. WhatamIdoing (talk) 02:58, 8 September 2026 (UTC)
I've already made my case for "this phrase often gets changed" =/= "this is a simple fix that a new editor with no experience can handle correctly without additional instructions". If this person really understood what the task is asking for they might have made a better change, OR they might have realized they aren't up to it and just skipped it entirely. Both would be a better outcome. ChompyTheGogoat (talk) 03:10, 8 September 2026 (UTC)
But they did "skip the suggestion entirely". And while they were there, they made a small change that wasn't related to the suggested edit.
Do you understand that if it makes a suggestion, then the tag is there, even if you decide that the tag is wrong? "Tags: Revise tone" is not a promise that the edit attempted to revise the tone. It's a paper trail explaining how the editor arrived at the article. WhatamIdoing (talk) 07:22, 8 September 2026 (UTC)
Are you confusing different examples? This editor made numerous good faith edits that are not useful and needed to be reverted, and asked their mentor for help understanding how revise tone tasks are meant to be accomplished numerous times in a row. If that doesn't indicate they don't understand the task then what on earth does?? ChompyTheGogoat (talk) 09:54, 8 September 2026 (UTC)
to be fair, whoever is answering their questions is not doing a very good job of it Gnomingstuff (talk) 00:13, 9 September 2026 (UTC)
That's a separate issue that also needs to be addressed, but there's still an overall failure to comprehend the tasks at all. Work that's specifically aimed at newbies should be reasonably self explanatory. After I reverted one and linked to the relevant guideline they came back and made a better edit, so they are capable of figuring it out if the information is provided. I don't really know what to say about the revise tone though because even I don't know what the task is asking. ChompyTheGogoat (talk) 12:49, 9 September 2026 (UTC)
I don't think your examples above are proof that newcomer tasks don't work, it rather shows that some newcomers are doing low-quality edits, regardless of any attempts to guide them. Your first link Special:Diff/1373683524 is their attempt to find references – someone who reads the tutorial on finding references that pops up when doing the task and considers Reddit a good source, is unlikely to ever do good contributions to our projects imo. Johannnes89 (talk) 09:31, 9 September 2026 (UTC)
is unlikely to ever do good contributions to our projects imo I think that's rather a sweeping statement. First, the editor may well have had good experiences outside Wikipedia with the accuracy of information on Reddit, so why would they think off the bat that it is an unreliable source? Second, maybe they missed the note on the fifth slide of the tutorial that social media is generally not reliable, or they might not consider Reddit to be social media - it is certainly user-generated, but the tutorial doesn't talk about the unsuitability of user-generated content. In this case, the edit was reverted with a decent edit summary, plus a corresponding talk page message, helping the editor to learn from the mistake. That is, I think, how we encourage and retain new editors, rather than dismissing them out of hand after they make a mistake on their fourteenth edit. Cheers, SunloungerFrog (talk) 10:07, 9 September 2026 (UTC)
And I do understand that such reversions are a necessity sometimes, but I think the more proactive we can be with learning resources to try to keep reversion rates down, especially on the first handful of edits, the better retention will be. ChompyTheGogoat (talk) 12:53, 9 September 2026 (UTC)
They literally came back and added a better source to that article after I reverted and linked to the relevant guideline. Clearly the task did not provide adequate support for them to understand it. ChompyTheGogoat (talk) 12:50, 9 September 2026 (UTC)
Also, this is my experience with most newcomer task edits - I'm not cherrypicking bad ones. I literally just ran across this editor at random while this discussion was ongoing. I've seen very few newcomer task edits that were actually good, and it's almost always the suggested links because those are idiot proof (and cause no real harm even if they're incorrect). ChompyTheGogoat (talk) 14:25, 9 September 2026 (UTC)
How strange. When I go through RecentChanges for newcomer tasks, I find that most of them are helpful, and some cause no real harm even if they're unnecessary. I find that only a small minority are actually "incorrect". WhatamIdoing (talk) 18:55, 10 September 2026 (UTC)
How true is that if you skip link suggestions and only look at revise tone or the templated tasks? There's a lot less uptake on the templated ones, but when I do see an expansion done it often boils down to "more words must be good". There are occasionally good ones, but out of all the ones I've seen (not actively looking for them) they've been few and far between, from editors who seem competent enough that they would have done fine without the tasks. ChompyTheGogoat[Bleat|Munched] 19:01, 10 September 2026 (UTC)
Special:Diff/1374235678: The new URL works but the edit itself is promotional puffery (e.g., "a base camp" becomes "providing protection to allow them to rest and strategize)" that also changes meaning (the walnut trees got lost in the edit, RIP walnut trees)
Special:Diff/1374235831: Gets rid of low-hanging fruit but also changes meaning, the original text did not imply the battle was "swift" or rule out it being slow
That's a 20% hit rate. Gnomingstuff (talk) 05:59, 11 September 2026 (UTC)
I'm not sure I agree with all of your assessments.
I defer to you about the AI, but I think it is a very slight improvement.
I agree with you; it's a clear improvement.
I defer to you about the AI, but I think it is an improvement in terms of framing the religious claims as religious claims rather than facts in wikivoice.
I agree with you (pointless at best).
The source didn't support the claim about walnut trees (or "base camp", though that might be within the range of Wikipedia:Use our own words). Also, the source does support a claim of shade, safety, and strategizing. Therefore this is an improvement that makes the article stick to the source.
This is a description of how a soldier earned the Victoria Cross for Australia. A "promotional" tone should be expected. You don't earn a "decoration for according recognition to persons who in the presence of the enemy, perform acts of the most conspicuous gallantry, or daring or pre-eminent acts of valour or self-sacrifice or display extreme devotion to duty" by doing things that can sound boring.
This edit got rid of an unencyclopedic exclamation mark. I'd rather have the one extra word than the exclamation mark.
The main problem here is that the paragraph is unsourced, so it's not easy to determine whether the "swift" claim is verifiable. I wouldn't be surprised if it were true, however.
Can you take another look at that? That edit turned 117 words into 74 words, but your note says it's wordier.
By "wordier" I mean that Cottage restoration has led to a renewed urban environment and overall visual aesthetic. is no different in tone than Most of the old cottages have been fixed up, so much so that the area has a newer look than it did just ten years ago except for the "bigger words," and arguably it is worse because it now has an abstract, promotional, real estate brochure-like slickness.
As far as changing meaning, if someone is "revising tone" in a way that changes the factual meaning of a sentence, and gives no indication that they understand that they are changing meaning (or worse, give an indication that they didn't, as with calling factual changes revised language to be more concise) then they didn't understand the task, and any improvements are basically accidental. Gnomingstuff (talk) 19:03, 11 September 2026 (UTC)
That reduced a 26-word-long sentence to a 13-word-long sentence. That's the opposite of wordier.
I think the new version has a more formal tone than, e.g., "fixed up". WhatamIdoing (talk) 23:17, 11 September 2026 (UTC)
We can't afford to let AI edits slide even if they are improvements. When newcomers start making a large number of formal/promotional sounding revisions across a wide variety of articles they likely have no subject matter knowledge on that's an immediate red flag. In some cases it's edit count gaming for nefarious purposes - in others, it just encourages them to keep inserting more slop. ChompyTheGogoat[Bleat|Munched] 06:58, 12 September 2026 (UTC)
The entire paragraph starting When newcomers start making... drives a coach and horses through assuming good faith. Cheers, SunloungerFrog (talk) 07:19, 12 September 2026 (UTC)
I said it's a red flag, not automatic proof of anything. AGF doesn't mean we ignore potential problems - it means we investigate further before taking action. Like leaving an initial warning, then reporting after they respond to the warning with more slop. Which happens on a regular basis. If they have a viable human written explanation then we let it go and move on. ChompyTheGogoat[Bleat|Munched] 07:23, 12 September 2026 (UTC)
I think that your making unfounded assumptions that newcomers don't have subject matter expertise on a wide variety of things is entirely failing to assume good faith. Cheers, SunloungerFrog (talk) 07:45, 12 September 2026 (UTC)
Ones that just so happen to pop up on newcomer tasks, including highly niche topics with poor sourcing (if any)? I did not say "Editors who are active in numerous subject areas must be using AI." It's a specific pattern that includes how the edits are composed. If I was still a newbie myself and hadn't seen it so many times I wouldn't think anything of it. The above example literally just happened, from one of the newcomers mentioned in this discussion that I was watching - before intervening - to see whether there would be additional proof. My spidey senses are rarely wrong. ChompyTheGogoat[Bleat|Munched] 08:04, 12 September 2026 (UTC)
I think that assigning a motivation other than doing their best to help ("edit count gaming for nefarious purposes") is the opposite of assuming good faith. I don't know if you've ever read Wikipedia:Assume good faith, but the main story there is a reminder to experienced editors (especially RecentChanges reviewers) that the people who are completely screwing up are genuinely motivated by a desire to help Wikipedia. They're not "gaming" anything, and they don't have "nefarious purposes".
In some cases does not translate to "all of the time". It means I have literally seen that happen on some occasions, meaning it was eventually proven. Some even turned out to be LTAs. I'm not assuming anything and I've had quite enough of the disingenuous misinterpretations. Do you have any relevant points to make that haven't already been discussed, or are you just going to continue arguing over increasingly pedantic minutiae? Because I know you aren't trying to imply we should allow AI slop simply because it comes from a new account. Good faith mistakes do happen also (albeit far less often), and my proposals attempt to minimize those as well so such editors don't get discouraged when they're reverted. ChompyTheGogoat[Bleat|Munched] 18:42, 12 September 2026 (UTC)
I am not assuming anything, I am classifying the edits as they exist in the world right now. At which point the need for assumptions is over, the edits are there and anyone can plainly see their quality or lack thereof.
More to the point I don’t really think it matters what the intent is, as this is a content issue caused not by any one person but by an overarching system. To which the only reasonable response should be to disable the system so it stops producing the problem. The purpose of a system is what it does, and this system is slowly rotting Wikipedia more and more every day. Gnomingstuff (talk) 00:12, 13 September 2026 (UTC)
Meanwhile, another AI slop spammer has now come along and edited the article. Note how they are just repeatedly blowing past the Paste Check warnings that are supposed to stop them from pasting things in; the critical oversight with that is if that someone doesn't care about your requesting them to not do something, warning them isn't going to help. Gnomingstuff (talk) 13:19, 9 September 2026 (UTC)
Of course. I've always said our target audience for newcomer support is the good faith editors who are WP:HERE. Those are who we want to retain. Ideally having well designed infrastructure can help with both - other things I've proposed like the AI/COI affidavits and newcomer patrolling would also help us identify and address the problematic ones. Some might learn and clean up their act while others just need blocked, but either way the sooner we notice and intervene the better.Btw, which edit are you referring to? I don't see that they've touched Angela (Trials of Mana). Ironic that a slopper is doing a better job at "revise tone" than any organic editors I've seen. ChompyTheGogoat (talk) 13:52, 9 September 2026 (UTC)
@ChompyTheGogoat Thanks for sharing your thoughts on the idea of reducing review redundancy. We have a software feature that could help with this, but it's currently not enabled on the English Wikipedia. On some other wikis, there's a 'patrol' button for each edit, so users can mark an edit as 'patrolled'. Other editors can then filter this edit out of venues like Recent Changes, and focus on unreviewed edits. There have been some discussions here about the feature, but no consensus to enable it. I'm interested in thinking about how we might be able to update the feature so that it could be enabled, if the community wanted to do so. I've been collecting notes at T409165 - would love to know if you have additional thoughts! —User:Samwalton9 (WMF)09:57, 10 September 2026 (UTC)
Patrolling isn't required for edits to be live, correct? My biggest suggestion would be to show the reviewed status on the feed even if someone chooses not to use it as a filter option. They can still decide whether or not it's something they want to check out for themselves. Nonbinary statuses and/or counts of reviews could be useful too. The concern about backlog is valid, if that's what the tool currently does - I don't think it's reasonable to expect all edits to be reviewed; it should just be additional information to help patrollers do what they're already doing. If a specific newcomer patrol is created (especially one focused on good edits/newcomer tasks instead of vandalism) I expect they'd have a significantly lower workload so it might be more realistic to clear their feed - or it might not. More flexibility for them to implement it however they find the most useful is most likely to be successful. My idea was something very lightweight that would just indicate another patroller has had eyes on it, but given the previous difficulties it may take more work to get RCPatrol into a form that EN editors are willing to pass. ChompyTheGogoat[Bleat|Munched] 10:16, 10 September 2026 (UTC)
Correct! This feature is different from Flagged Revisions (called Pending Changes here), which is the software that gates edits being live behind the patrol requirement. The native MediaWiki Recent Changes Patrol feature is all about the patrolling workflow, enabling users to filter out edits that have already been patrolled by others. Thanks, this all makes sense. I think this is a solveable problem with some software improvements, I just need to gain some clarity and put some definition on what changes exactly! Samwalton9 (WMF) (talk) 11:16, 10 September 2026 (UTC)
I think that plot summaries, particularly in fantasy or other forms of non-realistic fiction, are highly likely to correctly contain phrases that seem to have tone problems. The problem isn't the edit that was made; the problem is that the Revise tone task suggested improving that plot summary in the first place. —User:WhatamIdoing18:13, 10 September 2026 (UTC)
And adding one single exception (when some of them really do need to be fixed) doesn't change the fact that the task is inherently problematic, and even if it does correctly identify a passage that needs work it doesn't offer new editors the necessary support to actually understand how to fix them. This one sounds like it was ripped straight from the blurb on the cover, not actually a proper summary of the sources - which aren't cited in any case, so there's additional legwork needed to figure out what it really should say. ChompyTheGogoat[Bleat|Munched] 18:51, 10 September 2026 (UTC)
I don't agree that the task is inherently problematic. WhatamIdoing (talk) 18:57, 10 September 2026 (UTC)
That's obvious - as is the fact that you have no intention of ever changing your mind on much of anything. Plenty of other editors still consider this a problem, however. ChompyTheGogoat[Bleat|Munched] 19:04, 10 September 2026 (UTC)
I have no clue where to reply to this huge thread, but I wonder, instead of looking at the reversion rate of "revise tone" edits, has anyone studied the amount of "revise tone" edits that are targeted by more "revise tone" edits in the future? Going through User:7amad something's edits, many of the passages they changed had gone through like 3 or 4 rounds of "tone revision" that just changed various words to synonyms. Also, what's being done to prevent direct quotes from being included in these tasks?
I was a newcomer not that long ago and I agree the newcomer tasks are absolute crap. In particular the "add references" task is the definition of WP:BACKWARDS - it's almost impossible to find genuine references for 99% of the random garbage people stuck on a page in 2006, so no wonder most people probably just ask ChatGPT to give them a random, vaguely related link. After trying these tasks when I first made an account, I quit editing for several months.
Do you know what teaches new editors how to operate on Wikipedia? Asking other people. The only reason I know how to edit effectively is because I asked someone to teach me. Even reading every guideline and policy and WikiProject page I could get my hands on didn't show me how to do what I wanted to do - I had to get help from others. I have a baseless theory that a big part of the motivation towards LLM usage, both on and off Wikipedia, is the desire to avoid the friction of human interaction. Taking away more of that friction by creating these machine-generated tasks is misguided. Newcomers are served with a frictionless experience that teaches them nothing, then they are dumped unceremoniously into the worst interactions possible when other editors start reverting and templating them. There is no technological way around the fact that Wikipedia is a collaborative project and that Wikipedia's culture and craftsmanship can only be handed down through interactions from one user to another. Helping newcomers make connections with editors that do the same types of tasks or edit in the same topic areas would be a better way to use the technology than helping them avoid other editors while they unproductively shuffle text around. purringmaggot (talk) 20:11, 13 September 2026 (UTC)
Yep, finding my way to Teahouse early on is definitely the reason I'm still here.Thanks for pointing out something I'd also noticed but forgot to mention - the task doesn't seem to remove passages from the database after an editor makes changes, so others keep coming along and revising them again. So even when someone does actually make an improvement it could just be undone by someone less competent. And articles that have been tagged for newcomer tasks often have as bunch of them show up and start making multiple changes, which can leave the article worse than it started. ChompyTheGogoat[Bleat|Munched] 21:46, 13 September 2026 (UTC)
Also, what's being done to prevent direct quotes from being included in these tasks?
For whatever reason AI despises direct quotes in most non-reviewer contexts because it thinks they're somehow inappropriate and thus will attempt to paraphrase them (into slop) quite often (e.g. I also eliminated direct quotes except where necessary to preserve meaning, summarizing statements instead of reproducing conversational language). I suspect this is probably occurring here as well. Gnomingstuff (talk) 07:03, 14 September 2026 (UTC)
I shared with the WMF staff an example of a revise tone task that resulted in more promotional wording. The newer version contained one fewer word flagged by the bot, and so got a lower score. I suspect passages that go through a series of revise tone edits are ones where the 'promotional score' assigned by the bot decreases each time, but is still above the task-triggering threshold. (Maybe there is even flex for a slight increase in promotional score.) CMD (talk) 07:15, 14 September 2026 (UTC)
Is that what it's (theoretically) flagging - promotional tone? Someone else here said it was "wording that frequently gets changed", which is bizarrely vague. Lots of things get changed for lots of reasons. A lot of the ones I see aren't overtly promotional so much as awkward with poor grammar - more CE work than anything. ChompyTheGogoat[Bleat|Munched] 08:06, 14 September 2026 (UTC)
To my understanding the revise tone task assigns different words different levels of promotionality, and scores passages based on the concentration of those words. I don't know if or how it assesses overall grammar. CMD (talk) 08:59, 14 September 2026 (UTC)
Oy vey. I still !vote for removing at least that task entirely - it's just too problematic. Suggest Links is fine(ish) and the templated ones could be improved if people are willing to put the work in, but I think the underlying premise of Revise Tone is fundamentally flawed. We simply can't be relying on AI to determine whether or not certain phrasing is appropriate in a given context - let alone to communicate what the problem is to new editors for them to actually understand how it can be improved. They just read "revise=change something". (I can't remember if I've mentioned it before or not, but I have seen newbies make good improvements to phrasing - when they identify the problem themselves instead of following a task there.) Simple tasks with clear objective goals are the best way to ease into editing, and that's what we should be offering people who don't know where to start. Suggested Links has much higher uptake than any others for a reason - it's nearly impossible to screw up in any meaningful way. ChompyTheGogoat[Bleat|Munched] 09:45, 14 September 2026 (UTC)
@Chipmunkdavis, that's not my understanding of how the model works. You can read about it at meta:Machine learning models/Production/Tone Check#Model, and if you have in-the-weeds questions about it I can confer with my colleagues on the Machine Learning team (which built the model) to get you answers. Cheers, Sdkb‑WMFtalk 04:15, 15 September 2026 (UTC)
I don't see anything there that contradicts what I said. Anyway, I presume the team is already aware of the example I am talking about, it being long past. CMD (talk) 05:16, 15 September 2026 (UTC)
Hi @Purring maggot! Thanks for sharing those observations. I may be able to clarify a few things. First, we've programmed Revise Tone not to trigger on any quotations, so hopefully you won't encounter any issues there.
Regarding whether passages can resurface, the way the check works is that, after you have rewritten the passage it flagged, you click "recheck" and it checks whether the model still identifies a tone issue, and if so the check card persists. So because of that, if you've actually addressed the check, then by definition the model no longer identifies a tone issue and the passage won't be flagged again.
And on your last point, I agree that sociality is crucial to the Wikipedia model. We created the Mentorship program to help encourage this sort of educational interaction, but we know it has some issues and overall we're always looking for ideas. Do you have suggestions for how we could make newcomer tasks or other Growth features more social? Sdkb‑WMFtalk 04:12, 15 September 2026 (UTC)
Sounds like an awful lot of editors aren't bothering with that check (or don't care). See previous points.As far as mentorship, I don't think it's terribly helpful overall, but we really need some kind of standard for qualification so we don't have relative newbies advising other newbies with minimal oversight. I started helping at Teahouse early on, but only because it's a public venue where I knew more experienced editors would correct me if I made a mistake. The issue has been mentioned in passing before but was never actioned. ChompyTheGogoat[Bleat|Munched] 04:48, 15 September 2026 (UTC)
@Sdkb-WMF: I'm not sure the programming is working very well at avoiding direct quotations, either that or editors on revise tone tasks are just choosing a different part of the article to edit? Here are a number of recent diffs I've seen modifying a direct quote, tagged "revise tone":
As for increasing the social aspects of Growth features: I don't have a super great idea, just something tossed off that I'm sure would be hell to implement. Maybe there could be a kind of distributed mentorship, divided into a list of tasks or topic areas, where someone could say, for example, "I'm willing to teach someone the ropes of copy editing or biology articles". And then a newcomer that's editing suggested articles that need copy editing, or one that's picked biology as an area of interest, would get prompted on their homepage or somewhere "Ask (this guy) how to get started (doing copy editing, or working on biology articles)". Thinking of the concerns Chompy mentioned earlier about "newbies advising newbies", this is probably an even worse idea in terms of administering things since then we'd have to determine who actually has reasonable skills/experience in a whole bunch of individual areas. But I have seen conversations among mentors that suggest they feel a lack of direction in how to engage with their mentees, and that mentees don't seem to know how to engage with them, so I don't know, maybe some more nudging of newcomers in how to interact and what about would help drive productive interactions. purringmaggot (talk) 03:08, 16 September 2026 (UTC)
If we implement better standards for approving mentors we could allow them to self-identify areas of interest, provided no one objects to it on their nomination. Relevant WikiProjects could (maybe) also be involved in some way. ChompyTheGogoat[Bleat|Munched] 03:16, 16 September 2026 (UTC)
I just ran across this thread at the mentorship noticeboard which is like the mentor-led version of what I was talking about, recruiting and training newcomers to competently do a specific task. WikiProjects also came to mind for me but I don't have any solid ideas for incorporating them, especially given their wildly varying levels of activity. purringmaggot (talk) 03:29, 16 September 2026 (UTC)
Yeah, I wouldn't make their involvement mandatory, but maybe optional for those that are highly active to set what they feel are appropriate requirements for their subject matter and to maintain a list of approved mentors at the project page. ChompyTheGogoat[Bleat|Munched] 03:32, 16 September 2026 (UTC)
Followup thought: Could we implement some kind of automated assignment system based on these topic improvements once they go live (for those newbies that do set them)? ChompyTheGogoat[Bleat|Munched] 03:41, 16 September 2026 (UTC)
The main problem with "Ask (this guy) how to get started" is that new editors don't want to wait until "this guy" replies. WhatamIdoing (talk) 19:59, 17 September 2026 (UTC)
Which is why we have Teahouse. I don't think much of the mentorship program in its current state, but I do think it has more potential if the focus was on building a longer term collaborative relationships instead of just asking repetitive one-off questions, and actually pairing based on shared interests could help move things in that direction. ChompyTheGogoat[Bleat|Munched] 20:48, 17 September 2026 (UTC)
@Purring maggot, I followed up about quotations with the team, and it turns out I was mistaken above. We filter out block quotes currently but not common inline quotes. We've created phab:T439643 to document the issue and will look into it; feel free to subscribe to the task if you'd like to follow along. Cheers, Sdkb‑WMFtalk 23:58, 29 September 2026 (UTC)
Yet another case study in "newcomer tasks don't make sense to newcomers": one of the bots told me that I had to change a section on this article. Said "bot" was a Revise Tone suggestion, and they deleted commas because they thought they "had" to do something. Once again, this is one I just stumbled across, not intentionally looking for bad examples. ChompyTheGogoat[Bleat|Munched] 14:13, 15 September 2026 (UTC)
I am now trying to experiment with this system. Interestingly, scans were actually using a BERT model, which is usually outdated.
Before revising tone, it has a quiz which could be skipped. Then that quiz attempts to teach you how to revise tone, but I doubt that a 5-question skippable questionnaire with no policy attached to it could teach much of anything.
The results were not great.
There was a useful add link suggestion on the first article, but it ignored everything else, like WP:MOS (the article placed citations incorrectly, but then it only recommended a single link add over literally anything else).
Search engines that are expressly designed for searching web pages, documents, and images were developed to facilitate searching through a large, nebulous blob of unstructured resources. They are engineered to follow a multi-stage process: crawling the infinite stockpile of pages and documents to skim the figurative foam from their contents, indexing the foam/buzzwords in a sort of semi-structured form (database or something), and at last, resolving user entries/queries to return mostly relevant results and links to those skimmed documents or pages from the inventory.
I do not see how this is promotional. This is technical and relatively well-written.
Three years after the events of Ghosts 'n Goblins, the Ghosts have returned with Ghouls for revenge, initiating a mortal holocaust on the Princess' kingdom as beams of light struck through countless villagers. When Sir Arthur returns to the village, his rescue attempt was too late as his beloved Princess Prin-Prin also has her soul taken away from her body in front of his very eyes. Now it's up to the heroic knight once again to slay his way to the hellish castle to defeat the evil Lucifer and his legion of demons and restore the souls of Prin-Prin and every mortal.
This smells more of a copyvio than a basic promotional tone revise. There is absolutely no guide teaching how WP:PLOT works.
For my fourth article, it flagged half a section, but in reality, the entire section was problematic. It does not teach you that you should strip some parts instead of "revising tone". I blanked the section.
For the fifth article, some of the wordings were promotional. However, even after the recheck, it still said it was promotional, which was unhelpful. It proceeded to glitch by flagging the same paragraph twice and then flagged another paragraph before removing the flag for that paragraph. That was very confusing. It also did not manage to catch some subheading MOS issues, which was arguably more basic than checking for grammar. I do not think that that is included in medium nor hard mode.
The experience with this (knowing policy) was misleading and frustrating. When logging into my main account with &safemode=1, the articles I already fixed here somehow popped up again, only to suggest another article when it realized it was fixed. Sometimes, articles where I stripped the promotional claims ended up getting flagged with another hallucinated tag like the second article.
The promised newcomer feedback I gave a few weeks ago was here. Do not debate there or ping them (as they requested), discuss here and do not ping them. Thanks. LiteGlide (talk) 03:44, 26 September 2026 (UTC)
I have also remembered seen a repeating point which goes along the lines of patrollers need adrenaline (if I remember properly). However, the point of patrolling is about protecting Wikipedia, not about whether patrollers get that hit or not. Patrollers should not not patrol because it is boring. I am not going to debate this however, as I do not remember the details.
I will also be trying out medium mode, to see if it is any better. LiteGlide (talk) 03:52, 26 September 2026 (UTC)
At this point, using such a model at this scale to detect vandalism for patrollers (i.e. either "experienced editors" or EC) to scan would be much better. I am unaware if this exists. 16dvnk (talk) 04:03, 26 September 2026 (UTC)
I've been doing some recent patrolling after gaining access to WP: Interceptor and I've found the experience to be equal parts addictive and mindnumbing, which somehow feels like an appropriate balance. ChompyTheGogoat[Bleat|Munched] 04:24, 26 September 2026 (UTC)
I apologize if my comments here have come across as high expectations from volunteers. I know better than most just how steep the learning curve is, considering I've been here less than a year - my underlying concern is that the newcomer tasks don't help people learn. They rarely make sense even to those of us with more experience. I've seen a number of newbies make better edits on articles they choose to edit voluntarily than on newcomer tasks (including some I've used as examples here). And I'm still not against the overall idea of suggested edits; only their current incarnation. I don't believe that retention alone is an acceptable priority if it comes at the cost of other editors needing to do extensive cleanup. WP:CIR in general, and while we all know that newbies (and everyone else) will make some mistakes, any features targeting them should be optimized to help them overcome that learning curve and gain competence as quickly as possible. Some people just aren't ever going to be competent; it's not easy work, and I think it's less frustrating for everyone if those wash out quickly while the ones who are capable of learning make clear progress. A better mentor system might help with this, but overall it's difficult to know how to avoid wasting excessive time while also not being overly discouraging. (There's a reason I'm not a mentor myself.) I do want a better system that will help improve retention of the subset of newbies who have the potential to benefit the project in the long run, and I've made numerous suggestions to that effect. This user said if I am not sure of an edit, I would rather leave it to others, then to create more work which I think is a good mindset to have - it was also my own approach that I think helps with both competence and retention, because I wasn't making tons of mistakes and getting reverted right and left. I hung around discussion boards learning as much as possible and trod lightly in mainspace until quite recently. Some editors want to be more active to feel like they're contributing, and that's fine, but reverted edits usually don't do much in that regard, so we should be giving them functional tools that can help ensure their edits really are improvements. ChompyTheGogoat[Bleat|Munched] 04:55, 26 September 2026 (UTC)
LiteGlide, I think it's tripping over these phrases:
"expressly designed": an intensifier and in an encyclopedic context, usually needless; just say that it's designed.
"facilitate": buzzword
"nebulous blob of unstructured resources": redundant
"infinite stockpile of pages": unencyclopedic exaggeration to the point of falsehood (the number of pages on the web is large but finite)
"the figurative foam": unencyclopedic metaphor
"a sort of": casual, slangy phrase
Whoever wrote this would be welcome at Wikivoyage, where this kind of lively, casual tone is welcome. WhatamIdoing (talk) 19:45, 27 September 2026 (UTC)
Casual yes, but not overtly promotional. That's why this simple pattern matching really isn't great for determining intent. And it's a bit pedantic, but while the current number of pages is finite the potential for new additions is essentially infinite, which is definitely relevant to how search engines are designed vs dealing with a fixed database. ChompyTheGogoat[Bleat|Munched] 22:19, 27 September 2026 (UTC)
This is why the AI system is not exactly great for these tasks. 16dvnk (talk) 23:16, 27 September 2026 (UTC)
Did the software actually say the problem with this one was "promotional" tone, or were you just assuming that the Revise tone task is only promotional? When I checked an article a moment ago, it said "Other users often revise this kind of wording, saying the tone is unbalanced". "Unbalanced" ≠ "promotional". WhatamIdoing (talk) 02:36, 28 September 2026 (UTC)
I'm not going to attempt to find it again in the above mess, but I think someone (possibly from WMF) did say that's their intended purpose. ChompyTheGogoat[Bleat|Munched] 09:16, 28 September 2026 (UTC)
It said out loud that it was promotional. I don't remember the exact quote though. Really weird. 16dvnk (talk) 04:49, 28 September 2026 (UTC)
The blurb for the "Revise tone" task on the dashboard is Make articles more factual by removing promotional words. If you look at the tooltip -- which I doubt people actually do, but for completeness's sake -- the text is Help readers access trustworthy information by replacing promotional and opinion-based language with balanced content. Tone improvements are machine-suggested, and you decide whether to revise or decline each one.Gnomingstuff (talk) 18:01, 28 September 2026 (UTC)
Yes, we can do that locally. The devs provide a default text, but any admin or interface admin can override it. We'd need to decide what we want it to say, and produce evidence of a consensus (so the admin/intadmin will feel comfortable making the change).
Normally, we just change the English version and leave the translated versions alone, but it's also possible to change any language. The main thing to keep in mind is that TL;DR is one of the iron laws of the internet. If we turn a short message into a long treatise or a laundry list of all potentially relevant policies and guidelines, almost nobody will read, and even fewer will understand it. WhatamIdoing (talk) 13:53, 29 September 2026 (UTC)
Please tell me why you think it would be useful to change the description of the task when how it actually works is the issue. Literally what would that solve? ChompyTheGogoat[Bleat|Munched] 14:04, 29 September 2026 (UTC)
To recap: 1. The task is intended to identify promotional tone. 2. The task description says that it is intended to identify promotional tone. 3. The task is bad at identifying promotional tone.And you think removing the intended purpose from the description will fix this somehow? ChompyTheGogoat[Bleat|Munched] 14:12, 29 September 2026 (UTC)
Even if one subset of MOS:TONE violations is the main intention, it's okay for the tool to flag other TONE problems. There is no rule anywhere saying that the tool must only identify TONE problems that editors would label as specifically being 'promotional'. (However, keep in mind that the second example described above probably would be considered 'promotional' by most editors, since it appears to be a copy of text used in advertisements for the game.)
The task description ("Make articles more factual by removing promotional words") did not help the editor understand what needed to be fixed in the particular instances described above.
Did it actually do so correctly, or did it attempt to flag PROMO, fail, and happen to catch a different tone issue as a byproduct? Again, changing the description written by the programmers themselves does not change the underlying programming, and I fail to see how that would have any appreciable impact on user competency when even experienced editors are confused by it. You seem to be the only person obsessed with retaining this task and we keep getting dragged into the weeds over trivial details. I'm going to attempt to write up a summary/proposal based on the discussion up to this point, and I'd appreciate if you could refrain from continuing to drag things out. If anyone has specific input that they think is relevant and hasn't already been mentioned that's still welcome. ChompyTheGogoat[Bleat|Munched] 17:44, 30 September 2026 (UTC)
Do we agree that both of the paragraphs quoted by the OP are actually problematic in terms of MOS:TONE? WhatamIdoing (talk) 18:44, 30 September 2026 (UTC)
I'd say there's room for improvement with the first, but I don't find it inherently problematic. Not a NPOV issue. ChompyTheGogoat[Bleat|Munched] 23:31, 30 September 2026 (UTC)
The first contains casual, chatty phrases ("a sort of semi-structured form"), which is not the formal register that should be in an encyclopedia article. It also uses a metaphor ("foam") instead of sticking to objective facts. It is a MOS:TONE problem. Not all TONE problems are strictly about NPOV. WhatamIdoing (talk) 00:11, 1 October 2026 (UTC)
Thanks for your explanations, but in general it is evident that the tool misled me. Also, the technical issues of the suggestions I mentioned were not addressed. And I have not even started testing "medium mode". 16dvnk (talk) 03:03, 1 October 2026 (UTC)
And maybe highlighting the problematic words in addition of the whole section might be better. I missed foam entirely, which may be my issue, but still. 16dvnk (talk) 03:04, 1 October 2026 (UTC)
I am not sure what the model wants to detect. Since the models are (probably) open source, I might take a look in the weights. 16dvnk (talk) 03:07, 1 October 2026 (UTC)
To be honest, using AI tools may very beneficial, only if you do it properly and with suitable disclaimers and education beforehand. Unfortunately, these staff who added them in does not understand the side of newcomers, does not understand which problems are actually easier to fix (like MoS), uses the AI improperly so that it hallucinates, except there is no warning (and expecting new comers to realize which are hallucinated, which are not, which defeats the point of the tool), provides misleading descriptions, and an improper rollout with a potentially contentious technology. Now, somehow we are the ones to debug this mess. Clearly, we need a refactor of the tool, but VPM is not bringing a solution. 16dvnk (talk) 12:29, 2 October 2026 (UTC)
And clearly this is improper given the very obvious glitches I mentioned above. 16dvnk (talk) 12:33, 2 October 2026 (UTC)
I thought I was going to do a detailed analysis like easy mode in medium, except it is not exactly great. I inserted a test link to the article (reverted), but the tool did not attempt to stop me. After I was done, there was no mention of if what I have done was correct. In the guide (which is not even a quiz, just a broad and confusing manual of no mention of any policy, not even a nutshell), it was unsurprisingly skippable and required a remote button press. And the guide did not link to anything, even though these were supposed to be harder. I also do not see how somehow flawlessly revising promotional tone could somehow unlock you to source in medium mode (marketed as "After you have completed some easy edits." which is completely illogical). Medium mode was not useful at all and was vague. One of the regular users that use this, Idr888, once accidentally inserted a new citation with author "wpadmin", but the tool somehow did not flag it. They were confused but assumed it was correct. I later fixed it, but if I did not randomly stumble across that and taught then, who knows how much more broken citations would be inserted. Hard mode next, and I am not expecting any better. Thanks! LiteGlide (talk) 12:56, 2 October 2026 (UTC)
What exactly are you expecting this tool to do?
What it does it:
Finds an article that needs some work.
Tells you what the perceived problem is.
Asks you to fix it.
It sounds like you're expecting it to evaluate your changes to see if you did the work correctly. WhatamIdoing (talk) 18:44, 2 October 2026 (UTC)
You also say that it does not provide you with any warning. The Revise Tone task says "Help readers access trustworthy information by replacing promotional and opinion-based language with balanced content. Tone improvements are machine-suggested, and you decide whether to revise or decline each one." That last sentence sounds like a warning to me.
The decision about which tasks are easy/medium/hard was made by the community. The classifications may well be wrong, but it's based on the type of task (e.g., adding links is easy, adding sources is medium, expanding stubs is difficult). There is no attempt to evaluate an individual article. Adding links is always "easy" (even if it's actually difficult for that particular article), and expanding articles is always "hard" (even if it's actually easy for that particular article). WhatamIdoing (talk) 19:01, 2 October 2026 (UTC)
Thank you for the challenges. To clarify, I was not trying to attack the tool; I was trying to show what areas needed
improvement.
Hallucinating means that the tool puts false information in a page. Both my understanding and the link you added contradicted your point.
Article: a response generated by AI that contains false or misleading information presented as fact. Additionally, the BERT model is not Symbolic Artificial Intelligence.
Either way, debating if the term is right does not matter. What matters is that it is consistently producing false positives.
Tone improvements are machine-suggested, and you decide whether to revise or decline each one. That wording does not read like a warning. It just says that the suggestions are from a machine and you decide if you should fix it or not. That is also tucked at the last sentence of a greyed out paragraph. After you are in the experience, it does not remind the newcomer of the relatively high error rate.
The classifications may well be wrong, but it's based on the type of task (e.g., adding links is easy, adding sources is medium, expanding stubs is difficult). There is no attempt to evaluate an individual article. Adding links is always "easy" (even if it's actually difficult for that particular article), and expanding articles is always "hard" (even if it's actually easy for that particular article).
Which is why it is misleading for newcomers which has no way to know that. The skills between easy and medium does not transfer.
It sounds like you're expecting it to evaluate your changes to see if you did the work correctly.
I am expecting it to have less false positives, do a basic check to see if the sources attached do not introduce errors, and point newcomers to actual policy.
Once again, I need to reiterate that the attempts here are to improve the tool, and I do not intend to "grill" the system. Thanks. 16dvnk (talk) 02:49, 3 October 2026 (UTC)
You gave two examples of paragraphs that the Revise Tone tool "suggested" might need to have the tone corrected. In both cases, the paragraph violated MOS:TONE and actually did need to have the tone corrected. Where, therefore, is your evidence of false positives? All I'm seeing is evidence of PEBCAK – that is, the software correctly identified a real problem, but you didn't happen to understand the problem (which isn't a problem, overall; we all have our strengths and weaknesses, and Wikipedia editors generally manage to find a way to work on things they're good at instead of the things they struggle with). WhatamIdoing (talk) 04:06, 3 October 2026 (UTC)
The tool says "promotional", not MOS:TONE. This false positive means the model said "promotional" while the text was not promotional. While the text has issues with other WP:TONE issues, this is not what the narrow scope of the model was supposed to flag. Newcomers may see it, see that it is not promotional, and just skip because they are unaware of policies like WP:TONE. The text is not extremely bad afterall.
Applying PEBCAK is ironic, as newcomers are users that do not yet know how things work. I am not sure if I am misunderstanding your point, but using PEBCAK reads as "the user is wrong; the tool is right". But the whole point of the tool is for people who cannot yet be right.
Now, other than narrowing down the scope to "positive or false positive" (or some minor imprecise usage in my wording), let us widen back to scope to the actual problems, and not debating if they were positives or false positives.
The tool does say "promotional", but the tool also says "opinion-based". The tool also indicates the goal is "balanced content" and "Tone improvements". I realize that you didn't read (or at least remember reading) the rest of it, but the tool says more than just "promotional".
What the tool says, in part of one sentence, on one screen is not as important as what it does. What the tool did is identify paragraphs that needed "Tone improvements". It's not entirely the tool's fault that you didn't recognize the tone problems (e.g., the straight-up copy/paste of advertising text – how much more "promotional" can you get than a word-for-word copy of the advertisement?) in these paragraphs.
I certainly do remember and do detect the all the issues of the prose. The issue here is that the sentence is not "opinion based".
At this point, you are arguing narrowly about whether a case is a false positive or not. I also find you not engaging with any other of my points. What we are trying to do is to identify potential weaknesses including the potential incompetence of newcomers. However, so far this has spiraled into a deadlocked debate about whether a sentence is a false positive or not. Keep in mind that we are trying to improve the tool, not pointlessly and endlessly arguing about such narrow matters.
And the prompt asking you to fix it writes "promotional" and no other mention. 16dvnk (talk) 15:51, 3 October 2026 (UTC)
the straight-up copy/paste of advertising text And I already wrote that in my initial report, if you missed it. Thanks. 16dvnk (talk) 15:54, 3 October 2026 (UTC)
I give up. I'm requesting speedy close at this point because there's no possible way this can be concluded in any useful manner when it keeps getting dragged out in endless pedantic bullshit. I'm over it. Leave all the broken tools forever and let everyone else clean up after them. ChompyTheGogoat[Bleat|Munched] 21:19, 3 October 2026 (UTC)
At this point, people have continued to repeatedly narrow the scope and ignoring other points I say. I do not find this constructive. In addition, I have made all my points I will need to make here. As such, I do not plan to reply. Please do not ping nor reply to me. To progress this further, bludgeoning further will not work. Either file an RfC or Phabricator task (or whatever else may work) of the bugs I have mentioned. Thank you for your precious time.
I can't help but agree. Pedantic bullshit apart, and all the arguing about semantics, one can clearly conclude that the WMF's tool designs and the mentorship onboarding scheme put more cognitive load on the new user than they lighten. Kudpung กุดผึ้ง (talk) 04:58, 4 October 2026 (UTC)
I just looked at a few Revise Tone suggestions. These mostly seemed to be simple hostility to words like "excellent", "famous", "quirky" and "perfect" without any regard to whether these were appropriate or not. In all cases, I decided they were reasonable and just dealt with a grammatical error which was much clearer.
What's not clear to me is whether declining a Revise Tone suggestion will stop it being suggested in future. Does this tool have any memory or feedback?
I don't think so, unfortunately. WhatamIdoing (talk) 20:33, 4 October 2026 (UTC)
That's quite broken then as it will keep looping back until someone makes a change. Tsk. Andrew🐉(talk) 07:37, 5 October 2026 (UTC)
And because many newcomers assume the tasks are valid they just change what it tells them to even if the change actually makes things worse. ChompyTheGogoat[Bleat|Munched] 13:16, 5 October 2026 (UTC)
Who do you expect to add it? The newcomers who don't understand the task in the first place? ChompyTheGogoat[Bleat|Munched] 21:01, 12 October 2026 (UTC)
@Andrew Davidson and @WhatamIdoing - Declining a Revise Tone task will remove that suggestion from the Suggested Edits / Newcomer Task queue permanently for all editors. (Admittedly this is a little confusing because there is different logic in place for Suggestion Mode, but that's an entirely different feature, that is currently not exposed to new editors).
I know this question is related to Revise Tone, but some related info about the "Add a Link" task: previously we had an issue where a newcomer might accept an "Add a Link" suggestion and if that edit was reverted, it might simply get suggested again in the future until the suggestion is declined. That shouldn't ever happen again because we've released this improvement: T429417 Add Link should not make a recommendation if one has already been accepted or declined (Limit an article to only one Add a Link suggestion). The Machine Learning team is also using revert data in the model training pipeline now too, so hopefully we will start to see further suggestion quality improvements with that work as well. KStoller-WMF (talk) 00:08, 14 October 2026 (UTC)
Thanks, I'm glad to hear it. WhatamIdoing (talk) 04:41, 15 October 2026 (UTC)
Wikipedia articles in need of updating?
I recently discovered Category:Wikipedia articles in need of updating, which has an extensive backlog; the earliest sub-catagory is from January 2009. Would working through the backlog be a reasonable newcomer task? These are more complex tasks than fixing typos, but they mostly center around verifying some specific fact so seem like something a relative newbie could handle. RoySmith(talk) 13:03, 19 October 2026 (UTC)
I think that might work. I think a common-sense response to "please update" would be "Um, I'm going to have to go look this up", which is exactly what we want to happen. WhatamIdoing (talk) 21:53, 19 October 2026 (UTC)
Wikipedia:Nobody reads the directions. You should never expect people to read two long pages before trying to help. It would be much better to give everybody a very brief summary and a link for the few who want more. WhatamIdoing (talk) 22:27, 19 October 2026 (UTC)
If you're going to keep dragging that out, why do we even bother having any at all? More complex edits require doing more work, and that includes reading how to do it correctly. WP:CIR, and editors who refuse to learn how to make well formed edits get sanctioned. ChompyTheGogoat[Bleat|Munched] 23:02, 19 October 2026 (UTC)
In point of fact, not only is that an essay, but it's talking about how to write guidelines. I'm fairly sure the intention was never for it to be used to imply we shouldn't inform editors about existing ones. ChompyTheGogoat[Bleat|Munched] 23:05, 19 October 2026 (UTC)
CIR and "Newcomer task" really don't belong in the same sentence. The whole point of newcomer tasks is to entice people who have never done this into trying it, convincing them that we expect them to screw up and then providing friendly guidance and education when they inevitably do. RoySmith(talk) 23:47, 19 October 2026 (UTC)
No one creates an account because of newcomer tasks - something else interests them and then they work newcomer tasks to gain experience and (hopefully) competence. I don't expect perfection from the start, but we should be providing people with the resources to learn, both to minimize their frustration from being reverted and to minimize the cleanup for experienced editors. I have said before and will continue to maintain that boosting editor numbers purely to boost editor numbers is not a useful goal; we want competent editors who make constructive contributions (of any volume), and the goal for newcomer tasks should be to get newbies to that point - not to retain those who have no interest in learning or following our requirements. We can't force anyone to read them, but we can provide them with resources and explain why they're beneficial for everyone involved. A summary and a link is a perfectly adequate way to do so (and precisely the kind of thing I've already suggested). But if they only read the summary and not the pages and go trying to insert new content with no experience doing so there's a significant chance they will get reverted anyway. I've seen the kind of "updates" articles from 2009 often need, and it's a hell of a lot more than just correcting something to the latest name or number based on an existing valid citation. This idea absolutely does have potential, but we need to be cautious about how it's implemented so the inevitable resulting cleanup work doesn't outweigh the benefits. ChompyTheGogoat[Bleat|Munched] 00:14, 20 October 2026 (UTC)
We should assume that that people will only read the summary and not the pages. And if you make the summary too long, then we should assume they won't even read that. The first half of this blog post looks like the standard UI industry view: https://alisodigital.com/why-employees-ignore-work-instructions-and-how-to-fix-it/ It's about 500 words long. How much of it will you read and remember? Could having more information about how typical people do and don't read the instructions change your POV on how other people interact with written instructions? WhatamIdoing (talk) 00:30, 20 October 2026 (UTC)
I'll reiterate what I said above: if you're going to assume that no one ever reads directions, why do we bother having them at all? Either they're important and we should be trying to encourage people to read them, or they're useless and we should just resort to anarchy. The fact that many people don't bother is a problem we should try to solve (or at least improve), not just accept it. No one can ever become a competent editor if they refuse to read, so those are not the editors we want to retain. If they see the link and ignore it, make a mistake, get reverted, and then decide to go read after all - well, that's the stick side of the carrot and stick, but we should still try to offer the carrot first. ChompyTheGogoat[Bleat|Munched] 01:08, 20 October 2026 (UTC)
And your link there describes what the essay you keep referencing is actually meant to confer - not that have instructions is pointless, but that they need to be written better so that more people are able to digest them. I don't disagree with that in any way. We need more learning resources in more formats for the huge variety in editors with different learning styles, and I fully support any efforts to that effect. Personally I actually do learn better from text (something about devouring every book I've been able to get my hands on since about age 4?) I can read faster than most people speak and I retain it better. I loathe having to sit through a ten minute video that my brain will tune out instead of having text that I can skim to find the exact part I need in 30 seconds. I realize I'm an exception in that regard, and yes, and I still dislike getting bogged down by a tedious wall of text and may miss some parts during said skimming. Keeping guidelines concise - splitting even appropriate - with clear sections and the tl;dr "in a nutshell" are all helpful in that regard. If you'd care to volunteer to convert guidelines to other formats I'm sure you'd receive overwhelming support. ChompyTheGogoat[Bleat|Munched] 01:19, 20 October 2026 (UTC)
There is an old saying in software development: When all else fails read the manual. Yesterday, all my dreams... (talk) 22:42, 25 October 2026 (UTC)
And everyone knows that software manuals are written from the perspective of the dev who already knows how the thing works. Software devs and equipment designers have excellent ideas for software and products and write complex code but compiling a coherent manual for it is a separate discipline. Writing user guides and handbooks is an established field of study taught at undergrad and graduate levels usually as Technical Communication (or Technical Writing), as well as Information Design and UX, often as part of a broader media, Communication Science, or linguistics degree. Kudpung กุดผึ้ง (talk) 12:11, 26 October 2026 (UTC)
And did you continue reading the rest of the article? ChompyTheGogoat[Bleat|Munched] 03:32, 20 October 2026 (UTC)
Yes: It gave five reasons why ordinary people don't read the directions, and six ways they regularly recommend that their clients hire them to change it. WhatamIdoing (talk) 03:35, 20 October 2026 (UTC)
And where did they say "It's pointless to bother giving people instructions at all"? ChompyTheGogoat[Bleat|Munched] 04:05, 20 October 2026 (UTC)
I don't think it's pointless; that's why I have spent thousands of hours writing these pages. But anyone who expects people to read the directions is going to be disappointed many more times than they're pleased. WhatamIdoing (talk) 20:00, 20 October 2026 (UTC)
I find the instructions useful. From time to time I get involved in some admin task in an area where I'm not very familiar with current policy, so I refer to these pages for guidance. But in general, I agree that if you expect newbies to read (let alone understand) these pages before they hit the Submit button for the first time, you're going to be disappointed at lot. RoySmith(talk) 20:07, 20 October 2026 (UTC)
I think the point is that you need to make it so that the newcomers are forced to read the instructions without annoying them, which may (or may not) be an extraordinary task. 16dvnk (talk) 23:17, 20 October 2026 (UTC)
Instructions? You can lead a horse to water but you can't make it drink, but the main problem is the '...that anyone can edit' which was originally meant to mean articles, but somehow it got interpreted to mean 'anyone can write the PAGs and instructions'. So they do. And that's why it's such a confusing mess of 1,000s of pages of them, rarely written by experts in communication,and chopped and changed by anyone who comes along , especially vandals - just look at the history of the very example that was cited. 28% (that's more than a quarter) of all new users join Wikipedia with the sole intention of creating an article (according to the WMF) - but instead of helping them, WMF keeps conjuring up newcomer tasks that add to the cognitive burden rather than reduce it, so we get a massive backlog at NPP.. Kudpung กุดผึ้ง (talk) 18:15, 25 October 2026 (UTC)
My Advice for Newcomers is simple (whether they are starting a new article or trying to improve an existing one):
Research your topic before you write. Read lots of sources, and then summarize the key parts in your own words.
Cite your sources.
Don’t be afraid to make mistakes - we all do (especially when we are new).
Work with others, and be willing to compromise.
This should be enough to see any new editor through the first month or so of editing. The rest they will learn as they go… as we all had to do. Blueboar (talk) 18:46, 25 October 2026 (UTC)
There is just one snag: you have to get that message to the new user before they write their article - but nobody wants to listen to the simple solutions that have been repeatedly proposed since 2022. Kudpung กุดผึ้ง (talk) 11:40, 26 October 2026 (UTC)
Another idea: quizzes?
This is somewhat tangential since it's not a newcomer editing task, but maybe we could help encourage people to read policies and guidelines by offering quizzes on them, with badges they can display on their userpage for completion. These would be entirely optional for new users, but they could also potentially be utilized alongside sanctions for problematic editors that we're trying to help improve. For example, if someone gets blocked from mainspace for ongoing sourcing issues, having them to complete a quiz on WP:RS could be a potential requirement for an unblock request (imposed at admin discretion). Putting that knowledge to work in draftspace or via edit requests would help support their new understanding and ability to apply it as well.
I know many newbies would find this tedious and not have any interest, but I think there's a subset that does want to improve their skills and would be motivated by the ability to showcase them. I have a fairly good handle on most guidelines at this point, but as a terminal completionist I'd still enjoy the challenge of trying to check off every single one I could find. It would require volunteers to write them up, but WikiEdu might have some resources we could utilize, or at least suggestions on how something like this might be implemented. I still think we should liaise with them to improve learning resources on-wiki for editors who don't have the option of going through structured programs. They're the experts on this stuff.
ChompyTheGogoat[Bleat|Munched] 00:32, 20 October 2026 (UTC)
You could put together an example, if you wanted. Bawolff has an example for automatic 'grading' at User:Bawolff/Quiz. WhatamIdoing (talk) 00:41, 20 October 2026 (UTC)
Do you have a suggestion for a very simple guideline I could base it on? I'm not interested in putting a ton of effort in if no one supports this, but I'm willing to work up a quick one just to give people an idea of what I'm thinking. ChompyTheGogoat[Bleat|Munched] 01:23, 20 October 2026 (UTC)
Well, I did mean short, although I wasn't thinking quite that short! Certainly makes it easy though. ChompyTheGogoat[Bleat|Munched] 04:07, 20 October 2026 (UTC)
A few years back (5–10?), someone was doing some work on microcredentialing. If you wanted to develop it into a program, that would be a way to showcase success. WhatamIdoing (talk) 20:05, 20 October 2026 (UTC)
Nice, Wikipedia:Ignore all rules/Quiz is simple but effective. If I were to integrate that into newcomer onboarding, I would add an educational blub after someone answers, especially if they answer wrong.
We tested the quiz approach with the onboarding for Revise Tone. The quiz displays the first time newcomers complete a Revise Tone task, that way the learning feels relevant to what they want to do. When someone answers incorrectly we provide a succinct explanation. I was actually impressed with the completion rate, even with 5 questions, the majority of users who start the quiz end up completing it. [1]
The Growth team is also starting to connect more with WikiEdu and the folks working on the Wikimedia Core Curriculum as we make improvements to onboarding and the Newcomer Homepage.
As we update the Newcomer Homepage, one idea is to replace the "Get Help with Editing" section with something more engaging and educational than the current static list of help docs. I'm not sure exactly what this will look like, but I think it could include a section that is similar to the Policies and guidelines section on Special:PersonalDashboard. That page provides examples, but I love the idea of eventually having a short quiz for each of the 5 pillars. I think it's important to also link out to the policy pages for people who want to go deeper, but most new editors need to get started and get more invested before they are willing to read lengthy policy pages. Do you think integrating quizes directly from a main page (like the Newcomer Homepage) is the right approach, or do you think they need to be surfaced "in the moment" they are needed or the policy is violated? KStoller-WMF (talk) 00:32, 21 October 2026 (UTC)
I think offering them up front for editors who appreciate a more structured approach would be good. Since it's purely voluntary (if not related to sanctions) it wouldn't interfere with anyone who wants to just dive right into editing. I would integrate it in with however policies and guidelines are being linked initially - a "here's a fun way you can work through these pages and show off what you're learned" option. Specific ones can also be linked in other places they seem relevant. The overall idea is to try to address the "nobody reads the rules" issue by offering motivation, and hopefully improving retention when they have to actually think about the questions. Theoretically we could have one for every single guideline; it's just a matter of editors being willing to take the time building them (and creating the badges). Starting with the pillars would certainly be a good call. And I like the idea of linking specific ones that are relevant for newcomer tasks - you could have a brief summary in a pop-up when they start the task for the first time, then link from there to the full pages and associated quizzes. ChompyTheGogoat[Bleat|Munched] 01:19, 21 October 2026 (UTC)
My impression is that the concept of "show off what you're learned" is popular with a certain type of career-oriented contributor in developing countries, but not with the core community here. WhatamIdoing (talk) 17:10, 21 October 2026 (UTC)
Thanks. I really like the idea of having some core onboarding quizzes easily available from Home, but then also providing quick access to this style of learning material "in the moment" they might be needed (perhaps before a Suggested Edit, within an Edit Check, or even within warning templates). I added the idea and some quotes to this task:
I don't think we can work on this immediately, but it's definitely an area that I hope the Growth team can focus on soon! KStoller-WMF (talk) 23:42, 23 October 2026 (UTC)
Another tangential thought - maybe we could get some editors to work on improving the readability of P&Gs based on resources like the one WAID linked above. Break up walls of text into more manageable chunks, split them out as needed, write more "in a nutshell" blurbs, add bolding to emphasize critical aspects (I noticed they utilized that heavily in the article), add more visual aids, etc. That's in addition to potential A/V learning resources which I know have been discussed also. Those take longer to build though and we still need the text formats to be accessible as well. Some are already fairly good but others have lots of run on text that can be daunting even to us heavy readers.Spinning off from that, what about creating a new Wikiproject for all of these kinds of newcomer related things (wrapping mentorship under it as well) that would act as the local partners for the Growth team, addressing lesser changes like this on the ground, as it were? Having a variety of experience editors giving feedback and working collaboratively would help us have a broader perspective on different learning styles and what works best for different people. ChompyTheGogoat[Bleat|Munched] 01:37, 21 October 2026 (UTC)
Splitting policies and guidelines is really difficult. A couple of years ago, I suggested splitting WP:PSTS out of WP:NOR, and had two very smart, very experienced editors genuinely concerned that if we split the policy into two policies, then PSTS would somehow stop being a policy. (I'm chalking it up to them also being very busy and just missing it as they skimmed down the page, but if they were confused, then lots of people would be.) WhatamIdoing (talk) 17:13, 21 October 2026 (UTC)
Personally, I think PSTS stopping being policy would be an excellent outcome. People put way too much weight on "primary" versus "secondary" rather than things that matter more like reliability and independence. Anomie⚔ 18:38, 21 October 2026 (UTC)
I also would like to see PSTS go away, or at least be demoted. In some kinds of articles (i.e. scientific topics) primary sources are considered the best sources. Nobody is going to say (I hope) that a species of beetle is not notable because there's no secondary sources. RoySmith(talk) 19:33, 21 October 2026 (UTC)
If people could really figure out that Wikipedia:Secondary does not mean independent, I think that would solve a lot of these problems. Sometimes you need a secondary/analytical source (e.g., whether a new cancer treatment works), and sometimes you need a primary/original source (e.g., for a direct quotation, or to say that Queen Elizabeth died today).
I wouldn't expect splitting to be utilized too often, but there are some situations where it could definitely help. Maybe subpages could be utilized underneath a primary summary page to show they're all aspects of the same overall concept. ChompyTheGogoat[Bleat|Munched] 19:31, 21 October 2026 (UTC)
Break up walls of text into more manageable chunks, split them out as needed, write more "in a nutshell" blurbs, add bolding to emphasize critical aspects. We do this occasionally (at least those of us who know what were doing) but as often as not someone comes along who thinks they have a better idea and we get reverted. Rather than create a fuss, we just shrug our shoulders and move on, and it's back to walls of rambling text.
WADR, I think if the WMF were to take more seriously the voices of experience from the community, the entire management of newcomers would have been perfected and completed a long time ago, there would be less need for 100s , nay, 1,000s of pages of PAGs, and hardly any backlog at NPP; there seems to be a misunderstanding that because volunteers are, well, volunteers, there are no UX and UI experts among them. Instead, as far as I can see from my own experience and what the community is reporting in various threads on the VP, the newcomer help places a greater cognitive load on the new users than it reduces. Kudpung กุดผึ้ง (talk) 09:26, 21 October 2026 (UTC)
The other problem is that we tend to multiply help pages, rather than merge and consolidate them. WhatamIdoing (talk) 17:14, 21 October 2026 (UTC)
Why are nerds under-represented vs. jocks?
About 90% of the time I search WP for a scholar who wrote a seminal, highly-cited work, I find that the scholar has no article, yet some absolutely insignificant sports figure with the exact same name has a WP article..
WP sports projects have created very low requirements for athlete notability: Wikipedia:Notability (sports) ... e.g. the athlete just needs to play one season in some minor-league, or less.
The notability for scholars at Wikipedia:Notability (academics)appears to permit an article based on how much the author's work(s) are cited: "... show that the academic has been an author of highly cited academic work – either several extremely highly cited scholarly publications or a substantial number of scholarly publications with significant citation rates..."
Yet that simple test appears to be not utilized by the AfD people when assessing notability ... otherwise there would be a lot more articles on scholars. Are the Notability experts not applying an easy-to-compute "measure the citation impact of a scholar" metric when assessing notability? What is going on? How did the jocks achieve such dominance here in WP? </rant> Noleander (talk) 15:09, 12 October 2026 (UTC)
Just on the measure the citation impact of a scholar point, my understanding is that, unfortunately, it is difficult to come up with something that is easy-to-compute. Effectively one has to compare the citation statistics for the individual against comparable individuals in the field - having first decided what the field is! - and that is a manual task (see User talk:JoelleJay/Archive 4 §Tool for citation metrics comparison for a brief discussion that @JoelleJay and I had a while ago). It is not helped by the fact that many editors will not have access to Scopus or other citation databases to perform that manual task. Cheers, SunloungerFrog (talk) 15:48, 12 October 2026 (UTC)
Then the criteria should be relaxed. I can give 40 examples of scholars I've utilized in my articles that tremendously benefited humankind ... yet they have no WP article. To pick a random example: engineer Nicholas Schnitter who literally wrote the book on the history of dams. I shouldn't have to pay $$ for access to tool, then another 2 hours collecting justification that he meets the WP notability criteria. Noleander (talk) 16:17, 12 October 2026 (UTC)
In this example it is far easier to show that his book is notable; this only requires two book reviews, which popped up immediately for me on Google Scholar. Helpful Raccoon (talk) 10:31, 13 October 2026 (UTC)
Does the discrepancy arise at AFD, or at the step of article creation? Or both? Sports are tremendously popular and there is a whole ecosystem that produces and propagates stats, coverage, championships, and fandoms. I'm not disagreeing that there is an imbalance, just curious about what drives it. —Myceteae🍄🟫 (talk) 16:29, 12 October 2026 (UTC)
Speaking for myself: Over the years, I've started to create WP articles on about 20 great engineers and scholars, and I'll spend a minute googling them, and I quickly ascertain that there is no book about them. So, I realize I'm going to have to collect lots of indirect evidence of Notability. At that point, I give up, because I don't know how to gather the "measure the citation impact of a scholar" data.
If the "measure the citation impact of a scholar" are not going to FREE and FAST for editors, then Wikipedia:Notability (academics) should be extended to include the criterion:
The person wrote a book or journal article that is particularly important, foundational, and significant in their field.
I understand that could potentially be abused to create non-notable articles, but if the criteria are not expanded, WP will continue to fail to provide users with articles on thousands of important engineers and scholars. Noleander (talk) 16:42, 12 October 2026 (UTC)
Just because you mention books, another way in is WP:NAUTHOR. A couple of books with 2+ reviews each in scholarly journals usually demonstrates that the subject meets NAUTHOR. Cheers, SunloungerFrog (talk) 20:01, 12 October 2026 (UTC)
Yeah, with absolutely no evidence for this other than my feelings, I would assume that this discrepancy arises at the article creation rather than deletion stage. There are a lot more people who know and care about minor sports and entertainment figures than there are about all but the most successful and famous academics, the sources are usually more easily accessible, and the articles are often easier to write. Simply being notable is (at least theoretically) necessary but not sufficient to have an article on Wikipedia; it is also necessary to have a Wikipedia editor care enough to write the damn article. Caeciliusinhorto-public (talk) 11:51, 13 October 2026 (UTC)
Note since the discussion at Wikipedia:Village pump (policy)/Sports notability, participation-based criteria in non-championship/elite events does not have consensus support as a criterion for presuming that the standards for having an article are met, and they have been mostly removed from the sports-specific notability page. (I know of one example of a participation-based criterion in non-elite events that is still there; I was unable to get enough people to discuss the matter on the talk page to establish a consensus on how to proceed.) isaacl (talk) 17:51, 12 October 2026 (UTC)
I think you'll find that the number of editors prepared to spend their time creating article of sports figures (and actors, musicians etc) greatly exceeds the numbers editing in STEM. Also the articles are often easier to create. I think that is the primary barrier. Johnbod (talk) 18:30, 12 October 2026 (UTC)
And stubby articles can be mass-created. If I could find a chart of the 1959 line-up of the San Francisco Chinese Basketeers, then it's a few minues to set up a stub for the first one on the list and far less for the others, copying and adjusting that original articles. Such charts are common in sports, far less common in academia. -- Nat Gertler (talk) 16:16, 16 October 2026 (UTC)
Publications filled with people being nerds about jocks. I'm not sure conceptually how to be a jock about nerds. Conceptually stacked deck. CMD (talk) 23:58, 12 October 2026 (UTC)
So there are a few reasons that sports are popular for Wikipedia articles:
There are a lot of sports fans.
There are a lot of publications that people can pull from. This makes writing the articles for athletes much easier then academics. I have personally written a few biographies for academics, and hunting down 3rd party sources for biographical information is really hard.
There is a motivation to boost an athlete for marketing purposes. Not saying any article in particular is corporate, but I'm sure it happens.
Sports is a common special interest for Neurodivergent people, and they might make the effort to make an article.
Sports betting is a huge thing, so people gather information on specific athletes to help them feel more confident gambling.
There's also the fact that WP:NACADEMIC exists in part because your average scientist just doing their job doesn't generally get press. NACADEMIC itself is a fairly roundabout SNG as well, and requires some degree of being "read-in" to academia to come close to grokking it. —Jéské Courianov^_^vThrillerNight! 17:03, 13 October 2026 (UTC)
Perhaps the more balanced approach is that not every mid-tear, early career athlete ("sportsperson") should get their own article. Someone mentioned WP:NAUTHOR above. This produces an odd outcome where someone with 2+ notable books is notable and gets an article even if there is zero WP:SIGCOV of the person's biography, only book reviews. This produces articles like Sherry Argov, which is little more than a directory of her two books. Citation impact is sort of the academic's version of this but it's much easier to measure "has two or more books with standalone articles". —Myceteae🍄🟫 (talk) 17:16, 13 October 2026 (UTC)
The cases that really bother me are the scholars or engineers that wrote an important work that helped mankind through a major scientific advance or a safety improvement or an invention. The work might be recognized within their field, but no one really writes about the author. There are hundreds, maybe thousands, of unsung heroes that did wonderful work and they'll never get a wikipedia article. Noleander (talk) 17:17, 13 October 2026 (UTC)
Please do not let it bother you. Accept the fact that in today's world kicking or throwing a ball is more important to the public at large than obscure advances in quantum mechanics that made their flash drives possible. That is the world today, and Wikipedia reflects that. Yesterday, all my dreams... (talk) 20:53, 13 October 2026 (UTC)
We could raise the bar for how notable an athlete needs to be for coverage to something close to academics. For example, make it something closer to WP:NACADEMIC, so notability is more then just "was on team, had article written about them." GeogSage (⚔Chat?⚔) 19:07, 16 October 2026 (UTC)
Good one! Sigh! Donald Albury 18:30, 14 October 2026 (UTC)
Good lord, that is extreme. Carlstak (talk) 18:50, 14 October 2026 (UTC)
But there are also extreme cases of oblivion. Consider Jack Yuan at Sandisk. He was one of the three people who started a new industry but gets no Wiki page. And sometimes resistance to new pages is serious. Look at the talk page for Milos Ercegovac. The person who wrote that page was "out of breath" arguing about it. I managed to change the situation else he would have had no page although I am certain that your computer is using his work to add numbers right now. Yesterday, all my dreams... (talk) 22:11, 14 October 2026 (UTC)
One case in point I noticed is that Kyle Hill the basketball player is considered notable while Kyle Hill the science presenter is not. – MrPersonHumanGuy(talk) 13:25, 15 October 2026 (UTC)
I am sorry, but I would have supported that Afd. I am not at all sure how much of that man's content is correct. A better example would have been Jesse B. Wright whose fundamental work with Samuel Eilenberg changed our understanding of automata, long ago. . I heard that Wright just called Eilenberg out of the blue and gave him the idea. That was a seminal idea. He had done various other things at IBM research too. Maybe someone could start a page for him? And I am fascinated by the fact that he was blind! I have no idea how he could be such a good mathematician and not see. He deserves a page just for his seminal work with Eilenberg. Yesterday, all my dreams... (talk) 15:43, 15 October 2026 (UTC)
Because sourcing for academics is terrible. NACADEMIC proxies well for real world significance but produces terrible articles. Usually with an NAUTHOR pass you can mine the book reviews for biographical details. Even though a lot of things technically pass NACADEMIC, the terribleness of the sourcing dissuades article creation. PARAKANYAA (talk) 18:59, 16 October 2026 (UTC)
Another thing is people just people's interest in contributing to a topic. The book notability guideline is very, very lax, but relative to the amount of notable books there are very few contributing editors, so we don't actually have that many book articles. frequently, no one makes an article on Pulitzer Prize nominated books! It is madness! PARAKANYAA (talk) 19:02, 16 October 2026 (UTC)
I've written three articles about books, it is hard. Mostly, trying to hunt down 3rd party sources to describe the contents of the book can be a challenge. GeogSage (⚔Chat?⚔) 19:09, 16 October 2026 (UTC)
@GeogSage I love writing articles on books. And finding sources for articles on books. If you need help finding any sources feel free to ask.
But also you technically don't need secondary sources for the contents of the book, especially if it's fiction, WP:PLOTREF. They help when they're there but you can just cite the book itself. That's what we do for books/movies/etc. But usually for a nonfiction book summaries are in the reviews. PARAKANYAA (talk) 19:13, 16 October 2026 (UTC)
Thanks! I've been dinged before for citing the book itself, but could have just been an overzealous editor. Example of where deep diving the contents was tricky was Technological Transition in Cartography. There is plenty of content to verify the book as notably, but details about what is inside are a bit sparse or very general within these sources. How to Lie with Maps (same author) was much easier to find that kind of material. GeogSage (⚔Chat?⚔) 19:32, 16 October 2026 (UTC)
Citing the book itself for the contents is totally fine unless it's for interpretative stuff; I think "overzealous editor" is right. PARAKANYAA (talk) 19:42, 16 October 2026 (UTC)
"Why are nerds under-represented vs. jocks?" is the same question as "Why does every daily newspaper have a sports section, but none of them have an academics section?" WhatamIdoing (talk) 20:18, 16 October 2026 (UTC)
Well, to be fair, lots of newspapers have a books review section. We don't have articles on that many books. PARAKANYAA (talk) 20:31, 16 October 2026 (UTC)
Newspapers typically review a book once, which makes it difficult to establish that it meets the standard for having an article, while (due to fan interest) they cover sports figures and teams many, many times. isaacl (talk) 21:28, 16 October 2026 (UTC)
I'm not aware of any notability requirements that would benefit from a book getting reviewed more than once by the same publication - when counting notability-establishing sources for books I look at the number of unique review outlets. ScalarFactor (talk) 23:20, 16 October 2026 (UTC)
It being covered only once by one paper would not be any better or worse than it being covered by the same paper 20 times. PARAKANYAA (talk) 23:43, 16 October 2026 (UTC)
I once had a book that I wanted to write an article on. Somehow, it received three different full length reviews from three different authors over a yearlong period in The Independent, and no other paper. I could not write an article on it. PARAKANYAA (talk) 23:56, 16 October 2026 (UTC)
Sure, I wasn't referring to any such requirements. I was pointing out a difference between the sports section and the book review section, and also saying that with more coverage, it's typically easier to determine if a topic meets the standard for having an article. isaacl (talk) 02:42, 17 October 2026 (UTC)
Sorry, but I doubt if NY Times ever reviewed Topos Theory . I am sure 99.999% of their readers have not even heard of the term. Once again, we live in a world where kicking balls matters more than research. We must accept that. And given that Wiki is driven by crowd sourcing, ... you know the rest. Yesterday, all my dreams... (talk) 22:07, 16 October 2026 (UTC)
We lack articles on Pulitzer Prize for Fiction nominees! Those get reviewed in the NYT! PARAKANYAA (talk) 22:09, 16 October 2026 (UTC)
And did I mention science? We lack articles for plenty of mainstream, newspaper-covered topics due to lack of editing interest. For academic books the sources are all in academic journals. Academic journal book reviews are plentiful. Also not covered due to lack of editing interest. PARAKANYAA (talk) 23:44, 16 October 2026 (UTC)
WP:NBOOK is incredibly lenient. It took me about ~15 minutes to find more than enough reviews for Topos Theory:
Ioniţă, Cătălin (1979). "Review of Topos Theory". Bulletin mathématique de la Société des Sciences Mathématiques de la République Socialiste de Roumanie. 23 (71) (4). Societatea de Științe Matematice din România: 445–446. ISSN0373-2908. JSTOR43680483. Full access available to users of The Wikipedia Library.
And around half of that was formatting citations because toolforge:citer isn't playing nice with JSTOR right now.
In general, for fiction and non-fiction, high-quality and relatively-easy-to-access sources are in abundance relative to our current coverage of books. ScalarFactor (talk) 23:35, 16 October 2026 (UTC)
Sorry, I did not mean that there are no books on Topos theory. And if you had searched for topoi you would have had even more results. What I meant was that NY Times does not review those types of books. Yesterday, all my dreams... (talk) 23:57, 16 October 2026 (UTC)
In general my experience is that "serious"/academic nonfiction gets reviews in journals, while fiction and popsci/pop history/etc get reviews in newspapers & trade book review magazines. I normally wouldn't expect the NYT and a journal to review a book, but Ihaveremoveddozensofnotabilitytagsfrombookarticles by finding reviews in print sources like magazines and newspapers, all through sources in WP:TWL. ScalarFactor (talk) 00:06, 17 October 2026 (UTC)
I know y'all love to hate on AI, but I asked Claude "give me a list of the top 100 most notable scientists who do not already have articles in wikipedia". Amusingly, Claude declined to give me such a list ("I’d risk including people who already have articles or, worse, people who don’t exist") but did show me how to figure it out myself. Running Claude's query got me this list. RoySmith(talk) 20:32, 16 October 2026 (UTC)
Hate is a super nagative feeling. Please try disike instead. Yesterday, all my dreams... (talk) 22:18, 16 October 2026 (UTC)
My sparql-fu is weak to none, but I would imagine that would be trivial for somebody who knows it well. RoySmith(talk) 23:45, 16 October 2026 (UTC)
I also only speak baby sparql, but it looks like there were only nine more cut off by the limit. Which suggests to me either that enwiki's coverage of women in the National Academy of Sciences is pretty good, or that wikidata's is pretty bad. —Cryptic 04:19, 17 October 2026 (UTC)
I noticed the lack of women - and wondered whether it's the energy of the Women in Red project that has contributed to ensuring that current notable women scientists are getting properly represented in en.wiki! Well done, us. PamD 11:29, 17 October 2026 (UTC)
Hmm, I don't know about the US Academy, but the List of female Fellows of the Royal Society has been 100% complete since some years before this project was started. User:Edwardx told me had hunted down the last one in 2012 or 13 I think, and new ones get at least a stub on the day of the announcement. Johnbod (talk) 12:09, 17 October 2026 (UTC)
@Johnbod well, I did say "contributed", rather than claim all the credit for WiR! But, well done @Edwardx too. PamD 15:21, 18 October 2026 (UTC)
You are 300% right deep in your mind of course, as usual, but please do not pose a question that you know the answer to. It is because most readers are more interested in the kicking of balls than recent advances in cohomology. The idea is simple: if people do not understand something, there is no reason for newspapers to write about it, and it is not attention grabbing. As they say, if it bleeds it leads. But research does not bleed, so bus crashes come first. Wiki policies are decided by the public at large, so... you know the answer. Have a good day. Yesterday, all my dreams... (talk) 22:14, 16 October 2026 (UTC)
To move forward more productively - WP:NACADEMIC is one of our most inclusive subject-specific guidelines. The best fix is to make it even more inclusive. "The person's research has had a significant impact in their scholarly discipline, broadly construed" is a big vague, but in general it should be interpreted very generously, a gate wide enough to drive a truckload of academics through. Basically any academic who is publishing and is having others acknowledge or review or criticize their work should qualify. It's a little tricky because you can't rely on citation counts or the like anymore due to paper mills and the like, but hell, even some of the frauds are notable if for the wrong reason if they get caught. If we "accidentally" allow stubby articles on academics who appear to have published a textbook and journal articles but actually sold just 400 copies to their own students, and nobody cared about the journal articles, oh well, it's probably a good trade to start including the other lesser academics. I would say that we should consider removing "significant" from NACADEMIC criterion 1 to make it even more clear that if you're a publishing academic, we will cover you, even if the article is just a list of publications and basic educational affiliations. Academics aren't usually notable for their biography, they're notable for their work, so if their personal life is a mystery, that's fine. SnowFire (talk) 18:55, 17 October 2026 (UTC)
If we make it to relaxed, almost all of my friends (and I) would have qualified for a Wikipedia article in grad school. To get a Ph.D. in my program, most people published three articles in peer-reviewed journals. Most of us exceeded that minimum. I don't think any of us are notable though, and this is the situation in most academic departments. I think the main issue is that we are too relaxed on inclusion criteria for athletes. An average athlete is not notable, but probably has more written about them then an average person. GeogSage (⚔Chat?⚔) 20:40, 17 October 2026 (UTC)
Did you and your friends all become professors while still in graduate school? That would be pretty unlikely. So I don't think you'd qualify just from getting some publications out while a grad student, not even under my hypothetical loosened guidelines. (I am presuming we would apply it to people who became tenured professors, not just anyone publishing in academic journals.) SnowFire (talk) 23:44, 17 October 2026 (UTC)
According to Claude, "roughly 250,000 to 300,000 professors in the U.S. hold tenure". Claude also estimates that worldwide there's several million people in academia with appointments similar to what we call tenure in the US. Surely we're not positing that they are all notable? RoySmith(talk) 23:59, 17 October 2026 (UTC)
The fact of the matter is WP has far too many biographies of both athletes and academics, and far too many biographies altogether. In modern times the career trajectories of both are normally highly standard from a young age, and the bios rather boring as a result. I used to propose a moratorium on new biographies for say 6 months (except for the "urgently" newly notable), so that editors could get on with proper work on encyclopedic subjects. You can imagine the reaction to that. Far too many editors in the last decade confuse WP with a biographical dictionary. Johnbod (talk) 21:46, 17 October 2026 (UTC)
As opposed to what? What should we be writing articles on?
I've read plenty of print encyclopedias. Some of them are only biographical topics. Some of them are only organizations. Biographies are one of the major encyclopedic subjects. PARAKANYAA (talk) 01:43, 18 October 2026 (UTC)
Obviously we should have biographies, as we always have had. But, quoting from a talk I gave in 2011, which remains pretty much true: " I would make the following wild generalizations:
Our “top level” topic articles are generally weak, especially on abstract concepts.
Our articles on specific things, whether people, films, ships or species are often very good, and our coverage is usually very wide, even if many articles are pretty short.
So the more general and abstract the article subject, the worse our articles tend to be. This is the reverse of the pattern generally found in published reference works. It also means that some of our weakest work within a subject area gets the highest number of viewers. This is not good" Johnbod (talk) 01:52, 18 October 2026 (UTC)
Top level articles, especially abstract topics are misery to edit. One of many reasons that this is the case it can be incredibly difficult to stop people from coatracking on minor details about any topic. With broad articles you can basically justify shoving in any minor detail and attempting to stop people from doing this is like pulling teeth; people will die on the hill that the article needs to be 15000 words and include details from every single news article. Try to remove a few words cited to a passing news article from 2005 on a broad topic with dozens of academic books about it? Prepare for ANI (this happened to me once). Taken comprehensively basically all broad articles involve some degree of the dreaded original research in how you're presenting them, which, unless you are a subject matter expert on the topic, is usually bad. Versus articles on say, one movie or one person, where you can more or less recite dry facts.
Preventing biographies from being written would have 0 impact on the quality of these higher level articles, it would just make people edit less, because the kinds of people who edit articles on pop culture aren't the same people who care about improving articles on basic topics. You realize most people do this as a hobby, right? You couldn't pay me to write a broad topic article after what I've experienced. PARAKANYAA (talk) 02:16, 18 October 2026 (UTC)
And I do agree that it is an issue how bad our broader articles are, but really the only thing that would help this would be instituting stronger guidelines for dealing with broad articles/abstract topics, as the current lack of them opens up a lot of room for bad editing. PARAKANYAA (talk) 02:27, 18 October 2026 (UTC)
Not to digress too much, and I know this take will be unpopular, but top-level articles are on the whole less consequential than more niche ones. If Wikipedia did not exist people would still be able to find out more or less what they wanted to about those higher-level topics in half-a-minute of searching, whereas on more niche topics you might not have any other easily available compilations. In this sense Velites is actually more important than Roman Army, VITAL notwithstanding.
I'd have to dig through to find the research, but most readers are simply quickly skimming articles hunting for one or two tidbits of information; reading an article start-to-finish is very much the exception.
WP:Nobody reads the directions, and BLOAT is its own problem. I mean we're already in a situation where it is simply not possible for WIAFA to be met for broad topics if taken literally.
I agree those articles are a misery to edit, and have been for a long time. ~2026-46960-97 (talk) 03:40, 25 October 2026 (UTC)
Because it was easy for someone to connect sports databases to a script that would create articles. Articles about academics take more care and attention, so there are less of them. -- LCU ActivelyDisinterested«@» °∆t° 14:10, 18 October 2026 (UTC)
Apologies if someone mentioned it already, but AFAIK WP:NATHLETE also used to be an extremely low bar (one only needed to prove that the athlete had competed at a certain level and they were considered automatically notable) so I would imagine there are a lot of sportspeople articles left over from that time that would not be suitable if assessed under the current criteria. Athanelar (talk) 08:54, 20 October 2026 (UTC)
Wikidata pages automatically linking to en-wiki dab page
But since I'm not at all active at Wikidata, what's the deal with this? Does it make sense that new Wikidata pages are created for a dab page when the base title is a primary redirect? As an en-wiki editor who gets notified, what responsibility do I have to Wikidata? —Myceteae🍄🟫 (talk) 07:49, 13 October 2026 (UTC)
"What responsibility do I have" is probably the wrong question. Maybe something like "How can we improve this system for everyone?" would put you on a more productive path. WhatamIdoing (talk) 23:25, 16 October 2026 (UTC)
Editors are not required to editor, you're a volunteer and don't have a responsibility to any project. If something doesn't interest you just move on. -- LCU ActivelyDisinterested«@» °∆t° 14:14, 18 October 2026 (UTC)
Yes, and that's what I think "responsibility" is the wrong way to approach the question. Ideally, an editor who knows about the problem would:
Fix it if you can
Tag it if you can't
Ask for help if you need it (and then actually get the needed help!)
Agree on all three, it's also that editors shouldn't stress about it. That way lies editor burnout. -- LCU ActivelyDisinterested«@» °∆t° 21:14, 18 October 2026 (UTC)
My unfortunate word choice has become a distraction. The linking of a title with a primary topic to a dab page doesn't make sense to me. But I don't know much about Wikidata. So I wondered if folks here, where I am active and where we are concerned about things like primary redirects and when to link to dab pages, had any insight. If not, that's fine. —Myceteae🍄🟫 (talk) 19:50, 19 October 2026 (UTC)
Apparently, they routinely link to our dab pages. Doesn’t seem to have any impact on what we do here, so I wouldn’t worry about it. Blueboar (talk) 20:19, 19 October 2026 (UTC)
When we have a WP:PRIMARYUSAGE dab (e.g., Lock), we're supposed to create a matching redirect with the (disambiguation) title (e.g., Lock (disambiguation). It should be possible to run a query/database report that identifies
with a Wikidata entry (should be all of them, though it can take a while)
the Wikidata entry links to multiple other Wikipedias
and some/most/all of the other Wikipedias are not dab pages.
For example, our Lock dab page is d:Q366453, which has 13 Wikipedia pages (including ours). All of those are (correctly) dab pages except possibly w:kk:Құлып, құлыптау, қармау at the Kazakh Wikipedia. WhatamIdoing (talk) 22:05, 19 October 2026 (UTC)
If it's working as it's supposed to, that's good. I see that if a word or phrase had the same "base name" in another language but a different meaning, it would be distinguished as a different data item, i.e. Lock (Q16872403) and Lock (Q366453). I think that resolves my question/confusion about this. —Myceteae🍄🟫 (talk) 22:28, 19 October 2026 (UTC)
CentralNotice banner for WikiScholar 2027 (geotargeted to Bangladesh only)
Fewer people are coming to Wikipedia directly. AI chatbots and search summaries answer questions using Wikipedia's content, but readers never see the article, its sources or the community behind it. This matters most for young people, who are forming their reading habits at a time when an AI answer feels like enough, and who are also the future editors Wikipedia depends on.
WikiScholar 2027 is a national quiz competition for high school students in Bangladesh and its syllabus is a set of Wikipedia articles. To take part, students have to read Wikipedia itself, including articles on artificial intelligence, misinformation and information security, so they also learn why sourced, human-curated knowledge matters. Regional rounds include workshops on how Wikipedia works, giving engaged readers a path to contributing. The 2026 pilot reached more than 10,000 students in 18 schools, and this year the competition is nationwide. So we are expecting a million of reach.
The banner is one part of a wider campaign that includes direct school visits, social media and print media. We are requesting it here because many Bangladeshi students read English Wikipedia, and we want them to become regular readers and users of Wikipedia in both languages. Visitors from English Wikipedia will land on an English page, bn:উইকিপিডিয়া:উইকিস্কলার ২০২৭/en, and all our documents and our website carry English labels alongside Bangla.
We welcome comments on the wording, frequency or anything else, and we're happy to adjust the banner in response. Thank you! —Yahya (talk • contribs.) 22:04, 13 October 2026 (UTC)
I think this is a rare case where I can support showing banners to readers. I think a reasonable impression diet would be three impressions per ten days. Best, HouseBlaster (talk • edits • he/they) 00:12, 17 October 2026 (UTC)
I think this is fine, and I think the best impression diet is whatever the CentralNotice admins choose. WhatamIdoing (talk) 20:13, 18 October 2026 (UTC)
October 2026 Wikimedia Café: legal issues on Commons, and WMF Board selection process
Hello! There will be two Wikimedia Café discussion opportunities in October. In a change from the usual Café practice, this month's sessions will have different topics. Anyone who meets the Café attendance criteria is welcome to attend either or both sessions.
Session A will happen on Saturday, 24 October 2026 at 15:00 UTC (timestamp converter), at a time friendly to the Americas, Africa, and Europe. This session will feature Wikimedia Foundation lawyer Phil Bradley-Schmieg. We will discuss legal issues on Wikimedia Commons, including complexities of international law. (I am hoping that in a future month, a similar Café session will be offered at a time friendly to Asia and the Pacific.)
Session B will happen on Sunday, 25 October 2026 at 03:00 UTC (timestamp converter), at a time friendly to Asia and the Pacific, we will discuss proposed changes to how Wikimedia Foundation Board candidates are selected. The latest proposals are much different from the earlier July 2026 proposals. The due date for feedback on current proposals is 27 October, and Wikimedians are welcome to participate on the proposal talk page regardless of Café attendance.
anybody know why a blue dot showed up under my hamburger button and how to remove it?
I was editing and now it's there and i couldn't find anything about it. It's clearly supposed to indicate something that isn't unlike a normal notification. Willprove (talk) 15:05, 19 October 2026 (UTC)
I'm not sure which hamburger you're referring to, but a dot often means that there is a new or improved option on the menu. Open it and see! Certes (talk) 20:41, 19 October 2026 (UTC)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hamburger_button This. It's used in minerva neue skin on mobile. I have clicked on all the sections and i seem to have not found what it wanted me to find, considering the icon is still there. Willprove (talk) 01:28, 20 October 2026 (UTC)
It was the dashboard which i seem to have unlocked on my profile! Idk why the dot didn't just indicate my profile as the place where i was supposed to go. The dot had me so focused on the hamburger button that i didn't explore other sections Willprove (talk) 07:19, 20 October 2026 (UTC)
I'm afraid the modern design paradigm for many applications is to put a random new shape on our screens and leave us to guess what it means. Certes (talk) 10:29, 20 October 2026 (UTC)
Predicting the next CTOPs/CCTOPs
I don't know if this is appropraite to ask, but does anyone have predictions on which topics could be potentially WP:CTOP/WP:CCTOP territories sooner or later? FMecha (to talk|to see log) 19:31, 21 October 2026 (UTC)
I did saw that, I wonder what other topics could be one. I admittedly had the topic of AI (particularly the generative/LLM kind) as one such candidate of being a future CTOP. FMecha (to talk|to see log) 02:51, 22 October 2026 (UTC)
Though I appreciate some might not find any harm in this type of idle chatter, personally I don't think it's a great idea to make any predictions about it (maybe if someone's planning to get involved with mediation or other efforts to defuse the situation, but even then I think doing it privately is better). It risks labelling editors interested in a given topic, and I don't think that's helpful to the collaborative process. isaacl (talk) 03:28, 22 October 2026 (UTC)
Should page protection requests be split by day instead of month?
I've noticed that Wikipedia is not easy to edit and now I understand more about what Wiikipedia volunteers have to go through and I have more of an appreciation of what they have to do than before. Drjoshcohen (talk) 08:50, 23 October 2026 (UTC)
WP:LEADERBOARD and WP:MIA
[[WP:LEADERBOARD]] There should be separate list for those who make mass automated edits with tools as AWB than those who make manual edits. Even Twinkle Huggle STiki required individual edits not multiple edits in single click.
[[WP:MIA]]-- In past as editors were less so small number of edits were required. The editors should be listed as per total contributions and those with less contributions should be removed, Now very small number of edits are required for being added to this page.
Instead of apphabetical, listed as per total contributions.
