User:Sphilbrick/New page feed review

I am mulling over whether we as a community to tighten our standards on who is permitted to create a draft and ask for it to be reviewed. As part of a thought experiment, I decided to look at the New Pages Feed and look at a few of the entries.

I decided to take a look at Special:NewPagesFeed on 18 May, and I selected the first six consecutive items in the list. This is clearly not a substantial sample, but it is enough to illustrate some points.

General observation

Let's start with the caveat that six items constitutes too small a sample to draw statistically significant conclusions, but these entries do illustrate points worth considering.

As a placeholder, I'm going to use the term "qualified editor" as someone who meets certain standards to be determined, and who status permits them to create a draft and ask for a review.


 * Two of the entries (3, 5) are in decent shape. As with any early draft that is room for improvement but I wouldn't be unhappy about seeing either of these in main space. Both of these illustrate the point that a hard count/experience limit should not be the only path to becoming a qualified editor.


 * Two of these entries (2, 4) illustrate the problems caused when allowing unqualified editors to create a draft and ask for a review. While the review might not take a long time, when there are literally thousands of items in the queue, a wasting of time by the reviewer as well as the editor creating the draft. Both of these editors might be capable of making small edits to existing articles and when they have enough experience it is very possible they might be able to create an acceptable draft.


 * Two of these entries (1, 6) are examples of subjects which probably ought to have an article in main space, but these two drafts illustrate that the lack of knowledge of the editor produces something not yet acceptable. Both of these create a drain on resources as a reviewer has to take the time to be both positive about the likelihood that the subject matter is notable but explaining some of the shortcomings so that the draft can be improved. If the reviewer spends a lot of time and thoroughly lists all issues, perhaps the re-review will be successful, but if they only identify low hanging fruit issues, the next review might also fail. In both of these cases, it is my opinion that a qualified editor would produce an acceptable draft which would produce a higher quality product and lower drain on reviewer resources.

We need more data points, but this very preliminary review suggests that requiring that review requests must come from qualified editors will cut out a portion of doomed submissions, and increase the chance that the submissions which are made are in much better shape and require fewer reviewer resources.