User:Tstormcandy/Nov 2009 requested NEWT intervention

Posted to Administrators' Noticeboard on 16 Nov 2009, WP:AN

However much I was hoping it'd be useful, I'm throwing a flag up and making a general plea that "something" be done with the now-infamous WP:NEWT project page and discussion. The "testing" has been on a few weeks now with an unknown percentage of actual tests really reported, an unknown number of users that were publicly shamed for mistakes, and a talk page turning into patrols of all user levels openly saying they won't be on NPP anymore. Even though things are "better" the past few days and things have been better about sharing user info publicly, this lovely ANI yesterday after a big misunderstanding got rough. It was closed off fairly quickly and moved over to the NEWT talk page on resolved → no admin action required. Okay, I can go with that since it was a rather sizable misunderstanding. There were a few bigger concerns on the ANI, but it's no longer the actual actions of it but rather the whole concept of the covert actions and project in general that has people stung. Part of that incident regarded a patrol who even spotted a "new user" as being a Tester account, and unpleasantries ensued... mostly a lot of frustration and confusion, but not the sort of discussion a group of dedicated page editors and AGF-template-toting patrols bickering about something completely unnecessary. You break it, you bought it-- at least some good has to come from this all or it'll just mean more pain for everyone.

The purpose of the project? It was done once before about a year ago and it put some insight into deletion patrols. Some kind of science experiment? Okay, since desperately need some A7 adjustments in hopes of fielding less angry mail from other users. We can fix our half of the equation, at least. First big reason I'm here; it's not going anywhere. There have been a handful of admins that did a "test run" and moved to discussion or have talked it out more, but a good deal of the admins who printed up the first reports and humiliated a handful of editors have been mysteriously absent from talk since. It's extremely discouraging to know the persons most interested in the test results seemed to care more for a field trip than for good faith users on patrol, often without any attempt to clean up a mess they helped make. This all reminds me of a horrible shielded spy system placed on staff I ran into at a prior job, only this is far more evil since all comments are public and in a log somewhere and it's volunteer work! Let's... hope someone can think cough up a good idea now, at least. Again, my thanks to admins who have been around in discussion after tests or have hung around even after accidentally getting caught up in it since it's at least a different type of perspective.

Second big reason I mentioned at the top; users are openly saying they won't be doing patrols any more. Okay, it's not in bulk, but losing even 1 from this is unacceptable. We're not the guinea pigs of bored admins. Even if this is just "harmless testing" it's not acceptable to deliberately create article in extremely low quality that were still extremely questionable as possible CSD candidates. No one's opinion is absolute, but it was though no one was allowed to give a different opinion of the submitted text. Again, I do really appreciate those who stayed around and shared their thoughts and had some direct conversations with other users (polite ones!), but there were plenty that were less-than-polite as well. It's horribly embarrassing to people around, and I can see how the community overall wouldn't much like to read about how admins were seeming to toy with their brothers-in-arms. This aspect of trying to improve article quality and patrol/admin duties PR is quite a failure. Personally, I haven't learned a thing besides knowing to triple-check a user's contribution history to look for obvious hints of a test account, which might be so ridiculously obvious that the owning long-time admin even created the testersock's user page on the admin username. A lot of patrols would never see that, but many of us do as well, and even I'll admit to reading through talk pages of admins that had diverging opinions with other patrols to make sure I wasn't doing something horribly wrong in their opinion just because I really really never wanted to need to argue over certain hot-button issues for them if it were ever to come up.

What very seriously needs to be addressed for NPP and new contributing users alike that admins or community need to consider sooner rather than later:
 * Well-defined guidelines to make CSD A7s as avoidable as possible, via offering common and polite templates involving incubations, userfication, and/or use of newpage & construction, etc., so that as patrols we can get back to the thing in a bit or quick work on it to try to raise it to a low-end stub status to avoid deletion of what we might thing is savable.
 * WE DO NOT WANT TO BITE THEM and really want to save new articles, but it's extremely time consuming to do a rushjob legitimate save that includes some actual research and source-finding. ...So help, please. Since we should be sending a more personalized message anyway... well, to be blunt? It needs to be simplified enough so that basically anyone who patrols could have a way to easily mark a new page as "AGF New Page" to with a very polite message pointing out a few last details needed sent to the user to get them involved in avoiding deletion, but in a format that makes it as easily as smacking a PROD or CSD on something is currently. It would need another menu choice, basically.
 * No more use of patrols as guinea pigs, public or private. If you want data, put the article on your watchlist and note the history later and you wouldn't have to do a thing. I cannot say enough how demoralizing it is to see such an elitist attitude toward editors working for the same community goal. See some other ANI. Note: I'm at least trying to not en-or-discouraging anything done up to now, but when it gets disruptive it's too much either way.

What we do have so far, kind of, but barely related to WP:NEWT at most:
 * A proposed used of CSD-A10 that would help patrols harmlessly push aside hoax/BLP and some A7-9 with giant red banners and icons appearing everywhere.
 * What might actually end up being some templates at Requests for comment/userfication, with TW/HG support at least theoretically possible.
 * Some starter proposals on bite reduction.

This was not a very exciting way to spend 2 hours of my Sunday night, I'll admit. But it did need to be done. ♪ daTheisen(talk) 08:06, 16 November 2009 (UTC)