User:WereSpielChequers/Newpage proposal

This is a proposal I'm working on to make Newpage patrol asynchronous in the other direction, shifting from a system that makes it easy to create pages but a community that is unwelcoming and gets rid of most of those pages to the reverse. This is currently in my userspace but collaborators are welcome. Though if you disagree with the fundamental idea I'd prefer that you do so on the talkpage and keep this page for working this up into a proposal.

Newpage patrol is currently something of a trainwreck with hundreds of new editors every day contributing articles that immediately and often rather officiously get spiked. The Software makes it quite easy to create a new article, unlike most existing articles there is no html or other formatting required. Wikipedia has a complex set of policies that few newbies and not all new page patrollers either fully comprehend or even agree with.

There have been various proposals to amend the system such as restricting who can create articles (which undermine the strategy of Openness), and by making it easier to delete articles, such as by making unsourced a deletion criteria, which risks being a further step in moving from a policy of wp:verifiable to a policy of wp:verified.

We already have templates such as fact for statements sufficiently contentious that they need to be sourced, and a BLP policy that encourages us to simply remove unsourced contentious content about living people. I think there is a real risk that requiring a source for all new articles would be a further step towards requiring a source for all new edits or all new facts, and that those who would support such a policy change would see this as making "revert unsourced" a legitimate edit.

One of the problems of our article creation process is its asynchronous nature, with some patrollers and even admins working to an unwritten and much stricter policy than the consensus based one that some article creators follow. I'm happy to have the process be asynchronous, but I'd rather tip the balance the other way, with the software difficult and the community helpful, rather than the reverse.

I'd like to see an article creation process whereby:

If you need to pause after a sentence or two it saves a draft in your account that only you can see. Hopefully this will prevent many of the A1 and A3 tags. That could be extended to an option "ask for human help" and the person who volunteered to help would be able to view and edit the draft.

The software asks you what sort of article it is, and uses that to suggest categories that you might use for your article.

If you create an article title in all caps or a persons name with the surname all in lower case it would be nice if the process queried that with you and suggested an alternative.

If you draft an article in a language other than the one of that wiki, it would be great if the article creation screen recognised that and said in the language you are writing in "this is the Livonian Wikipedia and you seem to be writing in Navaho. Do you want to put this in the Navaho Wikipedia or are you going to translate this?"

A similar user friendly process could transwiki the draft and editor to Wikinews or wiktionary.

Where it could get really whizzy would be in sourcing. I'd be happy with a screen prompt in the article creation process that said, "You don't seem to have a source in this new article, please tell us where you got this information from [    ]" ideally with sufficient code behind to politely reject facebook, Linkedin etc if they are offered as a source. Such a prompt would be a good step towards a newpage patrol system that was asynchronous the other way, with newpage patrol being more about correcting categories and fixing newbie errors and generally helping article creators navigate an article creation process that was stricter than the article creation policy.

Another area could be establishing notability, with the screen asking questions such as what sort of article it was, and when you click band prompting you for each of the possible reasons for a band to be notable.