Wikipedia:Autoconfirmed article creation trial

In April 2011, a proposal was put forth to require autoconfirmed status in order to create articles. (Previously, no registration had been required; since 2005, an experiment was ongoing where registration was required.) In May 2011, the proposal was closed with a consensus that a trial should be implemented to test out this new idea. A second RfC was then opened to determine duration of the interventional phase of the trial, and it was decided that the interventional phase should run for 6 months, and then the changes should be reversed for a period of one month while their effects are discussed. The Wikimedia Foundation prevented the idea from going forward in 2011, but in June 2017 agreed to conduct and help implement ACTRIAL as a research experiment. In July 2017, after a post on his talk page, Jimmy Wales issued a personal statement regarding ACTRIAL supporting the use of limited trials to gather data to make Wikipedia policy decisions.

The discussion on the duration and terms of the assessment of the interventional phase was announced at the Village Pump and at Centralized Discussion, and was officially closed by independent admin summary 18 August 2011, in favour of the proposal with "... a clear consensus for a six-month trial, followed by a one-month period of discussion to determine the trial's effects. Given the wide support and uncontroversial nature ..."

ACTRIAL will serve as a trial of the original proposal that achieved community consensus. Information will be gathered during the trial period and reported to the English Wikipedia community at its conclusion, and the community will decide if any additional steps that should be taken based on the results. The trial began on 14 September 2017 and lasted for 6 months.

The autoconfirmed article creation trial (ACTRIAL) ended on 14 March 2018. The results of the research collected can be read on Meta Wiki. The community discussed the results and their impact on the English Wikipedia at Autoconfirmed article creation trial/Request for comment on permanent implementation, which closed on 18 April 2018 with support for making the changes permanent.

Basics
A trial is a study in which you change something in order to determine what the effect of that change is.

The intervention is what you change. In this case, the intervention is requiring autoconfirmed status for page creation. In this case, the trial consists of the interventional phase plus the non-interventional phase. During the non-interventional phase(s), autoconfirmed status will not be required for page creation.

The trial length is the length of the whole study: the length of the interventional phase (in this case, six months) plus the length of the non-interventional phase(s) (the time periods being used for comparison data).

For autoconfirmed status implementation
Currently MediaWiki's settings would only allow us to prevent non-autoconfirmed users from creating pages in any namespace, including their own userspace. (This is the  userright - see mw:Manual:User rights - which in MediaWiki all user groups have by default. On en.wp's MediaWiki configuration this is currently removed from anonymous users, with the result that everyone but anonymous users can create pages.) Possibly the desired result can be better achieved another way, but the most obvious solution is:
 * 1) A support for namespaces to user rights. That needs a modification to MediaWiki.
 * 2) For en.wikipedia.org the   right would be set to false for the content namespace(s) – for the anonymous ('*') and non-autoconfirmed ('user') user groups. That needs a modification to wikipedia's MediaWiki config, once 1. is done.
 * 3) Create MediaWiki:Noautocreatetext as a variant of MediaWiki:Nocreatetext shown to non-autoconfirmed users.  See  below.

For article creation flow implementation

 * 1) Update 2011 landing page to be simplified and work with current MediaWiki code.
 * ✅: New user landing page (WP:LANDING)

For trial data

 * Set up data pipeline to collect information about page creations

Updates to Wikipedia help pages and guidelines
When the change is made, a lot of Wikipedia's help pages and guidelines will be outdated. We should make a list of the ones that will need to be changed (at both ends of the trial). WhatamIdoing (talk) 19:56, 12 August 2011 (UTC)


 * 1) Your first article—point #2, "You can create a new article once you have registered an account..." ✅
 * 2) Starting an article—in the lead, "Articles may only be created by registered users..." ✅
 * 3) User access levels—"may immediately create pages in any namespace..." ✅
 * 4) User access levels—add creating pages to the list of restricted activities ✅
 * 5) FAQ ✅
 * 6) Post a notice on MediaWiki:Watchlist-details. Requested. ❌ (removed as requested)

Updates to Article Wizard
Article wizard/Ready for submission will need to be changed to only show the second option (create article in main namespace) to autoconfirmed users and only the first option (create article in draft namespace) to non-autoconfirmed users.

Statistics
In order to measure the effect the intervention has had, various statistics should be collected before, during, and after the trial. This section is a place to request the collection of well-defined statistics which you think will be useful in determining whether the intervention affects Wikipedia. Metrics to be measured should include: new users registered and retained, quality of new articles created, new page patrol workload, deletion process workload, etc.

The Community Tech team at the Wikimedia Foundation requested in July 2017 to receive funding to hire a data analyst contractor that will be devoted to this project. The Foundation will provide an update on funding by 15 August 2017.

Results and followup
On 14 March 2018, after 6 months, the trial ended. The results of the research can be found at meta:Research:Autoconfirmed article creation trial and Autoconfirmed article creation trial/Post-trial Research Report. Three major themes of the report were that:
 * 1) New user activity and retention is largely unaffected
 * 2) Creation of pages by new users shifted from article space to draft space
 * 3) Fewer low-quality and inappropriate pages have been created in article space

The independent consultant's research generally showed that the concerns (hypotheses) that were raised before the trial about the restrictions having a negative impact on retention of new editors did not occur, the trial and the research conducted received generally positive feedback.

The community held an request for comment at Autoconfirmed article creation trial/Request for comment on permanent implementation. The RfC was closed on 18 April 2018 with the community being in favour of requiring autoconfirmed or confirmed status, to directly create a new article. The discussion had 233 participants, and closed with 207 editors (88.8% of those participating) supporting the proposal, and 26 editors opposing.