Wikipedia talk:WikiProject User warnings/Testing

where
I would like to write additional proposed iterations to all the templates under test--I think I can shorten them substantially without loss of key significance. (I'm going on the principle that for anything that might possibly be unpleasant, people tend to read only the first few words. The observational evidence that convinced me of this: people getting parking tickets.)

Where should I put them? I'd like to start with Uw-unsor1-rand as a simple example. I'd like to get them looked t along with the others before the examples get cast in stone.

Is there a better place than this for general discussion?  DGG ( talk ) 05:10, 17 October 2011 (UTC)


 * Here. --Kudpung กุดผึ้ง (talk) 05:49, 17 October 2011 (UTC)


 * Actually just here is fine if we're talking about en-wp templates. That keeps us from crossing the streams with other projects. ;) As for where to draft the templates, you could either drop them here or on the talk pages of any individual templates. Just for scheduling sake, I was hoping to start the test for the 9 listed as "in progress) today, but I can hold off for 24 hours if you have some feedback DGG. Steven Walling (WMF) &bull;  talk   17:29, 17 October 2011 (UTC)

Deletion notifications in Twinkle
Hi newly formed task force!

As you might've noticed on the project page, I had the idea to test deletion notifications sent by Twinkle. While they don't technically fall under the rubric of user warnings, they do for all intents and purposes function like them, because they resemble warnings in virtually every way (same image, same impersonal and reproaching tone). I drafted alternatives to PROD, AfD, and some of the more commonly-used CSDs here. I'd love to...


 * 1) Get feedback on the idea of testing deletion notices as part of this project
 * 2) Get feedback on my more personalized/encouraging redesigns
 * 3) Get your ideas about other possible variants of these templates to test (these messages are more semantically sophisticated than warnings, so there are more variables we could change)

If there are Twinklers among you, I'd especially appreciate hearing what you think about this, both from the technical and social/community side. Maryana (WMF) (talk) 19:55, 17 October 2011 (UTC)
 * yes, Twinkle is used so much, that the work needs to be coordinated. I think there is general agreement to hace it match, so it might be better to transform all this to a coordinated project.  DGG ( talk ) 23:38, 19 October 2011 (UTC)
 * With an eye towards maybe doing a Twinkle test, we generated a random sample to find what the most common Twinkle warnings are. Steven Walling (WMF) &bull; talk   01:48, 21 October 2011 (UTC)
 * Well, I assume I'm a twinkler :) And I wouldn't object to a redesign of the templates if the outcome is more positive than negative. Anyway, you might want to look into the di-no license-notice template used for notification of di-no license and similar templates for deletable files (twinkle module semi-speedy deletion) → Aza Toth 12:32, 21 October 2011 (UTC)


 * The head Twinkler speaks! :)


 * Yeah, I don't believe those di- and db- notices were included in that list of templates Jonathan and Stu were looking for, but I saw a ton of them on the talk pages of current highly active newbies, so they're definitely important. We'll work up some alternate versions and put them up on the wiki for scrutiny/feedback.


 * Anyway, thanks for chiming in on this, and looking forward to running some cool Twinkle tests :) Maryana (WMF) (talk) 17:49, 21 October 2011 (UTC)

Heads up that we've proposed starting a test on WT:TW. Please comment there etc! Steven Walling (WMF) &bull; talk   23:49, 1 November 2011 (UTC)

Suggestions
I've rewritten each pair to show proposed improvements, when possible using strikeout for omissions and underline for additions, in the traditional way -- (not italics, to avoid confusion with the actual markup.)

Principles:
 * 1) shorter is better, especially in using the minimum number of words to give the idea.
 * 2) It is not just shorter but clearer to mention only the main possibilities. Notices are not the place to give a detailed presentation of rules and every possible alternative
 * 3) It is unnecessary to say the obvious, such as telling people this is Wikipedia.
 * 4) Politeness is good, but too much emphasis on routine polite expressions when saying basically negative things tends to sound like "You're fired. Have a great day." and is perceived as condescending
 * 5) If one wants to sound personal, it's better to send an impromptu message. And it only sounds [personal if it indicates knowledge of what the article and edit actually was, and is not enclosed in a box which inevitably like a form, no matter what is inside it.  It is impossible to counterfeit informality.
 * 6) As an exception to the priciple of brevity,  I would add to templates the phrase If you have any questions, just  ask on my talk page. or If you want some help, just  ask on my talk page. -- possibly as a   paragraph with the signature. Assume one or the other added to the examples below.

Uw-test1-rand
Hi! Your test worked, and has now been  removed. To experiment, use the sandbox. To learn more  about contributing, see the Welcome page.

Uw-delete1-rand
It might not have been your intention, but your recent edit removed content without explaining why. If this was a mistake, don't worry; the content has been restored. Take a look at the welcome page to learn more about contributing, and, if you want to experiment, please use the sandbox.

Uw-npov1-rand
Hello and welcome to Wikipedia. One of our core policies is that articles must be written from a neutral point of view. Your recent edit seemed to less than neutral to me, so I removed it for now. If you think otherwise, please explain on the article's talk page.

Uw-unsor1-rand
Welcome to Wikipedia! I noticed you made a change to an article, but didn’t provide a source for your edit. I’ve removed it for now, but if you can include a citation to a reliable source and re-add it, please do so!

Uw-error1-rand
Hello and welcome to Wikipedia! Your recent edit appears to have added incorrect information, so I removed it for now. If you believe the information that you added was correct, please cite reliable references or sources, or discuss it on the article talk page.

uw-blank1-rand
Welcome to Wikipedia. It may not have been your intention, but your recent edit removed the entire contents of an article. If this was a mistake, don't worry; the content has been restored. If there is a problem with the article, please discuss it on the article's talk page. If you think the article should be removed entirely, see the instructions for requesting this.

Uw-spam1-rand
Welcome to Wikipedia. Although everyone is welcome to contribute, an external link you added seems inappropriate according to our guidelines, and has been removed. Wikipedia is an encyclopedia, not a web directory, so we try to have articles link to only a few key sites.

Uw-bio1-rand
Hello and welcome to Wikipedia! I notice that you made an edit to a biography of a living person, but didn’t support your changes with a citation to a reliable source. We are very careful how we treat people who may be harmed by what we say, so please help us keep such articles accurate.


 * comment: this is actually a little more strict than the actual policy, which is  what was in the original notice, "Whenever you add possibly controversial statements about a living person to an article or any other Wikipedia page, you must include proper sources. " But I think it a very good idea to give simple safe advice on this.

uw-attack1-rand
Hello, and welcome to Wikipedia! I notice you made a comment that seemed less than civil, so I removed it. Wikipedia needs people like us to collaborate, so it’s one of our core principles to interact with one another in a polite and respectful manner, and to comment on the contributions, not the contributors.

Proposed deletion notify-rand
The article whatever has been proposed for deletion. The notice added to the article should explain why. While all contributions to Wikipedia are appreciated, content or articles may be deleted for any of several reasons.

To stop the deletion, remove the notice from the article, and explain why in your edit summary and  the article's talk page. Try to improve the article to address the issues; if  not improved, the article may be listed for a community consensus.

AfD-notice-rand
A discussion has been started whether the article whatever is suitable for inclusion in Wikipedia. The article will be discussed at Wikipedia:Articles for deletion until a consensus is reached, and anyone is welcome to comment. The discussion focuses not on opinion, but on good quality evidence that the article meets  our policies and guidelines.

You may edit the article during the discussion, especially to address the concerns raised, but please do not remove the article-for-deletion template from the top of the article.

 DGG ( talk ) 00:58, 20 October 2011 (UTC)

The suitability for inclusion of   whatever is now being  discussed at   Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/ and the community  will  make a decision. Anyone may join the discussion,  but  comments should focus on good quality evidence  that the article meets  our policies and guidelines, and not  on  opinion. The article may continue to  be edited, especially to  address the concerns raised, but  the article-for-deletion template should not  be removed.
 * Possible Alternative

I concur with  all  DGG's  other suggestions. --Kudpung กุดผึ้ง (talk) 04:17, 20 October 2011 (UTC)


 * I agree that the passive voice in my notice isn't good, But you too have a passive, tho its better than mine, -- I'm trying to find an active form that doesn't sound hostile. "I think that your article may not be suitable for inclusion" doesn't sound right. Or perhaps "I'm not sure the community will think your article .... "?  DGG ( talk ) 04:45, 21 October 2011 (UTC)


 * I absolutely agree with the principle that shorter is better, because people simply don't read very long warnings. In that light, I think these suggestions are eminently superior to the current default versions used. I also think the point about false politeness should be kept in mind. God forbid we should add "Have a nice day" to a warning that comes after a revert.


 * However, the key aspect that your suggestions lack is personalization: a simple explanation of who you are, that Wikipedia is edited by other people, and that you are able to be contacted. This is an absolutely key factor which the first test results strongly suggested had the positive effects of A) continuing to discourage incorrigible vandals B) decreasing the amount of retaliatory vandalism at the reverting editor C) increasing the amount of genuine questions from people getting reverted.


 * Without language signaling that the message comes from a human being and not an automated system, the test results clearly suggested that people do not pay as much attention to a warning. To be frank: I think we have to talk to other editors like human beings if we want to communicate more effectively. Unfortunately the scale of work that is going on here means that we can't realistically write every vandal a message from scratch explaining things. But we can do a better job of acknowledging something that most readers do not know: that Wikipedia is edited by people like them, people who are available to have a reasonable conversation explaining things if they're motivated to do so, and people who have to do the hard work of cleaning up after their mess. Anyway, what our data has unequivocally showed was that, if you directly invite people to talk with you about their edits, more of them will, and in good faith.


 * Anyway, to cut a long story short: do you want to set up an A/B test with your versions? Let's do it! It's my hunch that without personalization even shorter warnings won't be more effective at warning vandals and inviting good faith editors to do better. But we won't know for sure until we see the data. :) Steven Walling (WMF) &bull; talk   23:26, 20 October 2011 (UTC)


 * I liked your approach at first, and tried working with the personalized versions also, to present a pair of parallel personalized/non-personalized versions, but I couldn't get them short enough, & therefore abandoned personalization in order to get brevity. Reading over my attempts and your's is what convinced me that there is no way of being personal in a form. Myself, if I'm using Twinkle (which I almost always do), when I think it likely to result in understanding, I add a personal,  not a personalized notice, explaining the specific problem.  I have standard phrases I incorporate, but I can't see a way of doing it within a form, If you want to convey you're a person, what you send has to look like it's not being sent by a machine. Since these notices are in fact being placed mechanically, they might as well be efficient.  Every personalized wording I have ever encountered in the RW strikes me as insincere or feeble.  I've tried using form notices and then modifying them, and I've seen other NP Patrollers and admins do this also,  but  since the basic format is mechanical, the results still look mechanical,


 * But I agree with what I think you're saying, that the key thing is not what we write, but the need to start an actual dialog. I have found no phrases that really encourage it. What does often encourage it, I've found by trial,  is adding the specific problem--the criteria that seem to work is to first be  specific enough to show you have actually read the article, & second to make concrete  targeted suggestions for improvement--if the article should be  e abandoned, I make sure the needed changes are sufficiently detailed to make it clear it's unlikely that they can be met.  There's no brief way of doing that.


 * Not only must we experiment, but I think we should continually experiment--that perhaps there should always be more than one version with continuous measurement.


 * Of course, I'd like to set up a trial, if they strike you as ready for it.    DGG ( talk ) 04:45, 21 October 2011 (UTC)


 * Yeah, I definitely think they're test-ready. Our next step is to pick a canonical name for the set and put them into templates, along with the other errata required. We should also set a date for when we want to start the test. Steven Walling (WMF) &bull; talk   18:10, 21 October 2011 (UTC)

Hello (usename). The community is now discussing the suitability for inclusion of (whatever)  at Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/ and will make a decision. You are welcome to join the discussion, but comments should focus on good quality evidence that the article meets our policies and guidelines, and not on opinion. You may continue to edit the article, especially to address the concerns raised, but the article-for-deletion template should not be removed. Don't hesitate to  ask  me for further information. ~
 * another alternative

Kudpung กุดผึ้ง (talk) 13:16, 21 October 2011 (UTC)


 * I think this is better than what I had, and I think it should be substituted.  DGG ( talk ) 02:25, 22 October 2011 (UTC)

Okay, so Maryana and I have put up the short versions you suggested for the warnings, as well as a short version of the general level 1 warning:

Preparing a test of these suggestions

 * 1) uw-warn1-short
 * 2) uw-test1-short
 * 3) uw-delete1-short
 * 4) uw-npov1-short
 * 5) uw-unsor1-short
 * 6) uw-error1-short
 * 7) uw-blank1-short
 * 8) uw-spam1-short
 * 9) uw-bio1-short
 * 10) uw-attack1-short

DGG, we were thinking of starting a test with these ones versus the default on the 19th – the current test running will have been going a month on the 18th. Sound good? Steven Walling (WMF) &bull; talk   01:52, 4 November 2011 (UTC)


 * I also just realized that there's no test running currently on the Huggle/warn-1 template, so we could start a test of a template written in your style next week actually. Steven Walling (WMF) &bull; talk   21:55, 4 November 2011 (UTC)


 * Great. Thanks.  DGG ( talk ) 01:10, 5 November 2011 (UTC)

Okay, I closed down the previous test a little bit ago, and all we have to do is the template scut work before we can start a new test with the short versions. Steven Walling (WMF) &bull; talk   01:33, 19 November 2011 (UTC)
 * Right. But I'm wary of doing the changes myself--I' e recently been messing  up things  like this.   DGG ( talk ) 00:26, 21 November 2011 (UTC)
 * No worries. I planned on hitting the switch if that's okay. Steven Walling (WMF) &bull; talk   00:28, 21 November 2011 (UTC)

Child friendly: suggestions
I'm not sure if this is the right  place to  make this suggestion  but  here goes: Due to  recent issues over the  last   3 weeks, I've been doing  some very intensive page patrolling  (again). There appears to be an increase in  totally  unacceptable pages from  minors, and this may  be due to  the start  of the new semester and access to  schools' free use of the Internet. Not all  these pages constitute blatant  vandalism,  but  are often due to an obvious lack  of comprehension  that  Wikipedia is not  a social  networking  site for juniors. Bearing in  mind the current efforts  to  reword our templates, develop a new landing  page for new users, and to  create a brand new control  panel  for patrollers, I  think  we should now be considering  a set of child friendly set of templates. Although many  of the vandals will  never contribute seriously  to  the encyclopedia, there is a good chance that  some will  in  the future. These are not drafts  for  templates, but  they  are  examples  on  the lines of what  I  envisage:

''Hi (username), and welcome to  Wikipedia. I noticed the page you made at  (pagename) wasn't  suitable for an encyclopedia, and it will  shortly  be deleted (if it  hasn't  been already). Do consider writing  a decent  article that  belongs here,  but  remember that  Wikipedia is not  SpaceBook, MyFace, a blog, or a forum so  don't  waste your time writing  about  yourself or your friends, or some game that  was made up  in  the schoolyard. It's probably best  to  write a good article in  your Sandbox and get  another editor  to  check  it for you. Please read Advice for younger editors, and if you need any  help, you  can always  drop  a note on  my  talk  page''  ~
 * On new page creation

''Hi (username), and welcome to  Wikipedia. I noticed that the edit you  made at  (pagename) wasn't  suitable for an encyclopedia article, and it  has been removed. By all  means make truly appropriate edits  but  do remember that  Wikipedia is a very serious place. If you  want  to  make joke edits,  it's probably  best  to  make them  on another website where they  won't  do  any  harm. Please read Advice for younger editors, and if you need any  help, you  can always  drop  a note on  my  talk  page''  ~
 * On vandalism

Kudpung กุดผึ้ง (talk) 06:25, 20 October 2011 (UTC)


 * I tend to agree with SchuminWeb on this: the kinds of younger contributors who become regular contributors are exceptionally bright and would probably feel put off if they got this "kid friendly" template. That's the problem with making anything "kid-friendly" – you automatically make it uncool :)


 * But I do really like the idea of developing a targeted template like this! As we're going through and analyzing our data from the last test, we're also seeing a lot of vandalism and test edits from shared educational IPs. Since we mostly know which IPs those are (we have a list from the Summer of Research), we could develop a set of templates to use specifically for them. I'll have to check on the mechanics of this, but I bet we could get Huggle to read the IP and deliver a different message to anything in the schools list.


 * And it doesn't just have to be schools – we could deliver different messages to companies and all other shared IPs. Their talk pages are always full of warnings that are totally senseless, as the person who vandalized is almost certainly never going to read those messages, and the big shared IPs don't really get blocked. I think we need some really bold ideas for how to deal with this... including possibly even dividing them into two groups for A/B testing: warning and no warning. What if instead of a warning, we delivered a tip about editing or a suggested article for improvement? Crazy thought, I know :) Maryana (WMF) (talk) 15:09, 20 October 2011 (UTC)


 * Let's not run  away  with  the notion that  those who  are addressed by  the two examples I  posited are the kinds of younger contributors who  are exceptionally  bright. Any editor or admin  who  has spent  many  hours on  the factory  floor tagging  and deleting  articles knows from  instinct who  the bright  and innocent  ones are. Anyone who  has worked as a grade school/lower secondary  teacher or education  professor knows it too. We  have to  rely  on  good schooling  of the NPPers (far  too  many  of whom  are also  children and treat  it as a game) and good judgement  of the admins. Let  us not  forget  either that  a significant  number of young new editors are not  native English  speakers. We  don't  need stats to  prove any of this, a quick look  in  my  CSD and deletion  logs would provide all  the proof we need, and a look  at  their user pages will  say  the rest. I'm  really  talking  about  the new mainspace creation with Hi, I'm Annie and I  have a super doggy  called Bobbles and I  go  to  St Jon's primary  round the corner but  my  mummy  won't  let  me take the doggy to  skewel and '--' (because I can't  tell  you  here what  they  write! Kudpung กุดผึ้ง (talk) 15:34, 20 October 2011 (UTC)


 * Oh, I see what you mean. Well, honestly, I'm pretty skeptical about the power of any templated warning to keep that kind of thing from happening again and again. I'm more interested in messages that are geared toward easing the blow for good-faith editors who get caught in the cross-fire (such as those who are not native English speakers, as you mentioned). Also, I have a suspicion that the broken window theory is in effect here – kids (and adults) open up a shared IP talk page covered in warnings and think it's okay and normal to vandalize Wikipedia. But that's a theory that we'd need to test. Maryana (WMF) (talk) 16:09, 20 October 2011 (UTC)


 * There's no way  of testing  theories like that -  unless you  want  to  wait  4 - 6  years and see if today's vandals come back when they've graduated from  high  school. I  prefer the other broken window theory: the ones where young  hooligans throw rocks at  old ladies' living  room  window, and the the ones where some nice kids were playing  with  a ball  outside and ...  Kudpung กุดผึ้ง (talk) 16:31, 20 October 2011 (UTC)


 * Ah, but we could test this... if we set up an A/B test on shared IPs, with one group receiving only the standard set of warnings and another group receiving only friendly messages with invitations to register, we could see how many new accounts are created from those IPs, and what proportion of those newly-registered editors are good-faith contributors or not. Just because nobody's ever done it before doesn't mean it can't be done!


 * It's important to keep in mind that if we let a test like that run even for just a month on English Wikipedia, we'd collect thousands of instances, which would definitely be statistically significant for proving whether there was any effect. And even if that effect is small, if we find that we can use it to improve the new user experience for even a tiny fraction of the huge volume of new people making edits every day and guide them toward becoming Wikipedians, the editor decline problem would be solved. Maryana (WMF) (talk) 18:14, 20 October 2011 (UTC)


 * With the greatest  of respect Maryana, I think  we're talking  past  each other (probably  my  fault for having  mentioned schools in  the first  place).    I've been talking  all  along  about  registered accounts -  not  IPs. While the day-to-day  vandalism of adding  a few silly  words to  an existing  article is done mainly  by  IPs (and that's fairly successfully  dealt  with  by  the Hugglers), there is nothing  to  stop  kids from  creating  a user account from  their school  machines -  and we'll never find out  what  their IP number is. It's very  easy  to  make an account, put  10 self awarded barnstars and WikiLoves on your talk  page, and in  4 days you're set to  go. I've deleted about  five such  'articles' while we've been talking.  Kudpung กุดผึ้ง (talk) 19:18, 20 October 2011 (UTC)
 * Correction: I still  have WP:ACTRIAL on  my  mind - anyone who  makes an account can of course  immediately  post  a new article to  mainspace.  BTW: Schumin  doesn't  agree with  me either, but  I  would assume from  his CV that  he was one of the bright  kids.  This is the problem  we're up aganst: on  the one hand we're being  accused of not  being  friendly  enough  to  the children who  are all assumed to  become the Wikipedians of tomorrow, and on  the other hand we have people telling  us we should stick to  our verbose and bitey  templates. Those of us who  take Wikipedia  development  seriously also  probably  bright  kids. I  was, and by  the time I  was 12  I  was reading  Dostoyevsky, but  I  have worked with  children in  a multicultural  environment for 40 years, so  I'm  happy  to  stand accused of speaking  from  experience :)  Kudpung กุดผึ้ง (talk) 09:36, 21 October 2011 (UTC)


 * Regardless of whether we test a youth-specific template... I actually don't think all the kid editors are the future Wikipedians of tomorrow. Or any new editors. The truth is out of the thousands of times tools like Huggle and Twinkle revert and warn editors, it's usually accurate and those people are never going to come back. The number of editors who go on to make hundreds or thousands of edits as registered users is vanishingly small. But the problem is that we don't know which editors are going to become those star Wikipedians of the future. We're looking for a needle in the haystack every day on Wikipedia as RecentChanges rolls by, and however hard it may be, we have to try and keep it in mind that assume good faith is a practical policy for finding those hidden gems, not idealism or ignorance about the fact that most schoolkids making joke edits are not going to stay and be productive. Steven Walling (WMF) &bull; talk   18:05, 21 October 2011 (UTC)
 * I can pretty much confirm what Kudpung is saying above, and I too think most kids aren't the types to be editing here (I'm 21 myself, and I can safely tell you that if most Americans my age started editing it would be a disaster. I'm one of the bright kids, I read the Lord of the Rings trilogy in 4 days when I was 13 and read Atlas Shrugged at 16; no one else around me could even begin to catch up with me in speed or comprehension.).  The problem, as I see it, is that the types of people who frequent this site (and design our warning templates) are more given to hifalutin language which many/most high school students don't really get.  While this works among our populace (indeed, I enjoy the opportunity to give a brief sesquipadelian exegesis that this site affords me), it goes right over the heads of middle and high school children.  I think that warning kids in language they can understand will actually be helpful; it will get the message across to them without sounding pompous or official (which we all know kids that age hate).  If nothing else, I think it stands a better chance of getting their attention; with accounts that are obviously high-school kids, for example, I don't even bother leaving them a  because I know most people even my age don't have the attention span to learn even the basics of copyright law and our policies regarding it.  Something geared to them will at the very least help prevent damage, and at best might just reel in an editor or two who wouldn't have been inclined to participate had they received a template written in language incomprehensible to them. The Blade of the Northern Lights  ( 話して下さい ) 18:39, 21 October 2011 (UTC)


 * A thought occurs to me after reading this: how would these kiddie templates work with ClueBot, if at all? Since ClueBot catches much of the obvious vandalism (which is the kind that would require a "kiddie" tag most often), and it would presumably not be able to predict an age, it would use the default template, and these shiny new ones would have that much less of an effect.  Not really a deal-breaker in terms of the worth of these new tags, but it's something to consider, perhaps.  As far as my own opinion of them goes, I think the ones we have now are pretty good, and any "dumbing down" would sound patronizing to a reasonable person, which seems to be the kind we're trying to retain.  Also, Blade, with respect, I'm only a year older than you are, and I think you're selling us young'uns short.  It seems to me that there are a lot of people around our age, or even younger, from which Wikipedia would benefit. My opinion, for whatever it's worth. Writ Keeper (talk) 20:28, 21 October 2011 (UTC)

Hey Blade of the Northern Lights and Writ Keeper, thanks for your comments. You should add yourselves to the members list of this project if you're interested in participating more actively in these tests! This includes giving feedback on existing ideas and proposing new template tests entirely.

And, as a thematic aside, I'd like to confess that I was an utterly unpromising child and couldn't read at all till I was 6. But now, at the ripe old age of 27, I'm fluent in 3 languages and just wrote my first template in Portuguese. So I guess I'm doing okay :) Maryana (WMF) (talk) 21:12, 21 October 2011 (UTC)
 * I think I may have to do just that. And Writ Keeper, perhaps I'm jaded from my long experience on NPP and my experience in the Connecticut Community College system (I tutor basic English there) and SCSU; there certainly are some like us, but a lot who write pages like Kudpung describes above as well.  This page for me has represented the epitome of completely worthless pages created by bored students since I came across it (though as a bored student, I used the time to expand this, so it's not entirely negative). The Blade of the Northern Lights  ( 話して下さい ) 21:37, 21 October 2011 (UTC)


 * I think the key problem with the schoolchildren in unsophistication and immaturity about the internet in general, and when I see a particularly naïve new contributor, I try to leave a personal message, based on advice to young contributors--what I say depends upon my guess at the level of comprehension. Most of them simply do not understand we are not Facebook--they do not understand the risks involved and it's that part which worries me.  We can deal with deliberate vandalism well enough; we can deal with unsatisfactory articles. But we need to deal with the people. As Kudpung says, most NNPatrollers do not themselves have sufficient  understanding to do this properly, and that's a real problem. Possibly we can devise an edit filter--aimed at getting these people on a list where one of us who has worked as a teacher or knows as a parent or just understands from their recollection of their own earlier years, can explain things to them.   DGG ( talk ) 02:39, 22 October 2011 (UTC)


 * This is a perfect example of of the kind  of user that  is not  malicious, and not  really  vandalising, but  who  I  have had to  block  today. The templates are, IMHO, to  brutal: Lewis Grover. The creator is 10 years old. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Kudpung (talk • contribs)


 * I disagree about the potential of child editors. I've personally known people as young as 11 who were excellent editors, and in one or two cases very adequate administrators at about that age. Most of them wouldn't want their ages disclosed here, so I cannot give examples. I also encounter people who turn out, once we've exchanges a few messages, to be considerably younger than I had thought they'd be. In other contexts, I've known many people that age who had the sort of serious interest in hobbies that would have been transferable to WP had it existed at the time.   I've certainly known some who even at that age were more competent writers than 90% of our contributors. (myself, I think I would have been over-confident and over-aggressive.)
 * Certainly I've seen a lot of schoolboy vandalism, on and off WP. But the sort of thing they do on WP is relatively easy to deal with, much easier than spray paint in the RW. When I encounter it at speedy, if I do not have time I just downgrade the speedy reason to deny the satisfaction of see it called vandalism, and delete. If I do have time, I leave a personal message. I've almost never n seen the case where a personal message does not stop even the worst such vandalism. I will always leave a personal message if I see any talk p. where a young person declares their age, vandal or good contributor,  but it will focus on internet safety, not WP. By experiment, it MUST be a personal message, not any thing that could possibly be written by a computer. Schoolkids learn at an early age to ignore that.   DGG ( talk ) 20:45, 4 November 2011 (UTC)

Proposal: shared IP test
One issue we're running into when looking at the data from our Huggle experiments (we're currently processing data from our second Huggle test) is shared IPs. The trouble is twofold:


 * 1) It’s hard to measure the quality of editors (good-faith or not) who are using these addresses, because we don’t clearly know when it’s one person or many.
 * 2) It’s hard to measure the effect that our template is having, given that nearly all shared IP talk pages have so many other warnings on them. Take a look at some of these pages:
 * User_talk:114.141.89.3
 * User_talk:116.255.25.57
 * User_talk:12.10.219.38

They’re pretty gruesome – and it’s problematic for another reason...

Every day, hundreds of thousands of people open up Wikipedia at work, coffee shops, libraries, schools, and wifi hotspots all around the world. They’re not logged in, because most of them are just readers who probably don’t even know that they can register an account. That means every day, someone is noticing the big yellow bar that tells them they have new messages, clicking it out of curiosity, and opening a mile-long page full of angry warnings that probably weren’t meant for them. And that’s likely to be their first and only experience with the community. It’s certainly happened to me, and I’m betting it’s happened to many of you, too. Of course, we know those warnings aren’t intended for us – but the other 99% of people in the world don’t.

I’d like to propose a test to see if this phenomenon is actually having a negative impact that we can change. Here's how I think we can do it:


 * 1) Divide the full list of shared IPs on English Wikipedia in half. One half will be the control, and the other half the test group.
 * 2) For every talk page in the test group, we’ll set up an archival system that vigorously (i.e., hourly) archives old warnings sent to users of that IP. This will increase the likelihood that whoever reads the message will actually be the person making the edit that triggered it.
 * 3) We’ll be running our level one Huggle tests in the process, so some of those warnings will be our new more personalized versions, and some will be the defaults.

We’ll need to run this test a little longer – about a month. Afterwards, we can check to see:


 * How many registered editors emerged from each of the two groups, if any
 * What the quality of those editors is (good-faith or vandal/spammer)
 * Which templates were more likely to produce new registered editors who are not vandals or spammers

What do you think? Maryana (WMF) (talk) 21:20, 21 October 2011 (UTC)


 * When you say "hourly," do you mean once every hour, or as edits become an hour old, or if the page hasn't seen any activity for an hour? It seems to me the last would be the best. Beyond that, it seems like a good idea to me. Writ Keeper (talk) 13:35, 24 October 2011 (UTC)
 * Hmm, that's a good point. My thought was to keep it simple and just set up MiszaBot III to archive hourly. Is it possible to use an existing bot to archive after an hour of no activity on a talk page? Anybody know? If not, I'll investigate... Maryana (WMF) (talk) 16:20, 24 October 2011 (UTC)

Welcome template testing?
This topic is somewhat outside the scope of this project, but I assume the ultimate goal of all of this is to try to generate productive editors for the encyclopedia. Assuming that's true, I reflected on my initial experience with WP and tried to recall what it was that made me take up editing. In my case, I remember being impressed that I was welcomed to WP, and I then had some pleasant and stimulating interactions with Wikipedians. I now know that I simply received a standard welcome template, but I do recall it being a key part in drawing me into the community. I've since seen that there are a variety of welcome templates, including several that are designed for IPs. So, I am curious whether there has been any thought given to testing the welcome templates to see if any of the variations are more effective at drawing in new editors.-- Kubigula (talk) 04:29, 26 October 2011 (UTC)
 * Like you, in my  naïvety I  believed that  the welcome I  received years ago  was genuine, but  it  did offer some encouragement. I really believed it  to  have come from  soemone 'high up' who  had really  appreciated all  my  work  in a particular area. welcome templates a re much  misused, many  newbies think  it  is cool  to  rack up  their edit  count  by trawling  through new users and  adding  welcomes even to  those who  have only  made one or two  very  minor edits on  the fly. Like barnstars that  are now being  awarded for a first  edit, they  are losing  their significance. Perhaps there is an argument  for a short,  standard welcome that  is automatically  applied to  the talk  pages of newly  registered accounts, but  which  does not  thank  them  for all  their passionate hard work. --Kudpung กุดผึ้ง (talk) 07:53, 26 October 2011 (UTC)
 * Yes, we should definitely do a welcome messages test! What we should figure out first, though, is:
 * Who do we want to test on, registered editors, IPs, or both?
 * What do we want to measure? If we're dealing with registered editors, then retention. If we're dealing with IPs, though, then perhaps we should look instead at how many users go on to register an account from that address (that's not used for spam/vandalism)? Retention is tricky to measure with IPs, since so many of them are dynamic.
 * What variables do we want to focus on? Welcomes vary much more widely in content than warnings, but almost all of the commonly-used ones include tons and tons of links to policy, guidelines, task suggestions, help spaces... all a bit overwhelming for newbies, I'd guess. My first thought would be to test a very short, informal welcome (in the style of our personalized warnings, emphasizing that it's coming from a real person and not "Wikipedia") stripped of all but the very basic links (perhaps just a link to welcomer's user talk for registered editors and a strong recommendation to sign up for an account for IPs?) against the standard and one of the huge graphical juggernauts like  . This would show whether people respond more to welomes that focus on informality/one-on-one connection, simple teaching/instruction, or fancy bells-and-whistles graphics.
 * How can we get a big enough sample? I'm not sure that a bot that auto-welcomes anyone who registers is the way to go; in fact, I seem to recall that the community was resistant to the idea the couple of times it was proposed. One way to go about this would be to get in touch with the current top welcomers (we generated that list over the summer and could rerun the query pretty easily for this month) and ask them to use our randomized welcome template instead of their usual preferred welcome. Most of them are using Twinkle and welcoming tons of people.
 * Anyway, that's just my initial brainstorming on this. Sound good? Thoughts/suggestions? Maryana (WMF) (talk) 19:37, 26 October 2011 (UTC)
 * It occurs to me that there is already a huge amount of data out there from which we could potentially glean whether any of our existing welcome templates had a positive correlation with editor retention. Of course, I say this with all the confidence of someone who has no idea of whether or how such data could really be extracted or analyzed...


 * As to your 1st and second points, I think it would be wonderful if we could test whether any particular welcome message (such as welcomeIP) actually led to the registration of an account. However, I don't see how that's possible to measure as a practical matter.  Probably the best we could do would with IPs would be to see whether a particular welcome message led to additional productive editing from that IP address; however, as you note, even that would be of limited value given dynamic IPs.


 * So, probably the most practical test would be to see if a different type of welcome message works better on new account retention. I personally think the new type of warning message you have been testing (the "I edit Wikipedia too, under the name...") would work even better as a true welcome message - something brief that draws a personal connection to the new editor.  After that, coordinating with the high volume welcomers and see if they would agree to a randomized test against their favored message seems like the best way to test.-- Kubigula (talk) 22:14, 26 October 2011 (UTC)
 * There is a huge amount of data, but because we don't (yet) have the ability to search the text of revisions, it's hard to pull up lists of people who received certain kinds of templates, since that information isn't stored anywhere but in the diff. Running a controlled test has the advantage of a) tracking templates that let us easily grab lists of people who got warned with our templates, and b) determining if/when messages were checked – we can query a table to get that information, but it's not stored historically, so it's something we have to measure as we test. During the course of our warning experiments, we discovered that about half of users never even bother to look at their talk page, so it's important to know who actually did, in order to see whether templates are having any effect.


 * And we do have the ability to see which users are registering accounts from which IPs – a pretty solid measure of retention if we follow those accounts and code for editing quality. That information is also not stored historically, and there are, of course, some privacy issues (we wouldn't be able to release the data from that kind of study to the community, as we're hoping to do with the data from all of our experiments). But it's something that we can technically do... which of course doesn't necessarily mean we should :)


 * You're probably right, though, that these should be two separate tests, and that perhaps it would be easiest to start from registered editors. I'll take Kudpung's suggestion below and go talk to the Welcoming committee, as well as those heavy welcomers who aren't formally a part of it. But in that case, perhaps it might be time to change the name of this task force? :) Maryana (WMF) (talk) 14:31, 27 October 2011 (UTC)
 * In my  opinion, it would be impossible to  test the effect of welcome templates  objectively.  Taking  my  case above, how could metrics demonstrate that  a welcome template might  have inspired me to  make more articles? They can't. The only  way  to  know about  the effect of welcoming  new users would be to  ask them.  Such  a survey  would need a very  large random  sample size and would need WMF approval. I  don't  think  it's worth  it. I  believe the only  way  to  improve the welcome template situation would be to   list  the frequency  of use of all  welcome templates, weed out the ones that  are rarely    used, and slim down the choices in  the Twinkle menu . I  have long  held the theory  that most  of the  welcome templates, particularly  the long ones,  do  more to  frighten people away  than to  retain them.  TL;DR  is a very  real issue and is not  often taken into  consideration  by  the majority  of editors who  design/author template messages. I think  a possible suggestions  would be to  design   a basic template for new users that  focuses on  the major links(s) to  editing  help, and have a bot  apply  them  to   autoconfirmed new users who  have made, say,  20+ edits to  mainspace  (except  to  those who  have been warned for  vandalism), and a basic welcome for all  new IP  editors who  have made 5 edits to  mainspace, and who  have not  been warned for vandalism,  and which  would encourage them  to  register.  Kudpung กุดผึ้ง (talk) 01:33, 27 October 2011 (UTC)
 * Unfortunately, welcomer bot is a perennial proposal that's not likely to go through. But I disagree that we can't test the effect of welcomes. The beauty of A/B tests is that they're a very crude but extremely effective way of testing really nuanced, complex phenomena. If we create three test groups with a huge number of users (which we could easily do if we let the test run for as little as a few weeks and got a lot of heavy welcomers involved), and we know that everything about those groups is roughly the same except the very first welcome message they received, we'll know that any difference in retention among them is most likely due to the effect of that welcome message. But this only works with a large sample size. So, yes, paying a visit to the Welcoming committee would be very apropos :) Maryana (WMF) (talk) 18:19, 27 October 2011 (UTC)
 * BTW: This entire discussion would be probably  best  moved to the Welcoming committee.

Please obtain community consent before testing
Before implementing any significant type of 'test' (such as some indicated above, that could affect thousands of pages), please ensure that there is community consensus for it on a wider forum than this page - perhaps by posting to Village pump (proposals).

I am not commenting on whether or not some of the proposals here are good or bad; however, if anyone other than WMF was to suggest large-scale edits to many IP-user pages, or an 'auto-welcome' system, then they would have to gain consensus before proceeding with a trial.

When WMF do not follow that same process, it alienates the community.

It is particularly vexing when the reverse happens, and WMF chooses to over-rule a consensus suggested trial, as happened recently with WP:ACTRIAL.

Thank you for your consideration.  Chzz  ► 11:15, 28 October 2011 (UTC)
 * Hi Chzz,


 * I proposed this at VPR three days ago. Don't worry – Steven and I would never run this or any other test without community approval! "Pissing off Wikipedians" is decidedly not in our job description :) Maryana (WMF) (talk) 14:19, 28 October 2011 (UTC)


 * Thanks. I've now commented in that discussion.  Chzz  ► 15:59, 28 October 2011 (UTC)

Shared IP archiving proposal: please weigh in
Just a heads-up: shared IP talk page archiving test is currently being discussed here. Please add your two cents! Thanks :) Maryana (WMF) (talk) 23:21, 2 November 2011 (UTC)


 * Also relevant: the the request for a bot to actually perform these archiving functions. Please comment if you like. Steven Walling (WMF) &bull; talk   23:07, 3 November 2011 (UTC)

XLinkBot and spam warnings
Hey folks, just in case you haven't seen, we've been preparing messages to test for XLinkBot since Beetstra gave us permission to test. Please weigh in if you like. We're especially curious about the levels above one, since it's very experimental to test those at this stage. Docs are here. Thanks, Steven Walling (WMF) &bull; talk   21:41, 15 November 2011 (UTC)

Blog post recruiting folks for the project
Hey all, I just wanted to point everyone to a blog post Maryana and I wrote about the testing work:. If you can encourage anyone you might know who is interested in maybe doing this kind of testing on another Wikipedia, point them in our direction. :-) Steven Walling (WMF) &bull; talk   20:24, 21 November 2011 (UTC)

Update from Maryana & Steven
Hi all,

Nice to see some new faces on the participants list – welcome and thanks for joining :)

We've had a busy couple of months! So far, we've run tests on some of the major tools/bots that leave messages in the user talk space: Huggle, Twinkle, XLinkBot, and SDPatrolBot. We ran three Huggle tests on English Wikipedia and one on Portuguese and are now analyzing the data from these completed experiments. Look for both quantitative and qualitative analysis on the documentation page soon!

We have four tests currently running on English Wikipedia, and two more in the works. But there's still a lot more to do! The following is a list of potential future tests we're thinking of running next:


 * Image warnings (fair use, copyright, no description, etc.)
 * Block notices
 * AfC notices
 * Welcome messages

Please feel free to propose other ideas or help us start thinking about ways to redesign templates for the above tests. We created a draft space for this purpose, where you can get more hands-on with drafting new variants. Feel free to be bold :) Maryana (WMF) (talk) 23:57, 28 November 2011 (UTC)

Welcome message/template
I found a welcome template a while back that had all the right components but looked quite shabby. I decided to rebuild it and now am quite pleased with it. I've been handing out my own (preferred) version in slowly developing forms for a while, but it is technically pretty complete now. I'd love an (honest) opinion from your good selves.  fredgandt</i>  00:48, 29 November 2011 (UTC)

Discussion about testing AfC templates
Please see: Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Articles for creation. Thanks, <span style="font-family:Palatino, Georgia, serif;">Steven Walling (WMF) &bull; talk   22:21, 6 December 2011 (UTC)
 * So any progress? will there any test? I would propose that the tool get can get a page and because of the number of the page, posting another message, so no technical issues related to the problem of testing. Or is the idea stale? <span style="font-family:Courier New; display:inline; border:#009 1px dashed; padding:1px 6px 2px 7px; white-space:nowrap; font-size:smaller; color:#000000;">mabdul 23:23, 31 May 2012 (UTC)

Shared IP bot test live
Why hasn't the table been updated to show the Shared IP bot test has gone live? SharedIPArchiveBot is making edits. —C.Fred (talk) 17:43, 17 December 2011 (UTC)
 * Could someone explain the scope of this bot script (Shared IP)? At the moment my watchlist is filling up with retrospective archiving of IP pages. I am not convinced that this is a "good thing" in every case, particularly as I pretty consistently use the template on many of these IP pages which is often a better (more intuitive) solution than creating a separate archive page. --Fæ (talk) 19:59, 17 December 2011 (UTC)
 * The table wasn't updated because we're usually in different timezones than the bot writer, as well as the fact that it's the weekend here. As for the rest, I think the explanation on the bot's user page and the extended discussion at the BRFA should be self-explanatory. The bot was approved through a consensus on the Village Pump for proposals and with the Bot Approvals Group which took more than a month – ample time in which dozens of users commented. We have reached a test, the purpose of which is an experiment which will produce data about whether it is useful to provide this service, so we don't have to guess, which clearly meets the requirements of the BAG and the people who reached a consensus on the VP. While I am interested in your feedback, I don't think it's appropriate to try and derail an experiment that is based on a consensus decision in the community. <span style="font-family:Palatino, Georgia, serif;">Steven Walling (WMF) &bull; talk   17:34, 18 December 2011 (UTC)
 * Hm, interesting that my question is immediately considered derailing. Sorry you feel that way. Could you provide a link to the Village Pump consensus, particularly for the idea of hiding off the page threads more than 14 days old? --Fæ (talk) 17:49, 18 December 2011 (UTC)
 * No, your comment is not derailing. The fact that you stopped a bot running with the approval of BAG after extensive trials is derailing. <span style="font-family:Palatino, Georgia, serif;">Steven Walling (WMF) &bull; talk   17:54, 18 December 2011 (UTC)
 * You must be confusing me with the person that actually stopped the bot. You should ask them for their reasons. I think you might mean as the consensus, I am raising my comment on that at BRFA. Fæ (talk) 18:01, 18 December 2011 (UTC)


 * Why is the bot removing useful information templates like repeatvandal? That's there to inform admins and editors that there have been problems from a particular IP in the past and if it's to be removed, it should only be after an extended period in which the IP has not been blocked and has not vandalised in my opinion. HJ Mitchell  &#124;  Penny for your thoughts?  21:04, 4 January 2012 (UTC)
 * Hi Harry :)


 * The short answer is, it's a test to see whether those kinds of templates make any sense to use. For example, here's a talk page where repeatvandal is used, and here's the most recent edit that came from that IP. So, we have a perfectly good contributor using an IP that might also occasionally happen to be used by a vandal. If clearing that warning makes it more likely that the good contributor will register an account and/or continue making good edits, then maybe it's really unfair to label "repeat offenders" as such. Maybe those templates scare good people away, or increase the likelihood of good contributors getting inappropriately reverted and warned because it makes their edits look more suspicious. I don't actually know if any of that is true, but that's why we're doing the test :) Also, if a user is blocked or if they continue to receive warnings, their talk page won't be archived, so this won't affect current persistent vandals.


 * Does that make a little more sense? Remember, it's only a 2-month test, so if this ends up affecting the work of vandal-fighters in a negative way, that will show up in the results and be very good to know in the future. (But I very much doubt it will.) Maryana (WMF) (talk) 23:29, 4 January 2012 (UTC)


 * Why is the bot removing perfectly nicely formatted pages using Old IP warnings top (one of my favourites for neatly laying out an IP page so that only the most recent warning in the last month or two are shown; I have a neat script in my vector.js to do this for me (see /* Regex: tidy user warnings */)) and instead arbitrarily creates unnecessary archive pages and strips this useful formatting in the process? Thanks --Fæ (talk) 23:52, 4 January 2012 (UTC)
 * The point of the test is to negate the primary need for that warning by removing old, stale warnings that do not apply to someone using a shared or dynamic IP. If pages do not include long lists of inapplicable warnings, then there is no need to include a warning with a red alert sign that messages are probably inapplicable to the person reading them. Once the test is done at the time we agreed on at the Village Pump discussion and the bot approval, then we'll have data that will tell us whether cleanly archiving a page is a better method than including that template or the other previously used methods. <span style="font-family:Palatino, Georgia, serif;">Steven Walling (WMF) &bull; talk   00:27, 5 January 2012 (UTC)

some good content
Back a while ago, there was a problem with some of the ambassador program editors creating pages that werent a good fit for wikipedia. It generated quite a bit of noise when it was going on. One user posted the following to one of the editors in question, and I think it can provide some great content for some of our welcome/warning templates. Message can be seen here Gaijin42 (talk) 22:06, 9 January 2012 (UTC)
 * Yes. A hand written note is always better than a template, in my book. So far testing has strongly suggested that a longer message isn't as good though, probably due to the TL;DR factor, so short and sweet makes sense to me. But anyway, I'll try to comb through that some more to see if there's anything we could incorporate into more tests. Thanks for signing up, and for the note -- <span style="font-family:Palatino, Georgia, serif;">Steven Walling (WMF) &bull; talk   22:19, 9 January 2012 (UTC)

Huggle test two, other findings
Hi, guys. The data that you posted from the tests looks pretty interesting. I'm a little curious about one of your conclusions; specifically, the "other findings", #2, from the second Huggle test. You say that the templates are most effective if they are the first ones that editors receive, and that this is evidence in favor of the archiving scheme. Was that data based on editors' first templates ever, or just first templates on a talk page where the rest have been archived? It seems to me that, if the data included new editors who had no archived templates, this effect could be explained thusly: editors who would be swayed by a template will stop their undesirable behavior at the first template they see that applies to them, whether or not it's the first on the page, whereas someone who ignores templates will not stop, and are thus more likely to have previous ones anyway. So, the degree to which an editor pays attention to *any* warnings, not just the first, is a lurking variable. Whether it's the first template or not could have no significance; it's just that people who don't pay attention to warnings are more likely to have prior ones. Do you see what I mean? Thanks! Writ Keeper &#9863;&#9812; 21:10, 11 January 2012 (UTC)
 * That's a good point, Writ Keeper. When we say "first message" in this analysis, we do mean first actual message ever received by that user (the message that creates the talk page). You're right that it's hard to suss out the effect here, but what we're seeing is that the output of regressions becomes clearer when we limit our queries to only users without previous warnings – among the many reasons for this, one important one is that IP addresses with tons of previous warnings are almost certainly being used by multiple people, so trying to interpret some kind of coherent motivation behind those edits is rather erroneous. That's why we're trying to keep those two groups (registered editors/discrete IPs and shared IPs) separate in our analysis.
 * But what you're saying really holds true for the former group (registered/discrete IP editors), I think – people who are dissuaded by template warnings will stop editing after getting one, while people who don't care (i.e., serial vandals) will just ignore those warnings entirely. The disconcerting conclusion from that, though, is that warnings only repel people who follow the rules and don't have any effect on malicious lawbreakers, the very people they're meant for... Maryana (WMF) (talk) 18:40, 12 January 2012 (UTC)
 * It's probably both: lots of messages drown each other out and are ineffective, plus people/IPs that are problematic tend to get lots of warnings. Either way, I think it strongly suggests that there is little point in letting multiple series of warnings pile up, except as public documentation of prior notice before blocks. <span style="font-family:Palatino, Georgia, serif;">Steven Walling (WMF) &bull; talk   20:10, 12 January 2012 (UTC)
 * Just for the record, I think autoarchiving stale warnings on shared IP talk pages is a good idea; I just don't think this test data isn't really relevant to it, either for or against. I think we're comparing apples to oranges.  I guess we just have to wait until February, when the real archive test ends and we get real results to analyze.
 * As an aside, on the Testing page, it lists the tests in progress as starting in December 2011 and ending in January/February 2011; I assume this means January/February 2012?
 * Also, "suss" is an excellent word that I have never heard before, and I intend to start using it at every opportunity. :) Writ Keeper &#9863;&#9812; 20:58, 12 January 2012 (UTC)


 * EDIT: It just occurred to me what you might mean; you're saying that, if the friendly warning isn't buried under a bunch of less-than-friendly ones, a new person is more likely to read it and take it to heart? I can see that.  In that respect, I think you're right in that it *suggests* that archiving is a good idea.  It's not hard evidence, I guess, but I see where you're coming from. Writ Keeper &#9863;&#9812; 21:04, 12 January 2012 (UTC)
 * Ah, good catch on the documentation! Fixed :) And yeah, that's sort of what I was thinking with the archiving stuff – it's not concrete evidence by any means, but it's another thing to consider. I'm really looking forward to seeing the results in February. Maryana (WMF) (talk) 21:19, 12 January 2012 (UTC)
 * The other two dates in the "in progress" section had the same problem; I went ahead and fixed them. Writ Keeper &#9863;&#9812; 21:26, 12 January 2012 (UTC)

SDPatrolBot test results
Hey gang, just a note that we've put results from the SDPatrolBot test up here. Thanks! <span style="font-family:Palatino, Georgia, serif;">Steven Walling (WMF) &bull; talk   00:49, 24 January 2012 (UTC)

Archive template got archived
An existing archive template got sent to the archive page. This happened 3 times regarding wan, not sure if other archive templates are affected. This was in a Dec 2011 test, I just noticed it now, not sure if it's relevant, but figured I'd give a heads-up.  Equazcion  ( talk )  20:19, 11 Jun 2012 (UTC)
 * http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=User_talk:12.147.151.2/Archive_1&diff=466725215&oldid=356048729


 * Thanks for the heads up, Equazcion. The results of that test were inconclusive because of a couple glitches like that. We're not currently planning another shared IP talk archiving test, but if there's desire/interest in the community to set one up, we'll have a list of lessons learned to make sure it's done well :) Maryana (WMF) (talk) 18:02, 12 June 2012 (UTC)

First person warnings vs partial passive voice
I am a WP:Wikignome, and I object to the overly-first-person voicing of the level 1 warnings because this voicing reduces usability, by taking away a common use case. It is usable only when I have personally performed the revert, but it is useless for when I am warning due to another editor who reverts and fails to warn, which is a very common use case.

The following suggested wording of uw-error1 suits both use cases, is still friendly, and still takes responsibility (desired changes are bolded):
 * Hello, I'm Lexein. Your recent edit to the page Jamie Lee Curtis appears to have added incorrect information, so it was removed for now. If you believe the information was correct, please cite a reliable source or discuss your change on the article's talk page. If you think a mistake was made, or if you have any questions, you can leave me a message on my talk page. Thanks,

I would like the main discussion reopened, or at least for this version to be still available as a mod to the current voicing for all level 1 warnings. Please don't un-assist editors! So, where is the best place to widely discuss this for all level 1 warnings? --Lexein (talk) 01:54, 17 August 2012 (UTC)
 * 1) Is this intended to discourage 3rd-party warning?
 * 2) If this is not amended, I'll just always start with level 2, because I'm not going to waste my time editing the template output to restore the intended, and true, meaning.