 | The letter has now been officially published at the Wikimedia Foundation Meta site and to the Board of Trustees, and in the September 2022 issue of The Signpost, the Wikipedia newspaper. Please do not add any more signatures, the list can no longer be updated. The NPP coordination team would like to thank all 444 editors and admins who lent their kind support to this campaign. |
Dear Wikimedia Foundation and Board of Trustees,
It is our understanding that PageTriage—an essential MediaWiki extension used by the English Wikipedia's New Pages Patrol (NPP)—is not considered an active project within the WMF, and that software support for PageTriage is currently minimal; we cannot expect anything except critical fixes to maintain the present functionality.
New Page Patrolling by the New Page Reviewers is a critical function necessary to keep Wikipedia from being overrun with new articles that don't meet the community's standards for inclusion. While some members of the community seem to be obsessed with growing the number of articles (and many of us feel the WMF shares in that belief), others feel that the reputation of Wikipedia as a reliable and trustworthy repository of knowledge is best served by having "5.5 million good articles, instead of 6.5 million, of which 1 million are junk".
Because having a Wikipedia article today lends credibility to any topic, it has become a valuable commodity. With the rapid increase in availability of the Internet and low cost smart phones, there is always a huge number of articles seeking to promote products, businesses, and people of all professions. Some fear that Wikipedia is headed towards resembling "daisies (good articles) growing in a sewer". There are millions of existing articles that need some kind of improvement, and far too few editors working on these to make significant headway. We must ensure that all further additions at least meet our minimum standards for inclusion in the encyclopedia, as determined by the community consensus, as reflected in its policies and guidelines. This torrent of inferior articles is primarily stopped by the hard work and dedication of a limited number of us, the English Wikipedia NPP reviewers.
The "NPP team" currently has only around 100 people moderately active and only 25 or so that perform the majority of the reviews. For a few years now, a handful of people did a disproportionate number of reviews, and when they left the project, the number of unreviewed articles shot up to nearly 16,000 on a trajectory that indicated potential collapse. A concerted focus averted a crisis and the backlog, although still high, has been reduced. But all NPP volunteers are subject to "burnout" as it is mostly a thankless job, because "passing" an article is mostly a silent action without reward or fanfare, while "failing" one can bring stress and agitation during the deletion process.
NPP must be able to function without short-term herculean efforts by a few editors who inevitably quit at some point, and without periodic crisis modes triggered by runaway backlogs.
What the Foundation can do now to help NPP is: improve the PageTriage software. The software was rolled out ten years ago, and with the exception of some improvements in 2018, has had little attention for several years. There are bugs identified years ago that remain unfixed, and people get by after learning what works and what work-arounds to use. There have been dozens of enhancements requested that would make the system more efficient and easier to use. The plan when PageTriage was designed was that it be self-contained, i.e. provide all the functionality needed during the review process. It is not there yet. A better system will improve the workflow of the relatively small number of active reviewers, as well as potentially keep them engaged and make it easier to recruit new members.
NPP may have other issues that can only be addressed by the community, but we should not be fighting the software. We request that the PageTriage suite of apps be designated an active project with developer resources allocated. A specific WMF software engineer or WMF team should have ownership of it, and their responsibilities should include reviewing patches submitted by volunteers in a timely manner, fixing any and all reproducible bugs, and working on top features requested by NPP. The current status quo of having no maintainer, and with the Growth Team abstractly being the code stewards, while not having the time or resources to provide fixes, enhancements, or even to review and deploy volunteer-submitted patches is problematic.
The English Wikipedia NPP team stands ready to work together to identify and prioritize the issues. Please assign some resources so that we can properly maintain this important tool.
Sincerely, the "NPP team" (and other concerned editors)