The authoritative version of the Foundation report can be found on Meta
Editors have, over the last six months, made clear that New Page Patrol is a substantial “problem area” for the community. Patrollers complain of being overworked, while other editors raise issues with the patrollers themselves, stereotyping them as young, poorly educated and immature volunteers who are ignorant of the rules surrounding deletion.
To try and correct the overwork problem, the Foundation is designing a new New Page Patrol interface, “Zoom”. Doing this properly requires a lot of information about patrollers, however; who are they, what do they do, how do they do it, and what do they see as the problems with the status quo? Kudpung proposed running a survey of patrollers, firstly to help with developing Zoom, and also to gather data for his own ideas about community-driven solutions or improvements.
Having gathered this data, we can confirm that the common stereotype of patrollers as young, poorly educated and ignorant is almost entirely without basis. The vast majority of patrollers are over 18 and have undergraduate degrees or above - in some cases, actually exceeding the average for editors overall set in the April 2011 survey. They are largely familiar with relevant policies, and greatly exceed the expectations set by the stereotype. Indeed, the only major difference between patrollers and any other editor is that patrollers choose to patrol. This information provides a useful factual basis to begin developing the Zoom interface, and will be taken into account when designing the software.
Patroller suggestions for improving New Page Patrol have also proven very interesting; many are already being incorporated into Zoom, or will be taken into consideration. Those that are cultural rather than technical in nature should be investigated by the community. Those that are technical will be discussed as part of the development process for the New Page Triage feature. It is worth pointing out that there were a few problems with the survey largely due to the “hybrid” nature of the survey; a community-sourced proposal, with the Foundation relying on the results. We are confident these problems have not impacted on the validity of the data, and fully endorse its reliability.