The plight of the new page patrollers
This week the Wikimedia Foundation reported the results of its New Page Patrol Survey, part of a project to increase understanding of editors who work on new page patrol (NPP). NPP is the first line of defense against articles that do not belong on Wikipedia, be they unsuitable pages, copyright violations, or attack pages.
New page patrolling has long been a prominent problem area for the Wikipedian community. While patrollers complain of being overworked, other editors have raised issues with the patrollers themselves, characterizing them as mostly young and inexperienced volunteers who lack clue, are ignorant of deletion rules, and often mis-tag new articles. The NPP Survey, first suggested by Kudpung, aimed to collect information on current patrollers to base improvements to the NPP process. The results: Most new page patrollers are over 18 years of age, most have at least an undergraduate degree, and most are very much clued into what they are doing. The report – while providing a better view of who the average page patroller is and what the average page patroller does – substantially refutes some stereotypes.