Tracked in Phabricator
Task T265163
Wikimedia Foundation projects
Edit check
Offer people actionable feedback about Wikipedia policies while they are editing.
Group: Editing
Start: 2022-10-01
Team members: Bartosz Dziewoński, David Chan, David Lynch, Esther Akinloose, Marielle Volz, Rummana Yasmeen, Nicolas Ayoub, Sherry Snyder
Lead: Ed Sanders
Management: Peter Pelberg (product), Valerie Puffet-Michel (engineering)

In the 2022–2023 fiscal year, the Editing Team is working on a set of improvements for the visual editor to help new volunteers understand and follow some of the policies and guidelines necessary to make constructive changes to Wikipedia projects.

Below, you can find information about the goals of this project, the history that has informed it, and why the Wikimedia Foundation's Product Department is prioritizing this work. Watch Editing team/Community Conversations for scheduled meetings about this project.

Objectives

Newcomers and Junior Contributors from Sub-Saharan Africa will feel safe and confident enough while editing to publish changes they are proud of and that experienced volunteers consider useful.

Status

Reference Edit Check demo (mobile)

Edit Check Prototype (mobile) ready

A prototype for the first Edit Check is ready! Now, we need your help identifying how it might need to be fixed and improved before being enabled in production as a beta feature.

You can find instructions for trying out the Edit Check prototype and sharing feedback about on the talk page: Seeking Feedback: Edit Check Prototype.

For context, this first Edit Check that will prompt newcomers who are contributing new content without including a corresponding reference to consider doing so.

A screenshot showing what people will see who ''decline'' to ad a citation when Edit Check invites them to do so.
What people who ''decline'' to add a citation when Edit Check invites them to do so might see.

First version

The first version of Edit Check is almost ready for you all to try!

Within the next week, you can expect us to share a link to a test wiki where you can try the Edit Check prototype.

This first iteration will invite people who add more than 50 new characters to an article in the main namespace to include a reference in the they're making, IF they have not already done so themselves.

In the meantime, you can see the kinds of edits EditCheck currently thinks warrant a reference, by filtering Recent changes using the newly-introduced editcheck-references tag. View the tag on en.wiki and fr.wiki.

Informed by community conversations (still ongoing)[1][2][3][4] and a series of technical and design investigations[5][6][7], during February the Editing Team became clear about the first version of Edit Check on mobile...

A screenshot showing a dialog within the mobile visual editor that prompts people to add a reference when they do not do so on their own.
The initial version of the mobile Edit Check experience that will prompt people to add a reference.
  • User Experience: the first version of Edit Check will introduce a new step within the mobile visual editor's publishing workflow that people will see if/when they add new content without a reference. Design for the desktop user experience is still underway. See T329579.
  • Usability Testing: to learn whether people understand and can intuitively navigate the mobile Edit Check workflow, we will soon begin a series of usability tests. See T327356.
  • Technical Investigation: Edit Check will use a "transaction-based" approach for determining what new content is added within a given edit session. Work on developing a way to detect individual sentences is ongoing in T324363.
  • Initial Heuristic: To start, the initial Edit Check heuristic will be relatively straightforward in so far as it will prompt people to decide whether the change they are making warrants a reference if/when they are adding a new paragraph and that paragraph does not already contain a reference. See T324730 and T329988#8654867.

Next up: the Editing Team will be implementing the initial Edit Check heuristic (T324730) and a corresponding hidden change tag (T324733) so that we – volunteers and members of the Editing Team – can evaluate the extent to which the reference check heuristic is getting initiated in expected cases.

Work on Edit Check is underway! Below you will find an overview of what the Editing Team is actively working on…

  • Community conversations: Between October 2022 and January 2023, the Editing Team hosted seven community conversations to learn what contributing to Wikipedia has been like for people living in and from Sub-Saharan Africa. Next week, you can expect the team to publish the findings from these conversations and how they will inform the work we do on this project.
  • Initial Focus: The first feature the team will be introducing is one that checks whether the new content people are attempting to add includes a reference. Learn more in the Strategy and Approach section below.
  • Design: The team is actively working on a proposal for what the mobile user experience for the first reference check could be like. In the coming weeks, we will be inviting volunteers to help us revise and refine these designs. In the meantime, you can follow along with this work in Phabricator.
  • Talking with experienced volunteers: for the "reference check" to be useful to inexperienced and experienced volunteers alike, it will need to guide people to cite references in ways that projects expect. In the coming weeks, we'll begin conversations with experienced volunteers to learn what these expectations are so that we can ensure Edit Check is configured in ways that align with them.
  • Technical investigations: For the "reference check" to work, the software will need to know when people are attempting to add new content, whether that new content warrants a reference, and whether it currently contains a reference. The Editing Engineering team is currently doing a series of technical investigations to decide how we will approach building this functionality.

Strategy and Approach

To equip newcomers and Junior Contributors from Sub-Saharan Africa with the know-how and tools to publish changes they are proud of and that experienced volunteers consider useful, the Editing Team will be introducing new functionality within the visual editor (desktop and mobile) that will check the changes people are attempting to make and present them with actions they can take to improve these changes in ways that will align with established Wikipedia policies and guidelines.

The first "check" the Editing Team will be introducing is one that will detect when people are attempting to add new content to an existing article without a corresponding reference and prompt them to do so. The functionality will be accompanied by a complimentary set of features that will enable Senior Contributors to customize the user experience newcomers and Junior Contributors will see to ensure the software is guiding them to take actions that align with project policies and conventions.

Challenges

The visual editor's growing popularity among people who are new to editing Wikipedia[8] leads us to think that the editing experience has been reasonably successful at helping inexperienced volunteers learn the technical skills necessary to publish changes to Wikipedia.

The trouble is that the visual editor and other editing interfaces do not make people aware of the Wikipedia policies and guidelines they are expected to follow.

As a result, the changes inexperienced volunteers publish often break established best practices and lead to undesirable outcomes for inexperienced volunteers, experienced volunteers, and Wikipedia projects as a whole:

  1. Inexperienced volunteers become disappointed and frustrated when the good-faith change(s) they arrived to the wiki seeking to make are undone (read: reverted), deleted, and/or scrutinized in inequitable ways. These poor interactions are demotivating and drive these could-be volunteers and community members, and the knowledge that are uniquely positioned to offer, away.[9]
  2. Experienced volunteers need to do more work reverting low-quality edits and posting messages on inexperienced volunteers' talk pages to make them aware of the policies and/or guidelines they are likely to have unknowingly broken. Continually needing to educate inexperienced volunteers and undo their changes can lead to experienced volunteers becoming skeptical of inexperienced volunteers and impatient with them.
  3. Wikipedia projects struggle to grow and diversify their volunteer populations and shrink the knowledge gaps present within Wikimedia wikis.

This project seeks to address the problems above offering people relevant guidance about Wikipedia policies in the precious moments when they are in the midst of making a change using the visual editor.

Theory of change

This project is built on the belief that by surfacing relevant guidance in the precious moments when people are in the midst of making a change to Wikipedia and equipping them with the know-how and tools necessary to apply this guidance, they will make changes they are proud of and that experienced volunteers value.

In the longer term, the Editing Team thinks that people who are new, particularly people who have historically been excluded from and harmed by established power structures, will feel safe and motivated making changes to Wikipedia if they can accurately predict whether the changes they are attempting to make are aligned with existing Wikipedia policies, guidelines, and/or cultural conventions.

More broadly, the EditingTeam thinks that to evolve towards a future where wikis' policies and cultural norms – and ultimately, content – reflect the diverse experiences of the people these projects are intended to serve, we first need to make legible and explicit the norms and standards that are currently in place. This way, volunteers can develop shared awareness of cases where these norms and standards are not having the impacts they were intended to have and decide what – if any – changes they think are worth making to them in response.

Primary audience

The Editing Team is centering the needs of people in this work who are:

  1. Experience: Learning the basics of contributing to Wikipedia
    • In the context of this project, we are considering people who are still "learning the basics" to be people who have published <100 cumulative edits to a single, or multiple, Wikipedias. This includes people who are editing Wikipedia for the first time.
  2. Location: Living in Sub-Saharan Africa
  3. Projects: Contributing to the English and French Wikipedias
  4. Motivation: Seeking to fill gaps they notice within Wikipedia

The four focus criteria listed above are outgrowths of:

  • Newcomers are two times more likely to live in Africa or Asia.[10]
  • The movement struggles to retain editors who live outside Europe and North America.[10]
  • People from Sub-Saharan Africa are underrepresented within the movement: people from Sub-Saharan Africa represent only 1% of active unique editors, despite representing 15% of the global population and 7% of the global internet population.[11]
  • 80% of registered editors in Sub-Saharan Africa contribute to English or French Wikipedia.[12]

Also see Editing team/Community Conversations.

Design

Reference Detection

To start, the Editing Team is pursuing an approach with Edit Check that minimizes the likelihood of false positives and is implemented in ways[13] that empower volunteers, on a per-project basis, to evolve the heuristic[14] to become more robust over time.

This strategy amounts to the initial reference Edit Check becoming activated if/when all of the following conditions are met:

  1. A minimum of one new paragraph of text is added to the article someone is editing
  2. The "new paragraph(s) of text" someone has added does NOT include a reference
  3. The changes described in "1." and "2." are happening on a page within the main namespace (NS:0)

The conditions above are implemented and maintained in code here: editcheck/init.js.

The Editing Team arrived at the decision to start with a relatively limited and straightforward set of rules in order to:

  1. Increase the likelihood that newcomers and Junior Contributors find the guidance Edit Check is presenting them with, and the editing experience more broadly, to be intuitive and straightforward so that they feel encourage to return to edit again
  2. Decrease the likelihood that Edit Check is creating more work for experienced volunteers by prompting newcomers and Junior Contributors to add sources when they are not needed

You can learn amore about the assumptions that informed the thinking above in T329988#8654867.

Other applications

See Edit check/Ideas.

Configurability

The Editing Team thinks it is crucial that experienced volunteers be empowered to configure when, and for whom, Edit Check becomes activated. This way, they can be confident the software is promoting behavior they deem to be productive and modify the software when it is not.

In line with the above, and drawing inspiration from how the Edit filter and Growth Team Community configuration systems afford volunteers the ability to audit and configure how they function on-wiki, Edit Check will enable volunteers, on a per project basis to:

  • Audit and edit the logic that determines when the reference Edit Check becomes activated and
  • Review the edits people who are shown Edit Check are making

Work to implement the above is ongoing in T327959.

User Experience

Mobile

The first version of Edit Check will introduce a new step within the mobile visual editor's publishing workflow that people will see if/when they add new content without a reference.

Desktop

Design for the desktop user experience is still underway. See T329579.

Risks

#TODO.

Background

Volunteers throughout the movement have a long history of working to:

  • Proactively educate and guide newcomers to make changes they feel proud of and changes that improve Wikipedia
  • Prevent people from publishing destructive changes, and
  • React to and moderate changes to Wikipedia articles.

The Editing Team and this project have been inspired by these efforts, some of which are listed below. If there is a project or resource you think we should be aware of, please add it here!

Initiative Description Initiator(s)
Make edit notices more visible in Visual Editor How might we make it so people who are in the midst of an edit are likely to see and "internalize" the information that is currently presented within Edit Notices ? User:Stjn
Internet Archive Reference Explorer Automatically detect source quality en:User:Ocaasi
Wish: Reference requirement for new article creation Require new article to include references User:Mega809
Edit Notices Enables individual volunteers and projects to display a custom notice above the edit form, depending on the page, namespace, or other circumstances.
Page notices
Maintenance templates
Extension:AbuseFilter Enables privileged users to set specific actions to be taken when actions by users, such as edits, match certain criteria.
Extension:Disambiguator Displays a notification in the 2006/2010 wikitext editor whenever one adds a link to a disambiguation page.
ORES
Sugested Edits
CiteHighlighter Highlights 1800 sources green, yellow, or red depending on their reliability. Novem Linguae
Checkwiki Helps clean up syntax and other errors in the source code of Wikipedia
Edit Diff Tagging Showcases all the different tags that can be automatically determined (generally via basic heuristics) for a given Wikipedia edit diff. Isaac (WMF)
CivilityCheck A project to evaluate the civility in the comments of Wikipedia discussions in order to address the problem of abuse that leads to declining editorship within the Wiki community. Deus Nsenga, Baelul Haile, David Ihim, and Elan Houticolo-Retzler
BOTutor A bot that sends a message to people who attempt to publish an edit that triggers an existing set of rules User:ValeJappo
Gadget-autocomplete.js
Text reactions A proposal that would make it possible for the editing interface to react to what the people enter in the editing area
Editwizard A step-by-step process for guiding newcomers to source the content they are attempting to add to Wikipedia articles Ankit18gupta, Enterprisey, Firefly, and SD0001
User:Headbomb/unreliable " The script breaks down links to various sources in different 'severities' of unreliability. In general, the script is kept in sync with WP:RSPSOURCES, {{Predatory open access source list}}, WP:NPPSG, WP:SPSLIST (not fully implemented yet) and WP:CITEWATCH, with some minor differences." User:Headbomb
The Wikipedia Adventure Game based on the tech of Extension:GuidedTour that teaches basic wikitext markup and the rules about reliable sources and neutral point of view. Research into its effectiveness is described at meta:Research:Impact of The Wikipedia Adventure on new editor retention.
w:Help:Introduction The primary tutorial for new editors at English Wikipedia, covering both policies and technical how-to for VisualEditor and wiki markup. Most recently overhauled in late 2020 and more actively maintained than TWA. Sdkb, Evolution and evolvability, and others
User:Phlsph7/HighlightUnreferencedPassages A user script to highlight passages that lack references with a red background. Its main purpose is to help users quickly identify unreferenced passages, paragraphs, and sections in mainspace articles and drafts User:Phlsph7
Wish: Add notice to the visual editor that unsourced edits may be reverted A notice in the "Publish changes" dialogue of the visual editor that states that unsourced edits will be reverted User:Lectrician1
Wish: Warn when adding a url reference that matches the SpamBlacklist Warn when the url added as reference is registered in the SpamBlacklist, and thus prevent the warning from appearing when saving the page. User:DSan
Edit FIler #686 Edit Filter that is triggered when a new user possibly adding unreferenced material to BLP User:Rich Farmbrough
WikiLearn Platform for training
DannyS712/copyvio-check.js Automatically checks the copyvio percentage of new pages in the background and displays this info with a link to the report in the 'info' panel of the Page curation toolbar. User:DannyS712
XLinkBot A bot that warns people who have added an external link that is inappropriate in some way. w:User:VersageekUser:Beetstra

References

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