Wikimedia Meta-Wiki

Community Wishlist Survey 2023/Miscellaneous/Improvements to requested articles pages

< Community Wishlist Survey 2023 | Miscellaneous

Improvements to requested articles pages

  • Problem: In my opinion, as a relatively novice user, the requested articles pages on English Wikipedia are a bit daunting. For example social sciences or music. There's a really long list of requested articles. Sometimes they're already completed but they're still listed. Other times they have a redirect but aren't completed. There can be a description or just a title. Sometimes there are sources with full names or just numbers. It's not easy to see what's actually a candidate for making an article versus just a request without any research. I only just today that there's even a list of rejected requests.
  • Proposed solution: I don't have a concrete idea of how this could be improved but I'd love to hear what others think.
  • Who would benefit: I think this would be helpful for users trying to request an article, for editors looking for things to write, and generally to encourage people to get involved by an easy first step like requesting an article.
  • More comments: Some small ideas include:
  1. A voting system, so people could show support for articles they want. This would be nice because I think many people want to write about things that many others are interested in.
  2. A way to automatically show people existing/past requests before they add a new one.
  3. A way to automatically remove articles (or suggest to remove them) one they've been created.
  4. A standardized way of listing sources (this and the following kinda fit into the category of making a template for requests)
  5. A standardized way of writing a description of the page and maybe even why you personally find it interesting.
  6. A field that would let people indicate if they have found something to be notable or not notable yet.
These are just a few rough ideas coming from someone who occasionally makes pages but would like to request pages more often and may be more motivated to make pages if I see others requesting it or voting for it.

Discussion

@RayScript: We just wanted to clarify with you if this is English Wikipedia specific? Thanks for your time in making this proposal! GMikesell-WMF (talk) 21:19, 1 February 2023 (UTC)[reply]

I am not familiar with the requested articles process on other language Wikipedias. However, I assume that it's relatively similar so this would apply to multiple languages. RayScript (talk) 10:32, 2 February 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Hey, Ray - I don't think this is a good fit for this survey in particular, since a change to the structure of this process on en.wp requires only local initiative, not developer time. If you want my honest opinion, the whole concept is just plainly moribund and no longer serves any particular purpose, if it ever did. Might be more productive to just try and stick a fork in it, since I'm not sure anyone would even care enough to object. Doctor Duh (talk) 22:04, 10 February 2023 (UTC)[reply]

I totally get this and agree with some of it! About #2: There are a lot of cross links that are outrageous in content and organization. I think a forced template could fix this. The template would include these things and make them "required". It should check for duplicates or similarities rather than require the user to do so because most won't look themselves. I understand the popularity subjects #'s 1, 5 and 6, but what we want and what we need are two different things. For example, Wikipedia has become very popular with college students, who come here to research a subject. I myself use it for research. I believe #4 is being addressed in Citations, and that is probably the #1 complaint: the tediousness of adding citations. That alone deserves a vote. They're always a mess and editing is a nightmare. Magnoliasouth (talk) 23:59, 10 February 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Voting

Retrieved from "https://meta.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=Community_Wishlist_Survey_2023/Miscellaneous/Improvements_to_requested_articles_pages&oldid=24614263"