Grants:IEG/Learning about deletion

status: withdrawn

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eligibility and selection criteria

project:

Learning about deletion

project contact:

jschneiderpobox.com

participants:

grantees: Jodi Schneider
volunteers: Aaron Halfaker, Bluma Gelley

summary:

A learning tutorial designed to make an editor's first encounter with deletion a more encouraging and less emotional experience.

2013 round 2

Project idea

We want to:

• Help newcomers learn the most important policies and guidelines used in AfD for English-language Wikipedia.
• Help newcomers make better arguments

We will do this by providing brief, in-context information emphasizing Notability and Sources, in a UserScript for AfD. We would also have a short Guided Tour, starting e.g. with a banner that says "would you like to learn how this area works?"

This is important because we lose good potential contributors because of article deletion: Increase Participation and Improve Quality can be at cross-purposes. There are two good outcomes for newcomers in deletion:

1. the article gets deleted, but they understand why.
2. the article doesn't get deleted because they can make a compelling case in terms that Wikipedians understand.

We can help increase newcomers understand why content gets deleted: this will help newcomers take deletion less personally as well as to make compelling cases for content that could survive.

Project goals

Deletion is needed to prune unwanted and inappropriate content; but it often has the side effect of scaring away good potential contributors. This is most clear in the borderline and controversial deletion cases -- such as those that go to Articles for Deletion in English Wikipedia. New contributors are often confused about the meaning of terms like "notability" and "sources". Also, numerous rules are used in deletion -- including many subject-specific Notability guidelines that are not linked directly from the main Notability guideline page (e.g. those developed by particular WikiProjects).

The goal of this project is to make AfD outcomes easier to understand for newcomers, and to help newcomers make more relevant arguments in AfD discussions. In particular, we want to make it easier to learn the meaning of terms like "notability" and "sources". Over 90% of comments in AfD can be classified as relating to Notability, Sources, Maintenance, and/or Bias (see a summary from the research newsletter).

What will change

• Short, in-context information will appear on in-process AfD pages.

Why: learning the important guidelines and policies will help newcomers get started understanding why things get deleted. Why: This helps mitigate the overwhelming number of policy-related pages on deletion!

• Short Guided Tour of Deletion will be available from in-process and archived AfD pages and from the AfD template.

Why: orient newcomers in all the places they might come across deletion.

• Optional gadget will provide feedback (from automatic linguistic & machine learning process) when submitting a comment in a deletion discussion

- Tone - Which policy categories are applied Why: Help apply best practices, which come from guidance such as Why was the page I created deleted? and Arguments to avoid in deletion discussions and from research

See also

• my research on discussions in English-language Wikipedia, on the winning and losing argument patterns in deletion debates and the four criteria that summarize AfD debates.

Project plan

Intended impact

Measures of success

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Discussion

Community Notification

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Endorsements

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