Grants:IdeaLab/Page suggestion templates

Inspire campaign

Page suggestion templates

A template where an editor can place suggestions to improve the page can be put on top with suggestions in a collapsed list. Sometimes pages get deleted without given time to improve, while the talk page usually has very low traffic. This template allows concrete suggestions to be visible and considered.

idea creator• The Average Wikipedian

created on12:52, Tuesday, March 15, 2016 (UTC)

Project idea

What is the problem you're trying to solve?

There is a decrease in number of participants across Wikimedia projects due to new pages being swiftly deleted. This hinders the progress of improvement as projects become less active. By adding suggestions, new and experienced editors alike can have an idea on how to improve each page, therefore being less discouraging especially to newcomers who may not like seeing tags or do not understand how to improve the problem.

Meanwhile, articles that are kept simply because they do not meet any deletion criteria may be of low quality and left unattended, lowering the quality of Wikimedia projects. Using Wikipedia as an example, while AFC reviewers can give comments to drafts before they go into mainspace, new articles created directly receive little feedback. Currently, a place where task lists can be made for individual articles does not really exist. Sometimes talk pages are hardly ever followed by editors and it may take a while before talk page posts get noticed. If the template it placed on the page directly, it may gather attention and the problems can be fixed with collaboration between editors.

What is your solution?

A template is added to a page where problems exist. Instead of using tags to identify the problem, concrete, page-specific suggestions for improvement can be made. First of all, this helps editors note problems which may not have a fitting maintenance tag to address. That way, problems that do not meet tagging criteria can still be identified and solved.

Some pages that are flagged for deletion may have slight hope of improvement. Although pages may fully meet deletion criteria, it does not mean that the notion of the page itself is a bad idea, which is why this template can help salvage good ideas that should stay on projects. This can stop the number of active editors to continue plummeting and thus save the entire family of Wikimedia projects since most if not all of them require as many participants as possible.

Moreover, existing pages that are of low quality that have been left in such a state for extended periods of time may get noticed and finally get the improvement they need. After all, the aim of Wikimedia projects should be to increase the credibility of project contents in society, and that can only be done if most of the pages are of reasonable quality. For example, on Wikipedia, there are many articles which are of below average quality, while good articles and featured articles appear rare. Many of these lower quality and lower notability articles do not get any attention and are left in that state, making the overall credibility or reliability of Wikipedia decrease greatly. Stubs should be expanded and more reliable sources should be added to articles in general. That way, the quality of Wikipedia can approach that of a published encyclopaedia instead of having a wide range of article qualities.

Using a template may not be the best solution, and this suggestion may be a bit trivial, too simple to solve the aforementioned problems. I'm bringing this up hoping that someone might come up with a more advanced solution involving more techniques and connecting more people, for example involving the use of WikiData. We might need to have a focused group of people looking through reviews of pages, and eventually some common problems may be discovered and a group of experts might have to be hired to propose methods to remedy them.

Project goals

I hope to encourage more people to participate in Wikimedia projects and have faith in them, and ultimately improve the quality of Wikimedia projects as a whole by having pages reviewed individually.

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Endorsements

• The existing Requests for cleanup process at English Wiktionary is effective only for formatting and obvious problems. More subtle quality problems, which are numerous, need to be diagnosed and the diagnosis recorded for action. A difficulty is getting consensus on desiderata for entries (aka articles), so some flexibility on the categorization of problems would be needed. DCDuring (talk) 13:17, 15 March 2016 (UTC)

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