Wikimedia Blog/Drafts/PageCurationLaunch

This draft is for a Tech blog post that is scheduled to be published on Tue. Sep. 25 by 12pm PT, after review by Guillaume and/or Tilman. Please add your comments on the Talk page, or make edits directly on this page, depending on your level of confidence. Thanks!

Page Curation launches on Wikipedia

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Page Curation makes it easier for curators and creators to improve Wikipedia together.

Every day, thousands of new pages are created on Wikipedia, requiring hundreds of volunteer editors to check them for quality—a process called "New Page Patrol".

To help these patrollers do their important work, we are pleased to announce the launch of Page Curation, a new suite of tools for reviewing articles on Wikipedia.

Current page patrol tools like Special:NewPages and Twinkle can be hard to use quickly and accurately, and have led to frustration for some users. Page Curation aims to improve that page patrol experience by making it faster and easier to review new pages, using two integrated tools:

  • the New Pages Feed
  • the Curation Toolbar

The New Pages Feed lets you quickly see what new pages have just been created on Wikipedia. Helpful information is provided for each new page, including possible issues and whether or not the page has been reviewed. The feed can be sorted by date, or filtered by a variety of criteria, so you can easily find articles to review by type—or even by user name.

The Curation Toolbar (available to reviewers) appears at the right edge of any article you select in the New Pages Feed. This toolbar allows curators to review articles, tag them, and nominate them for deletion—all in one place and with a simple user interface. It also includes other useful curation tools. For example, you can quickly see information about the article and its history without ever leaving the page, send helpful messages to page creators—or jump to the next page on the list.

Page Curation was created in close collaboration with community editors, and was developed by the Wikimedia Foundation's editor engagement team from March to September 2012. A 'release version' was deployed on the English Wikipedia on September 20, 2012, and we plan to make it available to other projects in coming weeks.

If you are an experienced editor, please give Page Curation a try. A number of patrollers have already started using Page Curation, and we hope that more curators will adopt this new toolkit over time. To get started, watch this video tour or take the tutorial. For more info, check the help page, and report any issues on the talk page or to our Community Liaison, Oliver Keyes :).

We are also holding IRC office hours on Tuesday, September 25 at 19:00 UTC, and Wednesday, September 26 at 23:00 UTC, during which we will be happy to answer any questions you may have.

We designed Page Curation to offer a better experience, by making it easier for curators to review new pages—and by providing more feedback to creators, so they can improve Wikipedia together.

We hope you'll find this new tool useful. Enjoy!

Fabrice Florin, Product Manager
Wikimedia Foundation's Editor Engagement Team