Topic on Talk:Edit Review Improvements

Based on the mailing list discussion, I would like to propose to minimize article deletions. I have a fairly new editor and I had issues because the article I created was speedy deleted because it was found that it does not convey that the topic is significant enough. Not that it is not significant, but that it only does not explain why it is significant well enough.

Deletion of the article meant that I could not improve the article further and address the issues. Nor that I had an opportunity to learn with help from others how to do better articles. Even more, to even get access to the content I created, I had to go and ask the admin to restore it. I had to learn all this, find ways to communicate with somebody, and engage in discussions. Now it seems clear what happened, but at that time was far from that. Why was an article deleted without any due process (from my perspective)? Why I cannot access anymore the content I contributed so that I could improve it and try again?

Based on this I would recommend the following approach:

• There is a global draft namespace (I heard something like this exist).
• Instead of deletion of articles, move them to this global draft namespace and provide a link to it from the original (now empty) article name, so that others interested in this article can find it among drafts and help.
  • Only articles which are illegal or have some other very serious reason to be deleted should be deleted. Everything else should be kept on the basis of good faith.
• Now editors can continue to edit the article (draft) and eventually move it back to the main namespace. Not just the initial author of the article, but also others can join (and find the place to join).
• After some period (3 months? 6 months?) of draft being in the draft namespace, and it status not improved, it could be automatically deleted.

The important thing is that deletion becomes much less common. This improve experience of new good faith editors because they have a clear path forward and know what is wrong and how to improve the draft to be moved back. Bad faith editors would have their articles moved away to a draft namespace, which is not what they want anyway, so it will disrupt their agenda similarly to deletion.

Deletion is really problematic because it is so final. It cuts the whole process. To me reverts are much simpler. Your contribution is still there. You can improve on it. You can discuss it. Deletions (especially speedy ones) are experienced more forcefully.

Having been instrumental in getting the Draft namespace introduced, this all sound very similar to an initiative I begun some time ago. en.Wiki has a serious problem with its New Page Patrol system (a process that @Whatamidoing (WMF) claimed some years ago was not necessary), in spite of the excellent Page Curation suite of software tools that was also the end result of an initiative of mine and good , direct, collaboration between very senior staff who are no longer available for comment and the volunteer community.

Do feel free to find that alleged statement of mine. I, at least, will be interested in reading it in the full context.

Thanks for your feedback,@Mitar. It makes a lot of sense to reduce the negative impact of feeling that your work has been thrown to the trash. We have been exploring some ideas in this area:

• Encourage reviewers to move to some kind of working area instead of deleting it. It may be the global "draft" namespace or a sub-page on the user namespace (as many advanced users use as a kind of "draft" area).
• Anticipating the issues, and when the content is likely to be reverted, suggest to the user the possibility of publishing as a draft instead and provide the opportunity to ask for help.
• Provide some room for editors to improve the content before it is reviewed. For newcomers editing articles that are rarely visited but identified as likely to be in good-faith, we can consider deferring the review process so that they have an extra time to improve their content.

There are many aspects to consider and probably more ideas to add to the list, but I think this is a promising direction.